And it's an absolutely fantastic book. In 1959 Griffin darkens his skin (through the use of medication as well as a sun lamp), shaves his head and then spends six weeks getting firsthand experience of what it's like to live as a black man in the Deep South.
When seeing his new self in the mirror for the first time,
the transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. ...
I had gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won't rub off. The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me. ... For a few weeks I must be this aging, bald Negro; I must walk through a land hostile to my colour, hostile to my skin.
How did one start? ... I was a man born old at midnight into a new life. How does such a man act?
2 comments:
In Walden Thoreau says "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"
Indeed not.
Griffin knows it would be a miracle, something not truly possible: "I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won't rub off." When the black won't rub off... Because it can't rub off, just like Vincent's being born a woman and having had a lifetime experience of being a woman doesn't rub off in an instant by disguising as a person with external signs of being a male.
My husband is blind. I used to work within the usability field, and peers in my field would every now and then tell me how they had found a wonderfully easy, low cost "quick and dirty" method for making usable/accessible applications (because inviting real users for usability testing is rather expensive): They would blindfold themselves and then try to use the computer with artificial speech, just like a blind person would.
But when I told this to my husband, he would laugh and say "but they would never be able to imagine, truly imagine, what it is like to be living without any visual memory. They would always have the knowledge of how e.g. a Google result list would look like. They rely heavily on their experience as sighted people when they blindfold themselves. I don't have that experience, so I feel lost when I am on the internet. They would not understand this feeling of being lost by merely blindfolding themselves."
To truly look through somebody else's eyes would be a miracle indeed. But is it possible?
That's a very relevant question.
Firstly, it is definitely a sadly ironic point about a book like this that it takes a disguised white man to make the story sell and to make a lot of people listen that wouldn't lend their ear to a black man describing the actual (permanent!) black experience.
That said, one thing that makes Griffin's book fantastic is the fact that he doesn't actually pretend to be getting an authentic experience. In his preface he says that he has chosen to publish his journal "in all its crudity and rawness" (in stead of a scientific research study as he originally intended). The journal, he says, "traces the changes that occur to heart and body and intelligence when a socalled first-class citizen is cast on the junkheap of second class citizenship."
Thus his experience is actually presented as his own.
Moreover, Griffin stresses that the experience he does indeed get is bad enough and proof enough that the situation in the South is cruel and barbaric. On his journey it IS his black skin alone which determines that no, he can't use the restroom here; no he can't have a drink of water there (not to mention a seat in the front end of the bus, a room for the night or a decent job), and white people confide in him when they get a chance, airing depraved and cruel ideas that they wouldn't dream of sharing with their white "peers". And this, I believe, is Griffin's point in the passage about blackness that doesn't rub off: He adopted the black colour as more than makeup that could be wiped off, and therefore - on his journey - there is no use claiming that he's really white. There is no escaping his experiment. He looks black, and this is sufficient to degrade him to a second class citizen and to be treated accordingly: "The Negro. The South. These are the details" (thus the preface).
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