Shutter Click & Chat 09/21

Sorry I'm so late on this Tameka!!! Ok, so the topic is "My Special Book". Here's mine:

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin. It's a nonfiction book about John Howard Griffin, a white man who chemically alters his skin color so that he can live as a black man in the late 1950s South. This book is a compilation of his journals during that time, as well as his later musings while reflecting on those journals.

This book is...it's really hard to even put into words. I first read it in the fall of 1996. It was my first semester in college and I had to do a paper for English Comp I. There was a list of reading material to choose from and I chose this book. I know this may sound trite, even a little strange, but this book changed my life. It forever changed the lens through which I viewed racism.

Prior to reading Black Like Me, I already knew that racism was a horrible thing and that it was very much alive and well. Even though I lived in Mississippi at the time, I still kind of viewed racism distantly. I knew that I felt it was wrong. I knew that it bothered me. I knew that I didn't agree with it. But, I was never very open or outspoken about that fact. Racism had affected me personally in certain ways that I won't discuss here, but for the most part I looked at racism from the perspective of a passive observer. It was impossible to continue in that vein after reading this book.

I'd like to post some excerpts from the book and maybe all of you will see why it had such an enormous impact on me. This first passage is detailing Griffin's experience as he rode a bus in New Orleans. New Orleans was the first place he entered society as a black man. Also, please note that this book was written using the language in place at the time, which included the word Negro. Please know that in posting excerpts using that particular word, I mean no disrespect.

...I caught the bus into town, choosing a seat halfway to the rear. As we neared Canal, the car began to fill with whites. Unless they could find a place to themselves or beside another white, they stood in the aisle.

A middle-aged woman with stringy gray hair stood near my seat. She wore a clean but faded print house-dress that was hoisted to one side as she clung to an overhead pendant support. Her face looked tired and I felt uncomfortable. As she staggered with the bus's movement my lack of gallantry tormented me. I half rose from my seat to give it to her, but Negroes behind me frowned disapproval. I realized I was "going against the race" and the subtle tug-of-war became instantly clear. If the whites would not sit with us, let them stand. When they became tired enough or uncomfortable enough, they would eventually take seats beside us and soon see that it was not so poisonous after all. But to give them your seat was to let them win. I slumped back under the intensity of their stares.

But my movement had attracted the white woman's attention. For an instant our eyes met. I felt sympathy for her, and thought I detected sympathy in her glance. The exchange blurred the barriers of race (so new to me) long enough for me to smile and vaguely indicate the empty seat beside me, letting her know she was welcome to accept it.

Her blue eyes, so pale before, sharpened and she spat out, "What're you looking at me like that for?"

I felt myself flush. Other white passengers craned to look at me. The silent onrush of hostility frightened me.

"I'm sorry," I said, staring at my knees. "I'm not from here." The pattern of her skirt turned abruptly as she faced the front.

"They're getting sassier every day," she said loudly. Another woman agreed and the two fell into conversation.

My flesh prickled with shame, for I knew the Negroes rightly resented me for attracting such unfavorable attention. I sat the way I had seen them do, sphinxlike, pretending unawareness. Gradually people lost interest. Hostility drained to boredom. The poor woman chattered on, reluctant apparently to lose the spotlight.

I learned a strange thing-that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "n***er" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and always it stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.

This next passage is from a time when Griffin was at a Greyhound station, awaiting a bus to Mississippi. He was going there because the Pearl River County Grand Jury had just failed to return an indictment on the lynching of Mack Charles Parker. They failed to return an indictment in spite of the fact that the FBI had compiled a dossier of evidence identifying the lynchers. Griffin wanted to get a feel for the racial climate during such a painful time. The passage details Griffin's accidental foray into a waiting area that was not designated "Colored".

Once again a "hate stare" drew my attention like a magnet. It came from a middle-aged, heavyset, well-dressed white man. He sat a few yards away, fixing his eyes on me. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. 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. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?"

A Negro porter sidled over to me. I glimpsed his white coat and turned to him. His glance met mine and communicated the sorrow, the understanding.

"Where am I supposed to go?" I asked him.

He touched my arm in that mute and reassuring way of men who share a moment of crisis. "Go outside and around the corner of the building. You'll find the room."

The white man continued to stare, his mouth twisted with loathing as he turned his head to watch me move away.

In the colored waiting room, which was not labeled as such, but rather as COLORED CAFÉ, presumably because of interstate travel regulations, I took the last empty seat. 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."

I copied the passage in a little pocket notebook. A Negro woman, her face expressionless, flat, highlighted with sweat, watched me write. When I turned in my seat to put the notebook in my hip pocket, I detected the faintest smile at the corners of her mouth.

This book is full of stories like this. I had such a mix of emotions the first time I read it. I still feel that same mix every time I read it again. It's a combination of sadness, horror, deep shame that this our country's history, anger, guilt for not understanding how deeply it runs sooner than I did, the unfairness of it all...I can't really put into words all the things I feel. This book just tears at my heart. Please read it. You might find that it will change your life too.