Black Like Me (10 page)

“I’ll find out where you’re staying. I’ll come around noon tomorrow and check on you to see you’re all right.”

Again I was overwhelmed that strangers should go to such trouble for me.

I thanked him. He hesitated, as though uncertain, and then said: “I’m not buttin’ into your business, but if you’re planning on getting a girl - you don’t want to get one that’ll burn you.”

“I sure don’t.” I thought of La Fontaine’s “Les Deux Amis,” where the friend offers to help rid the hero of his sadness, even to procuring a girl for him. I detected no hint of lasciviousness in Bill’s voice or manner, certainly no element of pimping; no, he was simply trying to protect me.

“If you do plan on getting one, you better let me help you find a clean one.”

“I’m worn out, Bill,” I said. “I guess I’ll bypass it tonight.”

“That’s fine … I just didn’t want you to go getting yourself messed up.”

“I appreciate it.”

The cab driver delivered me to an address on Mobile Street, the main street of the Negro quarter. It was narrow, cluttered, lined by stores, cafés, bars. He was completely civil, and in such an
authentic way, I felt it was his real nature and not just a veneer to please the customer - the way I had seen it in the stores in New Orleans.

“Looks awful wild down here,” I said as I paid him. I had to speak loudly to make him hear me above the shouts and the amplified wails of jukebox rock-and-roll music.

“If you don’t know the quarter, you’d better get inside somewhere as soon as you can,” he said.

My contact inside referred me to another person in the quarter. As I walked down Mobile Street, a car full of white men and boys sped past. They yelled obscenities at me. A tangerine flew past my head and broke against a building. The street was loud and raw, with tension as thick as fog.

I felt the insane terror of it. When I entered the store of my second contact, we talked in low voices, though he made no effort to be guarded or cautious in expressing his contempt for the brutes who made forays into the area.

“The sonsofbitches beat one boy to a pulp. He was alone on a stretch of walk. They jumped out of the car, tore him up and were gone before anyone knew what was happening,” he said. “They framed another on a trumped-up charge of carrying whiskey in his car. He’s one of the finest boys in town. Never drinks.”

His bitterness was so great I knew I would be thought a spy for the whites if I divulged my identity.

Another car roared down the street, and the street was suddenly deserted, but the Negroes appeared again shortly. I sought refuge in a Negro drugstore and drank milk shakes as an excuse to stay there.

A well-dressed man approached and asked if I were Mr. Griffin. I told him I was. He said there was a room for me and I could go to it whenever I got ready.

I walked through the street again, through the darkness that was alive with lights and humanity. Blues boomed from a tavern across the street. It was a sort of infernal circus, smelling of barbecue and kerosene.

My room was upstairs in a wooden shanty structure that had never known paint. It was decrepit, but the Negro leaders
assured me it was safe and that they would keep a close watch on me. Without turning on my light, I went over and sat on the bed. Lights from the street cast a yellowish glow over the room.

From the tavern below a man improvised a ballad about “poor Mack Parker … overcome with passion … his body in the creek.”

“Oh Lord,” a woman said in the quiet that followed, her voice full of sadness and awe.

“Lordy … Lordy …” a man said in a hushed voice, as though there were nothing more he could say.

Canned jazz blared through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera. The board floor squeaked under my footsteps. I switched on the light and looked into a cracked piece of mirror bradded with bent nails to the wall. The bald Negro stared back at me from its mottled sheen. I knew I was in hell. Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony.

I heard my voice, as though it belonged to someone else, hollow in the empty room, detached, say: “Nigger, what you standing up there crying for?”

I saw tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light.

Then I heard myself say what I have heard them say so many times. “It’s not right. It’s just not right.”

Then the onrush of revulsion, the momentary flash of blind hatred against the whites who were somehow responsible for all of this, the old bewilderment of wondering, “Why do they do it? Why do they keep us like this? What are they gaining? What evil has taken them?” (The Negroes say, “What sickness has taken them?”) My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men’s souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock.

I turned away from the mirror. A burned-out light globe 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 picked them up and held them before the light with strange excitement, curious to see the image that some prior occupant of this room had photographed.

Each negative was blank.

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 parents, his girlfriend - who knows? He had sat here holding blank negatives, masterpieces of human ingenuity wasted.

I flicked the negatives, as he must have done, toward the corner, heard them scratch dryly against the wall and flap to the floor. One struck the dead globe, causing it to sing its strange filamental music of the spheres, fragile and high-pitched above the outside noises.

Music from the jukebox, a grinding rhythm, ricocheted down the street.

The aroma of barbecue tormented my empty insides, but I did not want to leave the room and go back into the mainstream of hell.

I took out my notebook, lay across the bed on my stomach and attempted to write - anything to escape the death dance out there in the Mississippi night. But the intimate contentment would not come. I tried to write to my wife - I needed to write her, to give her my news - but I found I could tell her nothing. No words would come. She had nothing to do with this life, nothing to do with the room in Hattiesburg or with its Negro inhabitant. It was maddening. All my instincts struggled against the estrangement. I began to understand Lionel Trilling’s remark that culture - learned behavior patterns so deeply ingrained they produce involuntary reactions - is a prison. My conditioning as a Negro and the immense sexual implications with which the racists in our culture bombard us, cut me off, even in my most intimate self, from any connection with my wife.

I stared at the letter and saw written:
Hattiesburg, November
14. My darling
, followed by a blank page.

The visual barrier imposed itself. The observing self saw the Negro, surrounded by the sounds and smells of the ghetto, write “Darling” to a white woman. The chains of my blackness would not allow me to go on. Though I understood and could analyze what was happening, I could not break through:

I went out to find some barbecue, down the outside steps, my hand on the cool weathered railing, past a man leaning forward with his head cushioned on his arm against a wall, leaking into the shadows; and on into a door somewhere. There were dim lights and signs: NO OBSENETY ALLOWED and HOT LINKS 25¢.

A round-faced woman, her cheeks slicked yellow with sweat, handed me a barbecued beef sandwich. My black hands took it from her black hands. The imprint of her thumb remained in the bread’s soft pores. Standing so close, odors of her body rose up to me from her white uniform, a mingling of hickory-smoked flesh, gardenia talcum and sweat. The expression on her full face cut into me. Her eyes said with unmistakable clarity, “God … isn’t it awful?” She took the money and stepped back into the open kitchen. I watched her lift the giant lid of the pit and fork out a great chunk of meat. White smoke billowed up, hazing her face to gray.

The meat warmed through the bread in my hand. I carried the sandwich outside and sat on the back steps leading up to my room to eat it. A streak of light from the front flowed past me, illuminating dusty weeds, debris and out buildings some distance to the rear. The night, the hoots and shouts surrounded me even in this semi-hiding place.

The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even that of the heartbeat. I wondered how all this would look to the casual observer, or to the whites in their homes. “The niggers are whooping it up over on Mobile Street tonight,” they might say. “They’re happy.” Or, as one scholar put it, “Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly.” Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul. “You are black. You are condemned.” This is what the white man mistook for “jubilant living” and called “whooping it up.” This is how the white man can say, “They live like dogs,” never realizing why they must, to save themselves, shout, get drunk, shake the hip, pour pleasures into bellies deprived of happiness. Otherwise, the sounds from the quarter would lose order and rhythm and become wails.

I felt disaster. Somewhere in the night’s future the tensions would explode into violence. The white boys would race through too fast. They would see a man or a boy or a woman alone somewhere along the street and the lust to beat or to kill would flood into them. Some frightful thing had to climax this accelerating madness.

Words of the state song hummed through my memory:

Scenes from books and movies came back - the laces, the shaded white-columned veranda with mint juleps served by an elegantly uniformed “darky,” the honor, the magnolia fragrance, the cotton fields where “darkies, happy and contented,” labored in the day and then gathered at the manse to serenade their beloved white folks with spirituals in the evening after supper … until the time when they could escape to freedom.

Here, tonight, it was the wood plank beneath my seat, the barbecue grease on my lips, the need to hide from white eyes degenerate with contempt … even in the land “where livin’ is fun.”

I rose stiffly to my feet. Suddenly I knew I could not go back up to that room with its mottled mirror, its dead lightbulb and its blank negatives.

I knew of one white man in Hattiesburg to whom I might turn for help - a newspaperman, P.D. East. But I hesitated to call him. He had been so persecuted for seeking justice in race relations I was afraid my presence anywhere near him might further jeopardize him.

I washed my hands and mouth under an outside faucet and walked around into the street to a phone.

P.D. was not at home, but I explained the situation to his wife, Billie. She said she was long ago inured to shocks, and insisted on having P.D. rescue me.

“Not if it’s going to cause you people more trouble,” I said. “I’m scared to death, but I ’d rather stay here than get you in any deeper.”

“It’s late,” she said. “I’ll contact P.D. He can bring you here without your being seen. Stand in front of the drugstore. He’ll pick you up. Only one thing. You’re not to do any of your investigating
around this area - okay?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“I mean, that would really get us in a jam …”

“Of course - I wouldn’t think of it.”

I waited in front of the lighted drugstore, which was closed down for the night. My nerves tightened each time a car passed. I expected another tangerine to be thrown or another oath to be hurled. Other Negroes stood in other doorways, watching me as though they thought I was insane to stand there in the bright light. A sensible man would wait in the darkness.

Moments later a station wagon passed slowly and parked a few yards down the street. I was certain it must be P.D. and wondered at his foolishness in parking where he would have to walk along a sidewalk toward me, past a gauntlet of Negroes who might not recognize him and who had good cause that night to resent any white man.

He got out and walked easily toward me, huge in the dim light. I could not speak. He shook my Negro hand in full view of everyone on the street. Then in his soft and cultivated voice he said: “Are you ready to go?”

I nodded and we returned to his car. He held the door for me to get in and then drove off.

“It’s amazing,” he said, after an uncomfortable silence.

We drove through the darkened streets to his home, talking in a strangely stilted manner. I wondered why, and then realized that I had grown so accustomed to being a Negro, to being shown contempt, that I could not rid myself of the cautions. I was embarrassed to ride in the front seat of the car with a white man, especially on our way to his home. It was breaking the “Southern rule” somehow. Too, in this particular atmosphere, my “escape” was an emotional thing felt by both of us.