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    Lott, White Like Me

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    Lott, White Like Me

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    a Eric Lott White Like Me Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction WAL May 2 ED BY HT LAW DE) of American Whiteness copynict (TITLE 17, US. CO ‘which would furnish the material for his Black Like Me (1961), John Howard Griffin strikes up a relationship with a black shoe shine “boy.” Griffin, white investigative journalist turned black by medi cal treatments, sunlamp sessions, and black stain, asks for lessons in the ways of Negro life. The shine man, Sterling Williams, “promised perfect discretion and enthusiasically began coaching me." “You just watch me and listen how I ak” says Williams, “Youll catch ‘on’” (27). Apparently he does catch on, for Williams soon certi- fies Griffin’ racial transmutation. “Within a short time {Williams} lapsed into familiarity” Griffin writes, “Torgetting I was once white. He began to use the ‘we' form and to diseuss ‘our situation’ The illusion of my ‘Negro-ness’ took over so completely that I fell into the same pattern of talking and thinking. It was my first intimate stlimpse. We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him” (28). Griffin's narrative is only one relatively recent example of a blackface tradition that is fundamentally concerned with a forbid- den Tapse into familiarity” between black and white men, Nodisem: bodied affair the venteloquizingor indeed purloining of black and cthercultures hasin many instanees taken the form of a homosocial dance of white men and black. Whether blackface performers’ fase nation with slave singers and dancers, Carl Van Vechten’s mirnick ing and brokering of Harlem Renaissance writers, or white-Negr© Al {the start of a journey into the “night side of American life,” White Like Me Norman Mailer’s pursuit of Muhammad Ali and others, white men’s inter- ‘course with black men has been fraught with masculinist rivalry as well ‘as “compromising” desire. These instances have injected potent fantasies of the black male body into the white Imaginary-and thence into the culture industry. In thus giving shape to the white racial unconscious, such homosocial scenarios actually found the color line even as they wit- ness the latter's continual transgression. Griffin's "We were Negroes” is ‘the perfect summation of this dynamite: renegades together on the “night side,” Griffin and Williams enact a racial encounter that is both age-old ‘and implicitly affirming of the Berlin Wall they have momentarily agreed toscale. For me, this instance raises the question of why and under what cir- ‘cumstances a blackface tradition emerged and continues intermittently to reemerge, if only briefly and in more or less ironized form. My as- sumption is that blackface is a charged signifier with no coincidental relationship to the racial polities of culture in wi ‘embedded? Why, ‘we might ask, this literal inhabiting of black bodies as a way of inter- racial male-bonding? There are, afterall, alternatives to such a practice; as Griffin's civil-rights-era contemporary Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), our white male writers have been stubbornly preoccupied with white male/dark male dyads (Ishmael and ‘Queequeg, Huck and Jim) which apparently fulfill a white need to be “Negroes” together. The historical fact of white men literally assuming a “black” self, the eternal and predictable return of the racial signifier of blackface, is another matter entirely; and I would argue that it began and continues to occur when the lines of “race” appear both intractable and obstructive, when there emerges a collective desire (conscious or not) to bridge a gulf that is, however, perceived to separate the races absolutely. Griffin's Black Like Me and blackface minstrelsy both exemplify this struc- ture of feeling, the former in its earnest antisegregationist politics, the latter in its derisiv® but transparently obsessive attempts to try on the ac- cents of "blackness." Blackface acknowledges a racial relationship which towhites seems neither satisfactory nor surmountable; this acknowledg- ‘ment owes in turn to perceptions of “race” and its signifiers that we would ‘now term “essentialist.” To “black up” is to express a belief in the complete suturing together of the markers of “blackness” and the black culture, apparently sundered from the dominant one, to which they refer. John Sowed observes of the withering-away of blackface: “The fact that, say, a ‘Mick Jagger can today perform in the [blackface] tradition without black- face simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost as Eric Lote a6 fll absorption of black tadiion into whit altar" Blckfce, hen relies and at the same ime espace on the boundaries race hae this dubleness as highly indicative ofthe shap of American whiten Indeed inthe largest rms this rail ope obgenun to canton he process a racial” construction sel the historical fomation of whites fo Tess tha of blake Our opel focus on the way “laces inten polar imagination has been produced out of white clturalexproyri Tron and travesty misses how necessary tis proces into the making ot tite American marhhod. The ater simply could hot exis thong Facial other against whieh it defines lf and which toa very areal oe tent takes up in isl as oe fis oun conatiuent clement By wey of several rather underhstriized instances in the history of blackface tniming and of maginary racial ansformation, tanto lok a some dence upon and necessary internalization of the ealtural practices ofthe diapossene My tte implies that Gifs Black ike Mee pectcy mie homed, that what Griffin uncovers in is trp through the black South are the contours of straight Caucasian malenes, Bu engage tht an caer post-World War texts of racial cuss dressing we must ackron tcge the American racial histories and cltralprodts that ipcly Structure thm, By this ofcourse | mean nineteonhcenturyblacklace Performance and ether siulr text; bt mean ls pertain fod s motral and eultral wansactions and sls, Encounters ih the other bothat home and abroad easly become intertwined as Grin putsitcarlyon ‘he Sout'sacial situation was blot on the whol cout try. an especialy efketed aint us overseas (8) tn examining the Tava consis of Arca imperil whiten Tasume absent the ‘acc adequately to demonstrate i) that he connector Deen ner ana internationals intimate If national esteem inci mates is ited to nernatinal prestige—the ability to wield power among forelgn races itis ao (or therefore) the case that representations of national raviallifrence ote provide displaced maps fr intereatanal ones Not to put too fine a pont on ithe domination of international thes has Ucponed om mastering the othr at home an novel in eral colonization whose achievement is agile al best and whic often seeded or thveatened by the gender and rata arangenens om which depends ‘White Like Me “Brothers For the Being” ‘The minstrel show's great popularity with northern white urban aud snces in the middle decades of the nineteenth century has been read as a fairly pat instance of financial and cultural manipulation. With its comic darkies, "plantation melodies,” challenge dances, malapropistic wizardry, nd general racial revanchism, minstrelsy long cried out for the revision- jst eritique to which it was only truly subjected in the 1960s and after’ In one of the most theroughgoing and persuasive such critiques, Alexan: dt Saxton surveys the social origins of certain major minstrel figures, among them T. D. Rice, Dan Emmett, E. P. Christy, and Stephen Foster. Many of the major innovators were northerners of urban origin (none from New England) who were raised in families with intimations of up- ‘ward mobility. All of them rejected the Protestant et the latitudes of the entertainment world, In the course of such escape they came into contact with/and stole—the music and dance of slaves and, free blacks and first tasted theatrical success in blackface performances. While these “professionals” were sometimes class mutincers, passing up ‘opportunities ata clerkship or better to immerse themselves in the under. ground world of blackface theater, they nevertheless shared with their families certain political ties to the elite of the Democratic party, the party of Andrew Jackson, antimonopoly, expansionism—and white su- premacy. Henry Wood of Christy and Wood's Minstrels was the brother of Fernando Wood, Southern-sympathizing mayor of New York; another brother served three terms as a Democratic Congressman from Buffalo and one term as a state senator. Stephen Foster belonged to a family of ardent Democrats related by marriage to President Buchanan's brother, and Foster himself helped organize a local Buchanan-for-President Club® Yet it seems to me that one unfortunate effect of this necessary cri- tique has been to reify and even reinforce the cultural domination taking place in the minstrel show. And evidence from performers themselves Points to a more complex dynamic, in which such dominative tendencies coexisted with or indeed depended upon a self-conscious attraction to the black men it was the job of these performers to mimic. Billy Whitlock, banjo player of Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, said that when on tour in the South he would, as the New York Clipper put it, “quietly steal off to some negro hut to hear the darkeys sing and sce them dance, taking. With him a jug of whiskey to make them all the merrier” (April 13, 1878) More reveatingly, performer Ben Cotton claimed that he would sit with and study blacks on Mississippi riverboats: “T used to sit with them in jic and escaped into a Erie Lote an front of their cabins, and we would start the banjo twanging, and their voices would ring out in the quiet night airin their weird melodies, They did not quite understand me. I was the first white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were per. fectly happy.” Self-scrving as thisis, it nonetheless indicates that a major strain of American bohemia has its origins in blackface performers and enthusiasts. So much the worse for bohemia, perhaps; but in addition to the minor disasters bohemia has perpetrated from Walt Whitman to Carl Van Vechten to Jack Kerouac, there is in its activities an implicit tribute to, orat the very least a self-marginalizing mimicry of, black c lure’s male representatives. This hardly addresses the social results of such activities, which may be more or less harmful than the exoticism that generated them, But with antebellum blackface performers a set of racial attitudes and cultural styles that in America go by the name of bohe- mianism first emerged, and in this clumsy courtship of black men the contours of masculine whiteness as we know it began to take a definitive and recognizable form* ‘Most minstrel performers were minor, apolitical theatrical men of the northern artisanate who pursued a newly available bourgeois dream of freedom and play by paradoxically coding themselves as “black.” In- deed if, for men, sexuality is where Freedom and play meet, “blackness” ‘was for antebellum bohemians its virtual condition—2 fascinating imagi- nary space of fun and license seemingly outside but in fact structured by Victorian bourgeois norms. This space seems to have arisen largely from encounters with black men—slave or dancer or vendor—to whom black- face minstrels had much access. For instance, according to legend—the closest we are going to get in the matter—T. D. Rice used an old black stableman’s song and dance in his first “Jim Crow” act. Dan Emmett had left his Mt. Vernon, Ohio, home by the age of eighteen (in 1834) and joined the military, where he learned to play the infantry drum from a man nick- named “Juba"—a black name, if nota black man, perhaps earned for the style of drum he played. Appearing as a banjo player in various circuses, Emmett was very soon teamed up with dancer Frank Brower, who had Icarned his dances directly from black men’ Stephen Faster no doubt had contact with black wharf workers and boatmen in his hometown of Pitts burgh, but according to his brother he experienced black church singing firsthand through a family servant, Olivia Pise, “member of a church of shouting colored people." Ralph Keeler ran away from his Buffalo home at the age of eleven and wrote that asa dancer with Johnny Booker’s min strels in the 1850s he "wandered all over the Western country.” keeping White Like Me continual company with that troupe's Negro baggage handler, Ephraim." EP. Christy reportedly crew material in the late 1830s from One-legged Harrison, a black church singer in Buffalo; Christy said the two had often traded “down home talk." Within the institution of minstrelsy itself, he enowned black dancer Juba (William Henry Lane) provided a link be {tween the cultures, figuring centrally in many challenge-dance contests, between black and white dancers.” The tableau reiterated in many of these scenies—a white man and a black man becoming, as Ben Cotton put it,"brothers for the time being’ —shows up often enough to be a defining, interest of these white Negroes, and we might pause over its role in the construction of American whiteness. For what appears in fact to have been negotiated in blackface per formance were certain kinds of masculinity. To put on the cultural forms of “blackness” was to engage in a complex affair of manly mimicry. Ex- amples of this dynamic since the heyday of minstrelsy are ready enough ‘at hand, but in the early nineteenth century it had yet to be given an available public form, To wear o even enjoy blackface was literally, for atime, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, tr gaite de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood. T. D. Rice, said his friend F.C. Wemyss, in the event of ‘abad draw fell into a kind of black homespun when dealing with theater managers, as though indeed into a black-white dyad that reproduced his ‘own felicitous exchanges with black men: “‘Lookye here, my master, this has been a bad job—I don't think you ought to suffer to this tune; live ‘and let live isa good motto—hand over —, and I will give you a receipt in full, and wish you better luck another time." How interesting that Rice should assume this humbled sense of masculinity precisely at the guilty moment of payment for expropriated goods, in the process authen- ticating his claim on the material; how fitting, too, that this disturbing ‘moment of conventional masculinity in the public sphere—the hard bar- gain, the deal—could with a ventriloquial shift be evaded or at least better managed. I is worth remarking the way minstrelsy traded on racialized images of masculinity if only because they have become so familiar, indeed ritu alized. In North Toward Home (1967), white Mississippian Willie Morris remembers “a stage, when we were about thirteen, in which we ‘went Negro.’ We tried to broaden our accents to sound like Negroes, as if there were not enough similarity already. We consciously walked like young Negroes, mocking their swinging gait, moving our arms the way they did, cracking our knuckles and whistling between our teeth." I would mai a Eric Lote tan that tis nam periting inte adulthood is 0 much a part of ronnie me came fr ng hey Train tiny anawre ofthe prcton In i The pei ache aera etd formalde scram th har ack anhooD, whch Lee Fadler the wa "Bor hora whee ae pert pou cl tod a ioginary Tans, our descents maga) Negros oe only hen ae expected to sce down o bing what we ella: a once mores These comma wh scat of ack maton th thconetf pubescent seal indas ht he sssuiono dominam Codes of macnn the Unie Sts ary negated haus og imaginary Hack tractor this sages ary pop Acpended in part onthe momentary earn of ts partuans toate svn adoesence-largliheconon to whch dominant sexo masculinity aspreone sl la cone ha weal anti o black men unerivtheset poston we nen gro upto oc Ane ge smo le he ee a and pon dstrbanec: Thee fe evden fr cep th performers and audiences slr found in lackace seething cle a Shomonvai charge Eve Sedgwick hes aged tha mnths behwrma was a space mt of infinite cones appt, Do sn biguons saul dentin through which sou bouteeols men pase tn thir way tothe “ropes elf ignorant and aperey cone Ghd stats of the mature ures pera" Semething oth ‘iuation appli nthe ease of navel men, evan of whose fra impersonations appear in the cote of roigharl-tambl acksonian trantness to ane grown out a's sms of seal ply Al Olive Lagan wot tha "some ofthe men who under ts [wene) busier a marly we ted BY ar cipro sie, pump shulers, beards face ty hus ond {GMa dens mot gat as women While shitting ore to posh War female mpersonation which a au American show rosin tran robb ewarin minster eon {obclow that the wie erown ofan swenehe George hrs. Barns Wiliam) owed ay fsa aptaae or oreapoion sich oles: And whe inaccurate snply to ead of hoon ftom etomincy a nded rest, tame se dee doc sem 0 sve been rgstered by hese performers "Heaps ol tin my lai dont bee eritea man inspite of mysving it wan said a Rochester cre of Francis Leon the mist famous pester female personal ‘White Like Me Leon was authentic enough asa female, this writer remarked, “to make a fool of aman ifhe wasn't sure”" Other performers evinced homosexual attractions more obliquely. “A instr show came to town and I thought of nothing else for weeks,” said Ben Cotton—this from the man who recalled the brotherhood of black dnd white singers2? Gcorge Thatcher, wellknown later in the century, hid of his first encounter with blackface performance in Baltimore: “I found myself dreaming of minstrels; I would awake with an imaginary tambourine in my hand, and rub my face with my hands to see if I was blacked up. .. The dream of my life was to see or speak toa performer:"* ‘We might speculate little as to the referent of the imaginary tambourine; the fantasy of racial conversion enacted in blackface seems to gesture ‘at least toward sexual envy of black men (tambourine as penis), if not desire for them (tambourine as hymen). The fantasy may indeed direct us to. process in which homosexual desire is deflected by identifying with potent male heterosexuality. Perhaps the fantasy indicates only the use: falness of blackface in mediating white men’s desire for other white men. In any case it did nothing to redirect myths of black masculinity, to say nothing of white men’s attitudes toward women; and it only confirmed black men’s status as bearers of black culture, objects of exchange. But it docs bring to the surface a more submerged motive for racial intercourse, ‘and it was (and is) probably one moment of most white men's enjoyment of black caricature. ‘These examples suggest that blackface performance reproduced or instantiated a structured relationship between the races, racial difference itself, as much as black cultural forms, They suggest moreover that this difference was as internal as it was external. To assume the mantle of whiteness, these examples seem to say, is not only to “befriend” a racial ther but to introject or internalize its imagined special capacities and attributes. The other is of course “already in us,” a part of one's (white) self, filled out according to the ideological shapes one has met in one’s entry into the culture. The black male and fantasies about him supply the content of the white male Imaginary. they make up its repertoire. This (racial) splitting of the subject actually makes possible one whole ‘area of white desire—but it also insures that the color line thus erected is. constantly open to,transgression or disruption.” Several theorists have termed this predicament “abjection.” Julia Kristeva writes of the abject that “‘unconscious’ contents remain . . ex ‘cluded but in strange fashion,” clearly enough “for a defensive position 10 be established” yet “not radically enough to allow for a secure differen- ric Lote an engagement with the other, the blacKIace performer on white a 28" mnfines . . . constantly question his solidity and impel ie (8) Theabjecionsoredoen of preacdigalantcn ee arae white” and male seems to depend upon remandin, eens th tha pti for ere Whe ner nn tively “excessive” in this respect, whether through exotic foor Istrenge i ication the. cae eae pleasure. Hatred of the other arises from the . sary hatred of one's own excess; ascribing this excess to the “¢ a other and nding by imagining. nerpoatiog pe the other—one conveniently and surreptitiously takes and. eave ph ci Homi Bhabha terms the “ambivalence,” of American whiteness 2* a n th civilization, second in healing the injuries of that civilization by maintaining alternative life styles and cultures."** This double bind is the bedrock reality of racial cross-dressing, whatever its local habitation and name White Like Me vis As Metaphor a Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957), a text whose mythologies, ming as its analysis, is of course the post-World War I reinven- is structure of feeling. As none other than Norman Podhoretz red in 1958 ofthe white-Negro discourse of which Mailers essay obser centerpiece: "I doubt if'a more idyllic picture of Negro life has led since certain Southern ideologues tried to convince the hings were just fine as fine could be for the slaves on the "27 Not a postdating or mere continuation of antebellum ow aleraxs-dressin but its gencalogical legacy, this postwar discourse— ‘Repeat writers, Bhis Presleys early career, John Howard Griffin's Black Jie Me, and others—did (despite its racial “modernity") reproduce the peessions of certain nineteenth-century Northern ideologues. To the ex- vt that these obsessions weren't wholly continuous with the dominant vhture in the ensuing years of protest, they returned as farce in the late 1960s: Elvis's 1968 comeback tv special, Grace Halsell's Sou! Sister (1969) (a second-generation simulacrum, for it imitates Griffin's Black like Me), and, in a crowning blow (to which I will return), Melvin Van Pecbles's Watermelon Man (1970)—in which Godfrey Cambridge in white- face plays a suburban racist who wakes up one morning to find himself black (100 much time under the sunlamp). The almost “classical” resur- rence of this trope and of white Negroism generally in the late 1980s and carly 19905—the movie Soul Man (1986); black-folk-filled music videos by Sting, Madonna, Steve Winwood, and many others; Lee Atwater’s blues Republicanism (R.LP); Vanilla Ice; True Identity (1991); Michelle Shocked's Arkansas Traveler (1992)—is as troubling in its ubiquity as it is bewildering in its ideological variousness, but I think these texts 100 confirm some of the remarks with which I began.” Mailer’s piece codifies the renegade cthic of male sexuality con- cived out of and projected onto black men—and always “compromised” by white men’s evident attraction to them—that informs the more than metaphorical racial romance underlying the construction of American Normal seas tion of thi eon paint world that td plantatios fe was war, nothing but war, the Knowing in the cells of his existence that Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibi tions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art ofthe primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night icks, relinguishing the pleasures ofthe mind forthe more obligatory pleasures of "he body, and in his music he gave voice tothe character and quality of his 2 Eric Lote cramp, pinch, sc ere asemecmatar! um and despair of is orgasm. Mailer and other white Negrocs inherited a structure of feeling whose self-valorizing marginality and distinction require a virtual imperson: jon of black manhood. tis revealing that while the specific preoccupa tions of Mailer’s existential errand are far from either Griffin's Black Like Me or Elis Pres, the shape of his white mythology ks pretty much the same in all cases, Its resonanee is, for instance, succinctly articulated in white guitar. ist Scotty Moore's remark to Presley at one of the mid:1950s recording sessions in which Elvis first found his voice: "Dann, nigger!" As Nelson George has observed, Elvis was the historical referent Mailer missed in limning the "white Negro.” Bringing to the stage the sort of “symbolic fornication” that for whites denotes “blackness,” his hair pomaded in imi- {ation of blacks’ putative imitation of whites, Elvis illustrates the curious dependence of white working-class manhood on imitations of fantasized black male sexuality.® It is truc that in Elvis's case we must be clear about the precise nature of the indebtedness; nobody who thinks wit can dismiss Presley as me their ears ely a case of racial rip-off. l agree with Greil Marcus that Elvis's working-class origins already placed him as close to Bobby Bland as to Perry Como—that in creating what was after all a dis: tinctive rather than derivative sound he didn't so much steal the blues as live up to them." Yet fantasies of "blackness" were unquestionably crucial in shaping a persona capable of such a task, ‘One image in particular stands out for its greater sublimation of this racial narrative, Much has been made of Presley's 1968 Christmas spe- cial, when after several years of silly movies and lifeless singing he roared back in black leather on network television. Marcus rightly identifies the central drama of the show as Elvis's attempt to win back his audience, and he demonstrates the way in which Elvis pulled all the stops out to do so, We might, however, also pause over the curious form of the show, in which Broadway productions of Elvis numbers (Elvis had not yet entered his Vegas period) alternate with an “unplugged” circle of Elvis and fellow ‘musicians getting raw. In these latter scenes the black leather of his outfit defines the ambience; it refuses to slip from the viewcr’s mind: Presley himself remarks upon how hot it is. Both Elvis's look and the doubled structure of the show seem to me to call up the racial themes I have been developing. Particularly ina show dedicated to proving how foreordained and irrelevant is all the music since Elvis's early triumphs (stage patter ‘White Like Me int has Elvis damning with faint praise “the Beatles, the Beards, hhoever"), ils"blues” portions appear to mediate (against all odds arone 0 he ara eth ait intentions) what ha been going oni he st 2 cd ne 198 Tha sos, the sl show stare ims the meaning of the sit and the “blacker” performance: they saree gnsoncios" af the production numbers-white asthe whale— em, In the leather-suited takes, and in songs such as the that surround following year’ eetion upon “blackness.” And his ever-increasing stature as the icon of Mpite American culture, a fulfillment of the dubious potential augured by the comeback special’s production numbers, only clinches my sense of the necessary centrality and suppression of “blackness” in the making of ‘American whiteness. - ; ‘Black Like Me turns this structure into social criticism. While Griffin has“blacked up” to beat his forebears, his text is nota story of passing. In facthe has only spotty interest in what blacks think of him; his concern is swith whites and how they will cat him in his adopted state, Whiteness is his standard: “Do you suppose they'll treat me as John Howard Griffin, regardless of my color—or will they treat me as some nameless Negro, ven though Lam still the same man?” Griffin asks some friends, among ‘whom, incidentally, ae three Fat agents (10), Iti the position of “name- fess Negro,” not member of any community one might care to name, that interests Griffin. He passes less into.a black world than into a “black” part ‘of himself, the remissible pleasures of abjection, triggered or enabled by \white distaste and aversion, (Some of which is his own—he speaks of the idea of turning black as having “haunted” him “for years” before under- taking his effort (71) What he goes on to uncover are the contours of blackness for whites: contours he has externalized and thus indulges in his very disguise. This racial logic underlies Grifin’s whole enterprise. In revealing ways, Black Like Me is complicitous with the racial designs it sets out to ‘expose. Griffin scems only dimly aware, for instance, that his disguise is an externalization, and yet there is evidence that his imagination of “blackness” colors him before his blackface does. Early on, pondering the dangers of his experiment, Griffin is gratified to find his wife ready, white Ie fs gone, "to lead, with our thrce children, the unsatisfactory family life of a houschold deprived of hushand and father” (9). That this is an un conscious reference to the much-bruited female-headed black family that ‘would soon be mythologized in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965) is indicated by Griffin’s other as Eric Lote mentions of the sadly depaternalized black family—as in: “[The black man's) wife usually earns more than he. He is thwarted in his need to ‘be father of-the-houschold” (90; sce also 42). Even when Griffin is white, that is, he is "black” inside; itis this part of his “make-up” that he explores in Black Like Me, (One need not look far for the sources of this concer in Griffin’ text, Early in his days of blackness, Griffin, for reasons that appear as unclear tohimas they do to.us, walks down his hotel hallway inthe early hours of the morning (he can’t sleep) to the men’s room. There he encounters two black men, one in the shower and the other naked on the floor awaiting his turn. Griffin writes that the waiting man “leaned back against the wall ‘with his legs stretched out in front of him. Despite his sate of undress, he hhad an air of dignity” (19). This rather anxious (and certainly clichéd) as. surance to the reader has its counterpart in Griffin’s remark to the man: “You must be freezing on that bare floor, with no clothes on” (20). As if things weren't bare enough all around, the waiting man “flick{s] back the \wet canvas shower curtain” and implores the bather to let Griffin wash his hands in the shower: (A nearby sink has been discovered to have no drain pipe.) Griffin hastity interjects: “That's alright, Team wat “Go ahead,” he nodded, Sure—come on," the man in the shower said, He turned the water down, bbe. In the shower's obscurity all could see was black shadow and sslearing white teth. I stepped over the other's outstretched leps and washed ‘quickly, sing the soap the man in the shower thrust into my hands. When f hha finished, I thanked him. (20) said, Clearly the driving force here isthe simultancously fascinating and threat- ening proximity of black male bodies, beckoning, stretching, theusting. If the accident of the scene's having occurred is not revealing, Griffin's retrospective mapping of it surely is. Moments like this put Griffin in the position of racial voyeur, allow him to confront the “shadows” of the white Imaginary. Paradoxically, as with his tutorials with the shine man, Ster- ling Williams, their result is to help Griffin identify with black men; “I fell into the samme pattern of talking and thinking,” he says of Williams (28). Whether or not as.a defense against interracial homoerotic desire, Griffin any case mentally assumes and impersonates—one ight almost say hhe“masters"—the position and shape of black maleness, Poised in his dis- guise between white subject and black abject, Griffin enters "blackness" according to the dictates of white desire, This indeed emerges from the Wy pages that are taken up with White Like Me coneratonsaitehiking Grifinhas with white men eho pare! him con uetons about hissexlfe “Ther plenty white women would ike wid god buck Negro’ says one (8) another man, with an “ed tae a (86), opines that backsJon't get wo darned many cont”

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