Black Like Me

Black Like Me, the brief, journalistic tale of a white man who travelled through the South posing as a Negro, is quickly becoming one of the minor classics in the literature of race. It describes, without embellishment, six weeks of constantly degrading experience. It leaves the reader literally sickened by a situation that is taken for granted in an entire section of his own country.

What Griffin did was really quite simple. He persuaded a dermatologist in New Orleans to treat him with a medicine used to cure vitiligo: a skin disease which causes white blotches to appear on a Negro's face and body. Where the medicine worked imperfectly, Griffin applied black stain; then he shaved his hair, and within a few days was transformed into a Negro.

Once black, he becomes frightened by what he had done. He is appalled by the unfamiliar reflection he finds in a mirror, frightened to be in a world so utterly cut off from his wife and children. He realizes that his appearance would terrify his family. "My inclination was to fight against it. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man.... The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he might once have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world wholly unfamiliar to me."

His initial problems, in an odd way, are amusing. In the first place, irrevocably a Negro now, he has no idea of how to enter the Negro world. Nor does he know what to expect from white people and, as an unfortunate corollary, he has no idea of how to behave if he is to avoid the white man's whip. He is perhaps the only Negro in the South who has not learned the consummately important lesson: how to outsmart the whites.

Quickly he learns about the conspiratorial friendship and courtesy which seems to exist between Negroes, taught in the same trap; conversely, he discovers the race hatred and race compromise which so often prevent Negroes from unifying for advancement. He learns of the squalid noisiness of the Negro ghetto, where sex, booze, and gluttony are the sole means of forgetting the lifelong barrier that seals them off from real humanity; of the tiny injustices imposed by the white world (Griffin is forever having to walk long blocks just to urinate); and of the bigger injustices that are perpetually evident in the white man's "hate stares," his constant use of the word "boy" while talking at all Negroes, his utter unwillingness to show them the tiniest human courtesy.

Although the book's power lies in its incessant detailing of indecencies, it contains several incidents that stand out from the rest. One is a brief episode. On a bus station wall Griffin finds a list of prices that some white man will pay Negro girls if they indulge in various sexual acts. "This man offered his services free to any Negro girl over twenty, offered to pay, on an ascending scale, from two dollars for a nineteen-year-old girl up to seven-fifty for a fourteen-year old, and more for perversion dates."

Griffin's comment on this advertisement may be obvious, but it is worth recording. "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 the 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 him the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking that he is inherently superior."

A little later in the book, Griffin is hitch-hiking through Mississippi. By day he can't find a ride--or a place to buy food, drink water, or urinate. At night, though, the white folk are only too glad to pick him up. They want to discuss sex with him.

"Has your wife ever had it from a white man?" one opulent looking driver asks Griffin. When he says no, the driver politely changes his question: "Has she ever wanted it from a white man?"

A younger, more careful man tries to disguise the same species of question behind sociological technique. Happy to find a black man who is intelligent, he asks whether sex is better for Negroes in general than it is for white men. When Griffin replies that Negroes are people, with the same pleasures and the same fears as other people, the driver is unbelieving. He tells his passenger that Negroes have remained free from the scourge of Puritanism that has deadened the senses of the rest of the country. Griffin tries to explain how it is to live in a ghetto--that Negro parents are as anxious about their children as white parents, or more so; but that Negroes are caught in a vicious trap where no act is private, and where the only escape is violent pleasure. But the driver remains unconvinced. He cannot be persuaded that his passenger could in any way resemble himself. Apparently to make the most of this rare opportunity to talk with an understanding Negro, he asks Griffin to show him his genitalia.

Griffin's observations about his two drivers are more humane than one would have expected. He tries to see the first man as he must function among whites, a respected member of his community trying to be decent with his family and his friends. The second, he realizes, is neither consciously insulting him nor is he especially perverted. He simply cannot imagine that Negroes might be human beings.

Black Like Me is by no means a perfect book. For one thing, Griffin's reactions to his experience are intensified by his newness to it. Besides, he can always escape if he gets too scared, as he does once during a particularly depressing night in Mississippi. While he is black, Griffin absorbs all the pain being a Negro involves, but he can find none of the real pleasures of being a human being: he makes no intimate friendships, has no wife or children, grows attached to no place.

His style has disturbing weaknesses. He is impossibly bad at reproducing dialogue, either Negro or white. Nor does his eye for detail, his feeling for character or his sense of humor quite do the experience justice. The reader is never quite brought inside the world Griffin is describing.

But these gifts might have destroyed the quality in Griffin that finally lends his writing such force: his almost self-effacing modesty, and his real decency. He describes for us a world that we will never see, and uses his personality simply to transmit the Negro's experience. And if the experience of being a Negro in the South is an almost unbearably ugly one, that makes it all the more essential that we leave our own comfortable world long enough to learn about it.