Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

In all fairness, I must add that this is the only example of deliberate cruelty I encountered on any of the city buses of New Orleans.

All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy - that the Negro is treated not even as a second-class citizen, but as a tenth-class one. His day-to-day living is a reminder of his inferior status.

the whites as a group can still connive to arrange life so that it destroys the Negro’s sense of personal value, degrades his human dignity, deadens the fibers of his being.

and in some instances the higher pleasures of music, art, literature, though these usually deepen perceptions rather than dull them, and can be unbearable; they present a world that is ordered, sane, disciplined to felicity, and the contrast of that world to theirs increases the pain of theirs.

The news had spread over the quarter like a wave of acid. Everyone talked of it. Not since I was in Europe, when the Russo-German Pact of 1939 was signed, had I seen news spread such bitterness and despair.

“We might as well learn not to expect nothing from Southern Justice. They’re going to stack the cards against us every time,” Sterling said. No one outside the Negro community could imagine the profound effect this action had in killing the Negro’s hope and breaking his morale.

It was not their refusal - I could understand that; it was the bad manners they displayed. I began to feel desperate and resentful. They would have cashed a traveler’s check without hesitation for a white man. Each time they refused me, they implied clearly that I had probably come by these checks dishonestly and they wanted nothing to do with them or me.

When the lady ticket-seller saw me, her otherwise attractive face turned sour, violently so. This look was so unexpected and so unprovoked I was taken aback. “What do you want?” she snapped.

It was my first experience with it. It is far more than a look of disapproval one occasionally gets. This was so exaggeratedly hateful I would have been amused if I had not be so surprised.

I was truly dumfounded by this deep fury that possessed her whenever she looked at me. Her performance was so venomous, I felt sorry for her. It must have shown in my expression, for her face congested to high pink. She undoubtedly considered it supreme insolence for a Negro to dare to feel sorry for her.

You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you.

The room was crowded with glum faces, faces dead to all enthusiasm, faces of people waiting. The books I had bought from the Catholic Book Store weighed heavily in my pocket. I pulled one of them out and, without looking at the title, let it fall open in my lap. I read: … it is by justice that we can authentically measure man’s value or his nullity … the absence of justice is the absence of what makes him man. - Plato. I have heard it said another way, as a dictum: He who is less than just is less than man.

An army officer hurried to get at the rear of the white line. I stepped back to let him get in front. He refused and went to the end of the colored portion of the line. Every Negro craned his head to look at the phenomenon.

As we crossed the bridge, the water of Lake Pontchartrain reflected the sky’s gray tone, with whitecaps on its disturbed surface.

He walked toward the rear, giving the whites a fawning, almost tender look. His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes.

bunch of dirty punks - don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better. Mein Kampf! Do you speak German? No. You’re ignorant. You make me sick.” He proceeded to denounce his race venomously. He spoke fragments of French, Spanish and Japanese.

He slouched far down in the seat and, working his hands wildly in the air as though he were playing a guitar, he began to sing the blues, softly, mournfully, lowering his voice at the obscene words. A strange sweetish odor detached from him. I supposed it to be marijuana, but it was only a guess.

“I have it now.” His eyes glowed and he hesitated before making his dramatic announcement to the world. I cringed, preparing explanations, and then decided to try to stop him from exposing me. “Wait - let me - ” “Florida Navaho,” he interrupted triumphantly. “Your mother was part Florida Navaho, wasn’t she?”

“People come down here and say Mississippi is the worst place in the world,” Bill said. “But we can’t all live in the North.” “Of course not. And it looks like beautiful country,” I said, glancing out at giant pine trees.

You may not even know you’re looking in a white woman’s direction, but they’ll try to make something out of it,” she said. “If you pass by a picture show, and they’ve got women on the posters outside, don’t look at them either.” “Is it that bad?” He assured me it was.

others grumbled about how unfair it was. The large woman was apologetic, as though it embarrassed her for a stranger to see Mississippi’s dirty linen.

I sat in the monochrome gloom of dusk, scarcely believing that in this year of freedom any man could deprive another of anything so basic as the need to quench thirst or use the rest room. There was nothing of the feel of America here. It was rather some strange country suspended in ugliness. Tension hung in the air, a continual threat, even though you could not put your finger on it.

“Oh, were you calling me?” Bill asked innocently. “I heard you yelling ‘Boy,’ but that’s not my name, so I didn’t know you meant me.”

in Mississippi everyone who boarded the bus at the various little towns had a smile and a greeting for everyone else. We felt strongly the need to establish friendship as a buffer against the invisible threat. Like shipwrecked people, we huddled together in a warmth and courtesy that was pure and pathetic.

They said nothing, did not look back, but hostility emanated from them in an unmistakable manner. We tried to counter it by being warm and kind to one another, far more than strangers usually are.

The bus circled through the streets of a small Southern town, a gracious town in appearance. I looked about me. It was too real for my companions, too vivid. Their faces were pinched, their expressions indrawn as though they felt themselves being dragged down the jail stairway, felt their own heads bumping against the steps, experiencing the terror …

“You mean a white driver’ll take a Negro passenger?” I asked. “Yeah.” “They wouldn’t in New Orleans … they said they weren’t allowed to.” “They’re allowed to do anything to get your dime here,”

A tangerine flew past my head and broke against a building. The street was loud and raw, with tension as thick as fog.

darkness that was alive with lights and humanity. Blues boomed from a tavern across the street. It was a sort of infernal circus, smelling of barbecue and kerosene.

Canned jazz blared through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera.

I knew I was in hell. Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony.

I saw tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light. Then I heard myself say what I have heard them say so many times. “It’s not right. It’s just not right.” Then the onrush of revulsion, the momentary flash of blind hatred against the whites who were somehow responsible for all of this,

My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men’s souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock.

He had sat here holding blank negatives, masterpieces of human ingenuity wasted.

struck the dead globe, causing it to sing its strange filamental music of the spheres, fragile and high-pitched above the outside noises.

anything to escape the death dance out there in the Mississippi night.

I began to understand Lionel Trilling’s remark that culture - learned behavior patterns so deeply ingrained they produce involuntary reactions - is a prison.

past a man leaning forward with his head cushioned on his arm against a wall, leaking into the shadows;

The imprint of her thumb remained in the bread’s soft pores. Standing so close, odors of her body rose up to me from her white uniform, a mingling of hickory-smoked flesh, gardenia talcum and sweat. The expression on her full face cut into me. Her eyes said with unmistakable clarity, “God … isn’t it awful?”

“Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly.” Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul.

Some frightful thing had to climax this accelerating madness.

My nerves tightened each time a car passed. I expected another tangerine to be thrown or another oath to be hurled. Other Negroes stood in other doorways, watching me as though they thought I was insane to stand there in the bright light. A sensible man would wait in the darkness.

We drove through the darkened streets to his home, talking in a strangely stilted manner. I wondered why, and then realized that I had grown so accustomed to being a Negro, to being shown contempt, that I could not rid myself of the cautions.

We merely fell into the fear that hangs over the state, a nameless and awful thing.

“popular prejudice,” or “keep the nigger in his place,” in a Christian and 100 percent American fairplay manner, of course. “I glad-handed from hell to breakfast, winning friends and conning people,”

More and more tormented, East entered a battle with his conscience, his sense of decency. It became clear to him that though he wrote in his paper what his readers wanted to see, this was not always the truth.

She and her father were constantly at war over the TV programs. I could make little sense of it, except that the arguments were long and full of recriminations on both sides; but the traditional roles were reversed. She did not approve of her father’s avid watching of westerns and children’s programs, and he insisted that he be allowed, by God, to view his “favorites.”

It is perhaps the most incredible collection of what East calls “assdom” in the South. It shows that the most obscene figures are not the ignorant ranting racists, but the legal minds who front for them, who “invent” for them the legislative proposals and the propaganda bulletins.

A green, spacious campus with white buildings, great trees streaming Spanish moss. We drove through slowly, of necessity, since the campus drives have cement ridges every forty or fifty feet that would cause your car to bump badly if any speed were attempted. P.D. cursed these richly

Despite the inequalities, I liked New Orleans, perhaps because I dreaded so the prospect of leaving once more to go into the Deep South, perhaps because it was, after all, so much better here than in Mississippi - though I understand that the rest of Louisiana is scarcely any better.