Christy Wampole

“place; it’s a mind-set. A strange coincidence: for my project on roots, I was reading a staggering book from 1980 called Le Corps noir (The Black Body) by a Haitian writer named Jean-Claude Charles. He coined the term enracinerrance, a French neologism that fuses the idea of rootedness and wandering. He spent his life between Haiti, New York, and Paris, very comfortably rooted in his nomadism. The first line of one of his experimental chapters is this: “il était une fois john howard griffin mansfield texas” (“once upon a time there was john howard griffin in mansfield texas”). I was stunned to find the small town that shares a border with my hometown in the pages of this Haitian author’s book published in France. What in the world was Mansfield, Texas, doing in this book I’d found by chance while researching roots for a totally unrelated academic project? The white man named John Howard Griffin referred to by Charles had conducted an experiment back in the late 1950s in which he disguised himself as a black man in order to understand what it must feel like to be black in the South. He darkened his skin with an ultraviolet lamp and skin-darkening medication and then took to the road, confirming the daily abuses in the South toward people with more melanin in their skin. His experiences were compiled in the classic Black Like Me (1962), which was later made into a film. When the book came out, Griffin and his family in Mansfield received death threats. It is astounding that I found out about this experiment, which began one town over from mine, through a gleefully nomadic Haitian who slipped it into his pain-filled essay about the black body. If you don’t return to your roots, they come and find you.”
― Christy Wampole, The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation