Over and over. He loved the commercial, the little kid in Dr. Dentons who takes command of the huge sofa, throws off its pillows, pulls on the bar and transforms the object as if opening some huge, mechanical flower: “So easy even a child can do it.” The triumph of the small over the large, and the end result, a comfy bed to snuggle in—what could be a greater prize? Arnold wanted a Castro Convertible Sofa, and so the name “Castro” became associated with one of his heart’s chief fantasies. He would have been an admirer of Fidel had he been the only child of Fulgencio Batista. Besides—“Fidel.” A Texas child interested in words, Arnold knew enough Spanish to know fidel had something to do with being faithful. Imagine having a leader whose name was “Faithful” and not “Ike.” He was for that.
But Arnold’s experience at his first demonstration was less than transformative. He got to sing the Castro song to himself a lot, and vaguely heard the occasional dialogues at the other end of the picket line—things about fair-mindedness, about compensation and payments and government bonds and sugar. But mostly, the demonstration was about getting tired of standing around with nothing to do.
Politics global versus politics local: the next day was another thing entirely. As Arnold approached the same corner of Broad and Main at 5:30 in the morning, his newspaper bag heavy on his bike, he saw something hanging high on the stoplight wire in the middle of the intersection. By the dawn’s early light, he had to ride close to distinguish the effigy—a half-black, half-white man, hanging by the neck, with a long paper sign attached to its bottom as if on shit-stuck toilet paper: “GRIFFIN: GOD-DAMN NIGGER-LOVIN, JEW-LOVIN, COMMUNIST SON-OF-A-BITCH.” Arnold remembered the school demonstration well enough to know this meant trouble, and he made a beeline for the first store with lights on—the grocery in the First National Bank building. Mr. Gibson was stacking shelves when Arnold banged at the door.
After a quick inspection, Gibson called the constable at home—got him out of bed—and told him to “get that damned thing down from there.” In the half hour it took Constable Diggs to get on the case and get the volunteer fire truck over there to remove the figure, it had been seen by enough early commuters for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to have gotten wind of the event. By the time their reporter and photographer arrived, the constable had taken it down and thrown the figure into the town dump, but some wag had retrieved it and hung it on the sign reading $25.00 FINE FOR DUMPING DEAD ANIMALS. The Star-Telegram played up the angle of one of its own newsboys discovering the effigy, and Arnold was photographed standing next to the dead beast as if it were some prize marlin and he the triumphant fisherman. He was sent to school late, with a note from Constable Diggs.
In the darkness of early next morning, John Howard Griffin awoke to find eight “For Sale” signs newly planted on his lawn, illuminated by the flickering light of a burning cross. Another was burning at the Negro School half a mile from his house. At 6 A.M., Arnold delivered a paper to 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?