MAN IN THE MIRROR:
John Howard Griffin and the Story of “Black Like Me”
By Robert Bonazzi
Orbis Books, 208 pages, $14 paper
Thirty-six years after its first publication, John Howard Griffin’s look at racism in America, “Black Like Me,” remains a staple of high school and college courses in contemporary American literature. Ten million copies of the book have been published around the world; the number of term papers written about it must be staggering. When a second edition appeared in 1977, with an updated afterword by Griffin, it was treated by most reviewers as a major publishing event.
These are unusual occurrences for a book initially intended for a small audience of sociologists. They are, of course, testaments to the book’s undeniable importance as a historical document. But what we tend to forget, and in fact far too rarely recognized at all, is that “Black Like Me” was a powerful literary work of a deeply spiritual nature.
Robert Bonazzi, a close friend of Griffin’s from 1966 until his death in 1980, has spent the last decade researching and writing what will be Griffin’s official biography. As a foretaste of that work, he has given us “Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of `Black Like Me.’ ” Readers familiar with Griffin’s work will find this an insightful and informative volume; teachers of American literature and history should positively rejoice. “Man in the Mirror” fills in so many gaps in the story, and provides such detailed biographical preambles and postscripts, that the book is surely destined to become the critical resource of choice.
The basic story is well-known. In 1959, a Texas novelist dyed his skin black and traveled through the Deep South for six weeks, recording the depravity of American racism. Bonazzi compares the text of the published “Black Like Me” with Griffin’s extensive journals, revealing a remarkable subtext. Griffin’s journey through the South was only the most visible portion of a lifelong quest to understand the human spirit. Like some transplanted medieval scholar, Griffin sought nothing less that God himself in the human heart. Inevitably, he was drawn to what he could not understand: the darkest aspect of the soul, man’s inhumanity to man.
Early in his life, Griffin sought understanding through the contemplation of the sublime, specifically medieval and classical ecclesiastical music. At age 15 he acquired a scholarship to attend the Lycee Descartes in Tours, France. He arrived knowing only a smattering of French, but within three years the brilliant lad from Ft. Worth was studying medicine at the University of Poitiers. Soon he was experimenting with the therapeutic effects of Gregorian chant upon patients judged to be incurably insane. His first published work was a study of 17th and 18th Century keyboard ornamentation, which he co-authored at age 19 with French musicologist Pierre Froger. When Germany invaded, Griffin joined the French resistance and began helping Jewish refugees flee occupied France.
After his identity was revealed to the Gestapo by a Nazi informer, Griffin had to return to the U.S., where he joined the military and was shipped to the Pacific theater. In 1943, Griffin was dropped on a remote island in the Solomons with orders to learn “everything possible about the indigenous culture.” Once again, he found himself having to cope with culture shock and learning to value totally alien ways of life. By the end of the war, Griffin had learned that a bombing injury would shortly cost him his sight. He traveled to France, where he spent a year in retreat at the Abbey of St. Pierre of Solesmes, the motherhouse of Gregorian chant. When he finally returned to Ft. Worth he was blind, once again a stranger in a strange land.
Ten years later, in 1957, having written two novels, married and become a father, Griffin’s sight returned, suddenly and inexplicably.
He had experienced and fought against the ravages of Nazi racism, found himself a highly civilized man incapable of survival without the aid of totally “uncivilized” natives in the jungles of the Solomon Islands, and experienced the prejudice that limits the blind in a seeing world. There was perhaps no white man alive in 1959 who could better understand the realities of American racism. All that was left for him was the great experiment. As Cyril Connolly put it in The Sunday Times of London: ” `Some actions are so absolutely simple and right that they amount to genius. It was an act of genius on the part of Mr. Griffin to decide to dye his skin and live as a Negro. Why did nobody think of it before?’ “
More to the point, how was it that a Southerner, born into and surrounded by ingrained racial prejudice, became one of modern America’s most outspoken advocates for racial equality?
Bonazzi answers these questions by delving into Griffin’s soul as he himself revealed it in his journals and in his voluminous correspondence with Catholic thinkers like Jacques Maritain and Thomas Merton. Griffin’s explanation of racism eventually boiled down to an assessment of what he termed our “cultural unconscious,” an ingrained set of attitudinal and behavioral norms that tend to define superior and inferior aspects of human activity. We can only escape the event horizon of this cultural singularity by accepting as valid the norms of a contrasting culture–in other words, by walking a mile in another person’s shoes, or, as in Griffin’s case, in another person’s skin.
That hard lesson came home to Griffin in the middle of his great experiment when, staring into a mirror, he realized he did not recognize the man in the mirror as himself. Skin color alone, he discovered in shock, was sufficient to relegate the face staring back at him to the status of Other. From that point on, Griffin’s quest was truly to find the divine within and to love his enemies without exception. As a nation, we are truly blessed to have had such a selfless interpreter of cultures born into our midst. Bonazzi’s “Man in the Mirror” goes a long way toward helping us understand such unlikely saintliness.
