Black Like Me (4 page)

“You coming back tonight, Mr. Griffin?” the man at the desk asked pleasantly.

“I’m not sure.”

“You can leave your bags here if you wish.”

“Thanks - I need what’s in them,” I said.

“Did you sleep all right?”

“Yes - fine. What time is it?”

“Little past eleven thirty.”

“Damn. I think I did sleep.”

The world looked blurred through the window and I waited for my eyes to accustom themselves to sunlight. I wondered what I should do, where I should go. I had a few changes of shirts, handkerchiefs and underwear in my duffel, about $200 in traveler’s
checks and $20 in cash. In addition I had my medicines and a month’s supply of the pigmentation capsules.

I stepped out into the street and began to walk in search of food.

No one noticed me. The street was full of Negroes. I ambled along, looking in store windows. White proprietors who cater exclusively to Negro trade stood in doorways and solicited us.

“Step right in - nice special on shoes today.”

“Come in just a minute - no obligation - like to show you these new hats.”

Their voices wheedled and they smiled in counterfeit.

It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high attitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb. Here people walked fast to juggle the dimes, to make a deal, to find cheap liver or a tomato that was overripe. Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it. I saw it as I passed, looking for food. A young, slick-haired man screamed loud obscenities to an older woman on the sidewalk. She laughed and threw them back in his face. They raged. Others passed them, looking down, pursing lips, struggling not to notice.

Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way. Here at noon, jazz blared from jukeboxes and dark holes issued forth the cool odors of beer, wine and flesh into the sunlight. Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto. Here I saw a young man, who carried in his body the substance of the saint, stagger, glass-eyed, unconscious from the dark hole, sit down on the curb and vomit between his feet.

“Man, he can’t hold his a-tall,” someone said.

I saw the sun caught in sweaty black wrinkles at the back of his neck as his head flopped forward.

“You okay?” I asked, bending over him.

He nodded listlessly.

“Yeah, shit, he’s just gassed,” someone said. “He’s okay.”

An odor of Creole cooking led me to a café at the corner. It was a small but cheerful room, painted baby blue. Tables were set with red-checked cloths. Except for a man at the counter, who nodded as I entered, I was the only customer. A pleasant young Negro woman took my order and fixed my breakfast: eggs, grits, bread and coffee - forty-nine cents - no butter and no napkin.

The man at the counter turned toward me and smiled, as though he wanted to talk. I had made it a rule to talk as little as possible at first. He noticed my bags and asked me if I were here looking for work. I told him I was and asked him if there were any better part of town where I could get a room.

“Ain’t this awful?” He grimaced, coming to my table.

“You live down here?”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes wearily. Light from the door struck gray in his temples.

“The Y over on Dryades is about the best place. It’s clean and there’s a nice bunch of fellows there,” he said.

He asked me what kind of work I did and I told him I was a writer.

He told me that he often took the bus into better parts of town where the whites lived, “just to get away from this place. I just walk in the streets and look at the houses … anything, just to get somewhere where it’s decent … to get a smell of clean air.”

“I know …” I sympathized.

I invited him to have a cup of coffee. He told me about the town, places where I might go to find jobs.

“Is there a Catholic church around here?” I asked after a while.

“Yeah - just a couple of blocks over on Dryades.”

“Where’s the nearest rest room?” I asked.

“Well, man, now just what do you want to do - piss or pray?” he chuckled. Though we talked quietly, the waitress heard, and her high chortle was quickly muffled in the kitchen.

“I guess it doesn’t hurt for a man to do both once in a while,” I said.

“You’re so right,” he laughed, shaking his head from side to side. “You’re so right, sir. Lordy, Lordy … if you stick around this
town, you’ll find out you’re going to end up doing most of your praying for a place to piss. It’s not easy, I’m telling you. You can go in some of the stores around here, but you’ve almost got to buy something before you can ask them to let you use the toilet. Some of the taverns got places. Yo u can go over to the train station or the bus station - places like that. You just have to locate them. And there’s not many of them for us. Best thing’s just to stick close to home. Otherwise sometimes you’ll find you’ve got to walk halfway across town to find a place.”

When I left him 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 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 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, sphinx-like, 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 “nigger” leaps out with electric clarity. Yo u 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.

I left the bus on Canal Street. Other Negroes aboard eyed me not with anger, as I had expected, but rather with astonishment that any black man could be so stupid.

For an hour, I roamed aimlessly through the streets at the edge of the French Quarter. Always crowds and always the sun. On Derbigny Street I had coffee in a small Negro café called the Two Sisters Restaurant. A large poster on the wall caught my attention:

1. Pray for guidance.
   

2. Be courteous and friendly.
   

3. Be neat and clean.
   

4. Avoid loud talk.
   

5. Do not argue.
   

6. Report incidents immediately.
   

7. Overcome evil with good.
   

I walked to the same shoeshine stand in the French Quarter that I had been visiting as a white man. My friend Sterling Williams sat on an empty box on the sidewalk. He looked up without a hint of recognition.

“Shine?”

“I believe so,” I said and climbed up on the stand.

He hoisted his heavy body on his crutch and hobbled over to begin the work. I wore shoes of an unusual cut. He had shined them many times and I felt he should certainly recognize them.

“Well, it’s another fine day,” he said.

“Sure is.”

I felt brisk strokes of his brush across the toe of my shoe.

“You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

I looked down on the back of his head. Gray hair kinked below the rim of a sea-captain cap of black canvas.

“Yeah - just been here a few days,” I said.

“I thought I hadn’t seen you around the quarter before,” he said pleasantly. “You’ll find New Orleans a nice place.”

“Seems pretty nice. The people are polite.”

“Oh … sure. If a man just goes on about his business and doesn’t pay any attention to them, they won’t bother you. I don’t mean bowing or scraping - just, you know, show you got some dignity.” He raised his glance to my face and smiled wisely.

“I see what you mean,” I said.

He had almost finished shining the shoes before I asked, “Is there something familiar about these shoes?”

“Yeah - I been shining some for a white man - ”

“A fellow named Griffin?”

“Yeah.” He straightened up. “Do you know him?”

“I am him.”

He stared dumfounded. I reminded him of various subjects we had discussed on former visits. Finally convinced, he slapped my leg with glee and lowered his head. His shoulders shook with laughter.

“Well, I’m truly a son-of-a-bitch … how did you ever.”

I explained briefly. His heavy face shone with delight at what I had done and delight that I should confide it to him. He promised perfect discretion and enthusiastically began coaching me; but in a guarded voice, glancing always about to make sure no one could overhear.

I asked him if I could stay and help him shine shoes for a few days. He said the stand really belonged to his partner, who was out trying to locate some peanuts to sell to the winos of the quarter. We’d have to ask him but he was sure it would be all right. “But you’re way too well dressed for a shine boy.”

We sat on boxes beside the stand. I asked him to check me carefully and tell me anything I did wrong.

“You just watch me and listen how I talk. You’ll catch on. Say,” he said excitedly, “you got to do something about those hands.”

Sunlight fell on them, causing the hairs to glint against black skin.

“Oh Lord,” I groaned. “What’ll I do?”

“You got to shave them,” he said, holding up his large fist to show his own hand had no hairs. “You got a razor?”

“Yes.”

“Hurry up, now, before somebody sees you.” He became agitated and protective. “Down that alleyway there - clear to the end. You’ll find a rest room. You can shave there right quick.”

I grabbed my bag as he watched in agony to see that the way was clear. The shoe stand was in skid row - a street of ancient buildings with cheap rooming houses and bars.

I hurried to the alley and walked down it into the gloom of a cluttered courtyard. A few Negroes, who could not enter the white bar, were served from the back. They stood around or sat at wooden tables drinking. I saw a sign that read:

GENTLEMEN

and was almost at the door when several voices shouted.

“Hey! You can’t go in there. Hey!”

I turned back toward them, astonished that even among skid row derelict joints they had “separate facilities.”

“Where do I go?” I asked.

“Clean on back there to the back,” a large drunk Negro said, pointing with a wild swinging gesture that almost made him lose his balance.

I went another fifty feet down the alley and stepped into the wooden structure. It was oddly clean. I latched the door with a hook that scarcely held, smeared shaving cream on the backs of my hands and shaved without water.

Sterling nodded approval when I returned. He relaxed and smiled, the way one would after averting a terrible danger. His entire attitude of connivance was superbly exaggerated.

“Now there’s not a hitch to you, my friend,” he said. “Nobody’d ever guess.”

An odd thing happened. Within a short time he lapsed into familiarity, forgetting I was once white. He began to use the “we” form and to discuss “our situation.” The illusion of my “Negroness” took over so completely that I fell into the same pattern of talking and thinking. It was my first intimate glimpse. We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.

A fine-looking middle-aged Negro woman, dressed in a white uniform, stepped out into the sidewalk a few doors away and stared at me.

Sterling nudged my ribs. “You got that widow woman interested,” he laughed. “You just watch. She’ll find some reason to come down here before long.”

I asked him who she was.

She works there in the bar - nice lady, too. She ain’t going to rest till she finds out who you are.”

I began to get thirsty and asked Sterling where I could find a drink.

“You’ve got to plan ahead now,” he said. “You can’t do like you used to when you were a white man. You can’t just walk in anyplace and ask for a drink or use the rest room. There’s a Negro café over in the French Market about two blocks up. They got a fountain in there where you can drink. The nearest toilet’s the one you just came from. But here - I got water.”