"Black like Me"

On the way to Hattiesburg, Miss., the bus pulled into a rest stop, and the white passengers got off. When one of the colored passengers, a big man in dark glasses, tried to follow them, the driver blocked his way. "Where do you think you're going?" he demanded. "I'd like to go to the rest room," the passenger said. "Does your ticket say for you to get off here?" asked the driver. "No, sir," said the passenger, "I'm going to Hattiesburg." The driver shut the bus door. "Then you get back in your seat." he commanded, "and don't you move till we get to Hattiesburg." Meekly, the passenger did as he was told.

What the driver did not know was that the man he had just intimidated was not a Negro but a white. He was John Howard Griffin, 39, Dallas-born author (The Devil Rides Outside) on assignment for Sepia magazine, a Negro monthly (circ. 61,975) published in Fort Worth. His skin darkened by pills,* ultraviolet treatment and vegetable dye, his straight brown hair shaved to the poll, he was touring the Deep South to see how it felt to wear the black man's skin. In the current issue of Sepia, in the first of five installments. Griffin began telling what it was like.

"The Hate Stare." Accepted without question as a Negro by both races, Griffin drifted through four states--Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia--well-dressed, comparatively well-heeled ($200 in traveler's checks), obviously well-educated, under his own name and ready to reveal the truth to anyone who asked. No one asked. His skin was black, and that was enough.

Throughout the South, Griffin encountered what he calls "the hate stare." Offering his seat to a white woman in a New Orleans streetcar, he watched her face stiffen into hostility. "What are you looking at me like that for?" she asked sharply, and turned away muttering, "They're getting sassier every day." Hitchhiking through Alabama, he was picked up by a white truck driver who inquired, with a leer, whether Griffin's wife had ever slept with a white man, informed him that "we're doing your race a favor to get some white blood into your kids." A factory foreman in Mobile, to whom Griffin applied for a job, told him coldly: "We don't want you people. We're gradually getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. Pretty soon we'll have it so the only kind of jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have." Wherever he went, he could get only the most menial work.

The Dark Night. Griffin began his masquerade with the feeling that as a Southern white, he lacked compassion for the Negro, as well as a true understanding of the Negro's lot. His four-week journey strengthened both of these impressions. "I had no idea what they have to go through," he said. "I literally bawled myself to sleep some nights. I learned that when it is night, when it is dark, then the Negro feels safest. Langston Hughes's line, 'Night coming tenderly/ Black like me,'* has real meaning."

After four weeks as a Negro, Griffin harbors new doubts about his own race. "I like to see good in the white man," he said last week. "But after this experience, it's hard to find it in the Southern white."

* Griffin took Oxsoralen, a drug sometimes administered to victims of vitiligo, a disease that produces milk-white patches on the skin. The drug makes the skin extraordinarily sensitive to ultraviolet rays; under sunlamp or sunlight exposure, the skin turns a deep brown. * From Hughes's poem "Dream Variations."

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