Black Like Me: November 14-15, 1959 Summary & Analysis

After a week of this project, Griffin realizes how emotionally exhausting it is to contend with racism on an everyday basis, even when people mask their bigotry with superficial pleasantries. “Existence becomes a grinding effort,” he notes. On the morning of the 14th, Sterling tells him that the Mississippi state jury decided not to indict a group of white men who kidnapped a young black man—Mack Parker—from his jail cell and lynched him. News of the failed indictment has now reached everyone, and the African American community is devastated. “We might as well learn not to expect nothing from Southern Justice. They’re going to stack the cards against us every time,” Sterling laments. With this, Griffin makes up his mind that he must travel to Mississippi because it’s the worst place for black people in America. This, he believes, will be the only way to understand the situation.

In the bus station that night, Griffin tries to purchase a ticket to Hattiesburg. “What do you want?” the white woman at the Greyhound window asks, giving him a “hate stare.” Taken aback by the viciousness of the glare, he asks if he has done something wrong, but the woman only says she can’t make change for his ten dollar bill. “Surely, in the entire Greyhound system there must be some means of changing a ten-dollar bill,” Griffin says. In turn, she snatches the money from him, turns around, and then returns with a fistful of loose change, which she flings at him so that it scatters about his feet. “Her performance was so venomous, I felt sorry for her,” Griffin writes. “I wondered how she would feel if she learned that the Negro before whom she had behaved in such an unladylike manner was habitually a white man.”

When Griffin is finally on the bus, he sits in the back and listens to black people talking about Mississippi, calling it “the most lied-about state in the union.” At one point, the bus stops and new passengers board. Among them is an “elegantly dressed” black man who nods kindly to the white people in the front and then “sneer[s]” at the black people in the back, saying, “This place stinks. Damned punk niggers. Look at all of them—bunch of dirty punks.” As the bus lurches onward, Griffin listens to this man get into a disagreement with someone sitting behind him. The elegantly dressed man’s name is Cristophe, and he shouts at the other black man, threatening to fight him until the man’s brother tells him to calm down, ultimately urging both of them to refrain from speaking to one another. As a result, Cristophe moves to sit next to Griffin. 

Although Griffin tries to avoid interacting with Cristophe, he eventually has no choice but to acknowledge his new seat partner, since Cristophe starts singing. “You don’t like the blues, do you, daddy?” Cristophe says. He then utters a haunting phrase in Latin, and Griffin “stare[s] at him dumbfounded.” Cristophe, Griffin learns, used to be an altar boy. “I came to sit by you because you’re the only one here that looks like he’s got enough sense to carry on an intelligent conversation,” he says, going on to indicate that this is because Griffin has lighter skin than the other black passengers. As for Cristophe, he claims that his father was Indian and his mother was French, though he immediately contradicts himself by saying that his mother was Portuguese. He then tries to guess Griffin’s lineage, determining that his mother must have been “part Florida Navaho.”

“I hate us, Father,” Cristophe says. “I’m not a Father,” Griffin replies, but Cristophe insists that he knows a priest when he sees one. “Look at these punks, Father,” he says. “Dumb, ignorant bastards. They don’t know the score. I’m getting out of this country.” He then confesses that he has just finished four years in the penitentiary and that he’s on his way to see his wife. At this point, he unexpectedly breaks into tears, and when Griffin tries to comfort him, Cristophe asks if he’ll pray for him the next time he goes to Mass. Griffin reiterates that he isn’t a priest, but he nevertheless agrees to pray for Cristophe. “Ah, that’s the only peace,” Cristophe says. “That’s the peace my soul longs for. I wish I could come back home to it, but I can’t—I haven’t been inside a church in seventeen years.”

Griffin tells Cristophe that he can “always go back” to the church, but Cristophe merely says, “Nah. I’ve got to shoot up a couple of guys.” Registering Griffin’s surprise, Cristophe tells him that he should get off the bus with him so they can “shoot up this town together.” Needless to say, Griffin declines this invitation, and Cristophe gets off in Slidell, Louisiana. 

While the bus stops in Slidell, a new driver comes on, as does a black man named Bill Williams, who sits next to Griffin and makes pleasant conversation, eventually offering him advice about how best to navigate through the hateful world of Mississippi. This conversation attracts the attention of the other black passengers, who chime in with their own advice, telling Griffin not to look at white women, to be careful when he walks past an alley so that he doesn’t get robbed, and to resist the urge to stop if a white person calls out to him. When Griffin thanks Bill for helping him, Bill says, “Well, If I was to come to your part of the country, I’d want somebody to tell me.”

The bus stops and the driver tells the passengers they have ten minutes to use the restrooms. After letting the white people off, though, he blocks the door. However, Bill—who is in front of Griffin—quickly slides beneath the driver’s arm and strides away. “Hey, boy, where you going?” the driver shouts, but Bill doesn’t turn around. After a moment, the driver turns to Griffin and says, “Where do you think you’re going?” In response, Griffin says, “I’d like to go to the rest room,” but the driver doesn’t let him, so he retreats to the back, where he and the black passengers lament this injustice. Fed up, one of the passengers decides to kneel between the seats and pee on the floor, and though everyone else wants to do this, too, they decide not to because it’ll reflect badly on their entire race.

When Bill returns to the bus, the driver says, “Didn’t you hear me call you?” “I sure didn’t,” Bill responds. When the driver says he can’t believe this, Bill says, “Oh, were you calling me? I heard you yelling ‘Boy,’ but that’s not my name, so I didn’t know you meant me.” When he takes his seat once more, everyone in the back sees him as a “hero” because of this “act of defiance.” Before long, the bus slides through Poplarville, where the jury failed to indict the men who killed Mack Parker, and a palpable tension settles over the black passengers. Pointing to the courthouse, Bill says, “That’s where they as much as told the whites, ‘You go ahead and lynch those niggers, we’ll see you don’t get in any trouble.’”

Upon the bus’s arrival in Hattiesburg, Bill helps Griffin find a place to stay and hails him a cab. After parting ways with his new friend, Griffin rides in the back of a white man’s cab, looking out at the African American section of town and finding himself intimidated by what he sees. “Looks awful wild down here,” he says, to which the driver responds, “If you don’t know the quarter, you’d better get inside somewhere as soon as you can.” Walking along the street to find the person who will help him find lodging (referred by someone Bill put Griffin in touch with), Griffin becomes the target of a car full of white men, who scream at him and throw a tangerine at his head before driving away. 

Griffin in completely unsettled not only by the car of racists, but by Hattiesburg’s entire atmosphere. “I felt the insane terror of it,” he writes. Periodically, cars drive through the streets and everyone disappears for their own safety, coming outside again only when the unknown vehicle has passed. Eventually, Griffin makes his way to a “wooden shanty structure,” where his room is at the top of the building. Once inside, he’s shocked by how “decrepit” his lodgings are, feeling quite uncomfortable despite the fact that his “contact[s]” have assured him that this is the safest place for him to stay. Alone, he looks down upon the street and feels like he must be in hell. “Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony,” he writes.

Trying to stop feeling sorry for himself, Griffin takes on the voice of his supposed black identity, saying, “Nigger, what you standing up there crying for?” But this does nothing to make him feel better—in fact, he feels as if this outburst has come from an entirely different person as he looks in the mirror. “It’s not right. It’s just not right,” he hears himself say. Trying to distract himself, he finds a roll of film negatives on the ground but is disappointed to discover that the frames are blank. Depressed, he sits down to write his wife, but he’s unable to conjure any words. “The observing self saw the Negro, surrounded by the sounds and smells of the ghetto, write ‘Darling’ to a white woman,” Griffin notes. “The chains of my blackness would not allow me to go on.” As such, he abandons the task.

Going back outside, Griffin seeks out barbeque food. When a woman working at the restaurant hands him his food, though, she looks up and he interprets her look as one that says, “God…isn’t it awful?” As music blares all around him, he thinks angrily about how white people like to claim that black people are “happy” with the way things are. “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,’” Griffin writes. “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.”

Feeling as if “disaster” could strike at any moment Griffin gives up and calls the only person he knows nearby, a journalist named P.D. East. Billie, his wife, answers the phone and tells Griffin that P.D. will pick him up and that he can stay at their house on the condition that he doesn’t do anything related to his project while staying with them, since P.D. has already been “persecuted for seeking justice in race relations” and, as a result, his entire family has been ostracized from white society.

When P.D. picks up Griffin, the two men ride side by side in the darkness, a strange awkwardness in the air. Griffin, for his part, wonders why their conversation is “stilted,” but then he realizes what’s happening. “I had grown so accustomed to being a Negro, to being shown contempt, that I could not rid myself of the cautions,” he writes. “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.” When he arrives at P.D.’s house, Billie greets him kindly but makes “gallows humor” jokes about the entire situation, which help ease the tension. “What did we fear?” Griffin wonders. “It was unlikely that the Klan would come riding down on us. We merely fell into the fear that hangs over the state, a nameless and awful thing.”

Griffin notes that this “nameless” fear that “hangs over” Mississippi reminds him of what it was like to live in Europe during the Nazi era—there was, he says, a shameful kind of fear that arose whenever he used to speak to a Jewish person during this time. “For the Negro, at least, this fear is ever-present in the South, and the same is doubtlessly true of many decent whites who watch and wait, and feel the deep shame of it,” Griffin writes.

After settling into P.D.’s house and spending time with his family, Griffin unwinds. Before long, P.D. gives him a manuscript of his memoir, The Magnolia Jungle and asks him to read it, so Griffin retreats to his room and reads, enthralled by the writing. “I read through the night the story of a native-born Southerner, a man who had tried to follow the crowd, who ran an innocuous little newspaper, The Petal Paper, glad-handed, joined the local civic clubs and kept himself in line with ‘popular opinion,’ which meant ‘popular prejudice,’” Griffin notes. Describing the premise of P.D.’s book, Griffin goes on to explain that P.D. slowly began to see that his attempts to placate racists were immoral, so he started writing editorials that challenged bigoted ideas. As a result, he and his family were threatened, and he lost “most of his local subscribers and ads.” 

Going into more detail about P.D. East’s downfall in white society, Griffin explains that P.D. was outspokenly against a bill “to levy penalizing fines against any church holding nonsegregated services.” This, P.D. upheld, was “simply the old story of legalized injustice.” “This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed in Southern legislatures,” Griffin notes. Interestingly enough, though, Griffin notices that P.D. East hasn’t let these hardships break his spirits. Although his entire life has changed as a result of his decision to speak out against racism, he still manages to be funny in his book manuscript. This, Griffin intimates, is one of the reasons he can’t put down The Magnolia Jungle. Indeed, when he finally tries to sleep, he sees that the sun has already risen. Shortly thereafter, P.D. wakes him up, and the two men spend the rest of the day discussing the manuscript.