In Search of Bisco

by Erskine Caldwell

  One of the common evidences of the poor buckra’s frustration is his gullible eagerness and fanatical desire to be duped by inflammatory exhortations of the designing, scheming, rabble-rousing, opportunistic, professional politician. These are the shrewd politicians who pander to the poor buckra’s prejudice for the purpose of perpetuating themselves in office.

  Having little within himself in which he can take pride, and habitually frustrated by his awareness of his past, present, and future economic and social poverty, the poor buckra resents any achievement of the Negro and retaliates by doing anything within his cunning to restrict and deny the rights of all Negroes. It is not unusual for men of such prejudice to instigate wily and overt violence in an effort to enforce and perpetuate racial injustice and discrimination.

  The urbanized Atlanta Negro, in contrast to the frustrated poor buckra, is the fortunate beneficiary of the most extensive educational complex of any American city. This educational system has been segregated from the beginning, not by the desire of Negroes but by the discriminatory customs of the politically dominant white race.

  Atlanta’s many schools, colleges, and universities for Negroes came into existence as the result of determined efforts of Negroes themselves to provide higher education and professional training for Negro teachers, lawyers, and doctors barred from enrollment in the public and private institutions reserved exclusively for the white race in the State of Georgia. This determination to provide higher education for Negroes has made possible the present trained leadership of authentic spokesmen for civil rights in Atlanta, in Georgia, in the South, and throughout the nation.

  A forty-five-year-old professor of history in one of Atlanta’s Negro colleges has the calm confidence of an educated man who strives to attain an ideal by gentle persuasion and temperate argument. He is a tan-skinned octoroon, being of East Georgia Geechee and South Georgia white ancestry, and without bitterness toward fanatical advocates of white supremacy and racial discrimination.

  It took us a long time, he said, and we’re on our feet at last. But now that we’re on our way, there’s one thing we don’t want to forget. The progress of the Negro up to this point is due to the collaboration by the enlightened younger generation of whites and the Negro religious leaders. That’s why we were able to come to life after waiting a hundred years since slavery for what turned out to be nothing. And now we’ve got something for the first time in the Negro American’s history.

  I’m convinced that without the leadership of our ministers in the beginning we would’ve been the blind leading the blind. That means we would’ve made mistakes in judgment and walked right into damaging excesses. We’ve had little, if any, political leadership in all our history. But, fortunately for us, we did have the Negro preacher to guide us with his kind of experienced leadership when we began taking our first steps toward racial freedom.

  The Negro preacher I’m talking about was not always an educated man, but, one of the educated or not, he was a thoughtful man. He advised our people to seek equal rights slowly and within reason and he himself went along with us to sit-ins and demonstrations—and to jail, too—but all that time he was cautioning us to keep our heads and not be tempted to resort to force and violence as a policy. This was the kind of leadership we needed at the critical stage when we were emerging from bondage and had the opportunity to consolidate our social and economic gains.

  If we can keep this ideal of persuasion in mind and not resort to violence, it won’t be long before we get our complete democratic freedom as Americans.

  But there’s danger ahead. There’s already evidence that well-meaning but hot-headed fanatics—and I mean Negroes themselves—are trying to get rid of the calm and proven leadership of the Negro preacher, charging him with being slow-footed and behind the times, and institute a gangster-type racket by putting goons and hoodlums in his place. The white man can jeopardize his cause, too, just as much as the Negro, by indulging in violence.

  Maybe I have this attitude about it because I’m not a black man. Some white people have the idea that all Negroes have a common ancestry. That might have been said about African slaves two hundred years ago, but not about us today. I’m a Geechee man myself—a Georgia-born octoroon—and I’m proud of it. This is why the Negro blood in me wants to keep the peace with the white blood that shows in my skin—or vice versa, if you wish. Judging from what I’ve heard about Bisco, he and I have a lot in common as Geechee men. Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s striving to keep peace within himself just as I am.

  Anyway, I’m convinced that we can gain more for ourselves by persuasion—since we are a minority—and gain it sooner—than we can by violence. This is something that can only be done by voting in every election. Our religious leaders know this and they are constantly reminding us of it. This is why more harm can be done to our cause by hot-headed Negroes throwing their weight around than by the rabid white supremists. You can’t make anybody be your friend by pulling a knife or pointing a gun at him.

  As it’s been, we’ve had set-backs when we tried to integrate a school or a hotel or a restaurant, but that was only temporary. History teaches that time is on our side. That’s been proved. It was only a very short time ago when the law of the land forced Negroes to ride in Jim Crow railroad coaches and at the back of the bus. It was Jim Crow this and Jim Crow that wherever a Negro went. All of that’s now been wiped from the books and a Negro can even sleep in a berth on a train if he’s got the money to pay for it.

  And another thing. Only a short while ago it would’ve been impossible for a Negro to get a room in any Atlanta hotel or motel and sit down to eat in the restaurant. But now, if he’s suitably dressed, he’ll be accommodated nearly everywhere he wants to go.

  The main trouble for us in Atlanta is that there are still some die-hard and over-my-dead-body hold-outs who maintain segregation and so far have been able to resist sit-ins and demonstrations. It’s going to take the civil rights law to budge them, and they’ll go to court and try to get delays on that, too.

  Some of those white people run advertisements in the newspapers boasting about their segregation policies—intimating that the Civil War of a hundred years ago may be revived if we don’t go away—and defying fate to force them to conform to the realities of the twentieth century.

  We’re using persuasion on those die-hards, and time and civil rights laws are on our side. We’ve come a long way already in just a few years and we’re proud of what we’ve got so far. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop now and be satisfied halfway. The only thing we’ll settle for now is total accomplishment.

  Sometimes I get to thinking how ironic it is that in our segregated part of Atlanta, over here on this side of the railroad tracks, we have Negro-owned restaurants and night clubs with Negro performers attracting so much white patronage that on busy week-end nights Negroes sometimes have to be turned away at the doors because white people have taken up the seating space.

  So when you talk about integration, don’t forget that white people of Atlanta came over here and integrated our restaurants and night clubs a long time ago without even going through the formality of asking us if we had any objection to being integrated by them. Of course, we think we do have the best night clubs and singers and musicians in Atlanta and we’re proud of it all.

  The white people can’t be blamed for wanting the best in night life, and they’re always welcome and they receive special attention. Just the same, it is an ironical situation to have our clubs integrated by some of the white people who make violent protests when we say we’d like to enter some of their places of business over on their side of the railroad tracks.

  White merchants want our trade, and they advertise for it in Negro newspapers, because anybody’s dollar is worth exactly one hundred cents. And yet they claim they ought to have the right to draw the color line at the lunch counter and the washroom door in a department store.

  The real hardship of Negro life is in the country and
small town and not in the city. I know about this because I’ve lived in all three places. I was born in a South Georgia small town and lived on an East Georgia sharecrop farm until I came to Atlanta to get an education. It’s the same in Alabama and Mississippi. In the larger cities, such as Birmingham and Mobile and Jackson, Negroes have been having their troubles with integration and civil rights, just as we do in Atlanta, but for the most part the Negro’s social and economic bind is in the country and small town. That’s where a colored man can be too scared to call his soul his own.

  Very little is heard about life in the country. The big city gets the newspaper headlines when something happens in the Negro slums. Just the same when you break down the Negro population figures in the Deep South, the country outnumbers the city two to one. Servants in small towns, restaurant kitchen-boys, sawmill hands, day-wage laborers, and sharecrop farmers are so dependent upon their jobs for housing and survival that they live year after year in subjection to the whims of their white employers. Negro urban life is concentrated in side-by-side dwellings and floor-upon-floor flats. That makes it much more conspicuous than that of twice as many people living in desperation elsewhere.

  I don’t mean to say our people are physically mistreated in the country and small town any more than a poor buckra is mistreated. Whipping and lynching are becoming things of the past, thank God. What does happen, though, is that as Negroes they are the victims of a kind of psychological hardship or bondage. I’m talking now mostly about the older generation—those who are forty and fifty and older. The white employer tells them to take the pay offered, the housing provided, the working conditions demanded—or he’ll get another boy who will.

  And there are always other boys waiting in line for a job, too.

  That’s the kind of system it is. It’s maintaining a pool of subservient people to work at the lowest possible rate of pay. This keeps the average country and small-town Negro in economic distress and makes him constantly fearful of risking his livelihood by speaking up for his rights. And this is why there’s so little public protest or demonstration outside the larger cities.

  However, a change is on the way. The younger generation of Negroes in the small community—those in their teens and attending school—are growing up without this fear. They’ll be the ones to do what their parents and grandparents were unable to do.

  Education is something new and exciting to young Negroes everywhere. The doors to the world are opening before their eyes, revealing sights their parents never knew existed, and they have the spirit and enthusiasm of pioneers to explore it.

  In my time, when I left my father’s sharecrop farm in East Georgia, with four half-dollars in my pocket and somehow managed to get to Atlanta, there was no schooling down there for us higher than the fifth grade. That was as far as anybody down there could go in those days.

  It’s a lot different now, of course. We have our high schools and colleges all over the state and the young Negro is getting his education. However, Atlanta is still the center of higher education and our colleges and universities here are the goals of the ambitious ones.

  But this is not a dead-end for students. Southern-born Negroes still migrate North and West in search of a better social environment and more economic opportunities. What we try to do is give them the best possible education so they will have a better chance to succeed in getting what they want wherever they go.

  That’s why I like teaching. It’s a satisfying feeling to know that I’m helping this generation to learn how to be good citizens in the North and South.

  7

  THE LONG, SCRAWNY, emaciated, poverty-shriveled arm of Appalachia thrusts southwesterly from West Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee into Northern Alabama. After this hopeful long reach over the border of Bisco Country, the supplicating hand of poverty opens palm upward for some token of sympathy. But it is too late for alms. The last coins of the kind-hearted have already been dropped into an imploring hand somewhere else with all sympathy spent.

  The bone-hard thumb of the hand of poverty is the Arkadelphia Mountain in the Appalachian Range and its calloused soil covers all of Walker County in Northern Alabama. Like the four bony fingers of the Raccoon, Blount, Oak, and Beaver mountains which reach hopefully toward Birmingham and its outcroppings of coal and ore and limestone, the Arkadelphia region was never in its history an agricultural country.

  The thin-soil gravel hills in Walker County are barren lands and the rocky ledges stubbornly resist the roots of vegetation. Whatever humus does accumulate under scrub pines and blackjack oaks is soon washed away by mountain rains and carried down the Warrior River to the Gulf of Mexico.

  In the beginning, long before the Civil War, the Anglo-Saxon settlers came to the gravel hills of Walker County in search of cheap land. They found with ease what they sought and then, unfortunately, they were misled by the false promise of its brief summertime luxuriance. After that, with all money spent, they had no choice other than to make it the homeplace of their families. Now, after many generations of inbreeding, it is the birthplace of the handicapped people of Alabama’s Appalachia who are rarely able to find anything but misery at home or away.

  The time has not yet come when such barren land on gravel hills can be industrialized to furnish employment for its people. There have been many attempts made without success to establish industries.

  Cotton mills have been built and abandoned; furniture factories were built and abandoned. The prospect of failure was obscured in the beginning by the optimism of success, but it took only a short time to realize that it was uneconomical to install industries in a remote region that had neither access to supply nor local sources of material for manufacture. The one remaining hope of the people is that sometime in the future science will find a profitable way to convert scrubby pine and yellow broomsedge into paper and plastic.

  After the failure of cloth and furniture manufacturing, other attempts, both realistic and visionary, were made to find a way for people to exist on such unproductive land. But home-tufted bedspreads and hand-braided scatter rugs soon glutted the tourist market. There was so much over-production of moonshine whisky that a man soon lost hope of being able to swap a gallon of corn liquor with his neighbor for a pig or to take a jug of it to the crossroads store to barter for a can of snuff.

  Then, even more recently, came the time when a vagabond shirt-and-skirt sweatshop would open overnight with several dozen sewing machines in an abandoned barn and pay wives and daughters thirty cents an hour to stitch and hem mill-end cotton cloth. That short-lived industry came to an end when federal minimum wage laws eliminated that occasional source of cash income in the gravel hills.

  The economic plight of Jasper and Cordova and other small towns in Walker County is not unique in this extreme southwestern region of Appalachia. Similar distress exists wherever the gravel hills of Northern Alabama have been eroded by mountain rains until only a few inches of topsoil remain to sustain scrubby pines, blackjack oaks, yellow broom-sedge, and May-pop vines. But as if to compensate for its hostile soil, the region is not lacking in an abundance of old-time religion of the whoop-and-holler sects and the die-hard politics of the run-nigger-run white supremists.

  The affable, congenial, reddish-bearded storekeeper at the fork of the road in the intervale was eager to talk about life and hard-times in the gravel hills of Walker County.

  I went to school off and on past seventeen, he said, and that was long enough to read and write past the sixth grade. But the best part was after I quit school I married the school teacher who could add, subtract, and multiply figures without never looking in the arithmetic book to go by.

  There was talk about it all along between here and Jasper—about a white man like me marrying her—and it still comes up now and then, because she sure don’t look pure-white like most white people do. She told me she looks like she does because she’s part-Indian from Middle Georgia. I took her word for it from the start, even if some people do still cla
im she’s dark-skinned like a part-white Georgia Geechee and trying to pass for all-white. But that don’t bother me none. Not a bit. Marrying that school teacher was the smartest move I ever made in my whole life and I’m satisfied.

  I asked her once what county in Georgia she came from, but she said she didn’t know because her folks brought her to Alabama when she was too little to remember. I never heard her say if her daddy was Bisco or anything like that, but it might’ve been for all I know. She won’t talk about kinfolks no more and it won’t do no good for a stranger to ask her about it.

  Anyway, what she did was give me her year’s pay when she quit teaching to marry me and set up housekeeping. I took that money and went to Jasper and bought a whole load of canned goods and staple groceries and a few other things like nails and hinges. Then I hauled everything out here to this little old store I built out of sawmill slabs all by myself. Not many folks lived out here at the fork and hardly none of them had money to spend for canned goods and staples. But nearly everybody had a way of somehow finding a little cash to spend for snuff and so I hauled some of the canned goods back to Jasper and swapped for all the snuff I could get.

  Getting that snuff to sell set me up in business right away and I never let the stock get short since. My wife was smart enough to learn me how to make the right change for a quarter or half-dollar so I wouldn’t cheat myself every time I sold a can of snuff. That started about twenty years ago and now I can make change as good as any storekeeper in Jasper or Cordova. Of course, now, I don’t have no big turnover like the other storekeepers, but that means I don’t have as many chances to make mistakes, neither, and short-change myself if I happen to count wrong.