He soon realizes that there is a certain code that black people follow. So Griffin has to discover this code and follow it. He is treaty badly by white people and that is no surprise to him. He is stunned by their lack of sympathy for the black people. "At each bus stop, I sounded the buzzer, but the driver continued through the next two stops. He drove me eight full blocks past my original stop and pulled up only then for the white passengers" (Griffin 48). Griffin's moment of epiphany was when he realized that he was now a black man and that he had crossed the line and he could not go back in his mind. "In the flood of light against the white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger-a fierce, bald, very dark Negro-stared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned by 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 shanties and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. Suddenly, almost with no mental preparation, no advanced hint, it became clear and permeated my whole being. My inclination was to fight against it. I had gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won't rub off. The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me"(Griffin 15). He realized when he realized when he was in the swamp, and he had no food, and no way to get anywhere he realized that this was because he was black.
