Scattered Shadows

This never before published memoir by the author of Black Like Me is an extraordinary chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit. The subtitle of Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision is not metaphoric. Griffin seems to have taken to sightlessness with a kind of steely gusto, coming to the belief that "a life without sight was as interesting as a life with sight." He was determined to excel in arenas where sight would seem to be essential. He became a champion cattle breeder, for instance. He wrote novels, and fought a pornography charge on one all the way to the Supreme Court (he won). Although fascinated by monastic life, Griffin struggled with faith, and in 1951 converted to Catholicism. He learned Braille, walked fearlessly with a cane, achieving independence by sheer determination, aided by his parents and later his wife Elizabeth. On January 9, 1957, ten-years blind and settled into his life as husband and father, he walked into his parents' house that afternoon and suddenly saw a flash of red, then a door "dancing at crazy angles." Soon after, the dazzling world of color returned: the faces of his parents, his never-before-glimpsed wife, and the children he had known only by touch. Like a figure out of the New Testament, he was miraculously restored.