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From Texas to Mexico After returning from a six week journey through the Deep South disguised as a 'Negro' in 1959, an experience which would become the classic, Black Like Me in 1961, John Howard Griffin prepared to move his young family and elderly parents to Morelia, Mexico to avoid the racist threats they were receiving from residents in their hometown of Mansfield, Texas. 'We prepare to leave for Mexico,' Griffin wrote in his Journal, on August 4, 1960, 'after 13 years here in this barn studio, and I try to sort my books- books gathered over the past 20 years of my life. Strange to go back over them, to dig them out and decide what to give, what to sell, what to keep.' Griffin examined, with nostalgic selectivity, certain books that had been packed away since 1949, when he had returned from France, then totally blind. He regained his sight in January of 1957. This entry, written on the threshold of the long-delayed departure for Mexico to reunite with his family, who had flown ahead a few weeks before, floats to other worlds and times. The sun scorches the countryside and overpowers the best efforts of an old, old fan that once cooled my Grandfather's store in South Dallas. Things forgotten, things not seen in years or, again, many that I got while I was blind and never saw until I went through storage boxes today. They range from magnificent volumes, like the Palographie Musicale from Solesmes, to our little two franc school volumes of Molire and Hugo. All represent periods of momentary enthusiasm that flared and then cooled to affection that remains to this day. Each was once held between my hands with that excitement nothing else can quite parallel. I find an old and worn copy of another French book, and it brings back the incidents long dead in my memory - the cluttered second-hand bookshop near the Cathedral of Tours. The purchase for little or nothing, the excitement then of hurrying to my room, up darkened steps, and finally sitting in a chair near the dormer windows and opening the world. . . .The experience of taking out and examining these beautiful things becomes almost unbearable- the evocations are fresh, stripped to their essences, and the essences were good, indeed terribly good for all of it was discovery, marvel, delight. Only his grandfather's fan moved the air on that sun-scorched day which reached 105 degrees. Griffin did not mention it here, but it was his maternal grandfather, Samuel Clements Young, who had introduced him to books. Every night, the old man had read from a set of The Harvard Classics, passing them on volume by volume to his grandson, until finally bequeathing the entire set to the future author.