Günter Grass | The Tin Drum / 1961

a tin[n]y beat

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Claude Carrière, Franz Seitz, and Voker Schlöndorff (screenplay, based on the novel by Günter Grass), Volker Schlöndorff (director) Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) / 1979, USA 1980

Günter Grass Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959). English language version translated by Ralph Mannheim (New York: Random House, 1961).

 

Writing about Volkner Schlöndorff’s 1979 film adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 fiction The Tin Drum, Roger Ebert began his review with the following series of critical “accusations”:

 

“Allegories have trouble standing for something else if they are too convincing as themselves. That is the difficulty with The Tin Drum, which is either (a) an allegory about one person's protest against the inhumanity of the world, or (b) the story of an obnoxious little boy.

     The movie invites us to see the world through the eyes of little Oskar, who on his third birthday refuses to do any more growing up because the world is such a cruel place. My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film's foreground obscured its larger meaning.

      So what does that make me? An anti-intellectual philistine? I hope not. But if it does, that's better than caving in to the tumult of publicity and praise for The Tin Drum which has shared the Grand Prix at Cannes (with Apocalypse Now) and won the Academy Award as best foreign film, and is hailed on all fronts for its brave stand against war and nationalism and in favor of the innocence of childhood.

     Actually, I don't think little Oskar is at all innocent in this film; a malevolence seems to burn from his eyes, and he's compromised in his rejection of the world's evil by his own behavior as the most spiteful, egocentric, cold and calculating character in the film (all right: except for Adolf Hitler).

     The film has been adapted by the West German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff from the 1959 novel by Günter Grass, who helped with the screenplay. It chronicles the career of little Oskar, who narrates his own life story starting with his mother's conception in a potato patch. Oskar is born into a world divided: in the years after World War I, both Germans and Poles live in the state of Danzig, where they get along about as well as Catholics and Protestants in Belfast.

     Oskar has fathers of both nationalities…., and he is not amused by the nationalistic chauvinism he sees around him. So, on his third birthday, he reaches a conscious decision to stop growing. He provides a plausible explanation for his decision by falling down the basement stairs. And for the rest of the movie he remains arrested in growth: a solemn-faced, beady-eyed little tyke who never goes anywhere without a tin drum which he beats on incessantly. For his other trick, he can scream so loudly that he shatters glass.

    There is a scene in which Oskar's drum so confuses a Nazi marching band that it switches from a Nazi hymn to "The Blue Danube." The crashing obviousness of this scene aside, I must confess that the symbolism of the drum failed to involve me.

    And here we are at the central problem of the movie: Should I, as a member of the audience, decide to take the drum as, say, a child's toy protest against the marching cadences of the German armies? Or should I allow myself to be annoyed by the child's obnoxious habit of banging on it whenever something's not to his liking? Even if I buy the wretched drum as a Moral Symbol, I'm still stuck with the kid as a pious little bastard.”

 

    I’ve quoted at length here because the generally exuberant and supportive film critic, Ebert, writes words that somewhat echo my own feelings—but oddly, not about the film, but the original novel—I had developed prior to reading his film review. The book, published in 1959, is often described as the first and most important of German post-World War II books that dealt straight-forwardly with their countrymen’s guilt. And it has consistently been praised by numerous critics (see, for example, the Darragh McManus essay in The Guardian in 2009, which begins “One could argue that Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum is the great novel of the 20th century.”) as a seminal work of 20th century fiction. 

     Although I think of myself as an extraordinarily well-read person when it comes to fiction and poetry, for some reason I had never before read the book, but given the news of Grass’ death earlier this year and my focus on World War II and Germany in my 2015 volumes, I became determined to correct that.

    I cannot report that it was a completely enjoyable project. Although Grass has a remarkable command of various fictional genres which he employs with inventive energy throughout the book, and although he most certainly creates a larger-than-life surrealist-tinged story, the fiction almost seems to me to cloak what I might have thought to be its major subject: life in Nazi Germany.

      By locating the action in Danzig, Poland, away from the German heartland, in part, Grass delimits his focus. While Danzig was one of the first territories to have been taken over by the Nazis, who claimed the city, in large, because of its large German population and its long ties with Prussia, which led soon after to the German invasion of Poland, by placing most the work’s action there, Grass puts the worst of the German atrocities on the fringes. Yes, we get a first-hand glimpse, so to speak, of the battle of the Polish Post Office; and through the fact that Oskar’s legal if not true father, Matzerath, is a Nazi sympathizer, we do not get an immediate portrayal of how that might affect family life. We even get a close-up glimpse of a Nazi rally which little Oskar, with his endless drumming, purportedly and quite miraculously “breaks up” by causing the Nazi band to shift to the rhythms of a waltz. But these events, including the later destruction of the Jewish Markus’ toy shop and Oskar’s later involvement in a troupe of dwarves entertaining the German soldiers in the bunkers, all seem almost incidental to the central tale which focuses on the determined little person, Oskar.

      The very fact that the fiction’s hero, Oskar, is a kind of eternal child, who would rather drum than talk, prevents the fiction from fully exploring and encountering deeper issues about the Nazi takeover. From a child’s point-of-view we get mostly glimpses, long perspectives, hints as opposed to direct presentation of the world Hitler and his associates created. The only thing that truly matters to Oskar is his drumming, and all else seems almost tangential.

      The book, moreover, does not at all make it clear that Oskar drums in opposition to the immorality he witnesses. At numerous times, Oskar seems far more attracted to and interested in Bronski, his mother Agnes’ not-so-secret lover than in Matzerath. While he may apply his shrill scream to nearby windows while he is left with Markus during one of his mother’s trysts, he also uses his drumming and screaming skills to tempt strangers—as well as Bronski—to steal good through windows he has cracked open. If Matzerath is a closet Nazi, he is more emphatically a wonderful cook and a rather doting father, despite the fact that even he must wonder about Oskar’s parentage.

      Oskar, moreover, is hardly presented as an individual with moral values in opposition with the German-controlled world around him. The forever young hellion is only too happy to deface church property, to seduce his own father’s shopkeeper and—after Agnes dies—his father's mistress, Maria, fathering her son Kurt. And, in a long episode, Oskar becomes the leader of a group of armed young bandits, The Dusters (an imitation of the real Edelweiss Pirates of Cologne) who represent the mirror image of the brownshirts, using the chaos of the Nazi’s last years to create chaos.

      Oskar is quite ready to be able to join with Bebra, Roswitha, and others of the midget group celebrated by Nazi soldiers. He witnesses the murder of several nuns walking across a nearby beach by Corporal Lankes. Rather than drumming out in disgust, Oskar seems to take in the event with little of the horror one might expect: “Roswitha, stop your ears, there’s going to be shooting like in the newsreels.” In other words, for him reality has become a kind simulacrum.

      After the war, Oskar turns even more corrupt, breaking into the bedroom of his neighbor, a nurse, and later, attempting to rape her. When she is murdered he is suspected and placed in an asylum, from which, even if he is found not guilty, he has no desire to leave.

       In short, Oskar, in Grass’ original work, is not only the “pious little bastard” who Ebert sees him as, but has been a child-voyeur, street thug, rapist, and collaborator, as well as an out-and-out liar whose tale is clearly unreliable, which completely diminishes any moral ground by which we might judge Nazi Germany. Since so much of the work is written in a kind hazy surrealist style with allegorical implications, moreover, it is indeed very difficult throughout to find in Grass’ The Tin Drum any moral center. 

   One might argue, of course, that during the Nazi regime there was no moral position left, and that Oskar represents the childlike aspects the culture as a whole, neither entirely good or bad, but mixed in its attempts to simply to survive. The drum is, arguably, a symbol of the potential of art to sustain existence within a world with no moral compass, and, like all art, is neither entirely evil or morally responsible. It is what it is, a force of expression that sometimes subverts the evil around it, but just often joins in to encourage society’s tortures, such as, late in the novel, when Oskar plays in a jazz group hired by a club whose members gather to grate onions so they might be able to cry, releasing their otherwise inexpressible feelings.

     As the first major post-holocaust German novel, such statements, however, seem to me to be as tinny and tiny as the beat of Oscar’s little drum. I might suggest, without actually judging Grass, that it is a work of a man who, having himself been involved in the Nazi regime, did not seriously want to explore the darkest aspects of those horrific years.

     In the film, Volker Schlöndorff, is only too ready to present Oskar as a moral center of the work, cutting vast sections of Grass’s original, including the last section, and extending scenes that show, in far more simplistic terms, direct connections with Oskar’s tin drumming and the immorality he witnesses around him. While Markus (Charles Aznavour), another of Agnes’ admirers, is very briefly presented in the book, for example, Schlöndorff extends the scenes in which he gently proposes to Agnes, and adds a long connecting scene wherein Markus’s shop is destroyed by brownshirts and left without any hope.

 

    Since Oskar is actually played in the film by an 11-year-old child (the eerie David Bennent), we can more easily forgive his selfish actions such as his determination to take the drum from the shelf of the Post Office director’s family during the building’s siege. His interest in Maria, and licking of effervescent sherbet powder from her navel seems more like curiosity than the fiction’s 16-year-old stunted boy’s same actions—even if it does end in sexual acts.

     Schlöndorff’ and his writers quickly wash over some of Oskar’s contradictory actions, clean up the hundreds of minor entanglements of the fiction and cut long sections to present a far more flowing narrative, where allegory is made more comfortable.

     Using Grass’ generation myth concerning an escaping criminal and Oskar’s grandmother’s many layers of skirts under which the criminal hides, the director even ends his film as a kind of testament to the Kashubian roots of Grass’ Danzig, pulling it away from both its Polish and Nazi pasts.

      If Schlöndorff’s vast reconstruction of Grass’ original might be said to be a great simplification of the novel, it is nonetheless far more satisfying as a moral allegory which quite entertainingly uses its somewhat loathsome tyke as a force standing apart and against of the ills of the period. Whether or not he was able to make Oskar likeable is another issue. But the issues around him are certainly more centered and focused in Schlöndorff’s cinematic rendition than in Grass’ original work. And the acting, finally, is quite brilliant.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2015

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (October 2015) and World Cinema Review (October 2105).

Phil Zuckerman | Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions / 2014

the aweist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phil Zuckerman Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions (New York: Penguin Books, 2014)

 

In Living the Secular Life American sociologist Phil Zuckerman explores what he describes as  “new answers to old questions” about secular living. Noting that, with a growing number of people in the US now describing themselves as  atheists, agnostic, or simply disinterested in religion—from the 1950s when fewer than 5 percent of the popular described themselves as nonreligious, it now has grown by 200 percent representing 20 to 30 percent of  the population—Zuckerman argues that it is increasingly important that we cease describing ourselves as a Christian nation and explore what it means to be secular and how one can live a moral and productive life without religion.

      In some respects, Zuckerman’s book is a bit like a self-help book, in which by using the examples of some of the hundreds of non-secular people he has interviewed, the author argues that most secularists can and do live moral lives, seek out a sense of community, raise they children effectively and create active communities that in some cases represent better welfare than the most religious sections of the US and throughout the world. Indeed, he argues, some of the most healthy and productive societies in the world such as the Czech Republic (with 61 percent of the population identifying themselves as secular), Estonia (49 percent), Norway (31 percent), and France (33 percent) show sharp increases in the numbers of their citizens who identify themselves as being nonreligious. A century ago around 10 percent of Dutch claimed to be religiously unaffiliated, while today that number has grown to more than 40 percent. It is estimated that about half of the population of Great Britain claim no religious identity.

     Zuckerman, moreover, demonstrates, through individual examples, that it is possible to remain secular even during the most trying of times and the facts of death need not require one to seek out a God or religious faith. Indeed, those who remain secular, and who do not believe in an afterlife may be stimulated by their focus on living to find greater meaning in their lives and to seek out even greater interchange with friends and others in their communities.

      Citing examples from his own life, the author describes his own wonderment of the universe as a positive force which he describes as “Aweism,” a live without religion but that still permits him to be in “awe” of the joys and beauty of the world around him. While he admits to being an “atheist,” Zuckerman feels the word is a negative response to something that he perceives as positive. The word “agnostic” suggests that he simply has not made up his mind, and even though he teaches as a secular humanist at Pitzer College near Los Angeles, he argues that describing himself as that represents more an agenda than a personal definition of who he is. An aweist, he suggests, allows others to know that the non-believer is not so much “against” those who believe as simply unable, given his intellectual constructs, to share their faith; yet, it helps them to see him as an individual who recognizes the wonder of the world and being alive in it.

       That does not mean, however, that Zuckerman’s beliefs are passive or that he simply chooses not to call himself religious. Like Tim Whitmarsh, whose Battling the Gods I write about elsewhere, Zuckerman argues for the necessity of studying and sharing with other secularists to find answers to the important questions of human values and beliefs. And somewhat like Susan Jacoby, writing recently (February 7, 2016) in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, he is dismayed by the continual insistence of political candidates and state and governmental leaders to attempt to describe the US as a Christian country (Rubio, Trump, Bush, Cruz, and even Clinton to a certain degree have all remarked on their faiths as representing the American people), particularly given the fact that a Pew Research Center study estimates that there are more than 36 million secularists in the United States alone. Zuckerman argues:

 

           …when pundits and politicians such as Senator Marco

           Rubio conflate being American with being a religious

           believer, they do so not only in gross ignorance of the

           demographic realities of American, but direct opposition

           to the vision of our founding fathers.

                As President Ulysses Grant declared in 1975: “Leave

           the matter of religion to the family alter, the Church,

           and the private school, supported entirely by private con-

           tributions. Keep the Church and State forever separate.”

 

     Zuckerman argues for increasing community involvement of secularists in promoting and maintaining the separate and church and state, while at the same time involving the non-believer in community and political life. Sadly, he reminds us that in most polls Americans would prefer presidents who were Catholic, Jewish, female, and even Muslim to an atheist—this despite the fact that, as the author has shown us, non-believers live as moral and productive lives as those who rely on faith. Given the growing world and American population, particularly among the young, who report that they do not believe, perhaps it is time to more carefully study what and how not believing means to our lives.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2016

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2016).

 

John Howard Griffin | Black Like Me / 1960

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.

    To give Griffin credit, however, he remains determined to investigate, and again takes a bus to Biloxi, this time hitchhiking back to Alabama, where he is locked in conversations with various whites, some bigoted, others somewhat interested, and, on one occasion, with a seemingly completely color-blind young man. 

     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).