Black Like Me (28 page)

But the real answer, never an easy answer, must be tracked along the path of events that forced him to confront his own cultural conditioning. Griffin had grown up in Dallas, Texas, which was as segregated as the Deep South, and where the dominant white culture cast black people into
Otherness
. He characterized his childhood as “Southern in the old sense, the terrible sense. We were not rich but not poor either; we were genteel Southerners, and I was taught the whole mythology of race.”

As a student he had excelled in the sciences but felt under- challenged by the American educational system that stifled rapid advancement. Searching for greater challenges, he responded to a newspaper advertisement for a private boys’ school in France, saying he would sweep floors to earn his keep. To his amazement, six weeks later he was offered a scholarship to the Lycée Descartes in Tours. Although he spoke no French, and his reluctant parents could afford only one-way passage and a small monthly stipend, he sailed for Europe at the age of fifteen, in 1935.

Leaving for Europe, where he would encounter different cultures, initiated profound changes over the next five years. He recalled being pleased to see African students in classes, but became indignant when they sat at the same table for lunch. He asked why and his French friends immediately responded: “Why Not?” The teenager was stunned and embarrassed to realize that he had never asked that question. While a “classical education” had expanded his knowledge and consciousness, his unconscious racism persisted.

After graduating from the lycée, he attended Medical School at Tours (also on scholarship) and attended some literature courses at the University of Poitier’s campus at Tours. Two years later, he became an graduate assistant to Dr. Pierre Fromenty, Director of the Asylum at Tours. But during the German occupation the director was conscripted into the French medical corps and the American, who could not be conscripted, was left in charge of 1200 patients, along with a nursing order of Catholic nuns. Soon after he joined fellow students in the underground resistance, and the asylum became a safe house where wounded soldiers got treatment.

The underground also gave temporary sanctuary to Jewish families from Germany, Belgium and France, in the alley boarding houses nearby, where Griffin heard parents, realizing that they would be shipped to concentration camps eventually, plead with him to take their children to safety. He helped smuggle children under the age of fifteen in the asylum ambulance—disguised as mental patients in straitjackets—out of Tours to the countryside, where other teams moved them on to England. In 1940, when the underground intercepted the Gestapo’s death list that included Griffin’s name, he was smuggled out of France, through England then Ireland, and back to the United States.

Griffin had witnessed the tragic effects of the Holocaust—refined to hideous perfection by the Nazis, who had drawn up
an indictment against a whole people
(the Jewish community of Europe), blaming their victims for every problem of German society. But he had
not
understood then the parallels between the Warsaw ghetto and every urban American ghetto; between anti-Semitism and white racism toward Negroes. Segregation—technically legal yet ethically unjust and immoral—was also an indictment drawn up against a whole people, the black community of America.

Enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1941, he was shipped to the Pacific theater the following year. Impressed by his linguistic skills, the high command assigned him to an island in the Solomon chain where he lived for a year in a remote village. He studied the indigenous culture, translated their dialect and gathered strategic information from the native allies. Initially, he viewed the natives as “primitives”—as
Other
. But after he was unable to navigate jungle trails, and had to rely on a five-year-old child as a guide, it became obvious “that within the context of that culture, I was clearly the inferior—an adult man who could not have survived without the guidance of a child. And from the point of view of the local inhabitants—a valid point of view—I was
Other
, inferior, and they were superior.” It was an experiential truth he could not deny.

While living with Pacific islanders, Griffin developed a
friendship with John Vutha, Grand Chief of the Solomons, who was a staunch ally of America in battling against Japan’s occupation. Vutha provided crucial information by tracking enemy movements and, when he had been captured and tortured by the Japanese, he refused to divulge allied positions. After 22 bayonet wounds, they left him for dead, hanging from a tree as an example. “There is little doubt that if he had given in and spoken,” Griffin writes, “the American victory at Guadalcanal might have been much slower in coming. Countless lives would certainly have been lost that were saved by his silence.” For his heroism, Vutha received the highest awards accorded by American and British governments.

In 1945, when a Japanese invasion plan was intercepted, Griffin was reassigned to the landing base on Morotai and resumed his duties as a radio operator. When the air raids were imminent, orders were sent to select one soldier for a dangerous mission. He drew the short straw and was dispatched to the radar tent at the edge of the airstrip with orders to destroy the files if the enemy invaded. That evening brought a steady rain. For the first time, he felt “a foreboding of violence, a certainty of death.” At nightfall he heard the scream of air raid sirens and the rumble of distant bombers. He ran down a slope toward a slit-trench for protection as the pattern bombing exploded along the airstrip. Just as he reached the rim of the trench, a nearby explosion catapulted him over the edge into darkness.

Two days later Griffin regained consciousness in the base hospital, suffering from a severe concussion that had impaired his eyesight. He kept his injury secret, pretending to read mail and playing the role of the recovering soldier until they promised to send him home. He earned the rank of sergeant, won medals and commendations, but never saved the stripes, claimed the awards, or filed for benefits. He had known war on both sides of the world and could not bear to be reminded of it.

Back home, he consulted eye specialists and was declared legally blind. Griffin was told that remaining light perception would be gone within 18 months. He sailed to France in the summer of 1946, to study music composition with Nadia
Boulanger and composer-pianist, Robert Casadesus. After realizing he would not become a composer, he made a retreat to the Abbey of Solesmes, the fabled monastery of Gregorian Chant, where he was granted permission to study with the Benedictine monks. In 1947, he experienced an epiphany that nudged him “out of the agnosticism I had drifted into and led me eventually into the Catholic Church.” By Good Friday of that year he was totally blind.

Returning to America, Griffin settled on his parents’ country property near Mansfield, Texas. He raised livestock as a two-year experiment to prove that the sightless could become independent. His hogs were judged best of show locally and the experiment was a success. He wrote a guide for the sighted in their relationships with the blind,
Handbook for Darkness
, published in 1949. That same year he wrote a 600-page novel in seven weeks, based on his experiences with music and monasticism in France, and he began a journal in 1950, which he would keep over the next 30 years. Also, he studied audio tapes on theology and philosophy, lectured on Gregorian Chant and, in 1951, converted to Catholicism.

His first novel,
The Devil Rides Outside
, was published in 1952, and became a surprise bestseller. In 1953, he wed 17-year- old Elizabeth Holland in a Catholic ceremony, and the couple moved into a cottage on her family’s farm west of Mansfield, eventually raising four children during their 27 years of marriage. The 1954 paperback of
The Devil Rides Outside
was censored in Detroit, and then submitted by the publisher as a test case on pornography. This historic battle was adjudicated by the US Supreme Court in the publisher’s favor in 1957. The ruling established the significant precedent that a book must be evaluated in its entirety and
not
censored on the basis of objectionable words or passages quoted out of context.
Nuni
, a novel set on a remote island in the Pacific, came out in 1956. His third novel,
Street of the Seven Angels
, a satire on pornography, appeared forty years after it was completed, in 2003.

During a decade of sightlessness Griffin experienced what it was like to become the
Other
, because the sighted perceived him as handicapped. “A man loses his sight then, but let it be understood
that he loses nothing else,” he declares in
Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
(2004). “He does not lose his intelligence, his taste, his sensitivity, his ideals, his right to respect” and “remains as much an individual as always.” Then without warning, on January 9, 1957, Griffin began perceiving reddish glints of light that stunned and frightened him. He telephoned his wife to say that he thought he was seeing and then broke down in tears. Elizabeth dispatched the doctor to her husband’s studio and followed soon after. On that day he glimpsed images of his wife and children, quite literally, for the first time. In a state of shock, the patient was sedated and taken to a specialist. The media was on the trail of the story, so Griffin was sequestered in the nearby Carmelite monastery, where he had made regular retreats. He needed calm, for it was not known immediately if eyesight would improve or fade. With weeks of rest, optical exercises, and the aid of powerful lenses, his sight steadily improved and he was astonished by the glorious gift of sight. Griffin had accepted blindness as a matter of Divine Will, believing that he had been plunged into a long night of the soul for a purpose, and also that his sight- recovery had been a revelation of mystical healing. This spiritual dimension grounded his demand for equal justice as a human right, no matter what his personal sacrifice.

In 1959, on the night before departure to New Orleans to begin the
Black Like Me
experiment, Griffin writes in his journal: “Nothing is more difficult than to face this, than deciding to look squarely at profound convictions and to act upon them, even when doing so goes contrary to our desires. Yes, it must be done—deciding to abandon ourselves deliberately and completely to that which is so beautiful, justice, and to that which is so terrible, the reprisals, the disesteem of men. We know it, perhaps we have even done it—made the act, said the yes.”

When Griffin returned from the Deep South journey, he wrote a series of articles for the black monthly magazine,
Sepia
, published between April and October of 1960 as “Journey Into Shame”—a hasty first draft of
Black Like Me
. Before the first installment hit the news stands, he and his family were receiving death threats by mail and over the phone from white racists
in their hometown of Mansfield. After being “lynched in effigy” (Griffin’s phrase) in April of 1960, his frightened parents made plans to sell their acreage and to resettle in Mexico, where older son Edgar owned real estate. By mid-August they had departed by car, and Griffin put his wife and three children on a plane bound for Mexico City two days later. He packed his own car and joined them all soon after. They settled in a small village overlooking the Spanish colonial city of Morelia, in the Sierra Tarasca mountains of Michoacán, about 130 miles west of Mexico City. It was their new home for nearly a year and Griffin wrote the final draft of
Black Like Me
there. This “lost” chapter in his story is told in
Available Light: Exile in Mexico
(2008). But during a series of communist student uprisings in Morelia, Griffin sent home his young family and elderly parents. He stayed on to write a report on the unrest, reflecting on the ironic fact that he had been hounded by the Nazis out of France, by the racists out of Mansfield, and finally by the communists out of Mexico.

Griffin returned to Texas in the spring of 1961. On August 20, he received an advance copy of
Black Like Me
. “Always a strange moment,” he remarked, “to see one’s work printed into this format, complete—a year of labor that weighs less than a pound; and yet few pounds of any substance have produced the explosion this has, the repercussions, the changes in our life and status.” His daily existence, if not his status, dramatically changed during the 1960s—this solitary writer soon transformed himself into a dynamic public advocate for the cause of equal justice by nonviolent means.

The uniqueness of Griffin’s story and his harsh denunciation of the segregated system was aired in interviews with Mike Wallace, Dave Garroway, Studs Terkel and others, stirring controversy before
Black Like Me
appeared in November of 1961. For the publisher, uncertain if the book would have interest to general readers, it was a free publicity campaign from heaven; for its author it initiated a nearly-endless purgatory only slightly less hellish than the journey itself. The book received rave reviews
from major media on both coasts, was hailed in Texas press but, with the exception of the Atlanta papers, it was entirely ignored in the South. However, the segregationists whose human rights violations had been exposed, would not ignore its author. While
Black Like Me
ascended bestseller lists, Griffin’s name was added to hate lists and he was targeted as “an enemy of the white race.” (A decade later the Klan caught up with Griffin, beat him mercilessly with chains, and left him for dead on a back road in Mississippi.) But he survived the beating and continued to lecture about racism, and his later treks cross country uncovered a geography of prejudice hidden beneath a thin veneer of tolerance.

On the lecture circuit for a dozen years, Griffin admitted that he had withheld criticism of the Catholic Church in
Black Like Me
, naively believing that once the hierarchy were made aware of the segregation of black Catholics, this immoral practice would be abolished. “I knew the Church’s teaching allowed for no racial distinction between members of the human family,” he writes in “Racist Sins of Christians” in 1963, because the Church “regarded man as a
res sacra
, a sacred reality. God created all men with equal rights and equal dignity. The color of skin did not matter. What mattered was the quality of soul.” He had been guided by the words of Father J. Stanley Murphy, who said: “Whenever any man permits himself to regard any other man, in any condition, as anything less than a
res sacra
, then the potentiality for evil becomes almost limitless.” Every religion professes the sacredness of human rights, but Catholic officials rationalized their discrimination “for fear of alienating souls.” Griffin “knew they were referring to the souls of prejudiced white Catholics,” and wondered “why they appeared to have so little ‘fear’ of alienating the souls of Negroes.”