Griffin that featured his own effigy, hung on a signpost, with his very own newsboy pointing it out. Over the fold. That day, with his picture in the Fort Worth paper, Arnold was the hero of the fourth grade.
John Howard Griffin was a Mansfield writer who lived with his wife and children a mile out of town on West Broad Street, the last house on Arnold’s newspaper route. He was a big man—six foot two, two hundred pounds—who six months earlier had conceived a big idea: he would shave his head, dye his skin black, and hitchhike around the South looking for work—to experience being a Negro. Why would someone do this, someone with a wife and three kids? This was no shallow journalistic stunt. On the desk at his parents’ farm lay an article that asserted that Southern negroes “had reached a stage where they simply no longer cared whether they lived or died.” Yet in Mansfield, there was supposed to be a “wonderfully harmonious relationship.” His Negro contacts were polite and friendly to him: the contradiction stared him in the face.
“When you look long into an abyss,” the mad German warned, “the abyss also looks into you,” and Griffin realized he had to know the answer to the riddle. With the permission of his family, and after a dermatology consultation, he undertook a brave, unique experiment: becoming the first white person ever to directly experience the lifeworld of the blacks. For six weeks he bused, hitched, and walked through Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, encountering squalor he had never known, unmotivated antagonism, inevitable violence, and above all hopelessness—just as the article alleged. He took notes of situations and conversations and, when he returned to Mansfield, published them in Sepia, a magazine widely read by Negroes in the deep South. The story had appeared in March and was picked up worldwide, so new and trenchant was the deed. Time did a long article, and there were TV interviews with Paul Coates, Dave Garroway, Harry Golden, and Mike Wallace. Radio-Television Française actually flew a crew of five from Paris to interview him on his family farm. All 1,400 citizens of Mansfield were buzzing about their famous—to many, infamous—celebrity.
But they did not buzz to him. Everywhere he went he created a ring of silence. Women stared at their shoes, and men glared hostilely just past his face. He had “stirred things up”; this was as unacceptable to the Mansfield power structure as it was to the loafers who stood around the filling station and street corners. The date for a castration had been set.
John Howard Griffin’s eldest daughter, Elise, was in Arnold’s class, and her younger sister, Nancy, was in second grade, two years behind. That the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the generations seemed an obvious truth to their peers. So Arnold made a point of sitting with them in the lunchroom when no one else would. He paid for that gesture at the end of the day when he found a note in his cubby, apparently from his Claggart #1: ARNOLD LOVES NIGGER ELISE lettered in nasty penmanship. “Nigger Elise” was three inches taller than Arnold, somewhat heavy, with white skin and hair blonder than her little sister’s, an unlikely match for the epithet and an even less likely target for Arnold’s affections. Nevertheless.
“Nigger-lover” was the worst thing anyone in Texas could say about anyone else. It was far worse than “nigger,” since niggers were basically all right as long as they stayed in their place. But nigger-lovers were unscrupulous race-traitors, never to be trusted, always to be shunned. Arnold’s Operation Friendship and Protection lasted only two days. By Thursday of that week, the Griffin children had moved in with friends in Dallas. By the weekend both Grandma and Grandpa Griffin had been threatened and were making plans to sell their farm. The town had drawn the line. Griffin would publish his classic memoir, Black Like Me, and move with his family to Mexico.
On the night of the move, Arnold lay in his non-Castro bed and stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars he and his father had glued so joyfully to the ceiling. The big dipper, pointing north. Pegasus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. The shapes seemed to be ebbing and flowing, losing their sharpness in his tears.
Eight
A thousand days pass quickly. Perhaps because of his physical beauty and intelligent charm, Arnold remained popular with most boys, with all the girls, and with all his teachers, in spite of his now outspokenly liberal positions on the U2 incident, Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin wall, the Soviet H-bomb, and the missile crisis. While others his age were religiously following Howdy Doody or Lassie, Arnold was reading the New York Times and writing critiques of articles in My Weekly Reader, comparing the facts presented with those in the newspaper of record. He would visit the Rawsons to check their magazines and discuss current events. He was still tight with Sam Barlow, one grade ahead, who ran interference for him with the bigger kids. It was one month before his thirteenth birthday that he became a man.
. . .
Eighth grade. Voice changing. Beard coming. Chest and penis getting larger. On November 22nd, 1963, at 12:30 P.M., the president’s Lincoln Continental turned sharp left into Dealy Plaza as Arnold and his classmates clutched their rolled-up paper bags, now filled with cores and pits and aluminum foil. As cynical as preadolescents can be, it was still adrenaline-making to feel the Secret Service coming straight at you. The boys stood up; the girls hopped and waved, and Jackie and her husband, pink and blue, waved back. Then, a firecracker? Another bang, something, just behind them, to their right. The car was being shot at—look at the president, lifting his arms. They were in the line of fire—a third shot—and the fiendish bar mitzvah gift: a view from thirty feet of JFK’s brain exploding onto Elm Street in a decorative shower of blood. “Get down! Get down!” But some people had to escape the motorcycle coming right at them, heading up the hill toward the picket fence. Unable to get safely through the embankment crowd, the officer dropped his Harley right at Arnold’s feet and scrambled the rest of the way, pistol drawn. A second trooper dropped his bike onto the sidewalk below and ran to catch up with his partner at the fence, while the presidential car sped ahead through the underpass with the president now invisible except for his right foot and Jackie on the trunk, with a Secret Serviceman sprawled on top of her in some confounding fusion of sex, loyalty, love, and death. For the rest of his life, Arnold would remember where he was when Kennedy was shot.
He and three of his friends sprinted up the hill toward the fence. The puffs of smoke were just beginning to dissipate into the tree branches. “Get back!” the first policeman roared, stopping the boys in their tracks. The two cops jumped the fence abutments on either side. After several seconds, Arnold signaled his crew of three over and around the wall to the packed parking lot. Footprints in the mud at the fence. Mudprints on adjacent car bumpers. It looked like two or three different snipers. Then the lot filled up with police. The four boys were taken into custody and locked in a squad car at the edge of the parking area. An hour later, two cops appeared with Mr. Thomasen, who identified the boys as being students from his group and assured the officers that they had been spectators only and had bravely jumped the fence to try to identify the assassins. The police took statements from the boys about hearing the shots, running toward the smoke, and finding the mudprints. They were never called to testify before the Warren Commission, which concluded that all fire had come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, high up and far to the left.
The class trip from hell—at least from Mr. Thomasen’s point of view. But oddly enough, for many of the students, an experience that helped shape and deepen their lives—a pedagogy of great price. On the short ride home, Arnold was anointed to speak at the school assembly to be held on Monday. During the short bus ride home, sixteen eighth grade students heard that the president was dead.
Arnold and his parents spent the weekend glued to the TV, sucking in every minute of this hingepoint of history. They saw the new president—a Texan—being sworn in on Air Force One. They saw the great bronze casket being offloaded at Bethesda. They saw interviews with the Dallas police chief, who declared himself convinced that Oswald was the lone assassin. They saw Jack Ruby step from the crowd in the police station and murder Lee Harvey Oswald before he could go to trial. They saw the flag-draped
