nsgraham's Full Review: John Howard Griffin and Robert (AFT) Bonazzi - Bla...
In commemoration of Black History Month, Epinions reviewers have joined together to participate in a Black History Month Book Writeoff. Our selections include works of adult and juvenile fiction, poetry, drama, biography, and non-fiction. Participating in this writeoff are: frazzledspice, jgibson2, jsgoddess, jnbmoore, jankp, lunadisarm, nsgraham, hadassahchana, pippadaisy, caines, ed_grover, stephen_murray, Sloucho, and vemartin. Please check out their reviews and discover some excellent authors.
Reading John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me”, an personal account of a white man who darkened his skin and journeyed into the deep South in the late 1950’s, was a strange experience. On the one hand, it is a searing account of how deeply racism affected the daily lives of blacks – Griffin finds the day to day, small slights more unexpected, and deeply affecting than the large. The misery of having to map out your daily journey to account for the public restrooms you could actually use, the cafes you could actually sit in. Of not being able to cash a traveler’s check in any store in town, although knowing that if you wanted to buy something, you’d be perfectly fine. Bus drivers disrespecting your request for a stop, because your walk to the door took too long. In this search for a job, he gets politely, and firmly, turned down repeatedly. As an black person growing up in America, I heard about the large slights, in a general way, but this book helped bring home some of the everyday realities. Griffin only spends a month and a half as a black man, and so did not experience any mind shattering horrors, but just three weeks into his trip and his face had “taken on the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes.” It is the day to day life that shapes the people we are, and Griffin successfully draws up something of a road map to this time and place.
Griffin’s journey is interesting because he’s one of the very few people to have crossed the race line, and particularly in this way. There have been black people who have passed as white, but white as black? And as a very dark black, as well. For there were differences in how light skinned and dark skinned blacks were treated, by all accounts. He meets the educated and more affluent men at the New Orleans YMCA, who discuss the race’s problems: “You have to be almost a mulatto…then the Negro will look up to you.” He meets a light skinned man, Christophe, on the bus into Mississippi, a powder keg, full of hatred for himself and the other blacks in the back.
In the end, Griffin can only take so much. His journey has depressed him considerably more than he ever though it would. As he becomes stays black, he succumbs to a despair that is devastating in it’s hopelessness. He finds himself unable to write to his wife, as if the black man he became was far too alien, too removed from the life he had before.
This is where I find some fault with the book. Griffin’s journey is not that of a black man. It is that of a white man, looking on as an observer, even as he goes as far as darkening his skin. The book, the experience, is a way to get white America to understand the black man’s plight, to sympathize, to say “this is not Other”. As such, the language of the book assumes much about it’s subjects, ascribing traits and characteristics that seem a little complete for the short amount of time Griffin knows any of these people. He also comes across as too scholarly, particularly when describing the black man’s despair. “The night was always a comfort… At such a time, the Negro can look at the starlit skies and find that he has, after all, a place in the universal order or things…. The night is his consolation. It does not despise him”. No, the night was John Howard Griffin’s consolation. One shouldn’t presume to speak for an entire race, particularly when spending only a month and a half as a member. Griffin doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up black. He only catches a glimpse of any community before he moves on the another state. This was a crash course in how horrible it was to be black, but it’s missing any and all sense of the joy.
But he book does do it’s job, and it does it well. Although Griffin is the victim of no major crimes, he conveys a feeling of fear and dread. His journey reveal to him depth of human ugliness he did not imagine existed beforehand, as much as he read and studied the “race problem”. When hitchhiking, Griffin is repeatedly asked, almost without fail, by his seemingly normal white male benefactors questions of a graphic sexual nature. He realizes that the grossness these men are showing not only wears him down, but makes them less than human as well. As he receives the “hate stare”, he notes with dismay how the disgust on the otherwise attractive young woman’s face makes her something of a monster. Griffin puts himself at an interesting crossroad – he’s receiving the rancor that goes along with being black, but also can’t help imagining the other sides of these people – the upstanding citizen, the loving wife, the faithful churchman. He can’t help it because he knows people like them – he *is* people like them. Black like me, but also white like me.
The author tells of his experiences after he darkened his skin and traveled through the South in order to find out how it feels to be black.More at HotBookSale
In 1959, Griffin--a white man--headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin, and immersed himself in black society. He then traveled through several state...More at Buy.com
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