In Search of Bisco

by Erskine Caldwell

  And he aint been back since, neither. I’ve heard it said he went over to Alabama or Mississippi, and maybe even more far off than that somewhere. I don’t blame him none for going off as far as he could get from here. A colored never has no chance once the nightriders come around and take out a grudge on him for being colored. If they don’t beat the life out of him to start with, they’re just as apt to stuff pure cement down his throat and then weight him down with scrap iron in a swamp somewhere. I sure was glad Bisco got away alive.

  Some folks say they’ve got letters in the mail from Bisco’s wife and she says they’re doing fine where they’re at. I still don’t know if it’s Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere else. But every time I heard about it, it made me feel real good, because everybody knows what the nightriders would’ve done if he’d stayed here and kept his wife and not left like they told him to.

  Anyhow. I’m none too pleased staying here myself where those same nightriding white men live all around and the colored still here about. They haven’t bothered nobody lately but that don’t mean they won’t if they take a notion. Anyhow. I keep my mouth shut tight when I’m around one of them. I’m too old now for me to pick up and make a move like Bisco done. I wouldn’t even know which way to go off somewhere to.

  19

  SOME ROADS LEAD out of the Deep South, some go around in inconsequential circles, others come to a dead end at the brink of sinister swamps, and a few roads go all the way to New Orleans.

  A person who takes one of the roads to New Orleans and goes there after time spent in the countryside and in other cities of the Southern states is likely to get the impression that New Orleans is a little bit of everything the Old South was in the past and some of what the New South is now. Most of all, however, he is likely to get the immediate impression that New Orleans has the fortune to be unique among all Southern cities.

  After the impression will come considerable evidence that the uniqueness of New Orleans is durable and memorable and incontestable. The humid climate of the city and its deep-water port are duplicated around the world. The conglomeration of modern architecture and ancient housing in New Orleans is similar to that of many American cities. But nowhere in the Deep South, or anywhere else in the United States, is there a comparable compound of people whose origins are French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, Mexican, Cuban, African, Indian, Cajun, Creole, and Gumbo.

  This unique admixture of nearly a million people of the world has produced a New Orleans family of man that could be duplicated elsewhere only in the imagination of an anthropologist.

  As the result of generations of racial commingling and assimilation, New Orleans is the one place in Bisco Country where social conflict has the best opportunity of being adjudged by intelligence and sympathy rather than by the agony of physical force and violence. New Orleans has had its share of racial disturbances in the past and, like other American cities in the Racial Sixties, it will be subjected to more in the future. Nevertheless, because of the sympathy and sophistication of its population, a mutually satisfactory adjustment of social and civil rights is likely to be achieved with more ease and quickness in New Orleans than elsewhere in the United States.

  It has been the progressive blending of the city’s heterogeneous population for more than two centuries that accounts for the noticeable contrast between the human compatibility and cosmopolitanism of New Orleans and, differing so distinctly, the innumerable pockets of racial conflict and disparity in the hinterland beginning at its own city limits and extending all the way from Louisiana to South Carolina.

  Beyond the city limits of New Orleans and throughout the hinterland there is fear and belligerency among Negroes and, most basic of all, cautious mistrust and suspicion of the white man and his motives. There is good reason for being mistrustful of the white man anywhere in Bisco Country, as Negroes have learned during years of painful experience, and parents have passed the warning along to their children. The fear has been generated over the years by threats and intimidation, by beatings and killings, and mistrust is a logical defense against injury.

  The older generation of Negroes has been cowed by fear and their only refuge is in mistrust. Among the younger generation, belligerency takes the form of active protests and demonstrations and, in the extreme, physical retaliation with fists and sticks and stones.

  In any form, this contention is a revolutionary step beyond fear and mistrust. Those who are actively belligerent are the new-age Negroes of the Racial Sixties who, unlike their parents and grandparents, have been freed from fear by education and visions of equality.

  In the past, poverty and its miseries were described by romanticists—and by theorists—as being a sympathetic bond between underprivileged whites and Negroes. Such a common bond did not exist in actual life in the Deep South and it still has no basis of fact. What actually happened was that in a showdown between the two, it was customary for the white-skin man to receive favored treatment from landlord and politician at the expense of the black-skin man. This was a traditional bribe paid to the poor-white to help keep the Negro in economic bondage and political subjection. Consequently, it was inevitable that Negroes would eventually become suspicious of the motives of the whole white race.

  The difference between being white-poor and Negro-poor in such an environment is that the former has had freedom of opportunity and movement and the latter has been a prisoner of discrimination and injustice. Long after civil rights legislation and conscientious efforts to enforce the law, this racial zoning in Bisco Country will continue to be as conspicuous as the distinct lines of demarcation between residential and commercial zoning of real estate in any American city.

  This is why poverty in Bisco Country did not begin merely because there was insufficient money for an individual to buy adequate food and clothing for his family. Poverty actually began when the human spirit of the Negro American was impoverished by the denial of the rights of citizenship. Urban or rural in environment, physical hunger and distress might be endured by a man of any race with little alleviation, but withholding the Negro’s freedom and equality while granting it to others who happened to have been born with white skin was more tragic in its psychological consequences than material poverty.

  The inevitable human reaction to this injustice was the cause of the rebellion of the Racial Sixties.

  During the progress of the Negro rebellion, no community in the Deep South will be privileged to have immunity from violence in the contest between equality and superiority. On one side are willful men who take pride and comfort in racial hate and they are not about to give up life-long prejudice and accept equality with Negroes without a struggle. On the other side are Negroes whose long-promised sweet-by-and-by can no longer be denied or postponed. In another age, after prejudice has been buried with the last survivor of Old South traditions, such a controversy is not likely to exist and certainly not tolerated for long.

  However, this being the nineteen-sixties, and an immediacy, the younger generation of whites and Negroes in New Orleans is not waiting for the future but is striving to reach truce and agreement now for the purpose of alleviating the aggravations that lead to conflict and riot. If such efforts are successful, New Orleans will have additional pride in its uniqueness.

  In contrast to the contemporary sophistication of New Orleans and the racial blending of its population—as well as a reminder of the deep-seated traditions of its hinterland—it would be well to look back into the past and to recall the era of the old-time darky when he was groveling in the dust and then trotting off in feigned cheerful obedience to the white master’s command.

  On a Deep South plantation even as recently as a generation ago he was an elderly Gullah or Geechee or Guinea or Gumbo, white-haired and stoop-shouldered, who was dressed in ragged clothing and had been trained from youth by lash or deprivation to live in constant fear of displeasing the whole white race. And, if he were a good darky, he received the favor of
being called Uncle.

  Because of his advanced age and failing health, he was no longer useful as a fieldhand. However, assumed to be senile, and therefore as trustworthy and harmless as a eunuch in the proximity of white women, his being permitted to be yardboy and buffoon was his ultimate reward for a lifetime of labor in the fields.

  Knowing by years of experience what was required of him, he listened to orders, hat in hand, with abject humility. When dismissed, he backed away from the white master to a respectful distance before daring to turn around and go off to his chore. His day began at dawn when he went to the back porch of the master’s mansion to wait patiently for the first command of the morning. His day ended when he saw the last light in the big house turned off at midnight or later. His pay was left-over food from the kitchen, the shelter of a barnyard crib, and occasional gifts of discarded clothing.

  In addition to his many regularly prescribed daily chores, such as saddling a horse, raking leaves, splitting firewood, plucking a chicken, butchering a hog, hoeing the garden, sweeping the porches, and cleaning the backhouse privy, the elderly yardboy and buffoon was often required to obey whimsical commands to perform antics on Sunday afternoons and holidays for the amusement of the master and his guests.

  There were times when Uncle Ned—or Uncle Pete or Uncle Jack—would be told to climb a tree in the front yard and to sit there on a limb until he saw a buzzard fly overhead. Sometimes he would be told to run around in circles and howl like a hound treeing a possum. He could be ordered to get down on his knees and pray aloud for rain to fall on all the cornfields in the county without a drop of water falling on cottonfields. He might be told to make up words for a song, and to sing it as loudly as he could about a high-yellow girl begging a white man to chase her into the woods. Many of these musical laments and mournful prayers with improvised lyrics lived in memory to become the enduring folk songs of the South.

  Now and then there were Sunday afternoon occasions—but always after the minister and his wife and children had finished eating midday dinner and had gone home—when the men left the women on the front porch or in the parlor and went down to the barn.

  Going-to-the-barn was a special event for the men and usually it was an occasion that could be anticipated after hearing a casual hint several days in advance. There the men could drink bourbon from bottles and watch an exhibition on the corn-husking floor that the elderly Negro had been ordered to arrange. It was his duty at a time like that to use a shotgun if necessary to bring a young buck and a girl to the barn from the Negro quarter to strip naked and perform whatever sexually inciting acts the men said they wanted to see. Afterward, the older white men went back to the house and the younger ones could stay in the barn and take turns mounting the girl on the corn-husking floor. At a time like that, a white man had no qualms about crossing the color line with a Negro girl. In fact, on remote plantations it was often a customary ritual to celebrate achievement of Southern manhood.

  It is not likely that the Old South plantation custom of going-to-the-barn is to be found anywhere in Bisco Country in the nineteen-sixties. However, whenever there is a portrayal of such a custom, it was probably conceived in satire by a little theatre group of composers, lyricists, singers, and musicians as an updated folk song called “Happy Integration—You-All,” and reminiscent of the tune to “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground.” And if the performance took place in New Orleans, in particular, there surely would be recognizable overtones of traditionally classic Negro blues and jazz in every rendition.

  The search for Bisco has led to the rhythmic din of blues and jazz of New Orleans. There is no sound of a funeral dirge in the narrow streets behind the levee and that is to be taken as a good omen that he can yet be found.

  The tempestuous music seems to be saying that Bisco is still somewhere in his native land—somewhere in Bisco Country—with tales of a lifetime of joy and sorrow as a Negro American.

  A Biography of Erskine Caldwell

  Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) was the author of twenty-five novels, numerous short stories, and a dozen nonfiction titles, most depicting the harsh realities of life in the American South during the Great Depression. His books have sold tens of millions of copies, with God’s Little Acre having sold more than fourteen million copies alone. Caldwell’s sometimes graphic realism and unabashedly political themes earned him the scorn of critics and censors early in his career, though by the end of his life he was acknowledged as a giant of American literature.

  Caldwell was born in 1903 in Moreland, Georgia. His father was a traveling preacher, and his mother was a teacher. The Caldwell family lived in a number of Southern states throughout Erskine’s childhood. Caldwell’s tour of the South exposed him to cities and rural areas that would eventually serve as backdrops for his novels and stories. After high school, he briefly attended Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, where he played football but did not earn a degree. He also took classes at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, Caldwell began to develop the political sensibilities that would inform much of his writing. A deep concern for economic and social injustice, also partly influenced by his religious upbringing, would become a hallmark of Caldwell’s writing.

  Much of Caldwell’s education came from working. In his twenties he played professional sports for a brief time, and was also a mill worker, cotton picker, and held a number of other blue collar jobs. Caldwell married his college sweetheart and the couple began having children. After the family settled in Maine in 1925, Caldwell began placing stories in magazines, eventually publishing his first story collection after F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended his writing to famed editor Maxwell Perkins.

  Two early novels, Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), made Caldwell famous, but this was not initially due to their literary merit. Both novels depict the South as beset by racism, ignorance, cruelty, and deep social inequalities. They also contain scenes of sex and violence that were graphic for the time. Both books were banned from public libraries and other venues, especially in the South. Caldwell was prosecuted for obscenity, though exonerated.

  The 1930s and 1940s were an incredibly productive time for Caldwell. He published a number of novels and nonfiction works that brilliantly captured the tragedy of American life during the Depression years. His novels took an unflinching look at race and murder, as in Trouble in July (1940), religious hypocrisy, as in Journeyman (1935), and greed, as in Georgia Boy (1943). In 1937 he partnered with his second wife, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, to produce a nonfiction travelogue of the Depression-era South called You Have Seen Their Faces.

  Through the decades, Caldwell continued to focus his attention on the dehumanizing force of poverty, whether in the South or overseas. Caldwell’s reputation as a novelist grew even as he pursued journalism and screenwriting for Hollywood. He adapted some of his best-known novels into screenplays, including God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road, directed by John Ford. As a journalist, he worked as a war correspondent during World War II and wrote travel pieces from every corner of the globe. In 1965 he traveled through the South and wrote about the racial attitudes he encountered in his heralded In Search of Bisco.

  Caldwell spent much of his later years traveling and writing while living with his fourth wife, Virginia, in Arizona. A lifelong smoker, Caldwell died of lung cancer in 1987.

  A baby portrait of Erskine Caldwell. Born December 17, 1903, in White Oak, Georgia, to a Presbyterian minister and a schoolteacher, Caldwell would later describe his childhood home as “an isolated farm deep in the piney-woods country of the red clay hills of Coweta County, in middle Georgia.” (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Erskine Caldwell as a child. With a minister father, Caldwell spent many of his early years traveling the South’s numerous tobacco roads. During these years, he observed firsthand the trials of isolated rural life and the poverty of tenant farmers—themes he would later engage with in his nov
els. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Caldwell’s early novels linked him forever to the Tobacco Road region of the South. This photograph, taken by Caldwell’s second wife, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, references the title of his most famous work, Tobacco Road. Published under legendary editor Maxwell Perkins in 1932, the novel was adapted by Jack Kirkland for Broadway, where the play ran for 3,182 performances from 1933–1941, making it the longest-running play in history at that time, and earning Caldwell royalties of $2,000 a week for nearly eight years. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Publisher Kurt Enoch (left) presenting Erskine Caldwell with the Signet paperback edition of God’s Little Acre, published in 1934, the year following its hardcover publication with Viking. Enoch would reprint God’s Little Acre fifty-seven times by 1961. The novel was not without controversy: The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice fought to have God’s Little Acre declared obscene, leading to Caldwell’s arrest and trial. Caldwell was exonerated, and God’s Little Acre went on to sell more than fourteen million copies and see life as a film adaptation in 1958. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)

  Erskine Caldwell’s passport photo from 1946 to 1950. His occupation on this heavily stamped passport identifies him as a journalist, and he traveled extensively as a reporter throughout his adult life. During World War II, he had received special permission from the U.S.S.R. to travel to the Ukraine, reporting on the war effort there. (Image courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.)