Through Other Eyes

We have passed out of death and into life, and of this we can be sure because we love our brothers....My children, our love is not to be just words or mere talk, but something real and active.

These words from the first letter of St. John were part of the scriptural reading assigned for June 16,1920, the day John Howard Griffin was born. A couple of years ago, having come across an old missal, he looked up that reading and thought, "Dear Lord, isn't it extraordinary!"--so much did the words seem to stand as prophecy on the course of his life.

John Howard Griffin died on September 8,1980, in Fort Worth, Texas, at the age of 60. The work he left behind is a prodigious output: novels, articles, interviews, and at least one classic, the book Black Like Me. Certainly, however, much of what he contributed to this country is not contained in any published work.

"The world," Griffin once said, "has always been saved by an Abrahamic minority....There have always been a few who, in times of great trouble, became keenly aware of the underlying tragedy: the needless destruction of humanity." Griffin has been part of the Abrahamic minority of our time--those who.have managed to hold on fast to their humanity while at the same time extending a hand in encouragement to the rest of us in our tentative struggles to be all that we are called to be.

Griffin was born and raised in Texas. At the age of 15, with some ingenuity he managed to carry out a somewhat fantastic plan to study in France, and attended the Lycee Descartes in Tours. He remained in Tours, attended medical school, and worked in an asylum for the mentally ill. An accomplished musicologist, he experimented with the use of Gregorian chant in the treatment of patients.

With the outbreak of war, all French doctors were drafted into the army, and Griffin suddenly found himself at the age of 19 in charge of the hospital. From that position, he worked with the resistance in the dangerous task of smuggling Jews and other refugees out of the country. In 1940, when word of his activities reached the authorities, he himself was forced to leave France to escape arrest. Returning briefly to America, Griffin enlisted in the Air Force, and was then shipped to the South Pacific, where he spent the next three years on a number of isolated islands studying the language and culture of aboriginal tribes.

Near the end of the war he was injured in an explosion which seriously impaired his vision. Told that his loss of sight would eventually be total, he decided to return to more familiar surroundings in France, where he continued his study of music and prepared himself to leave the world of the sighted.

"The sight of a pin," he wrote, "a hair, a leaf, a glass of water--these filled me with tremendous excitement. The plants in the courtyards, the cobblestones, the lampposts, the faces of strangers. I no longer took them in and bound them up in me--they retained their values, their own identities and essences. I went out to them, immersed myself in them and found them more beautiful than I ever dreamed they could be. They taught, they nourished when one gave oneself to them."

Griffin didn't consider himself, at the time, a Christian, and his first response to his condition was merely a sense of emptiness and loss. But something in him would not admit that his experience held no meaning. He might have died in the explosion; but he had lived. What was the reason?

Gradually his bitterness turned to gratitude, and with this came a new kind of freedom. He had been given a second life to color as he chose, free of ordinary reactions. With a new determination to discover within his affliction the meaning of God's will for his life, he spent many weeks at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes. In 1947 he returned to America, completely blind.

Settling on his parents' farm in Texas, Griffin experimented for awhile with various occupations. In 1949, at the suggestion of an acquaintance, he began to write, dictating into a wire recorder by day and then transcribing his work at the typewriter at night. In 1952 his first book, a 600-page novel, The Devil Rides Outside, was published.

The title of the novel comes from an old French proverb: "The devil rides outside monastery walls." It is the story of a young American musicologist who goes to live in a Benedictine monastery in France to study Gregorian chant. He grows in knowledge of himself--of his pride, his weaknesses, the yearning within him for something better than himself--and that knowledge is the counterpart of his growth in love, the knowledge of God. It is an extraordinary and beautiful book which bears the clear stamp of that concern which is at the heart of all Griffin's work--the struggle of the individual to discover what it means to be a human being.

By the end of the novel the hero has not formally undergone a conversion. But he is ready to return to the world--no longer, for him, a prison and a trap-more whole, more at peace, ready to continue the journey of faith. The year the novel was published Griffin was received into the Roman Catholic church.

His second novel, Nuni, was published in 1956. It tells the story of an American English professor, John Harper, who survives a plane crash to find himself stranded among a primitive tribe on a remote island in the South Pacific. The inhabitants of the island lead a dark, joyless existence, constrained by rigid taboos and morbid superstitions. They have no conception of love; sex is considered a distasteful chore. At a certain age children are tatooed in a dangerous ritual. Few of them survive, and so the villagers do not bother to name them. To those who die the people say, "We leave you in sunlight, and we go back and wait in shadow."

Nuni was written during a period of deep spiritual crisis in Griffin's life. Not only was he blind and slowly losing his store of visual images, but he suffered almost constant agonizing pain. A severe spinal virus left him partially paralyzed, at times only able to lift one hand.

In his journal he wrote, "I am aware that I am putting the problems of my life into the lap of Professor Harper and I am desperate for him to solve them. I am stripping him of everything that is generally considered necessary to a person's ability to function at a human level--family, friends, even clothing--and plunging him into a world he is ill fit to live in. With me the prospect is similar, though I never mention it aloud....It must drive us to turning into vegetables of frustration or it must drive us to God or an equivalent thing above and beyond us...."

Nuni relates a man's efforts to rediscover a sense of identity and humanity after his world has been turned upside down and dehumanized. It is at the same time a dramatization of the mystical life, and reflects the intense study of theology which Griffin was undertaking, and which he continued throughout his life, under the supervision of the Discalced Carmelites. Stripped of fear, pride, selfishness, nostalgia, sentimentality, an image begins to emerge of essential humanity. Reduced to its essence, according to Griffin, it is love.

Harper discovers that "the tattered perceptions of my human condition, those perceptions that have led me into such anguish, must transform themselves around the same human condition--through a perspective of eternity--to lead me into joy; showing me that tragedy is not in the condition but in man's perception of the condition." At the end of the novel he risks his life and surrenders his last link with his previous self, a gold locket containing pictures of his children, in exchange for the life of a little girl about to be tatooed. Returning to his hut, where he had been keeping track of the days, he rubs out the word "Thursday" and writes in its place "Sunday."

Through him something new and redemptive has come into this small world. He has suffered and learned to love and he has offered up that love in a gesture that has a transforming effect not only on himself but, in potential, for those around him.

In 1957 Griffin miraculously began to see again. A 12-year blockage of the circulation of blood to the optic nerve suddenly opened, restoring his sight. He saw his wife and two young children for the first time. One can barely begin to imagine the impact of such an experience. In his journal he described the joy he felt in being able to read the prayers and Scripture printed in the daily office:

"The soul's nourishment, the soul's normalcy, sinking beyond the words to their innermost meaning, seeking and thirsting for it...feeling it melt away all hardness as it awakened love to its proper dimensions. If only these clarities could remain always to erase the numbness, the endless pettiness....This morning, then, the tired brain, the battered brain conceived the idea of reading the clear black type of the office. And therein found full reason and justification for seeing again."

As before with the accident that had spared his life, so now with this incredible gift Griffin tried to discern its meaning. For what purpose had his sight been returned? Perhaps to see what others could not see and report on his vision. So he entered the second half of his life.

Griffin was a Southerner. He had grown up with segregation. Yet as a blind man he had known neither black nor white. His blindness had allowed him to judge others only by the quality of their hearts and minds. With the return of his sight, he became more aware of how much we do not see, of the way superficial appearances can serve as obstacles to true perception.

As he began to study the problem of racism seriously, he found himself coming up against a constant challenge from the blacks he met: "The only way you can know what it's like is to wake up in my skin." Griffin took the words to heart. He went to New Orleans, and there with the use of drugs, dyes, and radiation, he darkened his skin, then shaved his head and "crossed the line into a country of hate, fear and hopelessness--the country of the American Negro." For two months in 1959 he traveled through the Deep South. His observations were widely publicized in a series of magazine articles and later in the book Black Like Me.

Griffin's gesture was a radical effort at human empathy. Even after 20 years it retains its power, for, in spite of its subsequent publicity, it is a gesture which has been rarely, if ever, imitated.

Black Like Me is a profoundly radical book, and at the same time it is deeply spiritual. Its concern goes beyond a particular set of social/political/economic conditions to the underlying disease of the soul. It is a meditation on the effects of dehumanization, both for the persecuted and the persecutors themselves--sadly, a universal story, and one that is a long long way from a conclusion.

Griffin changed nothing but the color of his skin--and that was everything. Suddenly doors closed, smiles became indignant frowns, or worse. Griffin describes his experience of the "hate stare": "Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene, the very obscenity (rather than its threat) terrifies you. I felt like saying 'What in God's name are you doing to yourself?'" It is not only the burden of poverty, violence, and humiliation that blacks must bear; it is the knowledge, the terrible knowledge of the possibilities for evil in the human heart. What must such knowledge do to a person's soul?

Griffin writes of the immense melancholy of the ghetto: "The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man's soul, 'You are black, you are condemned.' "

By bus and hitchhiking he traveled through Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia. He entered Mississippi the week after a grand jury refused to indict a group of white men accused of lynching a black. By coloring his skin he not only gained access to the black world hidden from white eyes, he saw another side of the white world, the secret face which whites reveal only to their victims. "Do you know what we do to troublemakers down here?" asked a white man who picked him up. "We either ship them off to the pen or we kill them."

He describes the days spent in futile efforts to find work. He learns what it means to have to walk clear across town to be able to urinate or have a drink of water or even sit down. In a sad moment in a hotel room in the black part of town, Griffin looks at himself in the mirror:

The bald Negro stared back at me from its mottled sheen. I knew I was in Hell. Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony. I heard my voice as though it belonged to someone else, hollow in the empty room, detached, say: "Nigger, what you standing up there crying for?" I saw tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light. Then I heard myself say what I have heard them say so many times. "It's not right. It's just not right."

In one of the most poignant episodes in the book, Griffin accepts a ride from a poor, black farmer who invites him home to spend the night with his family. Though there are only beans for supper in their shack, the presence of a visitor creates a festive atmosphere.

Their courtesy to me was exquisite. While we spread tow sacks on the floor and then seed sacks over them, the children asked questions about my own children. Did they go to school? No, they were too young. How old were they then? Why, today is my daughter's fifth birthday. Would she have a party? Yes, she'd certainly had a party. Excitement. Like we had here, with candy and everything? Yes, something like that. But it was time to go to bed, time to stop asking questions. The magic remained for them, almost unbearable to me--the magic of children thrilled to know my daughter had a party.

Later, in the darkness, he thinks about his daughter's birthday party somewhere far away, and the contrast fills him with rage and shame: "I felt again the Negro children's lips soft against mine, so like the feel of my own children's goodnight kisses. I saw again their large eyes, guileless, not yet aware that doors into wonderlands of security, opportunity and hope were closed to them."

"Future historians," he wrote later, "will be mystified that generations of us could stand in the midst of this sickness and never see it, never really feel how our System distorted and dwarfed human lives because these lives happened to inhabit bodies encased in a darker skin; and how, in cooperating with this System, it distorted and dwarfed our own lives in a subtle and terrible way."

After his story was published, Griffin was exposed to a different, more personal form of hostility. His body was hung in effigy on the main street of his home town. His life was repeatedly threatened. Nevertheless, he threw himself into a decade of tireless work on behalf of the growing civil rights movement. Necessity forced him, much against his nature, into the role of activist. His unique experience allowed him to serve as a kind of bridge between two communities desperately in need of dialogue. Whites would listen to words from him which they could not hear from a black.

In almost every lecture he gave, Griffin told the story of Clyde Kennard. Kennard was a black man who served 10 years overseas in the U.S. Army. He attended the University of Chicago and, when his stepfather died, he moved back home to his family's farm in Mississippi. There he tried to enroll in Mississippi Southern College. Friends warned him he was asking for trouble, but he insisted on his right to attend this public school he supported with his taxes. This was even before James Meredith's valiant effort to desegregate the University of Mississippi.

Kennard was leaving Mississippi Southern College, where the administration had been able to find no legal way of preventing him from registering, when he was stopped by the police and arrested. The first charge was drunken driving. Later he was charged with having knowingly bought $25 worth of stolen chicken feed. The witness against him was a 19-year-old, mentally retarded black youth who had spent the previous three days in jail. At their trial the boy who had confessed to stealing the feed was given a suspended sentence. Clyde Kennard was sentenced to seven years of hard labor.

After serving three years, he was found to be suffering from intestinal cancer. The prison warden refused to let him be hospitalized and instead transferred him to the hardest work gang. He worked from sunup to sundown. At night the guards would drag him back to his cell, stumbling, hemorrhaging. He knew they were trying to kill him. Not until he was clearly dying was he finally paroled. His friends rushed him to a hospital in Chicago, but by that time there was nothing to be done for him. Griffin was with him and his mother. Before he died he whispered to Griffin, "What happened to me may be less terrible than what the system did to those men who killed me. It turned them into beasts, and it will surely turn their children into beasts."

It is a sad episode in our history; Kennard's name is not known to many. "One hopes," wrote Griffin, "that if one acts from a thirst for justice and suffers the consequences, then others who share one's thirst may be spared the terror of disesteem and persecution." And so Griffin persevered with those who shared "the harsh and terrible understanding that somehow they must pit the quality of their love against the quantity of hate roaming the world."

One positive outcome of those years was the deep friendship that developed between Griffin and Thomas Merton. At first they were drawn to one another through their mutual commitment to the civil rights struggle. To those who expressed wonder that an isolated monk could write with such insight about the racial issue, Merton gave credit to friends like Griffin who kept him informed.

But gradually another bond took priority in their relationship--their love of photography. Griffin gave Merton one of his own cameras, instructed him in its use, and so opened up for Merton a new world of expression that brought him particular joy in his last years.

Griffin later edited a volume of his own and Merton's photographs, A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton.

Griffin was designated, after Merton's sudden death, as his authorized biographer. To that end he spent several months living in Merton's hermitage in Kentucky, following the monk's discipline of prayer and study. Ill health finally demanded that the book be turned over to someone else. One can only wonder what might have issued from the collaboration of those two spirits.

Black Like Me continues to be read. At last count it had sold five million copies. It is a book which is familiar to almost everyone, though few can recall the name of its author. In a sense the enormous reputation of the book preserved, for Griffin, a kind of personal anonymity. It is a fitting irony. In Black Like Me he had written, "I felt the beginning of the great loneliness, not because I was a Negro but because the man I had been, the self I knew, was hidden in the flesh of another....The Griffin that was had become invisible." A few years ago, an interviewer praised the fantastic gambles Griffin had taken in his life, specifically the "risk unparalleled" in dying his skin. "What people don't really know," Griffin replied, "is that long before this I took another great gamble--what the French call simply 'le grand oui,' the Great Yes. The gamble was for God. That means leaping off that cliff and never knowing where you're going to land, but you have the faith that you're going to land somewhere."

Griffin knew well that one values much more dearly what one has to measure out. He suffered from virtually every affliction under the sun: diabetes, bad kidneys, emphysema, a weak heart. When he died, his wife said it was of "everything." That included skin cancer, one product of the skin treatments he had endured so long ago.

I sit in a bus station in New York City, reflecting on these mysteries. "Are you a writer?" On the bench beside me sits a middle-aged black woman dressed in a white uniform. Somebody's maid. Well, I'd like to be a writer; why does she ask? "I seen that article you tore from the paper." I look down at the clipping I am holding: "John Howard Griffin, Author of 'Black Like Me,' Dead at 60." "I read that book," she says. Really? What did she think of it? "I thought God bless that man."

Robert Ellsberg was a former editor of The Catholic Worker, studying religion and literature at Harvard University when this article appeared.