I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence.
John describes how he felt when he first saw himself as a black man. He was shocked to realize that he no longer recognizes the man in the mirror. For him, his black version looking back at him was a complete stranger. John felt imprisoned in the skin of a person he is not and he felt no connection between the man in the mirror and who he really was. This shows just how much a person builds his or her identity on the skin color they have and how much they relate to the outside world based on the color of their skin.
Under the dim light in the tiny room without windows, I realized I was having my first prolonged contact as a Negro with other Negroes. Its drama lay in its lack of drama, in its quietness, in the courtesies we felt impelled to extend to one another. I wondered if the world outside were so bad for us that we had to counter it among ourselves by salving one another with kindness.
The first interaction John has with another black person leaves a great impression on him. John always saw the blacks as being cold, emotionless and unwilling to interact with the whites around them. In reality, the blacks were warm and welcomed him with open arms when he needed help. But their kindness applied only to black people in the similar way that whites showed kindness only towards white people. This was, in John’s opinion, one of the reasons why blacks and whites were unable to accept one another. The problem was that each group had a certain image in their head about the people in the other group and they refused to accept that their opinion may be wrong.
Customers came—whites, Negroes, and Latin Americans. Well- dressed tourists mingled with the derelicts of the quarter. When we shined their shoes we talked. The whites, especially the tourists, had no reticence before us, and no shame since we were Negroes. Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling. "Yeah, when they want to sin, they're very democratic," he said.
The whites did everything they could to separate themselves from the black community but they still searched for black women to sleep with. The quote from above shows that such practice was ordinary among white man and the reason why they searched for black prostitutes to sleep with was that they were cheaper than their white counterparts. When it came to satisfying their own needs, the whites suddenly didn’t care if the woman was white or black and they even out of their way to be nice to the black men who may have known where they could find black women to sleep with. The situation is ironical for John because he is able to experience firsthand the hypocrisy manifested by the racist whites.
