Black Like Me (14 page)

“Have you got a good library in Mobile?”

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I think it’s supposed to be pretty good. My wife reads a lot.”

I could only conclude that his attitude came from an overwhelming love for his child, so profound it spilled over to all humanity. I knew that he was totally unaware of its ability to cure men; of the blessing it could be to someone like me after having been exhausted and scraped raw in my heart by others this rainy Alabama night.

I thought of Maritain’s conclusion that the only solution to the problems of man is the return of charity (in the old embracing sense of
caritas
, not in the stingy literal sense it has assumed in our language and in our days) and metaphysics. Or, more simply, the maxim of St. Augustine: “Love, and then do what you will.”

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue. When I crossed the line from Mississippi into Alabama, I felt as though I were leaving a cemetery.

Since I knew little of the Mobile of today, my young friend let me out downtown near the bus center. Across the street from the bus station, I saw an elderly Negro man seated on a door stoop near the curb. I went over and sat beside him. We talked casually for a time. He said he preached at a little street mission nearby. I asked him where I could find a room for the night. He put his head close to mine and studied me through thick glasses under the streetlamp. After asking if I were a “nice man,” he offered to let me bunk with him. He told me he occupied the two front rooms of the house where his daughter’s family lived.

We bought hamburgers for supper and took the bus to his home, eating on the way.

“It’s not much, but you’re welcome to stay here,” he said when he opened the door and turned on the lights. His two rooms were furnished only with an upright piano, a straight chair,
a small table and an unmade double bed. His courtesy was simple and easy. He picked up dirty clothes and old newspapers without apology. Then, while I unpacked my duffel, he went outside and returned with a large metal washtub. Refusing my help, he filled it with buckets of water from the back of the house. He offered to let me bathe, but seeing how much trouble it was to haul the water, I declined.

While he bathed, I sat on the bed in the other room and made notes. The walls had been covered with cheesecloth but never papered. Gray planking showed through the gauze. Above the bed he had pinned a calendar-reproduction of
Christ in the Temple
. Thumb-tacked to the door frame were photos of his family. His extra clothing hung from nails driven into the wall. A fluffy new beige-colored bath mat at the side of the bed was the only floor covering. Despite its poverty, the room had a bare brightness. My host, unlike most Negroes, did not use the more economical low-watt bulbs. He lighted his rooms brilliantly. I heard his footsteps and the drip of water on the floor as he stepped out.

I remained seated until I heard him begin to drag the tub across the floor. When I stepped in to help him, he was dressed only in a pair of wrinkled khaki pants. We carried the tub out and emptied it under a chinaberry tree in the side yard.

We undressed and prepared to go to bed in our underwear. He removed the small black Bible from his coat pocket, kissed it unself-consciously before placing it at the rear of the table. The only other book I noted - or reading material of any sort - was a paperback mystery standing upright between two oriental book-ends on top of the piano.

He waited for me to crawl into bed before switching off the light. I heard his bare feet on the floor and felt his weight as he settled into bed beside me. In a moment he was up again. Though the night was cold, he opened the front door so we could have some fresh air. From a distant radio I heard the desolating music of a dance orchestra.

“Do you want to talk or sleep?” he asked when he returned to bed. His voice sounded startlingly close in the dark, after my ear
had become accustomed to the radio music outside.

“Let’s talk a while,” I said, feeling the depression of the night and the poverty close in on the room.

But talk banished the somberness. He spoke of the Lord with relish. We lay there in the darkness under quilts, our voices bouncing back from the bare walls; and we chuckled and had a great time talking about the miracles. We marveled at the raising up of Lazarus.

“That ain’t every day, eh, Mr. Griffin?” he said, and nudged my arm with his elbow. “Don’t you wish you could’ve seen the look on their faces when they saw that dead man get up?” He burst out laughing. “After he’s been dead four whole days. God almighty!”

Later we talked about the South. He had sent two sons away to study law. They would never return. “If I could have foreseen ten years ago how things would happen, I’d have cleared out too. I’m too old now. And besides, I’ve got my daughters and grandchildren here.”

“But surely your sons will come back to see you.”

“I don’t want them to. They’ll come back for my funeral. That’s the worst part of this devilment. If the young ones want a decent life, they’ve got to go somewhere else. All the families are being split up. That’s the shame of it.”

We spoke of the whites. “They’re God’s children, just like us,” he said. “Even if they don’t act very godlike anymore. God tells us straight - we’ve got to love them, no
ifs, ands
, and
buts
about it. Why, if we hated them, we’d be sunk down to their level. There’s plenty of us doing just that, too.”

“A lot of the people I’ve talked to think we’ve turned the other cheek too long,” I said.

“You can’t get around what’s right, though,” he said. “When we stop loving them, that’s when they win.”

“How’s that?”

“Then they’ll have ruined our race for sure. They’ll have dragged us down plumb to the bottom.”

“Are you just supposed to let them carry on then?”

“No … we can’t do that any longer. We’re supposed to get our rights in a proper way. And try to understand that it’s hard for
them, too, to change around from the old ways. We’ve got plenty of old Uncle Toms that don’t want things changed any more than the whites. You can give them two dollars and they’ll pull the string that sends us all to hell. They’re a disgrace to our race. And then we’ve got plenty of young smart-aleck people that don’t want nothing except the chance to ‘get even’ with the whites … they’re full of hate and piss and it’s a God’s shame. They’re just as much Judases as the Uncle Toms.”

As always, the conversation stalemated with “None of it really makes any sense.”

T
hree days in Mobile
. I spent them walking through the town, searching jobs, and then every night I met my host on the corner opposite the bus station and we went to his house to sleep.

Again, an important part of my daily life was spent searching for the basic things that all whites take for granted: a place to eat, or somewhere to find a drink of water, a rest room, somewhere to wash my hands. More than once I walked into drugstores where a Negro can buy cigarettes or anything else except soda fountain service. I asked politely where I might find a glass of water. Though they had water not three yards away, they carefully directed me to the nearest Negro café. Had I asked outright for a drink, they would perhaps have given it. But I never asked. The Negro dreads rejection, and I waited for them to offer the drink. Not one ever did. No matter where you are, the nearest Negro café is always far away, it seems. I learned to eat a great deal when it was available and convenient, because it might not be available or convenient when the belly next indicated its hunger. I have been told that many distinguished Negroes whose careers have brought them South encounter similar difficulties. All the honors in the world cannot buy them a cup of coffee in the lowest greasy-spoon joint.
It is not that they crave service in the white man’s café over their own - it is simply that in many sparsely settled areas Negro cafés do not exist; and even in densely settled areas, one must sometimes cross town for a glass of water. It is rankling, too, to be encouraged to buy all of one’s goods in white stores and then be refused soda fountain or rest room service.

No, it makes no sense, but insofar as the Negro is concerned, nothing makes much sense. This was brought home to me in another realm many times when I sought jobs.

The foreman of one plant in Mobile, a large brute, allowed me to tell him what I could do. Then he looked me in the face and spoke to me in these words:

“No, you couldn’t get anything like that here.”

His voice was not unkind. It was the dead voice one often hears. Determined to see if I could break in somehow, I said: “But if I could do you a better job, and you paid me less than a white man …”

“I’ll tell you … we don’t want you people. Don’t you understand that?”

“I know,” I said with real sadness. “You can’t blame a man for trying at least.”

“No use trying down here,” he said. “We’re gradually getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. We’re taking it slow, but we’re doing it. Pretty soon we’ll have it so the only jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have.”

“How can we live?” I asked hopelessly, careful not to give the impression I was arguing.

“That’s the whole point,” he said, looking me square in the eyes, but with some faint sympathy, as though he regretted the need to say what followed: “We’re going to do our damnedest to drive every one of you out of the state.”

Despite his frankness and the harshness of his intentions, I nevertheless had the impression he was telling me: “I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing against you personally, but you’re colored, and with all this noise about equality, we just don’t want you people around. The only way we can keep you out of our schools and cafés is to make life so hard for you that you’ll get the hell out before equality
comes.”

This attitude cropped up often. Many otherwise decent men and women could find no other solution. They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from “winning,” even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race.

I walked through the streets of Mobile throughout the afternoons. I had known the city before, in my youth, when I sailed from there once to France. I knew it then as a privileged white. It had impressed me as a beautiful Southern port town, gracious and calm. I had seen the Negro dock workers stripped to the waist, their bodies glistening with sweat under their loads. The sight had chilled me, touched me to pity for men who so resembled beasts of burden. But I had dismissed it as belonging to the natural order of things. The Southern whites I knew were kind and wise. If they allowed this, then surely it must be right.

Now, walking the same streets as a Negro, I found no trace of the Mobile I formerly knew, nothing familiar. The laborers still dragged out their ox-like lives, but the gracious Southerner, the wise Southerner, the kind Southerner was nowhere visible. I knew that if I were white, I would find him easily, for his other face is there for whites to see. It is not a false face; it is simply different from the one the Negro sees. The Negro sees him as a man with muscular emotions who wants to drive out all of his race except the beasts of burden.

I concluded that, as in everything else, the atmosphere of a place is entirely different for Negro and white. The Negro sees and reacts differently not because he is Negro, but because he is suppressed. Fear dims even the sunlight.

I
hitchhiked up
toward the swamp country between Mobile and Montgomery. A magnificent cool day.

I walked some miles before a large, pleasant-faced man halted his light truck and told me to get in. When I opened the door I saw a shotgun propped against the seat next to his knee. I recalled it was considered sport among some elements in Alabama to hunt “nigs” and I backed away.

“Come on,” he laughed. “That’s for hunting deer.”

I glanced again at his florid face, saw he looked decent and climbed into the leather seat beside him.

“Do you have any luck getting rides through here?” he asked.

“No, sir. You’re my first ride since Mobile.”

I learned he was a married man, fifty-three years old, father of a family now grown and the grandfather of two children. He was certainly, by the tone of his conversation, an active civic leader and respected member of his community. I began to hope that I had encountered a decent white.

“You married?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Any kids?”

“Yes, sir - three.”

“You got a pretty wife?”

“Yes, sir.”

He waited a moment and then with lightness, paternal amusement, “She ever had it from a white man?”

I stared at my black hands, saw the gold wedding band and mumbled something meaningless, hoping he would see my reticence. He overrode my feelings and the conversation grew more salacious. He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. “And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them before they ever got on the payroll.” A pause. Silence above humming tires on the hot-top road. “What do you think of
that?”

“Surely some refuse,” I suggested cautiously.

“Not if they want to eat - or feed their kids,” he snorted. “If they don’t put out, they don’t get the job.”

I looked out the window to tall pine trees rising on either side of the highway. Their turpentine odor mingled with the soaped smells of the man’s khaki hunting clothes.

“You think that’s pretty terrible, don’t you?” he asked.

I knew I should grin and say, “Why no - it’s just nature,” or some other disarming remark to avoid provoking him.

“Don’t you?” he insisted pleasantly.

“I guess I do.”

“Why hell - everybody does it. Don’t you know that?”