color bind
by Douglas Messerli
John Howard Griffin Black Like Me (New York: New American
Library, 1960, 1961, 1977)
For some
inexplicable reason, I missed out on reading John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, first published in 1960.
In my small town of Marion, Iowa, there were few if any blacks, and even the
nearby Cedar Rapids had what I believe was a very small black population. I
certainly did not grow up, at least to my own way of thinking, in a racist home
or community (my father, superintendent of schools, was particularly
sympathetic, I believe, with equal rights and education for blacks) but we had
very little experience with blacks, and the larger issues that would soon enter
the American consciousness occurred a few years later, particularly in 1964,
the year I spent in Norway.
By the time I returned to the US and
began a university education, the kind of impassioned white plea for the “Negro
justice” that Griffin had written had changed into angry and impassioned
documents such as Stokley Carmichael’s Black
Power, a book I did read, along with Malcolm X’s Autobiography, with their arguments for Black Power and black
supremacy, works as Griffin, himself, notes in his intelligent assessment of
the changes that occurred after his book’s publication in his Epilogue, ”What’s
Happened Since Black Like Me,” that
ultimately presented the good deeds of whites who had worked for racial
equality as a thing of the past, as the black organizations worked to determine
their own identities and positions.
It seemed to me, as I note above, even
before encountering the controversy around Rachel Dozeal and reading books such
Your Face in Mine, that it is finally
time to read the book recounting a white man’s experiences in the south who,
basically, put on black face before traveling from New Orleans to Mississippi,
and later to various locations in Alabama in 1959.
If I began the book simply wanting to
challenge the assumption that in order to understand the condition of black men
and women during that year, we had to heed the words of a white man over the
many black documents that already had revealed the tortures of everyday racism,
by the time I finished the book, I gained a new respect for what Griffin had
actually done. This religious man was, from his youth on, a figure with great
empathy, working in World War II to help Jews escape Nazis, and who, when he discovered
he as on the Nazi death list, escaped back to the US, only to be wounded in the
Pacific as a member of the Army Air Corps. Growing blind for a head wound, he
amazingly regained his sight ten years later. Indeed, one can quickly compare
his blindness to his later commitment to color blindness, a connection which
the author himself avows in suggesting that the issue of racism began to
concern him when he could longer see the apparent differences between the
races. That Griffin would also convert to Catholicism and maintained a faith
based on the guidance of Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Thomas
Merton also attests to his commitment to enacting his spiritual values in
relation to his fellow beings.
If we can look back upon the episodes of
the book now with a kind of recognition of the naiveté of it all, akin to the
commitment of the Gregory Peck character, who “becomes temporarily Jewish” in
the film Gentlemen’s Agreement to
reveal the truths about anti-Semitism in post-war American society, we
nonetheless must also recognize the courage it took to for a journalist to go
on such a voyage in the Jim Crow South of the late 1950s, a few years before
the more vocal and nationally-witnessed movements of Martin Luther King, Jr.
and others, which would begin to change the Old South.
In New Orleans, Griffin does not so much
encounter the immediate hatred of whites, but begins, nonetheless, to
comprehend what it means, literally, to live in a segregated society. For the
first time for many whites, the journalist makes clear what it means to go out
into the world each day without readily available bathrooms, without being able
to sit down in a café to cup of coffee, without the possibility of even sitting
down, in some places, without abuse and police interaction. Not only are black lives
lived at the edges of the otherwise active worlds going on about them, but the
blacks are forced to behave in thousands of obvious and sometimes subtle ways
that pretend satisfaction and civility at the very same time that they remain,
as true individuals, invisible to the whites who put daily force them into
situations based merely on the color of their skin.
Confessing the truth of his situation to a
local shoeshine worker, who Griffin had known previous, the author himself is
given a job, becoming a “boy” polishing up the boots of men who hardly
recognize his existence or, when they do, tolerate him with hauteur.
Hearing of a recent lynching of a black
man in Mississippi, which a jury, despite evidence from the US government
itself, refused to indict, Griffin determines to head out for more problematic
encounters with the racial horrors of the South. Although he is somewhat
dissuaded by black friends in New Orleans, and is warned even by his fellow
black bus travelers on the way to Hattiesburg, he boldly ventures into a new
world where he is suddenly thrust overnight into the “hell” of raucous late
night black community, where blacks, simply attempting to enjoy themselves by
dancing, singing, and eating through the night, are threatened at any moment
with gun-toting young white men driving through the streets.
If there was ever an example of what some
have argued is the real problem about a white pretending to be black, who can,
at any moment, take back his color to become one of the blessed race, it is
revealed in Griffin’s actions; after being psychologically tortured by an
ex-con on the bus trip, the journalist finds the sordid room he has been forced
to rent for the night nearly impossible to endure:
I turned away from the mirror.
A burned-out light glove lay on
the plank floor in the corner.
Its unfrosted glass held the reflection
of the overhead bulb, a speck
of brightness. A half-dozen film
negatives curled up around it
like dead leaves. I pick them up and
held them before the light
with strange excitement, curious to
see the image that some prior
occupant of the room had photographed.
Each negative was black.
I imagined him going to
the drugstore to pick up the package
of photos and hurrying to this
squalid room to warm himself with
the view of his wife, his
children, his parent, his girlfriend—who
knows? He had sat here holding
blank negatives, masterpieces of
the human ingenuity wasted.
If this
seems to be mere speculation of Griffin’s part, he soon moves off into an even
more imaginative realm by attempting to explain how the black’s “jubilant
living” and “whooping it up,” as whites describe it, is actually an expression
of despair, a way to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or
gluttony in order to escape the white racism.
That may well be true, but we are given
no sociological evidence that might prove it, and we can only recognize it as
an empathetic explanation of the chaos in which he has found himself. Fearing
the violence of the scene, Griffin picks up the phone and calls a white
newspaperman friend, P. D. East, who has also been prosecuted for “seeking
justice in race relations,” in whose comfortable home he spends the rest of the
night and weekend.
East is described later as a kind of
wicked humorist, but his mockery of the way whites talk about blacks,
particularly in the context of Griffin’s torturous night, is almost
intolerable, particularly when East delivers him up again to New Orleans by way
of Dillard University, where, after locking his car door in the paradisiac
isolation of the campus, he mocks his fellow whites once again with the words:
“Did you ever see a damn beautiful campus for a bunch of niggers. They’re getting uppityer and uppityer.” Somehow, over the
years, the humor of this apparent self-mockery of his fellow bigots, has been
lost.
But even in these situations, in retrospect, I suggest that Griffin, despite his constant personal, quasi-sociological analyses of the meaning of the incidents he experiences, seems, at moments, a bit dense. Picked up by a young man in his late twenties who questions him about black sex, presuming like many whites, that, as the young man states it, “Negroes are much more broad-minded about such things [sexual],” “I understand you make more of an art—or maybe hobby—out of your sex,” Griffin chalks it up as representing yet another white who has allowed myths about blacks to dominant his imagination:
He asked about the Negro genitalia
and the details of Negro sex life.
Only the language differed from
the previous inquirers—the substance
was the same ….He quote Kinsey and
others. It became apparent he
was one of those young who possess
an impressive store of facts, but
no truths.
Even when
the boy asks him to expose himself, Griffin appears not to imagine that the
boy, in what seems apparent to me, was probably a gay man seeking to find a
sexual experience with the other race. The fact that the boy later apologizes
seems to hardly faze the open-minded journalist, who has, one perceives, missed
the forest for the trees.
On the other hand, soon after, when he is
picked up, finally, by a black man who, perceiving that Griffin has nowhere to
go, invites him to spend the night in his swampland shack with his six children
and his wife, Griffin reveals a deeper gift of yarn in his description of the humble world of
this man who has nearly nothing, yet lives life with more grace and gentle
pride in this family’s life that in any self-satisfied bigot. Griffin, in
short, seemingly reiterates what blacks throughout the south later realized,
that their new-found pride and self-determination not only would help save
their own lives, but was necessary for the salvation of lives of their fellow
whites.
Even in a world filled with gators and
snakes, these simple folk celebrate with cut-up bits of Milky Way bars, singing
out their goodnights like the Walton’s in the nostalgic TV series. The
overwhelming revelations that Griffin makes transform his sociological
consolations into a kind pure poetry akin to the descriptions of the South of
James Agee and so many other authors (at one point Griffin has an opportunity
to meet Flannery O’Connor, but moves on in his journeys; it would have been
marvelous for these two ardent Catholic thinkers to have actually the
opportunity to meet) have discovered in their homelands:
Thinking about these things, the
bravery of these people attempting to bring
up a family decently, their
gratitude that none of their children were blind or
maimed, their willingness to share
their food and shelter with a stranger—the
whole thing overwhelmed me. I got
up from bed, half-frozen anyway, and
stepped outside.
A thin fog blurred the moon.
Trees rose as ghostly masses in the diffused
light. I sat on an inverted
washtub and tremble as its metallic coldness seeped
through my pants.
…….
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.
One longs to
find out how those children matured into adulthood.
Just as we begin to realize the
significance of Griffin’s acts, he slips off again into white face, appearing
across the country on various television and news shows, including a somewhat
imposing, but ultimately fulfilling, interview with Mike Wallace. The
journalist becomes famous, while the hundreds of blacks he identified with have
become nameless.
Yet, strangely, his courage becomes even
more clear as the year passes, a time during which his family is threatened, an
effigy of him is burned on the downtown streets of his home in a small Texas
town, and his parents (his mother having herself been threatened) his wife and
children, and, eventually, he himself retreat for protection to Mexico where
they were exiled until 1961.
If we still might wonder if blacks might
not have presented their messages about their inequality better than a white
man, Griffin makes quite clear in his “Epilogue” just how impossible that might
have been, given that there was so little communication between the two races.
As he relates it, during the race riots of the late 1960s, he and other white
spokesmen were time and again flown into cities fearing racial tensions. At
many of these meetings, where he generally stayed with blacks, the white leaders
did not even think to invite black community leaders to their meetings, and
when chastised by Griffin and others for their racial attitudes, were ignorant
enough to ask him where they might find such black leaders in their towns.
Rumor became rampant, writes Griffin, even in my home town of Cedar Rapids
(where the media wrongly suggested masses of blacks from Des Moines were being
shipped to the home of Quaker Oats and Collins Radio). It was a time which, he
reveals, liberal leaders like him might find themselves accused by
segregationists for exposing themselves if entered a local bathroom alone, or
in accosting a woman whose path they crossed.
At some lectures, where Griffin was
applauded with his honest assessments of how, even after new governmental
racial decisions were put into effect, that blacks continued to be isolated and
ghettoized, black representatives, speaking from the same podium, were met with
stony stares and hostility for stating the same things.
In a strange sense, Griffin’s simple color
transformation, continued, long after, to make both black and whites see him a
man of mixed race; he was put in to a kind of color bind, where he was
sometimes perceived as too black for the white community and too white for the
new generation of blacks.
As Griffin attempts to explain it, black
and liberal whites both had to rethink the world they had once imagined of an
integrated society where there was no discrimination and racial injustice.
Blacks had to stop bowing to white leaders and to take over their cause,
particularly after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and, accordingly, wise
whites, like Griffin, who had devoted their entire lives to race relations, had
to abandon their roles as spokesmen for the black race. Those who could not,
Griffin notes, became bitter, even accusing the numerous new black leaders as
incompetent.
In short, Griffin seems to have able to
comprehend his important role in the battle of race justice with a sad sense of
the consequences of the inability of his countrymen as a whole to actually
perceive their continued racist behavior, sometimes even those who thought of
themselves as the most enlightened in their communities. The results, as we
have had to come to terms with this year, seem almost prophetic given that
Griffin composed his Epilogue to this book in 1977:
Polarization. Separation. No one has
wanted this, white or black. It has come
because the things we dreamed of did
not materialize. Many still hold the old
dreams even while accepting today’s
realties.
Los Angeles, July 13, 2015
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (July 2015).
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