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

opens up the entry of November 24th with him walking toward s Montgomery, on the highway he encountered a white man with a shotgun in a pick-up truck who offered him a ride, John hesitated then sat in the truck. During the car ride the man talked to John about mongrelization (the crossbreeding of two different races where one usually sees the other as inferior) and tells John how he has participated in it many times even as a married man, a father, and even a grandfather. Later on down the road the man drives through a highly vegetated swampy area and remarks on the ease of getting away with killing and disposing of a black man in the swamp, John soon after exits the truck and it is now dark outside. John sees a café light and heads towards it in hopes of being allowed to purchase some food and water of which he had been in lack of all-day. John walks up to the café whistling and making sure not to startle the two white people that were in the café, as he walks in he ask the white lady if he may purchase some food and drink, she declines by saying they were closing and shuts the doors. John begs the lady and she eventually allows him to buy food and after drinking an orange drink leaves the store and later spots a car that had a black man driving.
John makes plans with the man to sleep on his floor at his house, the man has a wife and six children that all lived in a house with only two rooms.

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

woman.
That same night John had stepped outside and sat in the tub and thought about his children and how the black children were just the same as them, their kisses the same, their actions the same, yet the only thing separating them from having the same opportunities as his own children was the color of their skin. John saw the children as he said “not as a white man or a black man but as a human parent,” and it saddened him greatly to think that such acts could take place and go as far as decreasing the value of one’s life just based on their skin color. John continuous to have the same nightmare of whites giving him hate stares and they basically represent the fear of him being black and being unable to escape the hate and discrimination of white people. John leaves the following morning and leaves money for their courtesy and for their children. Two kind white boys pick him up and drive him to town where he purchases a bus ticket to Montgomery, John boards the bus and after a while stops at a halfway stop in Selma where he met these girls that were asking for money for a missionary tract and he gave them money and then followed them to see how they would approach a white person. The girls were almost every time denied the money that they aspired when they approached whites, but not all some gave money without even asking what is was for. Night fell and John had just finished talking to his wife and children on the phone as he made his way towards the bus stop, he found a seat in the back of the bus and he fell asleep with the other blacks sitting around him.
Personal Thoughts of this Selection:
The book continuous to heighten my interest along with a new sympathetic perspective towards earlier generations of African-Americans and their struggle and fears they faced during the time period. John is very good at painting a clear picture in your mind of how it would be like in the shoes of a black man, the point of view that he uses allows the reader to experience his thoughts and gives the story emotion and a mutual understanding from an everyday person, of the experience of an entirely different world.