Black Like Me Analysis

“Black like Me” Reading # 5: John begins the entry of November 21st with him looking for a job in Mobile. While searching he comes across a man and asks him about a job, the man allows John to tell him what he could do. Immediately afterwards he tells John that his kind are not wanted here and that jobs of skilled labor are trying with all their power to prevent and get rid of blacks in any jobs besides the ones that whites wouldn’t want to do. John concludes the entry with the idea that whites and blacks experience a totally different atmosphere, and realized this as he was walking through familiar parts of Mobile where he had previously as a white man had seen the scene of the port totally different from how he saw it as a black man. John

John meets the family and is delighted by the excessive kindness he receives from the man’s wife and six children, they all ate beans and the loaf of bread that John had just bought at the café and for a dessert they all split the thinly sliced Milky Way bars that John had also gotten from the café. Afterwards, John and the father walk outside and talk about how he never makes enough to pay his debts but he doesn’t give up. They go and urinate and John remembers when he was a child reading the story of a black boy stopping to urinate in the swamp and it’s at his moment that john feels like he has completely made the transformation from white boy reading about a story in a big house to the black man urinating in the swamp. John later ask about the population of alligator around his house and then asked why he doesn’t hunt them and eat the meat in their tales, and to that the man responds with the law that states that you can be charged a fine for killing alligators. They return to the house after fetching some well-water for the kids to bathe and for them to shave. Before they all fall asleep all of the kids give their parents and John a kiss and a hug goodnight. While the others sleep John is still awake and witnesses the reasoning behind why they had so many children, and he described it as being because of the despair of living in the swamp and the smell of poverty drives a man to cling to his