Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood

By Cecile Pineda

Told in the voice of a five-year-old girl who sees more than she understands, this novel chronicles her passage through sickness, the separation of her parents, and a maze of secret lives, all with the richness of her budding imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781609401832

Cecile Pineda

CECILE PINEDA was the founder, director, and producer of the Theatre of Man, 1969-1981. She is the author works of fiction and nonfiction, including Face, Frieze, The Love Queen of Amazon, and Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World, among others. Her novels have won numerous awards, including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, a Neustadt Prize for International Fiction nomination, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. She is professor emerita of creative writing at San Diego State University.

Book preview

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Reviews for Fishlight

[iliadawry-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A remarkably interesting, if somewhat dated, read. Griffin's experience and his capacity to communicate it are amazing.

[lilibrarian · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of a white author who died his skin black and went to live in the south as a black man in 1958, before the civil rights movement took off. Includes an afterward written in 1976.

[unclebob53703 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One-of-a-kind story of a white man living as a black man in the deep south in 1959-1060. This definitive edition published in 2006, with index.

[magadri-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The premise of this book was very interesting. I enjoyed the book for the most part. However, I felt that a few times that Griffin kept pretending that he knew what everyone around him was thinking and feeling, so it grew it a little old. I think that if Griffin had stuck more to the facts and less to what he thought other people were thinking, this book would have been better.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Massively outdated now, but at the time considered to give true insight. One man risks his health by darkening his skin so he can try to find out what it's really like to live in a Black man's shoes.

[jsnickola · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

a must a book my dad loved and a book that I later read and loved as well .

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An amazing book! The author darkens his skin to find out what it is like to be a black man in the South in 1959. Simply amazing! I love where he wrote, "Didn't Shakespeare say something about 'every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up'? He knew his religious bigots." This seems to be Griffin's version of "The devil can cite scripture for his purpose."
-( The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Quote Act I, sce. III), but still, it is powerful either way! Also powerful, was the revelation of what it meant when some young black men would yell, "Take ten!" Wow. This book, and this author just blow me away!

[jodes101 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in grade 10 and even almost 30 years later it has still stuck with me. At the time I thought the racism in the south of America was totally appalling only years later did I realise it wasn't much better in Australia.

[auntieknickers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I hope we as a society have made some progress since 1963. when I read this book, or 1961, when it was first published. I suspect we still have a ways to go.I don't think this was a school assignment, but I'm pretty sure it was recommended by a teacher. I wonder if any diversity classes would assign it now -- perhaps it would be too easy for white kids to dismiss it as long-ago history. Still, I think it has relevance today.John Howard Griffin decided to find out for himself whether the stories of discrimination were true and how it felt to be black in America. He darkened his skin (with drugs under a doctor's supervision) and set off to find out. The experiences he relates in BLACK LIKE ME brought home to thousands of readers the realities of racism.Someone doing Griffin's experiment today would not have to worry about forgetting to use the "colored" drinking fountain or where to sit on the bus. But I suspect he would still find that, simply by changing his skin color, much of his daily life would be very different. I would still recommend this book, especially for teens who have grown up in primarily white communities.

[iudita_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not a great choice for me. Although I don't doubt the authenticity of his experiences, I found some of the conversations he had with people to be improbable and the writing felt almost childish. It just felt staged to me but I do give him credit for bringing attention to the troubling issues this book was built around. In all fairness, the book is 55 years old and it is not the type of book that ages well.I'm sure that in its day it attracted a lot of praise.

[jbgusa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stirring and thoughtful book about a white person who makes himself black, to learn the humiliations they experienced back in the 1960's. Hopefully that era is long past.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

John Griffin underwent a series of treatments to change his skin colour and then travelled in the American South. He did it deliberately to inform northern Liberals what blackness really meant, in aa social context. It is a book which had quite an effect, and became an artifact of the era.

[piquant00 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Should be required reading in American public schools.

[g8whilliquor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book, a profound look at racial issues Griffin experienced while assimilating himself as a black man in the South, 1952.

[emscape · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As most everybody should already know, a man named John Griffin disguised himself as a black person and traveled around the Deep South late in 1959. He was able to intimately understand the divide people are faced with on both sides. He completely immersed himself in his role, thinking, feeling and experiencing everything as a black man. His writing is very insightful and so sad. Having been born in 1981 and having lived in Minnesota my whole life, I have never really understood what this situation in our country was like. Though we have made great strides towards equality and justice, there are still folks down where my dad lives in South Carolina that have similar attitudes to the whites encountered by Griffin in his book. Each generation gets a little better, and I agree with Griffin's point that it is only through education, knowledge, empathy and love that this shameful attitude can be completely demolished. This is an important book, even still today, for everyone to read. It reminds us that those times were not long ago and that there is still work to be done in this arena.

[marient7 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book. I would like to know more about the drug he took to turn black. The book is a little dated but has merit.

[patrickgarson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

John Griffin dyes and medicates himself black before plunging into the Jim Crow South of 1960. His experiences as a black man - and a white - inform this book, which remains remarkable, though not astonishing, some fifty years later.Of course, the idea of a white person trying to appropriate black experience in this way would set teeth on edge in 2011 - and rightly so. But postmodernism and its effect on political discourse and sociology was still inchoate. Griffin is motivated from a sympathy for the plight of "the Negro" and also curiousity as to the difference between black and white in the south.The gulf proves far wider than he could imagine, in all its dehumanising, destructive power. It's quite interesting: the genre of 'undercover journalist' is extremely common these days, but beyond a few writers like George Orwell and Jack London, Griffin had no real template to follow and his prose eschews the factual, reportage-based journalese we've come to expect from these books. Rather, it's a heady, ardent fever-dream.This gives the book an almost nightmarish quality - Griffin isn't simply slapping on a mask, he is transforming his identity, literally and figuratively, and it accompanies an horrific transformation in the South as he had previously experienced it. In this respect, the book reads like a kind of descent into the underworld; there is an almost mythic quality to Griffin's experiment and Black Like Me abounds with fearsome monsters and villains, and titanic heroes.But it's all - amazingly, horrifyingly - real. I don't want to imply there is nothing more to this book than an impressionistic grand guignol - Griffin does document the daily, myriad struggles he faces as a black man, and he often does it without hyperbole. He doesn't need to; it speaks for itself.There are some weaknesses, however. The trail-blazing nature of the book necessarily means some missteps, and Griffin is over-eager to ascribe motivations and thoughts to his "fellow" Negroes, the antagonistic whites, and the other people he comes across. Yet the experience still speaks for itself. Griffin's willingness to immolate his own identity and privilege in order to highlight a terrible injustice is admirable, and difficult to ignore. It's not often that a book is so much more than the sum of its parts. Even if you think find this slim volume disappointing, or too light on facts and heavy on emotion, it transcends these textual quibbles. Black Like Me is fascinating, educational, disturbing and actually quite uplifting in a way, as book. But as an historical document - both as a seminal step in a genre, a powerful record of institutionalised racism, and a resounding clarion call to whites not in or aware of the then-nascent civil rights movement, it is in a class of its own.

[tpoi_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am not really sure I can 'rate' this book at this point in my life. I would imagine it would be rather outdated though perhaps the writing itself has held up? I do know that I read it in high school and it greatly influenced my view of race (doesn't exist, though ethnicity does, as well as bigotry and prejudice), US history and justice. It was a great book to have thrown at a kid and I appreciate having been struck by it.

[cecrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a non-fiction work detailing the experiences of a middle-aged white man (like myself) who posed convincingly as a black man in the southern United States, prior to the civil rights movement. Prior to reading this, I'd seen an Oprah episode where a young white man named Josh Solomon who was inspired by this work had tried the same procedure of skin-altering drugs and disguise but didn't last a week. John Griffin, journalist and author, endured a full six weeks in the deep south in 1959. His advantage was the full knowledge that his society was blatantly and openly racist. It wasn't his task to determine if racism existed. He was on a mission to experience it, the ultimate walk in another's shoes, and to learn how it can be endured.The author writes with penetrating insight, doing his best (and admirably so) to frame explanations in addition to relating events. Many of his explanations for the behaviours he witnesses feel spot-on, brilliant, and well backed-up by the examples. There were many quotable discoveries like this for me throughout. I found an enormous amount of clarity shed on the double-edged sword of racism, and on the insults that can be generated by statements a white man might mistakenly view as innocuous. The epilogue paints the story of the 1960s (before my time) more clearly than anything I've read before, leading into the "separation" approach that finally achieved real progress.I was taken by how consuming Mr. Griffin's new identity was for him, how within just a matter of days it controlled his psyche to the point where he had difficulty framing any thought as a white man would. Picked up by a white friend for a brief escape from his experiment, he writes "I was embarrassed to ride in the front seat of the car with a white man, especially on our way to his home." This was at night with no witnesses, and still he felt this as a result of his new persona and all the oppression that swiftly came with it.The saddest episodes occurred whenever white people were confronted by their own contradictions and became belligerent or affronted rather than learn anything. Either they sensed the danger in questioning anything that would place them against the white mainstream, or couldn't face recasting their entire lifetime's behaviour in a very bad light.The events of this book took place just as Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement started rolling. It's a capturing of the world which that movement was trying to change. But however much things have changed since, in many sad respects they remain the same. What most of us see today on the surface is not as obvious as what Mr. Griffin experienced, but (as the young man on Oprah discovered) much still lies beneath. This is a must-read book for confronting and examining these truths.

[aketzle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chilling stuff...such a powerful book! Don't know what else to say, except READ IT!

[wisemetis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Before the Civil Rights movement took off, Griffin darkened his skin pigmentation and traveled in the deep South as a Negro. This is a fascinating story that looks at race relations in the 1960s from both sides that I heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in Civil Rights, that era of history, or sociology. I could not put it down.

[gisbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A riveting, deep and quick read. Amazing!

[04nny · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book for people who are interested in the old days when racism was very harsh. A very realistic book, and it is very descriptive. I strongly recommend this book to teenagers and people who are into history. Reading this book you can find almost every bit of information what was happening.

[edith1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

White male writer in the 50s undergoes treatment to look black and travels to the US South to see what it is like to be black in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana. It's thoughtful and well-written, and does teach new things. (At least to me.) Recommended.

[tiffanyak_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brave, chilling, and honest. When John Howard Griffin sets out to discover the truth about racism in the deep south in the late 50's, the results of his daring experiment would become a literary sensation around the world. As you read, you can't help but wonder what the results of such an experiment would be today. While there can be no doubt we've made great progress in the last 50 years, this book also serves as a reminder that we've still got a long way to go. A great read for today, and a great reminder of who we were as a people half a century ago. I strongly recommend it.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is almost fifty years old, but it is still a revelation -- at least to an elderly white liberal like myself. I can remember the South in the 1950's, and what Griffin did took enormous courage. That produced a view from the other side that no white person could have had, then or now. And it also makes vividly clear the deep evil of racism -- of not treating another person as a human being. What is encouraging is the progress that has been made since he wrote: what's discouraging is the gap that still exists. Griffin's style is straight reportage, plus editorial comments, in a diction that already sounds slightly old fashioned. Should be required reading in high schools across the country

[andyray_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Why does this book earn five stars? Because it was the kickoff book for what we of the 1960s called "the revolution" of the civil rights movement. Griffin writes concisely and laterally about what it feels to be a white man becoming black in the Deep South and the ways that whikte society keep the black people down "in their place", raanging from the companyh store to voter qualification test. Here is a good extract from the book. Armed with the voting rights act, a black man came into the county courthouse to cast his vote for his candidates. He had to take a test to determine his elgibility. Here it is: "Can you recite the fifth paragraph of the U.S. Constitution?" The prospective voter did so. Can youj tell me the presidents from 1840 through 1860, their terms of office, and what they were known for doing while in office? The black man did so. The "tester" then handed the man a newspaper printed in Chinese and asked him to read the lead paragraph of the top story. "I can naot make out the whole paragraph but I can read the headline," the black man said. Incredulous, the white sheriff's deputy said: "What? You can read the headline? What does it say?" "It says," said the black man, "This is one black man who isn't gonna vote in the state of Mississippi this year."

[crazybatcow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating glimpse into a nasty piece of American history. It's difficult to imagine the world that Griffin entered. It's completely unfathomable how people can treat people worse than animals just because of their skin color.I hope the world has come a long way in the 50 years since this "experiment" was undertaken because it was shameful to see what Griffin experienced as a black man.

[albinorhino_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The premise of this book was very interesting. I enjoyed the book for the most part. However, I felt that a few times that Griffin kept pretending that he knew what everyone around him was thinking and feeling, so it grew it a little old. I think that if Griffin had stuck more to the facts and less to what he thought other people were thinking, this book would have been better.

[rebeccaann_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fairly famous book so description wise, I don't think there's much to add. Griffin wanted to have first hand experience of black oppression so, with the aid of certain tanning drugs and skin dye, he darkens the pigment of his skin in order to pass in the African American society. This is the tale of his ordeal.I found this book fascinating. I knew just from lessons in school how bad racism was in the late 50s, so that part didn't surprise me. What was surprising is the contrast Griffin observes between how white people acted around other whites and how they acted around blacks. When he is being verbally attacked by someone, he constantly tries to imagine them in their "other" life. He imagines them tucking their children in, helping a neighbor, hanging out with friends. It really showed how even a person who is ordinarily very kind can have such a dark side to them.This book was also terrifying in the regards in that it shows how close America came to having our own era of mass genocide. Murders of blacks, as many know, were not heavily investigated (if they were looked into at all) and of course, there was the Ku Klux Klan. I did not, however, know that black men were being offered money to get themselves sterilized and stop "the taint". Though not as violent as say, the Nazi era (which Griffin compares this period of America to), it's still startling and frightening in it's own way. I also did not know about "Take Ten", a motto that became frequent among blacks when racism was at its worst. The black population, knowing the hatred of whites was growing to an all time high, began saying this motto to one another on the streets. America then had a population of ten whites to every one black. For every black man (or woman) killed, they reminded each other to kill ten whites to even the score. This truly chilled me to the bone.It really is sad the Griffin did not live past the eighties. I think he would have been extremely proud of us now. We may not have racism totally conquered, but with Barack Obama being our first black present, I would say we've come far.