Black Like Me: November 19, 1959 Summary & Analysis

On Griffin’s first day in Biloxi, he starts hitchhiking along the road, eventually getting into a car owned by a white man with red hair. Right away, Griffin can tell he is kind, and begins to hope that he has perhaps “underestimated the people of Mississippi.” However, the driver soon goes out of his way to make it clear that he’s from Massachusetts, clearly wanting Griffin to know that he’s “not a Mississippian.” When the two men fall into a conversation about race, the driver says that he respects his new neighbors but doesn’t understand why they’re so unable to talk about equality. “They can’t discuss it,” he says. “It’s a shame but all they do is get mad whenever you bring it up […]. They’re blocked on that one subject. […] if I mention race with any sympathy for the Negro, they just tell me I’m an ‘outsider’ […].”

After his ride with the redhaired driver, Griffin walks for a long time, trying to eventually make his way to Mobile, Alabama. That night, he begins getting more and more rides. Indeed, he learns that white men who would normally pass him during the day are more likely to pick him up at night. “It quickly became obvious why they picked me up,” he writes. “All but two picked me up the way they would pick up a pornographic photograph or book—except that this was verbal pornography.” Believing that they don’t need to show any kind of “respectability,” these men ask Griffin shockingly lewd questions about his sex life. “They appeared to think that the Negro has done all of those ‘special’ things they themselves have never dared to do. They carried the conversation into the depths of depravity,” Griffin notes.

Ride after ride, the drivers ask Griffin about his sex life. Sometimes these conversations become dangerous, as is the case when one driver asks if he has ever been attracted to a white woman. Griffin says he hasn’t—remembering the dangers of showing interest in white women—but the driver says, “Do you think I’m crazy? Why, I had one of them admit to me just last night that he craves white women.” He then says that there are “plenty white women” who would like to sleep with a black man, but Griffin merely replies, “A Negro’d be asking for the rope to get himself mixed up with white women.” Once it becomes clear that Griffin won’t talk about being attracted to white women, the driver pulls over and lets him out.

At one point, a young man picks Griffin up and begins speaking with an “educated flair.” Still, though, all of his questions have to do with sex. “Though he pretended to be above such ideas as racial superiority and spoke with genuine warmth, the entire context of his talk reeked of preconceived ideas to the contrary,” Griffin writes. For instance, the driver says, “I understand Negroes are much more broad-minded about [sex],” insisting that black people don’t have the same kind of “inhibitions” as white people. “I don’t think there’s any difference,” Griffin replies. “Our ministers preach sin and hell just as much as yours. We’ve got the same puritanical background as you. We worry just as much as white people about our children losing their virginity or being perverted.”

Clearly excited by the fact that Griffin speaks “intelligently,” the young man pushes on, even asking “the size of Negro genitalia and the details of Negro sex life,” though he tries to disguise these lewd interests by using hifalutin language and making fleeting references to sociological studies. “The boy ended up wanting me to expose myself to him,” Griffin writes. “I turned mute, indrawn, giving no answer.” After driving in silence, the driver says, “I wasn’t going to do anything to you,” and Griffin assures him that he knows that. “It’s just that I don’t get a chance to talk to educated Negroes—people that can answer questions,” the young man says.

“You make it more complicated than it is,” Griffin tells the driver. “If you want to know about the sexual morals of the Negro—his practices and ideals—it’s no mystery. These are human matters, and the Negro is the same human as the white man. Just ask yourself how it is for a white man and you’ll know all the answers.” In response, the driver cites “social studies” that make a different argument, but Griffin cuts him off, saying, “They don’t deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white.”

The next driver that picks Griffin up is a young man who looks tough and unforgiving but actually turns out to be a kind man who believes in equality. When he pulls over to buy both Griffin and himself hamburgers, Griffin wonders how, exactly, this southerner has managed to adopt such an egalitarian spirit, but he can’t quite figure it out—the man is simply kind.

Griffin arrives in Mobile, Alabama and meets a black man near the bus station. This man, it turns out, is a local preacher, and he invites Griffin to stay with him, though he only has one bed. As such, the two men go back to the preacher’s house and climb into bed together. “Do you want to talk or sleep?” the preacher asks, and since Griffin is beginning to feel overwhelmed not only by the rough night he has had, but by the intense “poverty” of the preacher’s home, he says he’d like to talk. This, he notes, “banishe[s] the somberness.”