Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

  I have held no brief for the Negro. I have looked diligently for all aspects of “inferiority” among them and I cannot find them. All the cherished question-begging epithets applied to the Negro race, and widely accepted as truth even by men of good will, simply prove untrue when one lives among them. This, of course, excludes the trash element, which is the same everywhere and is no more evident among Negroes than whites.

  When all the talk, all the propaganda has been cut away, the criterion is nothing but the color of skin. My experience proved that. They judged me by no other quality. My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without which life loses its significance and becomes a matter of little more than animal survival.

  I searched for some other answer and found none. I had spent a day without food and water for no other reason than that my skin was black. I was sitting on a tub in the swamp for no other reason.

  I went back into the shanty. The air was slightly warmer and smelled of kerosene, tow sacks and humanity. I lay down in darkness, in the midst of snores.

  “Mr. Griffin … Mr. Griffin.”

  I heard the man’s soft voice above my shouts. I awakened to see the kerosene lamp and beyond it my host’s troubled face.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. In the surrounding darkness I sensed the tension. They lay silent, not snoring.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was having a nightmare.”

  He stood upright. From my position flat on the floor his head appeared to touch the ceiling beams far above. “Are you all right now?”

  “Yes, thank you for waking me up.”

  He stepped carefully over the children and returned to the other room.

  It was the same nightmare. I had been having it recently. White men and women, their faces stern and heartless, closed in on me. The hate stare burned through me. I pressed back against a wall. I could expect no pity, no mercy. They approached slowly and I could not escape them. Twice before, I had awakened myself screaming.

  I listened for the family to settle back into sleep. The mosquitoes swarmed. I lighted a cigarette, hoping its smoke would drive them out.

  The nightmare worried me. I had begun this experiment in a spirit of scientific detachment. I wanted to keep my feelings out of it, to be objective in my observations. But it was becoming such a profound personal experience, it haunted even my dreams.

  My host called me again at dawn. His wife stood in lamplight at the stove, pouring coffee. I washed my face in a bowl of water she had heated for me. We spoke by nods and smiles to avoid waking the children sprawled on the floor.

  After breakfast of coffee and a slice of bread, we were ready to leave. I shook hands with her at the door and thanked her. Reaching for my wallet, I told her I wanted to pay her for putting me up.

  She refused, saying that I had brought more than I had taken. “If you gave us a penny, we’d owe you change.”

  I left money with her as a gift for the children, and the husband drove me back to the highway.

  The morning was bright and cool. Before long a car with two young white boys picked me up. I quickly saw that they were, like many of their generation, kinder than the older ones. They drove me to a small town bus station where I could catch a bus.

  I bought a ticket to Montgomery and went to sit outside on the curb where other Negro passengers gathered. Many Negroes walked through the streets. Their glances were kind and communicative, as though all of us shared some common secret.

  As I sat in the sunlight, a great heaviness came over me. I went inside to the Negro rest room, splashed cold water on my face and brushed my teeth. Then I brought out my hand mirror and inspected myself. I had been a Negro more than three weeks and it no longer shocked me to see the stranger in the mirror. My hair had grown to a heavy fuzz, my face skin, with the continued medication, exposure to sunlight and ground-in stain, was what Negroes call a “pure brown” - a smooth dark color that made me look like millions of others.

  I noted, too, that my face had lost all animation. In repose, it had taken on the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes. My mind had become the same way, dozing empty for long periods. It thought of food and water, but so many hours were spent just waiting, cushioning self against dread, that it no longer thought of much else. Like the others in my condition, I was finding life too burdensome.

  I felt a great hunger for something merely pleasurable, for something people call “fun.” The need was so great that deep within, through the squalor and the humiliations of this life, I took some joy in the mere fact that I could be alone for a while inside the rest room cubicle with its clean plumbing and unfinished wood walls. Here I had a water faucet to drink from and I could experience the luxury of splashing cold water on my face as much as I wanted. Here, with a latch on the door, I was isolated from the hate stares, the contempt.

  The smell of Ivory livened the atmosphere. Some of the stain came off and I wondered how long it would be before I could pass as white again. I decided to take no more pills for a while. I removed my shirt and undershirt. My body, so long unexposed to the sun or the sun lamp, had paled to a café-au-lait color. I told myself I would have to be careful not to undress unless I had privacy henceforth. My face and hands were far darker than my body. Since I often slept in my clothes, the problem would not be great.

  I wet my sponge, poured dye on it and touched up the corners of my mouth and my lips, which were always difficult spots.

  We boarded the bus in late afternoon and rode without incident to Selma, where I had a long layover before taking another bus to the state capital.

  In deep dusk I strolled through the streets of a beautiful town. A group of nicely dressed Negro women solicited contributions for missionary activities. I placed some change in their cup and accepted a tract explaining the missionary program. Then, curious to see how they would fare with the whites, I walked along with them.

  We approached the stationkeeper. His face soured and he growled his refusal. We walked on. In not a single instance did a white hear them out.

  Two well-dressed men stood talking in front of the Hotel Albert.

  “Pardon us, sir,” one of the women said, holding a tract in her hand. “We’re soliciting contributions for our missionary - ”

  “G’wan,” the older one snapped, “I got too many of them damned tracts already.”

  The younger man hesitated, dug in his pocket and tossed a handful of change in the cup. He refused the tract, saying, “I’m sure the money’ll be put to good use.”

  After we had gone two blocks, we heard footsteps behind us. We stopped at a street corner, not looking back. The younger man’s voice came to us. “I don’t suppose it does any good,” he said quietly, “but I apologize for the bad manners of my people.”

  “Thank you,” we said, not turning our heads.

  As we passed the bus station, I dropped out of the little group and sat on a public bench near an outside phone booth. I waited until I saw a Negro use the phone and then I hurried to it, closed the door and asked the long-distance operator to call my home collect.

  When my wife answered, the strangeness of my situation again swept over me. I talked with her and the children as their husband and father, while reflected in the glass windows of the booth I saw another man they would not know. At this time, when I wanted most to lose the illusion, I was more than ever aware of it, aware that it was not the man she knew, but a stranger who spoke with the same voice and had the same memory.

  Happy at least to have heard their voices, I stepped from the booth to the night’s cooler air. The night was always a comfort. Most of the whites were in their homes. The threat was less. A Negro blended inconspicuously into the darkness.

  Night coming tenderly

  Black like me.

  At such a time, the Negro can look at the starlit skies and find that he has, after all, a place in the universal order of things. Th
e stars, the black skies affirm his humanity, his validity as a human being. He knows that his belly, his lungs, his tired legs, his appetites, his prayers and his mind are cherished in some profound involvement with nature and God. The night is his consolation. It does not despise him.

  The roar of the wheels turning into the station, the stench of exhaust fumes, the sudden bustle of people unloading told me it was time to go. Men, better and wiser than the night, put me back into my place with their hate stares.

  I walked to the back of the bus, past the drowsers, and found an empty seat. The Negroes gave me their sleepy smiles and then we were off. I leaned back and dozed along with the others.

  November 25 Montgomery

  In Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, I encountered a new atmosphere. The Negro’s feeling of utter hopelessness is here replaced by a determined spirit of passive resistance. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’ s influence, like an echo of Gandhi’s, prevails. Nonviolent and prayerful resistance to discrimination is the keynote. Here, the Negro has committed himself to a definite stand. He will go to jail, suffer any humiliation, but he will not back down. He will take the insults and abuses stoically so that his children will not have to take them in the future.

  The white racist is bewildered and angry by such an attitude, because the dignity of the Negro’s course of action emphasizes the indignity of his own. It is a challenge to him to needle the Negro into acts of a baser nature, into open physical conflict. He will walk up and blow cigarette smoke in the Negro’s face, hoping the Negro will strike out at him. Then he could repress the Negro violently and claim it was only self-defense.

  Where the Negro has lacked unity of purpose elsewhere, he has in Montgomery rallied to the leadership of King. Where he has been degraded elsewhere by unjust men of both races, here he is resisting degradation.

  I could not make out the white viewpoint in Montgomery. It was too fluid, too changeable. A superficial calm hung over the city. At night police were everywhere. I felt that the two races stood like blocks of concrete, immovable, and that the basic issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, were lost from view by the whites. The issues had degenerated to who would win. Fear and dread tensed both sides.

  The Negroes with whom I associated feared two things. They feared that one of their own might commit an act of violence that would jeopardize their position by allowing the whites to say they were too dangerous to have their rights. They dreaded the awful tauntings of irresponsible white men, the jailing, the frames.

  The white man’s fears have been widely broadcast. To the Negro these fears of “intermingling” make no sense. All he can see is that the white man wants to hold him down - to make him live up to his responsibilities as a taxpayer and soldier, while denying him the privileges of a citizen. At base, though the white brings forth many arguments to justify his viewpoint, one feels the reality is simply that he cannot bear to “lose” to the traditionally servant class.

  The hate stare was everywhere practiced, especially by women of the older generation. On Sunday, I made the experiment of dressing well and walking past some of the white churches just as services were over. In each instance, as the women came through the church doors and saw me, the “spiritual bouquets” changed to hostility. The transformation was grotesque. In all of Montgomery only one woman refrained. She did not smile. She merely looked at me and did not change her expression. My gratitude to her was so great it astonished me.

  November 27

  I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society. I went out only at night for food. My heart sickened at the thought of any more hate. Too, I wanted no more sunlight until I had the medication sufficiently out of my system to allow me to lighten.

  November 28

  I decided to try to pass back into white society. I scrubbed myself almost raw until my brown skin had a pink rather than black undertone. Yes, looking into the mirror, I felt I could pass. I put on a white shirt, but by contrast it made my face and hands appear too dark. I changed to a brown sports shirt, which made my skin appear lighter.

  This shift was nerve-racking. As a white man I could not be seen leaving a Negro home at midnight. If I checked into a white hotel and then got too much sun, it would, in combination with the medication still in my system, turn me too dark and I would not be able to return to the hotel.

  I waited until the streets were quiet outside and I was sure everyone in the house slept. Then, taking my bags, I walked to the door and out into the night.

  It was important to get out of the neighborhood and into the white sector as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. I watched for police cars. Only one appeared in the distance and I dodged down a side street.

  At the next intersection a Negro teenager strode by. I stepped out and walked behind him. He glanced at me and then kept his eyes to the front. Obviously thinking I might harass him, he pulled something from his jacket and I heard a click. Though I could not see what he held in his hand, I have no doubt it was a switch-blade knife. To him I was nothing more than a white stranger, a potential source of harm against whom he must protect himself.

  He stopped at the corner of a wide street and waited to cross. I came up beside him.

  “It’s getting cold, isn’t it?” I said, seeking to reassure him that I had no unfriendly intentions.

  He stood like a statue, unresponsive.

  We crossed the street to a brighter downtown section. A policeman strolled toward us and the boy quickly dropped his weapon into his jacket pocket.

  The policeman nodded affably to me and I knew then that I had successfully passed back into white society, that I was once more a first-class citizen, that all doors to cafés, rest rooms, libraries, movies, concerts, schools and churches were suddenly open to me. After so long I could not adjust to it. A sense of exultant liberation flooded through me. I crossed over to a restaurant and entered. I took a seat beside white men at the counter and the waitress smiled at me. It was a miracle. I ordered food and was served, and it was a miracle. I went to the rest room and was not molested. No one paid me the slightest attention. No one said, “What’re you doing in here, nigger?”

  Out there in the night I knew the men who were exactly as I had been these past weeks roamed the streets and not one of them could go into a place and buy a cup of coffee at this time of night. Instead of opening the door into rest rooms, they looked for alleys.

  To them as to me, these simple privileges would be a miracle. But though I felt it all, I felt no joy in it. I saw smiles, benign faces, courtesies - a side of the white man I had not seen in weeks, but I remembered too well the other side. The miracle was sour.

  I ate the white meal, drank the white water, received the white smiles and wondered how it could all be. What sense could a man make of it?

  I left the café and walked to the elegant Whitney Hotel. A Negro rushed to take my duffel. He gave me the smiles, the “yes, sir - yes, sir.”

  I felt like saying, “You’re not fooling me,” but now I was back on the other side of the wall. There was no longer communication between us, no longer the glance that said everything.

  The white clerks registered me, surrounded me with smiles, sent me to my comfortable room accompanied by a Negro who carried my bags. I gave him his tip, received his bow and realized that already he was far from me, distant as the Negro is distant from the white. I locked the door, sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette. I was the same man who could not possibly have bought his way into this room a week ago. My inclination was to marvel at the feel of the carpet beneath my feet, to catalogue the banal miracle of every stick of furniture, every lamp, the telephone, to go and wash myself in the tile shower - or again to go out into the street simply to experience what it was like to walk into all the doors, all the joints and movies and restaurants, to talk to white men in the lobby without servility, to look at women and see them smile courteously. />
  November 29

  Montgomery looked different that morning. The face of humanity smiled - good smiles, full of warmth; irresistible smiles that confirmed my impression that these people were simply unaware of the situation with the Negroes who passed them on the street - that there was not even the communication of intelligent awareness between them. I talked with some - casual conversations here and there. They said they knew the Negroes, they had had long talks with the Negroes. They did not know that the Negro long ago learned he must tell them what they want to hear, not what is. I heard the old things: the Negro is this or that or the other. You have to go slow. You can’t expect the South to sit back and let the damned communist North dictate to it, especially when no outsider can really “understand.” I listened and kept my tongue from giving answers. This was the time to listen, not to talk, but it was difficult. I looked into their eyes and saw sincerity and wanted to say: “Don’t you know you are prattling the racist poison?”