Black Like Me (6 page)

A handsome, mature man entered and was introduced as J. P. Guillory, an insurance agent. When the others had gone and the café was closing, Mr. Guillory told me he came often to the Y to play chess. He asked if I would join him in a game, but I had work to do.

“Your name is somehow familiar, Mr. Griffin,” he said. “I’m an avid reader. I must have read something by you. What are the names of some of your books?”

I named them. His face blanked with astonishment.

“Why, I just started reading that. My lawyer friend lent it to me,” he said. He gazed at me and I had no doubt he thought I was either a tremendous liar for claiming authorship of a white man’s book or that I was confessing something to him.

“I promise you I wrote it,” I said. “I can’t tell you more, but read the book, and the piece in last September’s
Reader’s Digest
, and you’ll know who I really am.”

I returned to my room and wrote in my journal. My landlady lit the fire and brought a pitcher of drinking water for my night stand. As I looked up to thank her, I saw the image in the large mirror of the wardrobe. Light gleamed from the elderly Negro’s head as he looked up to talk to the Negro woman. The sense of shock returned; it was as though I were invisible in the room, observing a scene in which I had no part.

I dozed and the phone awakened me. I listened to it ring again and again but then realized that it could not be for me. No one in the world knew where I was. Finally someone answered it.

I heard noise and laughter. I got up in the darkness and
walked to the window that looked down into the windows of the Y gym. Two Negro teams were playing baseball and a crowd of spectators alternately booed and cheered their favorites. I sat at the window and watched them until hunger began to pester me.

The kitchen clock read 7:30 when I passed through to go out to eat. I walked over to South Rampart in search of a café. As I turned the corner, I noticed two large white boys sprawled on the front steps of a house across the wide boulevard. One of them, a heavyset, muscular fellow in khaki pants and a white sweatshirt, whistled at me. I ignored him and continued walking. From the corner of my eye, I saw him get slowly to his feet and angle across under the streetlight to my side of the street.

“Hey, Baldy,” he called softly.

I walked faster and looked straight ahead.

“Hey, Mr. No-Hair,” he called. I realized he was following about seventy-five feet behind me. He spoke casually, almost pleasantly, his voice clear in the deserted street.

“I’m going to get you, Mr. No-Hair. I’m after you. There ain’t no place you go I won’t get you. If it takes all night, I’ll get you - so count on it.”

A deep terror took me. I walked faster, controlling my desire to break into a run. He was young, strong. If I made it a chase, he would easily overtake me.

His voice drifted to me again, from about the same distance, soft and merciless. “Ain’t no way you can get away from me, Mr. Shithead. You might as well stop right there.”

I did not answer, did not turn. He stalked me like a cat.

Cars passed occasionally. I prayed that a police car might choose this street. I noted that when my footsteps slowed, his slowed; when mine accelerated, his matched them. I looked for an open door, a light. The stores were closed. The sidewalk, with grass at each seam, stretched ahead from streetlamp to streetlamp.

Then, to my immense relief, I saw an elderly couple waiting on the corner for a bus. I approached and they stiffened with caution. The quarter was not safe at night.

I glanced back to see the boy halted at mid-block, leaning against the wall.

“I’m in trouble,” I said to the couple.

They ignored me.

“Please,” I said. “Someone’s chasing me. I don’t know what he wants, but he says he’ll get me. Is there anyplace around here where I can call the police?”

The man looked around. “Who’s chasing you, mister?” he asked irritably.

“That boy back there …” I turned and pointed to the empty street. The boy had disappeared.

The man grunted disapprovingly, as though he thought I were drunk.

I waited for a moment, thinking I would catch the bus. Then, certain it had been only a prank, I started down the side street toward well-lighted Dryades, where I knew I would be safe.

I had gone half a block when I heard his voice again.

“Hey, Shithead,” he said quietly.

I tasted fear and despair like salt in my mouth.

“You can stop right along about there anyplace, dad.”

We walked on in silence, his footsteps again matching mine.

“Stop right along there. Ain’t no nice people on this street for you to hide behind, Baldy.”

I searched for some solution and could find none. Something deadly, nightmarish about the pursuit terrified me more than the pursuit itself. I wondered about my family. What if he should knock me in the head - or worse; he sounded diabolic. For an instant I imagined the expression of some police officer’s face as he looked at my black body and read my identification papers:

Would he think I had merely stolen the papers from some white
man?

“What do you keep walking for when I told you to stop, dad?”

I knew I should never get away from the bully unless I bluffed. I had long ago been trained in judo. Perhaps if I were lucky enough to get in the first blow, I might have a chance. I saw an alleyway in the dim light and summoned a deep growl.

“You come on, boy,” I said without looking back.

“You follow me, boy. I’m heading into that alley down there.”

We walked on.

“That’s right, boy,” I said. “Now you’re doing just like I want you to.”

I approached the alley entrance. “I’m going in, boy. You follow me.”

“I don’t dig you, daddy.”

“You follow me boy, ‘cause I’m just aching to feed you a fistful of brass knucks right in that big mouth of yours.” I fairly shouted the last words.

I stepped into the alley and pressed against the wall, sick with fright. The stench of garbage and urine surrounded me. High above the buildings’ black silhouette stars shone in a clear sky. I listened for his footsteps, ready to bolt if he accepted the challenge.

“Blessed St. Jude,” I heard myself whisper, “send the bastard away,” and I wondered from what source within me the prayer had spontaneously sprung.

After what seemed a long time, I stuck my head around the alley corner and looked back along the street. It stretched empty to the streetlamp at the end.

I hurried to Dryades and along it to the well-lighted steps of the Catholic church I had visited in the afternoon. Sitting on the bottom step, I rested my head on my crossed arms and waited for my nerves to settle to calm. A great bell from the tower slowly rolled eight o’clock. I listened as the metallic clangor rolled away over the rooftops of the quarter.

The word “nigger” picked up the bell’s resonances and repeated itself again and again in my brain.

Hey, nigger, you can’t go in there
.

Hey, nigger, you can’t drink here
.

We don’t serve niggers
.

And then the boy’s words:
Mr. No-Hair, Baldy, Shit-head
. (Would it have happened if I were white?)

And then the doctor’s words as I left his office yesterday:
Now you go into oblivion
.

Seated on the church steps tonight, I wondered if he could have known how truly he spoke, how total the feeling of oblivion was.

A police car cruised past, slowed. The plaster-white face of an officers peered toward me. We stared at one another as the car took a right turn and disappeared behind the decrepit rectory of the church. I felt certain the police would circle the block and check on me. The cement was suddenly hard to my seat. I rose and hurried toward a little Negro café in the next block.

As I stepped through the door, the Negro woman sang out: “All we got left’s beans and rice, honey.”

“That’s fine. Bring me a big plate,” I said, sinking into a chair.

“How about some beer?”

“No … you got any milk?”

“Don’t you like beer, honey?”

“I like it, but I’ve got diabetes.”

“Oh … Say, I’ve got a couple of pig tails left. You want me to put them in with the beans?”

“Please.”

She carried the platter to my table and fetched my milk. Though Negroes apparently live on beans and rice in this area, it is no handicap. They are delicious and nourishing. I tried to eat the pig tails, but like chicken necks, they are mostly bone and little meat.

Later, in my room, I undressed for bed. The game still went noisily at the Y next door. Though the large house was still, I heard the TV from Mrs. Davis’s room somewhere on the other side.

The whites seemed far away, out there in their parts of the city. The distance between them and me was far more than the
miles that physically separated us. It was an area of unknowing. I wondered if it could really be bridged.

T
wo days of incessant
walking, mostly looking for jobs. I wanted to discover what sort of work an educated Negro, nicely dressed, could find. I met no rebuffs, only gentleness when they informed me they could not use my services as typist, bookkeeper, etc.

The patterns became the same. Each day at the shine stand we had the same kind of customers; each day we cooked food and ate on the sidewalk; each day we fed the beggar and the pigeons.

The widow woman dropped by both days. I gently let her know that I was married. Sterling said she asked him about me, proposing to invite me to her house for Sunday dinner. I stayed at the stand less and less.

Among Negroes I was treated with the most incredible courtesies, even by strangers.

One night I decided to go to a Negro movie house. I walked up Dryades and asked a young man if he could tell me the way.

“If you’ll wait just a minute, I’ll show you the way,” he said.

I stood on the corner and in a moment he returned.

We began walking. He was a first-year student at Dillard University, hoping to become a sociologist, to “do something for our people.” The walk appeared to be endless. We must have gone at least two miles when I asked: “Do you live over in this direction?”

“No, I live back there where you saw me.”

“But this is taking you way out of your way.”

“I don’t mind. I enjoy the talk.”

When we reached the movie, he asked, “Do you think you can find the way back?”

“Oh, yes … I won’t have any trouble.”

“If you aren’t sure, I can find out what time the feature ends
and come back for you.”

Stupefied that he would walk these miles as a courtesy to a stranger, I suggested he let me buy him a ticket for the show and we could walk back together.

“No, thanks - I have to get some studying done. But I’ll be glad to come back for you.”

“I wouldn’t think of it. At least let me pay you something. This has been a great favor.”

He refused the money.

The next morning I went to the Y café next door for a breakfast of grits and eggs. The elderly gentleman who ran the café soon had me talking - or rather listening. He foresaw a new day for the race. Great strides had been made, but greater ones were to be made still. I told him of my unsuccessful job-hunting. He said it was all part of the pattern of economics - economic injustice.

“You take a young white boy. He can go through school and college with a real incentive. He knows he can make good money in any profession when he gets out. But can a Negro - in the South? No, I’ve seen many make brilliant grades in college. And yet when they come home in the summers to earn a little money, they have to do the most menial work. And even when they graduate it’s a long hard pull. Most take postal jobs, or preaching and teaching jobs.
This is the cream
. What about the others, Mr. Griffin? A man knows no matter how hard he works, he’s never going to
quite
manage … taxes and prices eat up more than he can earn. He can’t see how he’ll ever have a wife and children. The economic structure just doesn’t permit it unless he’s prepared to live down in poverty and have his wife work too. That’s part of it. Our people aren’t educated because they either can’t afford it or else they know education won’t earn the jobs it would a white man. Any kind of family life, any decent standard of living seems impossible from the outset. So a lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can - mostly in pleasure, and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture,
because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid?”

“Yes, and then it’s these things that cause the whites to say we’re not worthy of first-class citizenship.”

“Ah …” He dropped his hands to his sides hard in frustration. “Isn’t it so? They make it impossible for us to earn, to pay much in taxes because we haven’t much in income, and then they say that because they pay most of the taxes, they have the right to have things like they want. It’s a vicious circle, Mr. Griffin, and I don’t know how we’ll get out of it. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can’t deserve our rights.”

Others entered, ordered breakfast, joined the conversation.

“Equal job opportunities,” Mr. Gayle said. “That’s the answer to much of the tragedy of our young people.”

“What’s needed?” I asked. “What kind of wisdom can overcome the immense propaganda of the racists and the hate groups? People read this poison - and it’s often presented in a benevolent tone, even a kind tone. Many sincerely think the Negro, because of his very Negro-ness, could not possibly measure up to white standards in work performance. I read recently where one of them said that equality of education and job opportunity would be an even greater tragedy for us. He said it would quickly prove to us that we can’t measure up - disillusion us by showing us that we are, in fact, inferior.”