Black Like Me (16 page)

I mentioned this to my host. “But we can’t do any better,” he said. “ We work just for that … to have something a little better for the kids and us.”

“Your wife doesn’t seem to get down in the dumps,” I remarked.

“No - she’s good all the way through. I’ll tell you - if we don’t have meat to cook with the beans, why she just goes ahead and cooks the beans anyhow.” He said this last with a flourish that indicated the grandness of her attitude.

We placed buckets of water on the cast-iron wood stove in the kitchen so we could have warm water for washing and shaving. Then we returned outside to fill the wood-box.

“Are there really a lot of alligators in these swamps?” I asked.

“Oh God yes, the place is alive with them.”

“Why don’t you kill some of them? The tails make good meat. I could show you how. We learned in jungle training when I was in the army.”

“Oh, we can’t do that,” he said. “They stick a hundred-dollar fine on you for killing a gator. I’m telling you,” he laughed sourly, “they got all the loopholes plugged. There ain’t a way you can win in this state.”

“But what about the children?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid the
gators might eat one of them?”

“No …” he said forlornly, “the gators like turtles better than they do us.”

“They must be part white,” I heard myself say.

His laughter sounded flat in the cold air. “As long as they keep their bellies full with turtles, they’re no danger to us. Anyway, we keep the kids close to the house.”

(Later I learned that the fine for killing alligators appears to be a conservation measure and means of controlling turtles, not a punitive action against the Negroes, though few Negroes realize this.)

The cheerful and fretful noises of children being readied for bed drifted to us as we returned to the kitchen. Physical modesty in such cramped quarters was impossible, indeed in such a context it would have been ridiculous. The mother sponge-bathed the children while the husband and I shaved. Each of the children went to the toilet, a zinc bucket in the corner, since it was too cold for them to go outside.

Their courtesy to me was exquisite. While we spread tow sacks on the floor and then feed sacks over them, the children asked questions about my own children. Did they go to school? No, they were too young. How old were they then? Why, today is my daughter’s fifth birthday. Would she have a party? Yes, she’d certainly have a party. Excitement. Like we had here, with the candy and everything? Yes, something like that.

But it was time to go to bed, time to stop asking questions. The magic remained for them, almost unbearable to me - the magic of children thrilled to know my daughter had a party. The parents brought in patch-work quilts from under the bed in the other room and spread them over the pallets. The children kissed their parents and then wanted to kiss Mr. Griffin. I sat down on a straight-back chair and held out my arms. One by one they came, smelling of soap and childhood. One by one they put their arms around my neck and touched their lips to mine. One by one they said and giggled soberly, “Good night, Mr. Griffin.”

I stepped over them to go to my pallet near the kitchen door and lay down fully dressed. Warning the children he did not want
to hear another word from them, the father picked up the kerosene lamp and carried it into the bedroom. Through the doorless opening I saw light flicker on the walls. Neither of them spoke. I heard the sounds of undressing. The lamp was blown out and a moment later their bedsprings creaked.

Fatigue spread through me, making me grateful for a tow sack bed. I fought back glimpses of my daughter’s birthday party in its cruel contrasts to our party here tonight.

“If you need anything, Mr. Griffin, just holler,” the man said.

“Thank You. I will. Good night.”

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

“Good night,” again.

“Good night, Mr. Griffin.”

“That’s enough,” the father called out warningly to them.

I lay there watching moonlight pour through the crack of the ill-fitting door as everyone drifted to sleep. Mosquitoes droned loudly until the room was a great hum. I wondered that they should be out on such a cold night. The children jerked in their sleep and I knew they had been bitten. The stove cooled gradually with almost imperceptible interior pops and puffings. 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.

And yet misery was the burden, the pervading, killing burden. I understood why they had so many children. These moments of night when the swamp and darkness surrounded them evoked an immense loneliness, a dread, a sense of exile from the rest of humanity. When the awareness of it strikes, a man either suffocates with despair or he turns to cling to his woman, to console and seek consolation. Their union is momentary escape from the swamp night, from utter hopelessness of its ever getting better for them. It is an ultimately tragic act wherein the hopeless seek hope.

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 trembled as its metallic coldness seeped through my pants.

I thought of my daughter, Susie, and her fifth birthday today, the candles, the cake and party dress; and of my sons in their best suits. They slept now in clean beds in a warm house while their father, a bald-headed old Negro, sat in the swamps and wept, holding it in so he would not awaken the Negro children.

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.

It was thrown in my face. I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all humans. Ye t this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status. It became fully terrifying when I realized that if my skin were permanently black, they would unhesitatingly consign my own children to this bean future.

One can scarcely conceive the full horror of it unless one is a parent who takes a close look at his children and then asks himself how he would feel if a group of men should come to his door and tell him they had decided - for reasons of convenience to them - that his children’s lives would henceforth be restricted, their world smaller, their educational opportunities less, their future mutilated.

One would then see it as the Negro parent sees it, for this is precisely what happens. He looks at his children and knows. 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.

It was too much. Though I was experiencing it, I could not
believe it. Surely in America a whole segment of decent souls could not stand by and allow such massive crimes to be committed. I tried to see the whites’ side as I have all along. 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. Recent scientific studies, published in
The Eighth Generation
(Harper & Brothers, New York), show that the contemporary middle-class Negro has the same family cult, the same ideals and goals as his white counterpart. The Negro’s lower scholastic showing springs not from racial default, but from being deprived of cultural and educational advantages by the whites. When the segregationist argues that the Negro is scholastically inferior, he presents the most eloquent possible argument for desegregated schools; he admits that so long as the Negro is kept in tenth-rate schools he will remain scholastically behind white children.

I have held no brief for the Negro. I have looked diligently for all aspects of “inferiority” among them and I cannot find them. All the cherished question-begging epithets applied to the Negro race, and widely accepted as truth even by men of good will, simply prove untrue when one lives among them. This, of course, excludes the trash element, which is the same everywhere and is no more evident among Negroes than whites.

When all the talk, all the propaganda has been cut away, the criterion is nothing but the color of skin. My experience proved that. They judged me by no other quality. My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without which life loses its significance and becomes a matter of little more than animal survival.

I searched for some other answer and found none. I had spent a day without food and water for no other reason than that my skin was black. I was sitting on a tub in the swamp for no other reason.

I went back into the shanty. The air was slightly warmer and smelled of kerosene, tow sacks and humanity. I lay down in darkness,
in the midst of snores.

“Mr. Griffin … Mr. Griffin.”

I heard the man’s soft voice above my shouts. I awakened to see the kerosene lamp and beyond it my host’s troubled face.

“Are you all right?” he asked. In the surrounding darkness I sensed the tension. They lay silent, not snoring.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was having a nightmare.”

He stood upright. From my position flat on the floor his head appeared to touch the ceiling beams far above. “Are you all right now?”

“Yes, thank you for waking me up.”

He stepped carefully over the children and returned to the other room.

It was the same nightmare. I had been having it recently. White men and women, their faces stern and heartless, closed in on me. The hate stare burned through me. I pressed back against a wall. I could expect no pity, no mercy. They approached slowly and I could not escape them. Twice before, I had awakened myself screaming.

I listened for the family to settle back into sleep. The mosquitoes swarmed. I lighted a cigarette, hoping its smoke would drive them out.

The nightmare worried me. I had begun this experiment in a spirit of scientific detachment. I wanted to keep my feelings out of it, to be objective in my observations. But it was becoming such a profound personal experience, it haunted even my dreams.

My host called me again at dawn. His wife stood in lamplight at the stove, pouring coffee. I washed my face in a bowl of water she had heated for me. We spoke by nods and smiles to avoid waking the children sprawled on the floor.

After breakfast of coffee and a slice of bread, we were ready to leave. I shook hands with her at the door and thanked her. Reaching for my wallet, I told her I wanted to pay her for putting me up.

She refused, saying that I had brought more than I had
taken. “If you gave us a penny, we’d owe you change.”

I left money with her as a gift for the children, and the husband drove me back to the highway.

The morning was bright and cool. Before long a car with two young white boys picked me up. I quickly saw that they were, like many of their generation, kinder than the older ones. They drove me to a small town bus station where I could catch a bus.

I bought a ticket to Montgomery and went to sit outside on the curb where other Negro passengers gathered. Many Negroes walked through the streets. Their glances were kind and communicative, as though all of us shared some common secret.

As I sat in the sunlight, a great heaviness came over me. I went inside to the Negro rest room, splashed cold water on my face and brushed my teeth. Then I brought out my hand mirror and inspected myself. I had been a Negro more than three weeks and it no longer shocked me to see the stranger in the mirror. My hair had grown to a heavy fuzz, my face skin, with the continued medication, exposure to sunlight and ground-in stain, was what Negroes call a “pure brown” - a smooth dark color that made me look like millions of others.

I noted, too, that my face had lost all animation. In repose, it had taken on the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes. My mind had become the same way, dozing empty for long periods. It thought of food and water, but so many hours were spent just waiting, cushioning self against dread, that it no longer thought of much else. Like the others in my condition, I was finding life too burdensome.

I felt a great hunger for something merely pleasurable, for something people call “fun.” The need was so great that deep within, through the squalor and the humiliations of this life, I took some joy in the mere fact that I could be alone for a while inside the rest room cubicle with its clean plumbing and unfinished wood walls. Here I had a water faucet to drink from and I could experience the luxury of splashing cold water on my face as much as I wanted. Here, with a latch on the door, I was isolated from the hate stares, the contempt.

The smell of Ivory livened the atmosphere. Some of the stain came off and I wondered how long it would be before I could pass as white again. I decided to take no more pills for a while. I removed my shirt and undershirt. My body, so long unexposed to the sun or the sun lamp, had paled to a
café-au-lait
color. I told myself I would have to be careful not to undress unless I had privacy henceforth. My face and hands were far darker than my body. Since I often slept in my clothes, the problem would not be great.