Color of my skin: John Howard Griffin

I was blind and now I see

If an American, because of his dark skin, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life that we all want, who among us would be content to change the color of his skin and take his place? Who of us would then be content with the advice of patience and delay? – JFK, June 11, 1963

I was more interested in hearing an interview with Morgan Atkinson, who made a film, Uncommon Vision, about John Howard Griffin, who in 1961 wrote Black Like Me, which along with MLKJR’S Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958), The Measure of a Man (’59) and, of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a huge effect on many of us in the days of the Civil Rights Movement. JHG wrote his book “to shake up the status quo.”

John Griffin, “searching for that divine spark that unites us all”, traveled to France at the age of 15 to study and adventure. He was in medical school at 19 when the war broke out and found himself working with the Resistance until he was expelled from the country. He then served with the Americans; an explosion gradually blinded him in 1945. When he returned to civilian life he was a writer, rancher, and photographer. Surprisingly, he recovered his sight. He wrote that it was somehow more difficult to return to the world of being able to see than it was to adjust to being blind. He loved classical music where he found some of the harmony he longed for. He became a Catholic, a convert like Thomas Merton, with whom he shared a love of photography, social justice, a curiosity about not being too easily comfortable or satisfied, a marvel that ultimate truth cannot be stated simplistically, and that one must experience the profound truth for oneself. He would later work on a biography of Merton (he joked that it was his “monk like me” period since he plunged into life in Gethsemane). Both he and Merton had the heart of a Zen poet.

Silvery blue rain is gently drenching our lovely San Gabriel Valley as I write and think of JHG friend Thomas Merton.

“Think about it,” Merton wrote one rainy night, “all that speech that spills over, sells nothing, judges no one… What a thing it is to sit utterly alone, in the woods, at night, caressed by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the speech the rain makes by itself on the ridges… No one started it, no one will stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks, I will listen.”

John was first influenced to investigate Catholicism as a young man in France when he was exposed to Gregorian chant in 1946. He was encouraged by his experience. Interestingly, he first heard the chants in an asylum where it was used to calm and perhaps even transform some of the patients. When he was blind, he learned more about Gregorian chant and visited Solesmes Abbey in France. John was fascinated by the monks, both intellectually and the way they lived. He uttered what he called the big “Yes!” after her years of searching for a focus for his spiritual life.

John Griffin taught us empathy, walking in someone else’s loafers, “a total life changer”, through his courageous story of changing his skin color from white to black and at the end of his six-week experiment, changing from black to white and vice versa. The stories teach deeply; Indian philosophers called them lilas, God’s play that reveals our sacred humanity as well as our shadows, “the universal story of men destroying the souls and bodies of other men (and destroying themselves in the process) for reasons they don’t really understand, the story of the persecuted, the let down, the feared and loathed.” John Griffin showed me my own prejudices, even against myself. And he pointed beyond that to the inviolable inner goodness of every person, regardless of his race, religion, or sexual preference.

John tells of his stay in a shanty with a humble black family: “Dinner was on the makeshift table. It consisted entirely of large yellow beans in water… I praised the children until the father’s weary face brightened with pride. He looked at the children the way another looks at a rare painting or a treasured jewel… Locked in the two rooms with the soft light of two kerosene lamps, the atmosphere changed. The outside world, outside standards disappeared. They were cooked somewhere out there in the vast darkness…”

Once, when JHG was experiencing the disrespect shown to him for being a black-skinned person, he visited a two-thousand-acre wooded Trappist monastery, entering “as the monks chanted Vespers…their voices floated to me. It was a shock, like walking from the dreary swamps into the sudden bright sunlight. Here all was peace, all silence except the chanted prayers. Men here know nothing of hate.”

Black Like Me sold 12 million copies, but John Griffin died with virtually no money. He wasn’t smart with money, but he certainly had wonderful artistic successes and to this day he is a huge influence for social justice and his idea that “there is no other.” He was bedridden for the last three years of his life and wrote that if one could transcend the suffering of being sick, he could develop an unlimited capacity for compassion.

When JHG concluded her experiment, “she felt strangely sad…almost as if she was running from my share of (the black person’s) pain and anguish.” Today, driven by the upheaval of our intimately interconnected world, JHG encourages us to create an inclusive world by touching one another with kindness, humor, and wisdom.