Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

how can you render the duties of justice to men when you’re afraid they’ll be so unaware of justice that they may destroy you? - especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.” He said this with real sadness.

He also told me things that Negroes had told him - that the lighter the skin the more trustworthy the Negro. I was astonished to see an intelligent man fall for this cliché, and equally astonished that Negroes would advance it, for in effect it placed the dark Negro in an inferior position and fed the racist idea of judging a man by his color.

As I left his office, he shook my hand and said gravely, “Now you go into oblivion.”

“What are you going to do - be a Puerto Rican or something?” he asked.

Turning off all the lights, I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stood in the darkness before the mirror, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on. In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger - a fierce, bald, very dark Negro - glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. The transformation was total and shocking.

the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. Suddenly, almost with no mental preparation, no advance hint, it became clear and permeated my whole being. My inclination was to fight against it. I had gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won’t rub off. The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been.

The completeness of this transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I had imagined. I became two men, the observing one and the one who panicked,

I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devastated me. The Griffin that was had become invisible. The worst of it was that I could feel no companionship with this new person. I did not like the way he looked.

How did one start?

I was a man born old at midnight into a new life.

the secret awareness that the person on the other end did not know he talked with a Negro.

As I had suspected they would be, my discoveries were naïve ones, like those of a child.

I walked to the cigarette counter, where the same girl I had talked with every day waited on me. “Package of Picayunes, please,” I said in response to her blank look. She handed them to me, took my bill and gave me change with no sign of recognition, none of the banter of previous days. Again my reaction was that of a child. I was aware that the street smells, and the drugstore odors of perfume and arnica, were exactly the same to the Negro as they had been to the white. Only this time I could not go to the soda fountain and order a limeade or ask for a glass of water.

sat down on the bed to the loud twang of springs. A deep gloom spread through me, heightened by noise of talk, laughter and jukebox jazz from the bar downstairs. My room was scarcely larger than a double bed. An open transom above the door into the hall provided the only ventilation. The air, mingled with that of other rooms, was not fresh. In addition to the bed, I had a tiny gas stove and a broken-down bed stand. On it were two thin hand towels, a half bar of Ivory soap. It was past one now. The light was so feeble I could hardly see to write. With no windows I felt boxed in, suffocating.

I could not shake the almost desperate sadness all this evoked, and I marveled that sounds could so degrade the spirit.

realized I was having my first prolonged contact as a Negro with other Negroes. Its drama lay in its lack of drama, in its quietness, in the courtesies we felt impelled to extend to one another. I wondered if the world outside was so bad for us that we had to counter it among ourselves by salving one another with kindness.

warmed by the brief contact with others like me who felt the need to be reassured that an eye could show something besides suspicion or hate.

Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it. I saw it as I passed, looking for food. A young, slick-haired man screamed loud obscenities to an older woman on the sidewalk. She laughed and threw them back in his face.

Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way.

He told me that he often took the bus into better parts of town where the whites lived, “just to get away from this place. I just walk in the streets and look at the houses … anything, just to get somewhere where it’s decent … to get a smell of clean air.” “I know …” I sympathized.

lack of gallantry tormented me. I half rose from my seat to give it to her, but Negroes behind me frowned disapproval. I realized I was “going against the race” and the subtle tug-of-war became instantly clear. If the whites would not sit with us, let them stand.

Her blue eyes, so pale before, sharpened and she spat out, “What you looking at me like that for?” I felt myself flush. Other white passengers craned to look at me. The silent onrush of hostility frightened me.

I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged. I left the bus on Canal Street. Other Negroes aboard eyed me not with anger, as I had expected, but rather with astonishment that any black man could be so stupid.

A large poster on the wall caught my attention: DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM: Pray for guidance. Be courteous and friendly. Be neat and clean. Avoid loud talk. Do not argue. Report incidents immediately. Overcome evil with good.

had been visiting as a white man. My friend Sterling Williams sat on an empty box on the sidewalk. He looked up without a hint of recognition.

If a man just goes on about his business and doesn’t pay any attention to them, they won’t bother you. I don’t mean bowing or scraping - just, you know, show you got some dignity.” He raised his glance to my face and smiled wisely.

“Hey! You can’t go in there. Hey!” I turned back toward them, astonished that even among skid row derelict joints they had “separate facilities.”

We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.

- I got water.” He reached behind the shine stand and brought out a gallon lard can with wires looped through holes in each side to make a handle. A flake of ash floated on the water’s surface. I up-ended the bucket and drank.

all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such low morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.

We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk, were suddenly elevated in status by this man’s misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.

I felt the wall warm against my back, making me drowsy. My first afternoon as a Negro was one of dragging hours and a certain contentment.

Two pigeons flew down to the sidewalk at our feet. Joe tossed them some bread scraps. The sun sparked iridescence from their purple necks as they pecked. They provided us deep pleasure, an anodyne to the squalor and clutter of the street.

By four o’clock the street was in shadow. Sunlight rimmed the buildings above us and the air chilled rapidly.

the YMCA Coffee Shop, which turned out to be the meeting place of the city’s important men.

I’ve been shown many courtesies by the whites.” “Oh, we’ve made strides,” he said. “But we’ve got to do a lot better. Then, too, New Orleans is more enlightened than anyplace else in the state - or in the South.” “Why is that, I wonder?” I asked. “Well, it’s far more cosmopolitan, for one thing. And it’s got a strong Catholic population,” he said. “A white man can show you courtesies without fearing some neighbor will call him a ‘nigger-lover’ like they do in other places.”

“He utilizes this knowledge to flatter some of us, tell us we’re above our people, not like most Negroes. We’re so stupid we fall for it and work against our own. Why, if we’d work just half as hard to boost our race as we do to please whites whose attentions flatter us, we’d really get somewhere.”

I saw the image in the large mirror of the wardrobe. Light gleamed from the elderly Negro’s head as he looked up to talk to the Negro woman. The sense of shock returned; it was as though I were invisible in the room, observing a scene in which I had no part.

I wondered from what source within me the prayer had spontaneously sprung.

And then the boy’s words: Mr. No-Hair, Baldy, Shit-head. (Would it have happened if I were white?) And then the doctor’s words as I left his office yesterday: Now you go into oblivion. Seated on the church steps tonight, I wondered if he could have known how truly he spoke, how total the feeling of oblivion was.

The whites seemed far away, out there in their parts of the city. The distance between them and me was far more than the miles that physically separated us. It was an area of unknowing. I wondered if it could really be bridged.

Among Negroes I was treated with the most incredible courtesies, even by strangers.

Our people aren’t educated because they either can’t afford it or else they know education won’t earn the jobs it would a white man.

They make it impossible for us to earn, to pay much in taxes because we haven’t much in income, and then they say that because they pay most of the taxes, they have the right to have things like they want. It’s a vicious circle, Mr. Griffin, and I don’t know how we’ll get out of it. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can’t deserve our rights.”

“They’re about fifty years behind the times,” an elderly man said. “The social scientists have shown this is wrong. Our own people have proven themselves in every field - not just a few, but thousands. How can the racists deny these proofs?” “They don’t bother to find out about them,” Mr. Gayle said flatly. “We need a conversion of morals,”

“So, if you want to be a good American, you’ve got to practice bad Americanism. That makes sense, too,” Mr. Gayle sighed. “Maybe it’d take a saint after all to straighten such a mess out.” “We’ve reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy,”

First, the discrimination against him. Second, and almost more grievous, his discrimination against himself; his contempt for the blackness that he associates with his suffering; his willingness to sabotage his fellow Negroes because they are part of the blackness he has found so painful.

realizing that a few days earlier I could have gone in and ordered anything on the menu. But now, though I was the same person with the same appetite, the same appreciation and even the same wallet, no power on earth could get me inside this place for a meal.

I looked up to see the frowns of disapproval that can speak so plainly and so loudly without words. The Negro learns this silent language fluently. He knows by the white man’s look of disapproval and petulance that he is being told to get on his way, that he is “stepping out of line.”

A woman watched me with sympathetic anger, as though she in no way approved of this kind of treatment. However, she did not speak.