In Search of Bisco Page 11

  Some of the installment collectors will claim you’re two weeks behind in payments and say they’ll call the police if you don’t pay double. I’ve seen some of them pull back their coats and show a pistol if you don’t give them the money in a hurry.

  The cheating salesmen will show samples and take orders for what they’re selling and collect a dollar or more down payment and then never deliver what they’ve promised. They leave town and never come back again and you can’t call the police and have them arrested for cheating or get your money back.

  I’ve never been up North and I don’t know what it’s like up there. I’ve heard a lot of talk about it, though, and some will say Negroes are better off living in Chicago or St. Louis and others will say that’s no different than right here in Little Rock. They say the pay is better up there and you can eat better and have finer clothes. Others will say Negroes have to live in a certain part of town just like here and pay lots more rent, too. If that’s true, I don’t see much difference.

  As much as I know about it, being a Negro is just about the same no matter where you live. The way it is now the whites are going to try to boss you wherever you are.

  What I want to do is get a good education so I can be my own boss. That’s the only way a Negro can get what he wants. The trouble right now is that I don’t know how I’m going to get more education after I finish high school.

  I’ve never been mixed up in any of the fights a crowd of white boys will come around and start. I’m not scared of them and I’ll fist-fight if I have to, but I’m not going to get out there in the street and throw rocks and swing bicycle chains. I’ve got something better to do. Colored students ought to be spending their time studying all they can so they can get good jobs when they leave school. Otherwise, if they don’t watch out, they’ll end up cleaning washrooms and hauling garbage and shining shoes for white people for the rest of their lives.

  That’s one thing you can say for me. I’m not going to be satisfied hiring out like that. I don’t know yet how I’m going to make my way like I want to, but I’m going to get started by getting the best education I can somehow or other. That’s something I’ve promised myself. I might not get very high up, but I sure won’t be down at the bottom of things.

  It’s what I’ve been saying that I’ve got against people who come around and say Negroes ought to get out and spend their time spiting whites and do everything they can to make the whites suffer. I’ve heard some of them say spit on white people and rob them and knife them. They’ve got clubs just to do that.

  That makes no sense to me. If Negro students spend their time trying to harm white people in some way, they’re not helping themselves at all. That’d be wasting the time they could be educating themselves so they could get some of the good jobs the white people have the first call on now.

  My dad says voting is going to make a big difference about things before long. He says when the colored start doing that the way they should, there’ll be a lot of changes made. That makes more sense to me than joining the white-hating clubs.

  That’s why you won’t see me spitting on white people and carrying a gun or pulling a knife. I’m going to be studying somewhere. Right now I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ll find a way somehow.

  14

  THE GUMBO NEGROES of Southern Arkansas have been in the United States just as long as the Gullahs of South Carolina, the Geechees of Georgia, and the Guineas of Alabama and Mississippi.

  However, it was the fate of the Gumboes to be the first among Negro Americans to be displaced as farm laborers by cotton harvesting machines. This is a distinction thrust upon the Gumboes on Delta plantations in Arkansas with as little regard for their welfare as the first Africans received when they were shackled, shipped across the Atlantic and sold into lifetime slavery.

  In origin, Gumboes were the Angola slaves sold at auction in New Orleans during the late seventeen-hundreds and early eighteen-hundreds. They were given their new-world name for being identified with okra, called gumbo in their native Bantu language when it was mixed with other ingredients for a meal, and the seedpods of which had been their bedding and food aboard slave ships.

  When bought by plantation owners—and taking their remaining okra seedpods with them—the Gumboes were sent to Eastern Louisiana and Southern Arkansas to clear the land of trees and raise cotton in the fertile alluvial soil of the flood plains of the Mississippi River.

  The word gumbo probably would not have survived and become permanently established in the American language if the female Angola slaves had not been kept in New Orleans by the French as concubines and if the males on the plantations had not been provided with female Ouachita Indians for sexual partners.

  As time went on, the mulatto male offspring were sent from New Orleans to the plantations—in quick progression the female becoming quadroon and octoroon—and the planters, using cloth and trinkets as inducements, lured females of the Ouachita Indians to the plantations to become child-bearing.

  As the result of this African-French-Indian fusion, gumbo became the popular descriptive term for anything or anybody produced by a mixture—soup, soil, vegetation and African, French, Indian.

  Now, in the nineteen-sixties, descendants of the Gumbo slaves, their bright tan coloring and sharply-profiled Gallic faces distinguishing them from other Negro Americans, are being displaced by farm machinery and sent into exile. From the point of view of agricultural economists, they are obsolete labor units without salvage value. Picking cotton by hand on the delta farms of Arkansas nowadays would be as economically antiquated as mowing a six-hundred-forty-acre section of Nebraska wheat with a sickle.

  Being sent into exile from a Southern Arkansas cotton farm means, to many Negroes, becoming a wandering refugee in his own native America. After having been dispossessed and evicted from his two-room tenant-farm homeplace, which was usually his birthplace as well, an elderly Negro is a social and economic outcast with no place to go and without the likelihood of being able to earn an adequate living. Moreover, having been a farm laborer all his life and consequently not eligible for social security, he will not receive benefit payments when he is sixty-five and older.

  But even this is not always the ultimate fate of a social and economic outcast. Many of the smaller towns in isolated parts of the cotton belt have devised insidiously authoritative means of preventing a farm-exiled Negro family from living within corporate limits and thereby becoming eligible for local welfare aid of a few dollars a month. When this takes place, families are ordered, and forced by police intimidation or edict, to keep moving and go somewhere else.

  The usual result of being forced by small-town command to keep moving is that such unwanted Negro families eventually find themselves crowded into shacks and hovels in the already over-crowded segregated sections of Pine Bluff and Little Rock. The younger Negroes often go to Chicago and Detroit in search of work and a better place to live. The elderly exiles stay behind and pass their remaining years in poverty and squalor and hopelessness.

  The tall, thin, bright-brown Gumbo with a characteristic African-French-Indian facial profile and straight black hair turning gray is sixty-six years old. Usually he has a job for two or three days a week working as yardboy. When he works, he is paid forty cents an hour for a full day mowing grass, cultivating flowers, trimming hedges, and raking leaves. He said he pays four dollars a week to rent the house where he and his wife live in the swampy lowland Negro section of Pine Bluff.

  I don’t mind telling about myself. I aint got a thing to be ashamed of. I worked hard all my life and I’m proud of it. I went to work on a cotton plantation about thirty miles down south of here when I was ten or eleven years old. I stayed right there on that same plantation all my life up to a little more than a year ago when I was getting close to sixty-five.

  That’s when the white man said I’d got too old and slowed down to do much good for him. He told me and my wife to pick up and leave. I wasn’t looking to hea
r him say a thing like that. It was the worst surprise I ever had in all my life. I’d put in the past fifty-some years working the cotton for the white man and his daddy before him and I sure hated hearing him tell me I couldn’t stay no longer and had to go off somewhere else.

  My folks lived on that same plantation down there all their lifetime, too. It was the only homeplace me and them ever had. My wife was born down there, too, and me and her had just one daughter only. She got married to a Sanctified traveling preacher who came by from over across the Big River and stopped and preached once and took up a collection and then they went traveling off to California. I aint seen her since and don’t reckon I never will again.

  That preacher said he’d been born ’way back in Georgia somewhere and grew up mostly in Alabama and Mississippi where his daddy was a sometime sawmill man. His name was Henry, but he never did say what his daddy’s name was and I don’t know if it was Bisco or Frisco or anything like that. Anyhow, he was a big handsome man even if he was a poormouth Sanctified preacher.

  Like I was saying, I was a pretty good cotton hand down there on the plantation. And the white man used to say so, too, up to the time when he changed his mind about it one day. I didn’t know things went wrong somehow until he came up and started complaining about how slow I was doing the picking. My old hands had got a little stiff in the joints and I just couldn’t make my old fingers move quick enough to pick cotton faster no matter how hard I tried. But the white man said that was nothing but my own fault and none of his.

  The white man said everybody else on the place but me was picking up to four hundred pounds a day and I was having a hard time getting up to near two hundred. My wife tried her best to help me out, but her back’s been bad a long time and she couldn’t stoop over enough to do much good. I just couldn’t never get much picked over two hundred even when she helped out the best she could.

  The white man’d already bought two cotton picking machines and was fixing to get two more. I asked him please let me change over to running a machine picker in the field for him instead of hand picking. But he said I was past sixty and too old to learn how to run the machine good enough. He put the young boys to running the machine pickers and told me I was so old I’d be better off quitting and going somewhere to retire, anyhow.

  That was when the white man said times has changed a lot and he wanted me to go off somewhere else and look after myself the best I could from then on. He said I was a heap better off than the mules he got rid of when he bought the picking machines. He didn’t have to tell me how he figured that. He sold those mules to the dog food factory. They hit those mules on the head with a sledge hammer and hauled them off on a truck one on top of the other. It was a sad sight to see those good old mules end up like that. I’d been feeding them and treating them for colic and plowing them for I don’t know how long. You get to know mules by name when you do that, and they know you, too. Don’t think they don’t. It’s just like being people together.

  I begged about it, but the white man wouldn’t even let me keep on living on the place and chop cotton for him. He said he could get all the Mexicans he needed at cotton-chopping time and pay them sixty cents an hour and not have to provide houses for them because they could sleep in the barn and he could get rid of them by cutting off their pay the same sundown the chopping was finished. I couldn’t never figure why the Mexicans got paid sixty cents an hour for doing the same work the colored was paid thirty cents for. The white man said it was the government law, but it didn’t sound fair and square for the government to do a thing like that.

  Anyhow, I felt real sorry for those Mexican folks. They didn’t even know what the word was for what they was doing none of the time. They’d have to point at something like when they wanted a drink of water or a match to light up their tobacco.

  When the white man said for me to pick up and go, I told him I didn’t have a single dollar to my name to live on after that. He said that wasn’t no fault of his. He said he wasn’t God Almighty and didn’t have nothing to do with the way things was in the world. He told me to pray about it and maybe I’d get some advice that way. I’m a religious man, but I never heard of the Good Lord telling anybody where to go to look to find money. Even the preachers can’t get it that way.

  I thought sure he’d let me and my wife stay on the place till we died, but he wouldn’t pay attention to no talk like that. He said he was going to burn down my old house because it stood in the way of the machines and slowed work.

  Like everybody knows, a colored man can’t just stand there keeping on begging like that with a white man. A white man is liable to get mad at you and no telling what’d happen to you. I’ve seen bad things happen too many times in my life and I don’t want none of that kind of trouble. Not at my age, I don’t.

  The last thing I spoke to the white man was I felt mighty sad leaving the plantation after being born on it and living and working down there on it for him and his daddy all my life since I was ten or eleven years old. That’s all I could say. There wasn’t nothing else I could think of to tell him that he’d be apt to listen to.

  He told me he’d let one of the young colored boys take me and my wife in a truck to Pine Bluff or anywhere else we wanted to go just so it wasn’t no farther off than Pine Bluff. He told me I could take the furniture and anything else that belonged to me and my wife. Then he gave me ten dollars of his own money out of his pocket and walked off. He walked off so quick I never got a chance to thank him for the money or nothing like that.

  There’s been some other old folks like me and my wife who’d been sent off the plantations and come to Pine Bluff when the white man said he didn’t need none of us no more, but I didn’t know how to locate none of them in such a big city where everybody was a stranger to me. When me and my wife got here to Pine Bluff in the truck, the best I could do was look for a friendly man and ask him please let me unload the furniture in his front yard. I had to do something like that quick because the boy driving the truck said he’d been warned to unload and hurry back to the plantation before dark and he was scared not to.

  There wasn’t much furniture on the truck—only some chairs and kitchen table and my wife’s old sewing machine and things like that. But when it was all piled up on that truck with the bedstead on top, people seeing us drive around looking for a place to stay must’ve thought a big flood was on the way and time for everybody to find a place safe from the high water.

  Anyhow, I don’t know what I’d done if I hadn’t come across a friendly colored man who took pity on me. He let me and my wife unload the furniture in his front yard and said we could put some quilts down and sleep on his front porch. We stayed there four days cooking on his cookstove and sleeping on his porch before I could locate a house to move to and rent for four dollars.

  The big trouble about that was the rats. I’m used to some rats, but not like the big fat ones that come out at night here in Pine Bluff and crawl all over you when you’re trying to sleep like they own the whole world. Country rats don’t bother me none, but these city rats sure make me nervous.

  My big worry besides the rats is making a living, because I’m getting old fast. Not many white folks want to hire an old man like me. They say the young colored boys work harder and faster for the same pay. But I’ve just got to make a living somehow if I can’t get the social security. I’ve been told about state welfare pay, but that don’t amount to much, nohow.

  The way it’s been, I’ve had about twenty or more yardboy jobs in nearly a year and a half and can’t find a steady job to save my life. I work two or three days in a week sometimes and then get paid off and told not to come back no more after that. Then I have to go looking for another yardboy job somewhere in town. The longest lasting job I had was three weeks. And that only added up to six whole pay-days of work.

  I know I do good yard work. People tell me so, too. But somehow they just don’t want me working steady for them. I’ve asked some of the white people why they had t
o let me go. One of them told me it was some kind of trouble about the social security. A white lady said if I worked steady all the time for her, and kept it up for two or three months she’d have to pay out extra money to the government for the social security. She said she’d rather hire a different yardboy every two weeks or so and not pay the social security money.

  That’s something else that bothers me all the time. If anybody needs the social security, it sure is me. But I just can’t find a way to get connected with it so I can draw some of the welfare money. Looks like everybody else except me is connected with it somehow, because just about everybody I work for says they has to deduct about a dollar from my pay for the tax. It’s hard on me to lose a dollar out of my pay like that nearly every week and never get none of it back.

  I don’t like to come right out in the open and say some white people do something wrong. I wasn’t raised to talk like that. But if it aint wrong it still don’t look exactly right. I went to the social security place not long ago and asked the people down there when I would be due to get some government security money because I was already past sixty-five. I didn’t expect it to amount to much but I sure thought I’d get something. They said it’d likely be nothing at all because I wasn’t covered with it.

  I told those people I’d worked on the plantation all my life up to a year or more ago and had been doing yard work in Pine Bluff for the past year and that sometimes when I got paid off I was short a whole dollar they told me was the deduct to pay the tax.