Back in my younger days, one of my favorite books was a 1961 non-fiction account called “Black Like Me,” by John Howard Griffin. Mr. Griffin was a white journalist who darkened his skin enough to pass for Black and then took a tour of the Deep South to see how he would be treated. Of course, he was treated horribly – it was the height of Jim Crow, soon to be challenged by the Civil Rights revolution.
What made the book so intriguing, at least to a 15-year-old white kid, was that he could actually pull this off and then simply change the color of his complexion and no longer experience the lifelong hardship and mistreatment of being Black in the South. The experiment lasted six weeks and was clever and illuminating.
When I first became paralyzed with transverse myelitis, there was some early hope that I could recover once the inflammation subsided. At the time, I thought, “Hey, I could become the John Howard Griffin of paralysis” – able to tell the world the many misperceptions and indignities and then return to what others would call “normal.” That didn’t happen – I never recovered – and I was left to write about life with paralysis and never again, after paralysis.
Having just endured six and a half weeks confined to a rehab center – about the same time Mr. Griffin spent being Black – I came to realize, once I was back home and recovering, that I had experienced a short course in a situation that millions of older Americans will never escape or are just about to enter as a life sentence: the dreaded nursing home. They called it a rehab facility but there were no energetic, athletic types rehabbing and in fact, no one under the age of 60, maybe 70. I’m sure some people left at some point, but none of the people I met.