In Search of Bisco Read online

  But the people at the social security place said the whole time I was working at farm work on the plantation didn’t count none and the deducts from yardboy pay don’t mean nothing at all because I didn’t work steady for the same people long enough at a time to count. They told me I ought to keep people from making the deducts till I got a steady job and worked at the same place three or four months. That’s what they said exactly. But they don’t know how hard it is for an old colored man like me to speak up and tell white folks the right thing they ought to do.

  If I was a lot younger, I’d start right in and say to the white people they ought to pay me all the money when I do work for them and don’t hold some back and call it deduct for the social security for me that aint. I hear the young colored people talk like that, but I’m an old-timey darky and I just can’t make myself say it at my age.

  The benefit security pay is the big thing I want to get hold of. If they’d put that in the civil rights, I’d sure have something to be thankful about. And then while they’re about it, I wish they’d put something in the law about those rats down there where all us colored live. My feet stick out the end of the bed because it’s shorter than me and hardly a night goes by when I don’t get a rat bite on one or both my big toes. I can put up with a lot of hardship, but I just can’t get used to those rats that come out from somewhere in the dark of night.

  15

  FOR MORE THAN A century and a half the Deep South was wholly dependent upon the servitude and muscle of the Negro to do its work and produce its wealth. Cotton farming, the principal source of wealth for the white Southern landowner, could not have prospered without the labor of the Gullah, Geechee, Guinea, and Gumbo. But now times have changed and mechanized agriculture is replacing human muscles with tractors, harvesters, and combines.

  There are already many regions in the agricultural South where the Negro laborer is no longer useful as a worker and, as it follows, is no longer wanted as a citizen. Among these regions—other than the mechanized cotton belt—is the Grand Prairie of Eastern Arkansas. This is one place in Bisco Country where cotton, because of unsuitable soil, will not grow and thrive; now it is also hostile ground for the Negro American.

  The Grand Prairie is a small empire in the bayou region between the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers that has produced more rice during the past fifty years than any other region in the United States. Few Americans rely upon rice as a basic food, but beer drinkers would go thirsty and put up a loud clamor if brewers could not have an ample supply of it.

  The three necessary natural elements for the production of rice—thin soil on hardpan base, abundant water, and sub-tropical climate—have always been present in this region of Arkansas. And now rice farming on the Grand Prairie has become the most completely mechanized of all agricultural operations in the nation. This combination of natural circumstances and perfected technology has made the production of rice relatively effortless, highly profitable, and no longer dependent upon the use of human labor.

  Rice paddies on the Grand Prairie are contoured and terraced by levee machines; flooding and irrigation are electronically timed and controlled; seeding and fertilizing are done by airplanes; and the largest combines that have yet been devised for such agricultural purposes harvest the rice crop. Such specialized machinery and techniques require skilled operators, and the stoop-labor Negro was not one of those privileged to receive the essential training in a white man’s country. Like the mules that were no longer useful and were sold to the dog food cannery, the Negro laborers too were sent to their destiny elsewhere.

  The wealthy owner of nearly five hundred acres of riceland paddies on the Grand Prairie between Stuttgart and DeWitt is a soft-spoken, friendly-mannered, white Protestant Southerner in his fifties. He was born in Arkansas, he was educated in Arkansas, he inherited the land from his father, he is untraveled beyond the Mid-South, he is fiercely imbued with the Southerner’s hatred of the Negro, and he has been a rice grower for thirty years. During the first twenty years, all the work of raising rice was done by mules and Negroes; now neither a mule nor a Negro remains on the farm.

  Nowadays the owner employs a land-leveling company to terrace his paddies; he uses an aerial farming service to seed and fertilize; and the contracts with still another company to harvest with combines. Each third year, as scientific rice growers do, he leases his flooded paddies in a rotation of acreage to a commercial fish hatchery for the purpose of restoring fertility to the soil. Such expert management of rice farms is not unusual on the Grand Prairie. After all, the owner is not a mere dirt farmer; he is an efficient businessman in stylish country clothing.

  I’ll tell you exactly how it is, he said. We don’t need niggers around here. We finished using them a long time ago when we changed over from mules to machines. The niggers know it, too. They’ve gone away and won’t never come back. That’s why you don’t see their black asses around shacks on rice farms like you still do in some parts of the cotton country in Arkansas.

  I bulldozed some of their stinking shacks and set fire to the rest of them when I stopped hiring niggers about five years ago and told them to pick up and get the hell off my land. Some of the old niggers put on a pitiful face and said they didn’t have nowhere to go. I told them I didn’t give a good God damn where they went and the country would be better off if they went to hell or back to Africa. You have to talk like that to niggers to get any sense through their thick black skulls.

  Some of the younger niggers tried to get me to let them learn tractor driving, but I wouldn’t listen to that, neither. You let fucking niggers stay on your place and before you know it every one of them has a sackful of bastard kids, maybe eight or ten or more, and that means you’d have to pay more taxes to build their schools and hire their teachers. When I pay school taxes, I want my money to go to educate white children—not black-assed niggers. And that’s how it worked out. We got rid of them and kept our school taxes down at the same time.

  I don’t know where all of them went when they left here. They just disappeared. Went somewhere out of sight. Thank God. That’s why we’ve got a lower percentage of niggers in our county than you’ll find anywhere in Arkansas. The few niggers left here in the county now are no more than ten or fifteen per cent of the whole population. That’s good. It’s a damn good showing when you think that nearly everywhere else in Arkansas the black bastards are fifty per cent or more.

  You’ll find a few of them working around the rice mills in Stuttgart doing the heavy work and others will be janitoring and hauling garbage. We need a few to stay and do that kind of work. I wouldn’t want to see a white man shoveling garbage and cleaning toilet stools. That’s nigger-work. The same about cooking and house-cleaning, too. We couldn’t get along without enough nigger women to do that for us.

  What happened to most of the dinges who left the rice farms was that they went to Little Rock and Memphis and somewhere up North. It’s hard on the white people in Little Rock and Memphis, but I’m glad a lot of them went up North and gave the bleeding-hearts up there a whopping big dose of what they’ve been begging for.

  We never had Georgia niggers living here. When we needed niggers on the Grand Prairie in the old days—hell, we raised our own. That was no trouble—we had plenty of fucking niggers around here for that. And that’s why we didn’t need to get them from Georgia. I know all about those Georgia niggers—most of them are half-assed whites and we don’t want them coming to Arkansas and stirring up our niggers with wrong notions. Whenever I saw one from Georgia or Alabama, I’d tell him to go back where he came from or else keep on moving to Texas. I don’t know if one of them was named Bisco or not. I never heard that name for a nigger, but it sounds like one of those half-assed whites from Georgia.

  They talk real big up North about segregation and discrimination down here and now we’ll see how smart they are about handling niggers. They’ve been doing their fault-finding up North for a long time and now we can sit back and watch the Ya
nkees squirm and run for cover and holler for help.

  I’ll pass the hat any day, and match anybody’s money with my own, to buy bus tickets for any nigger and his wife and ten bastard kids to go North and live with the Yankees. That’s a standing offer with me and I’m always glad when I have a chance to do it.

  I’ll tell you why it makes sense to do that. This country around here is just as safe to live in now as it is pretty. There’s nothing to be scared of, day or night, like it is where the niggers live by the thousands in the big cities and where they’ll knife a white man for his money and get their hands on a white woman for rape. You can go out after dark here and think nothing of it. There’s no black bastards prowling around at night now to hit you on the head or stick a knife in you. Even a white woman without her titty-bags on is safe to go where she pleases day or night anywhere on the Grand Prairie and not get stripped naked and thrown down and nigger-raped. I dare the Yankees to make a claim like that and try to prove it.

  Everybody knows what happens up North all the time where a lot of niggers went. You read about it in the papers and hear about it on television. And I’ll bet you that’s only the half of it. Robbing, killing, raping, and everything else you can think of. But even that’s only the beginning. Just wait a while. It’s going to get a hell of a lot worse all over the country. And a lot of people are going to get hurt—if not killed. The only way to stop it now is for the nigger-lovers to wake up and find out it’s this thing about civil rights that’s the cause of it.

  The only civil rights the niggers ought to have is what they already had—and that was too many for them. They could ride on the highways and watch the same television shows the white people did and buy what they wanted in the stores. But when the law tells them they can live in any part of town they please and eat in the same restaurants you do—then that’s encouraging them. And that’s what they want. Encouragement. You give them an inch of that and they’ll stop at nothing. They’ll claim it’s discrimination unless they can get white women next. I know what I’m talking about. I wasn’t born and raised in Arkansas for nothing.

  None of this trouble would’ve started in the first place if people up North had had the sense to leave well enough alone. But no—they came down South to Little Rock and New Orleans and Birmingham and other big cities and started talking like a bunch of damn fools about segregation and discrimination and civil rights. The whole country was getting along fine up to then. We had the niggers in their place all over the South and they damn-well stayed in it.

  But those bleeding-heart Yankees from the North—and even some from Washington, too—started stirring up trouble by telling the niggers they ought to have more civil rights. That’s when the niggers started thinking they were as good as white people. So it wasn’t long till they claimed they had to have equal rights in everything. They started out wanting to send their black-assed kids to white schools and eating in white restaurants. But that was only the beginning and there’s no end to what they’ll try to get after this.

  Now the Yankees up North are getting a whopping big dose of their own medicine and it’s gagging them in the gullet. While they’re trying to puke it out, it makes them realize they don’t want to associate with niggers up there no more than we do down here. That’s why they are wishing to God they’d never started this thing.

  All right. So now they’ve got the civil rights law. But before this thing started, the niggers were peaceful and quiet and satisfied. They didn’t expect no more than what they already had. Now there’s no end to what they’ll try to do from now on. They already talk like they think they can take over the whole country and run it as they God damn please. If it keeps on, the next thing’ll be that they’ll say they want a law passed that’ll make it a crime for white whores not to give them equal rights.

  The government in Washington can pass all the laws they want and print them in letters a foot high and nail them to every God damn telephone pole in Arkansas, but nigger-loving laws won’t make us change our ways of handling them. We’ve got our own way of doing things. You’ll never find me living in a house next to niggers shitting and pissing all around the place. If that’s what the Yankee nigger-lovers want, they can have it, but by God nobody’s going to make me put up with all that nigger stink. Before I’d put up with it, I’d set fire to their house or dynamite it to-hell-and-gone.

  It sure was a lucky thing for us that we got rid of the niggers on the Grand Prairie long before this trouble started. The way it is now, we can feel sorry for the Yankees in the North and be glad about our own selves at the same time. It’s a God damn pity about the Yankees, but they asked for it and now they’re stuck with it.

  16

  THE TOWN OF BASTROP has been built on a gritty hummock that rises a few feet above the perennial green flatland of delta grass in Northeast Louisiana.

  The courthouse square is Bastrop’s principal business district and, like small-town county seats throughout Bisco Country, it is surrounded by the usual predominance of fifty-dollar loan company offices, cubbyholes of ubiquitous white-shirted lawyers, drug stores selling lawn furniture and little red tricycles, and variety shops with fly-specked window displays of women’s twenty-nine-cent pink rayon panties.

  This is where white merchants solicit the Negro’s dollar, and then, as soon as it is in hand, and with the practiced brusqueness of a practical whore, send him back to confinement in his segregated shantytown until he earns another dollar to spend.

  Beyond the courthouse square and along its tree-shaded, white-skin residential streets, Bastrop is still not unlike many other towns in the Deep South where the white half of nine or ten thousand people live, work, and conform to the century-old social, religious, and political customs of the community.

  As elsewhere from South Carolina to Louisiana, absolute white skin and either a pretense of wealth or assumed aristocratic ancestry are necessary prerequisites in Bastrop for acceptable economic status and social standing. Likewise, unfailing church attendance and unwavering loyalty to the entrenched political machine are required to be posted as public records before full citizenship is granted. Non-conformists and other dissidents in Bastrop quickly find out that they have the choice of doing either of two things—conform or suffer social and economic boycott.

  It was Bastrop’s fate in its beginning to be geographically isolated in a hip pocket of Louisiana. Consequently, it is its misfortune to have been culturally by-passed since its days of plantation glory in the nineteenth century. The town’s few paved roads come from the backwoods of Southern Arkansas and its local roads disappear somewhere in the swamps between the Mississippi and Ouachita rivers. The one access the town has to the rest of the world is a forty-mile highway to Monroe, the only place within nearly a hundred miles that has a city-size population.

  However, Bastrop does continue to exist and prosper with good reason. It is in the center of an extensive region rich in cotton, timber, cattle, and chemical industry and it is populated by an abundant supply of thirty-cent-an-hour and fifteen-dollar-a-week Gumbo Negro laborers. With such a combination of wealth-producing natural and human resources, it is as content now as it was a century ago to be geographically remote and culturally isolated in America.

  Contentment is likely to continue among Bastrop’s cotton planters, timbermen, and cattlemen as long as the Negro laborer can be kept under social, economic, and political domination—which even in the nineteen-sixties means keeping the Negro in his place—and as long as ingenious means can be devised to perpetuate sub-standard wage scales.

  All this is a familiar way of life to many Southerners of both races who live in the states bordering the Mississippi River from Memphis to New Orleans. However, the white Northerner, and particularly the New Englander, who moves to this region of the Deep South to work as a technician or engineer or supervisor in an industrial plant often finds it difficult, if not impossible, to condone expressions of racial hatred and acts of spite. Usually, Northerners soon dis
cover that the famed Southern hospitality so graciously offered guests at the front door can be transformed immediately afterward into tirades of ruthless abuse and intimidation forced upon Negro servants at the back door.

  The forty-year-old college-educated wife of a petroleum engineer had lived in Bastrop with her husband and three children for nearly two years. They had always lived in New England before moving to Louisiana and she and her husband had never been able to afford to employ a servant until they came to Bastrop. Her husband’s increase in salary, and the prevailing low wages for servants in Bastrop, had made it possible for them to employ a full-time Negro maid.

  The first time I realized something was wrong was about a year ago, she said. My husband and I had made many friends in town and I knew some of our closest neighbors very well by then. It was one morning soon after breakfast when one of the neighbors came to the door and said she and another neighbor were having coffee at her house and they wanted me to join them. I was pleased to be invited and of course I went.

  The three of us talked casually about nothing in particular for about five minutes while we were drinking coffee. Then one of the women suddenly spoke in a sharp tone of voice and said she and several other women on our street were having trouble with their maids and that it was all my fault. I was so taken by surprise that I thought she was joking and I laughed.

  There was a long silence in the room and I could see the tense expressions of anger on their faces. Realizing then how serious they were, I asked what I had done to cause any trouble. Asking that one question was the only chance I had to speak again for what seemed like a full half-hour. They were so angry that both of them were trying to talk at once during most of the time.

  Even so, it didn’t take long to find out why they were so angry and upset. I had been in the habit of giving our Negro maid a little extra money whenever my husband and I had guests for dinner. Kathy’s salary of fifteen dollars a week was exactly the same as the other full-time maids in town received, but I just could not let her work several hours longer than usual at night without paying her extra for it. And even when we had just a few people come for cocktails, I always gave Kathy something extra then, too.