Black Like Me: November 24, 1959 Summary & Analysis

Hitchhiking between Mobile and Montgomery, Griffin gets a ride from a white man in a truck who has a shotgun leaning against his leg in the cabin. Laughing, the driver says, “That’s for hunting deer.” Their initial conversation starts out normally, as the driver asks about Griffin’s family. Eventually, though, he asks if Griffin has a “pretty wife,” and when he says that he does, the driver asks, “She ever had it from a white man?” When Griffin doesn’t respond, the driver goes on, saying that he hires many black women at his business and that he has sex with all of them as part of the interview process. “You think that’s pretty terrible, don’t you?” he asks. “I guess I do,” Griffin says. The driver then insists that everybody does this, saying, “We figure we’re doing you people a favor to get some white blood in your kids.”

Griffin is astounded by the driver’s “hypocrisy,” thinking about the many times he’s heard white people speaking terribly about the “horror” of “mongrelization” and the importance of “racial purity.” Moving on, the driver asks Griffin why he’s in town, asking if he’s here to “stir up trouble.” Griffin denies this, but the driver tells him what white people do to black people who “stir up trouble”: “We either ship them off to the pen or kill them.” Suddenly, Griffin sees how eager this man is to make an example out of a black man, and this “terrifie[s]” him. “You can kill a nigger and toss him into that swamp and no one’ll ever know what happened to him,” the driver says, and Griffin only dares to say, “Yes, sir,” before falling silent. Shortly thereafter, the man pulls to the side of the road and asks Griffin to get out.

As Griffin gets out of the truck, the driver says, “I’ll tell you how it is here. We’ll do business with you people. We’ll sure as hell screw your women. Other than that, you’re just completely off the record as far as we’re concerned.” With these words ringing in his mind, Griffin wanders a desolate stretch of road, starving and parched. Eventually, he comes upon a “service station” with a grocery store inside. Seeing the white owners, he hesitates, but then he remembers what the racist driver said: “We’ll do business with you people.” As such, he enters and buys food, careful not to do anything other than purchase the goods. Back on the road, he’s relieved to be picked up by a black man, who takes him home for the night despite the fact that he only has two rooms to share between his wife, two daughters, and himself.

That night, after having a jovial time with the black driver and his family, Griffin wakes up and realizes that he has been screaming. This is because he was having a nightmare, one he’s been having rather frequently. In the dream, white people surround him and give him “the hate stare” as they close in on him, his back “against a wall.” The next morning, Griffin has breakfast and coffee and prepares to leave, reaching for his money. However, the driver’s wife stops him, saying, “If you gave us a penny, we’d owe you change.” Still, Griffin leaves money before returning to the highway, where two white boys drive him to a bus station.

In the bus station, Griffin buys a ticket for Montgomery and then goes to the bathroom, where he looks at himself in the mirror. Having been in this disguise for more than three weeks, he is “no longer shocked” to see himself. Suddenly, he feels “a great hunger for something merely pleasurable, for something people call ‘fun.’” As he continues to look into the mirror, he sees that his skin has lightened because he hasn’t been lying under the sun lamp, so he darkens the corners of his lips and reminds himself that he must be careful not to take off his clothes in front of anyone, since the majority of his body has lightened.