Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

The small room was perfectly clean except for a placard attached to the back of the door. I read the neatly typed NOTICE! until I saw that it was only another list of prices a white man would pay for various types of sensuality with various ages of Negro girls.

In these matters, the Negro has seen the backside of the white man too long to be shocked. He feels an indulgent superiority whenever he sees these evidences of a white man’s frailty. This is one of the sources of his chafing at being considered inferior. He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior.

The highway ran for miles along some of the most magnificent beaches I have ever seen - white sands, a beautiful gulf; and opposite the beach, splendid homes. The sun warmed me through, and I took my time, stopping to study the historic markers placed along the route.

some of the local Negro citizens were considering a project to keep an account of the gasoline they purchased throughout the year and at the end of that time demand from the town fathers either a refund on their gasoline tax or the privilege of using the beaches for which they had paid their fair part.

I felt the keenest disappointment, and mentally erased the passages I had composed about the kindness of the Mississippian who gave the Negro a ride.

It quickly became obvious why they picked me up. All but two picked me up the way they would pick up a pornographic photograph or book - except that this was verbal pornography.

it is harrowing to see decent-looking men and boys assume that because a man is black they need to show him none of the reticence they would, out of respect, show the most derelict white man.

at the fact that I could say it. His whole attitude of enthusiasm practically shouted, “Why, you talk intelligently!” He was so obtuse he did not realize the implied insult in his astonishment that a black man could do anything but say “yes, sir” and mumble four-letter words.

Only the language differed from the previous inquirers - the substance was the same. The difference was that here I could disagree with him without risking a flood of abuse or petulance.

It became apparent he was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.

They showed me something that all men have but seldom bring to the surface, since most men seek health.

“They don’t deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white,” I said. “They only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don’t spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man’s conditioning.”

Deprive a man of any contact with the pleasures of the spirit and he’ll fall completely into those of the flesh.” “But we don’t deprive you people of the ‘pleasures of the spirit,’ ” he said. “In most places we can’t go to the concerts, the theater, the museums, public lectures … or even to the library. Our schools in the South don’t compare to the white schools, poor as they are. You deprive a man of educational opportunities and he’ll have no knowledge of the great civilizing influences of art, history, literature and philosophy. Many Negroes don’t even know these things exist. With practically nothing to exalt the mind or exercise the spirit, any man is going to sink to his lowest depths. It becomes vicious - and tragic.”

Most often the sex-king is just a poor devil trying to prove the manhood that his whole existence denies.

“I don’t know …” he sighed. “It looks like a man could do better.” “It looks that way to you, because you can see what would be better. The Negro knows something is terribly wrong, but with things the way they are, he can’t know that something better actually exists on the other side of work and study.

I could only conclude that he was color blind, since he appeared totally unaware that I was a Negro. He enjoyed company, nothing more.

He looked young, not over twenty, and I wondered how he had escaped the habit of guarded fencing that goes on constantly between whites and Negroes in the South wherever they meet. He was the first man I met of either color who did not confuse the popular image of the thing with the thing itself.

I thought of Maritain’s conclusion that the only solution to the problems of man is the return of charity (in the old embracing sense of caritas, not in the stingy literal sense it has assumed in our language and in our days) and metaphysics. Or, more simply, the maxim of St. Augustine: “Love, and then do what you will.”

When I crossed the line from Mississippi into Alabama, I felt as though I were leaving a cemetery.

My host, unlike most Negroes, did not use the more economical low-watt bulbs.

That’s the worst part of this devilment. If the young ones want a decent life, they’ve got to go somewhere else. All the families are being split up. That’s the shame of it.”

“You can’t get around what’s right, though,”

we can’t do that any longer. We’re supposed to get our rights in a proper way. And try to understand that it’s hard for them, too, to change around from the old ways.

As always, the conversation stalemated with “None of it really makes any sense.”

No matter where you are, the nearest Negro café is always far away, it seems.

in many sparsely settled areas Negro cafés do not exist; and even in densely settled areas, one must sometimes cross town for a glass of water. It is rankling, too, to be encouraged to buy all of one’s goods in white stores and then be refused soda fountain or rest room service.

“No use trying down here,” he said. “We’re gradually getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. We’re taking it slow, but we’re doing it. Pretty soon we’ll have it so the only jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have.” “How can we live?” I asked hopelessly, careful not to give the impression I was arguing. “That’s the whole point,” he said, looking me square in the eyes, but with some faint sympathy, as though he regretted the need to say what followed: “We’re going to do our damnedest to drive every one of you out of the state.”

They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from “winning,” even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race.

walking the same streets as a Negro, I found no trace of the Mobile I formerly knew, nothing familiar. The laborers still dragged out their ox-like lives, but the gracious Southerner, the wise Southerner, the kind Southerner was nowhere visible. I knew that if I were white, I would find him easily, for his other face is there for whites to see.

Fear dims even the sunlight.

I began to hope that I had encountered a decent white.

I looked out the window to tall pine trees rising on either side of the highway. Their turpentine odor mingled with the soaped smells of the man’s khaki hunting clothes.

Mongrelization is already a widespread reality in the South - it has been exclusively the white man’s contribution to the Southern Way of Life. His vast concern for “racial purity” obviously does not extend to all races.

He spoke in a tone that sickened me, casual, merciless. I looked at him. His decent blue eyes turned yellow. I knew that nothing could touch him to have mercy once he decided a Negro should be “taught a lesson.” The immensity of it terrified me. But it caught him up like a lust now. He entertained it, his voice unctuous with pleasure and cruelty.

It was a side he would show no one but his victims, or those who connived with him.

He showed me the lowest and I had to surmise the highest.

I felt strangely safe, isolated, alone in the stillness of dusk turning into night. First stars appeared in darkening skies still pale and the earth’s heat escaped upward.

‘Okay, so you’re going to give up just because you get no butter with your bread. That’s no way to act. Go ahead and eat the bread - but work, and maybe someday we’ll have butter to go with it.’ I tell them we sure ain’t going to get it any other way.”

The headlights fell on a shanty of unpainted wood, patched at the bottom with a rusting Dr. Pepper sign.

I praised the children until the father’s tired face animated with pride. He looked at the children the way another looks at some rare painting or treasured gem.

One of the smaller girls salivated so heavily the chocolate dribbled syrup-like from the corner of her mouth. Her mother wiped it off with her fingertip and unconsciously (from what yearning?) put it in her own mouth.

A fragment of memory returned - recollection of myself as a youngster reading Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, her description of the Negro boy stopping along a lonely path to urinate. Now, years later, I was there in a role foreign to my youth’s wildest imaginings. I felt more profoundly than ever before the totality of my Negro-ness, the immensity of its isolating effects. The transition was complete from the white boy reading a book about Negroes in the safety of his white living room to an old Negro man in the Alabama swamps, his existence nullified by men but reaffirmed by nature, in his functions, in his affection.

They like to live this way. It would make them just as miserable to demand a higher standard of living as it would make us miserable to put us down to that standard.”

he laughed sourly, “they got all the loopholes plugged. There ain’t a way you can win in this state.”

“Good night,” the children said, their voices locating them in the darkness.

Odors of the night and autumn and the swamp entered to mingle with the inside odors of children, kerosene, cold beans, urine and the dead incense of pine ashes. The rot and the freshness combined into a strange fragrance - the smell of poverty. For a moment I knew the intimate and subtle joys of misery.

I felt again the Negro children’s lips soft against mine, so like the feel of my own children’s good-night kisses. I saw again their large eyes, guileless, not yet aware that doors into wonderlands of security, opportunity and hope were closed to them.

bean

"mean"? "bleak"?

No one, not even a saint, can live without a sense of personal value. The white racist has masterfully defrauded the Negro of this sense. It is the least obvious but most heinous of all race crimes, for it kills the spirit and the will to live.

I have studied objectively the anthropological arguments, the accepted clichés about cultural and ethnic differences. And I have found their application simply untrue. The two great arguments - the Negro’s lack of sexual morality and his intellectual incapacity - are smoke screens to justify prejudice and unethical behavior.