Mirror

John Howard Griffin just isn't a symbols kinda guy. He's a journalist. He's after the cold, hard, truth. But there is at least one time that he lets his symbolism skills run wild.

The night that Griffin makes his entrance into the black community, he looks into a mirror and tells us what he sees:

I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. 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. Even the senses underwent a change so profound it filled me with distress. I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin's past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. (7.12)

Normally, a mirror is an affirmation of a person's identity. If you ever forgot you are, or what you looked like, you could just turn to the old looking glass. That's why people use the phrase "take a look in the mirror," to mean look at your own actions. Even MJ (that's Michael Jackson—RIP) needed to check himself out so much that he wrote a top-selling single about it. Fun fact: MJ's increasingly white skin was a result of vitiligo, the condition that Griffin's skin-darkening medication was designed to correct. Mind: blown.

But we digress: who does Griffin see when he looks in the mirror? He sees a stranger. A black man who does not share his history, his culture, his class, or his family. It's almost like he doesn't even see a human in the mirror, let alone himself.

When he started this experiment, Griffin thought that it would be a mere question of darkening his skin. Nothing else would change. But it's at this moment that we see he's in for a much bumpier ride than he thought. Not only has he darkened his skin, but he's also completely changed his identity. At this moment it seems like Griffin feels that he has totally lost his identity.

We see Griffin look in the mirror a couple of times after this, but there's no big revelation. Even when he turns back into a white person, it's not the mirror that helps him realize that he can pass. It's the reactions of other people. So does Griffin ever regain his identity? Was his identity ever really lost? Does he get a new one?

What do you think?