In Search of Bisco Read online

  Kathy had never complained about the salary we paid her, and I’d been careful to find out what the prevailing wages were before I offered her the job, but the pay was so small for the work she did—and for the long hours, too—that I was ashamed to pay her so little. I suppose you could say my husband and I wanted to conform to local customs because we intended to live here for a long time.

  Anyway, I was always glad when we invited guests to dinner or cocktails and had a good reason to give her a few dollars extra to make up for the small salary.

  Then, besides that, I’ve always had a weakness for wanting to make small gifts to people I knew well, and so once in a while I’d buy something at a store that I knew Kathy wanted or actually needed. She has five children and her husband is a janitor who also makes only fifteen dollars a week. The gifts never cost more than two or three dollars, but I know they were worth many times that much to her.

  What had happened was that some of the Negro maids who worked for our neighbors found out that I was giving Kathy something extra now and then, as well as occasional gifts, in addition to her salary. I couldn’t blame Kathy for talking about it and I couldn’t blame the other maids, either, for wanting some extra pay when they had to work longer than eight or nine hours.

  I’d supposed that everybody would feel obligated to pay a servant something extra for working as late as midnight, after working all day, too. I was so upset that morning when those two women talked the way they did that I told them that anybody who’d make a Negro maid work much longer than her usual hours, and then not pay her something in addition, should not be permitted to have a servant. I was damn mad about it.

  I don’t know what else I said that morning, because I was so upset I might’ve said anything. Whatever it was I did say, it must’ve been to the point, because neither of those two women has spoken to me or invited me to her house since. That means I’m on their outcast list and I’m glad of it.

  I’ve been told by some of my other neighbors during the past few months—the friendly ones, of course—that those two former acquaintances are saying all sorts of things about me. For one thing, they delight in calling me a Northerner, which they consider a disdainful epithet, and they spread rumors that I’ve lost all my friends in Bastrop and that I’m so miserable that I’m begging my husband to resign from his position at the chemical plant so we can leave town.

  If anybody’s looking for an example of a closed society, you wouldn’t have to go any farther than Bastrop to find it. I don’t know if it’s typical of the South, but it’s sure plain hell to be surrounded by what’s right here.

  Some of the other gossip in Bastrop about me is that I have an immoral past and came South because I thought I could hide it here. One story is that I was somebody’s mistress in Boston while I was going to college. And I was. And I’m proud of it. I’ve been my husband’s only mistress since the first time I met him. That’s something some of the gossiping matrons couldn’t truthfully boast about—not if they knew their husbands as well as other people in town do.

  Another thing I’ve heard is that I’m said to be partly Negro because I have dark skin and curly black hair and think I’m fooling everybody by trying to pass for a white person. What they don’t know is that whatever I am suits me perfectly and I wouldn’t want to be any different. I have no idea what they’ll try to think of next to say about me, but it’s sure to be the meanest thing they can think of.

  There are only a few of us Northerners—as we’re called—living in Bastrop right now and occasionally two or three of us will get together and talk about the gossip that’s circulating about us in town. We have a few drinks, sympathize with each other, and then sometimes have a good cry together. Or a big laugh about it all. Either crying or laughing helps a lot. After that we can go home feeling like human beings again and not like diseased untouchables.

  But that kind of feeling never lasts long. After a few days there’s sure to be some new despicable gossip in circulation. Not long ago it was said that I was going to try to desegregate our church by encouraging my maid, Kathy, and other Negroes to organize a sit-in demonstration during a Sunday morning service. I’d never thought of such a thing and had no such intention, even though I do think Negroes should have the right to join any church they wish and attend services like any other member.

  Anyway, what happened was that the minister heard about it and he said it was up to the membership to decide if the church was to remain segregated or be desegregated. He said that instead of taking a standing vote during services, he had decided it would be better to circulate petitions among the members.

  It was a foregone conclusion, as the minister knew, that very few people would sign a petition favoring integration of anything in Bastrop. Social and economic pressure against such a thing in a Southern town like this is too strong. But my husband and I signed in favor of it. And that did it. The whole thing was a trick, of course. It was all some people wanted to know when they saw our names on it and the petitions were immediately withdrawn before anybody else was asked to sign. The church is all-white—just as it’s always been.

  Ever since then I’ve been called a Negro-lover—or, as they delight in saying it, nigger-lover—civil rights agitator, communist organizer, and, of course, a Northerner. When my husband and I attend church services now on Sunday mornings, we get a very icy-cold reception. Our best friends speak to us, and the minister shakes hands as though performing a distasteful duty, but you’d think by the way everybody else manages to look in some other direction that my husband and I had committed all the unpardonable sins in the book and were not only untouchable but also unlookables.

  I suppose the unpleasantness will wear away in time, if we live here long enough, but right now it’s a terrible price to pay for having convictions and the courage to express them. It’s worth it, though, to know that you still have the strength of character to stand up for what you believe in and not be crowded into submission to somebody else’s prejudice.

  There’s no doubt that terrible things are happening to Negroes in many places in the South these days—including murder—but I can’t imagine any place where there could possibly be more subtle hatred for the Negro than right here in Bastrop. Hatred has to be the word for it. Nothing else will express it. The Negroes know they are hated and they try to be careful not to make a move that might be displeasing to a white man and be an excuse for brutal retaliation.

  I’ve never seen a white person spit at a Negro’s face or deliberately run over a Negro child with his automobile, though I’ve heard that such things are done, but there are other things that reveal subtle hatred of Negroes.

  Not long ago a new coin-operated washateria opened in town. It was so modern and well-equipped with the most up-to-date automatic washers and dryers that everybody wanted to use it. It had soft lighting and comfortable lounge chairs and vending machines for candy and drinks. The rest rooms were painted in pastel colors and lavishly mirrored and the whole place was more like a private club than anything else. As to be expected, there was a large sign posted at the entrance, FOR THE USE OF WHITES ONLY.

  The owner of the washateria, seeing how successful it was, and being a good businessman, lost no time in finding a location for a second washateria for the exclusive use of Negroes. Identical modern equipment was installed—washers, dryers, lounge chairs, vending machines, and all the rest. The only difference was that there was no sign at the door of the newer place prohibiting its use by anybody.

  Both washaterias were open day and night. The second one had been operating for no more than a week when late one night after the last Negro customer had left, a group of white women drove up in a car and waited outside until they were sure the owner himself had gone home. Then, each woman carrying two sacks of sand, they went inside, dumped the sand into the machines, and inserted coins into the slots. The machines started automatically. And by the time they had completed their cycles every washer and dryer in the place was damaged be
yond repair.

  The owner locked the door the next day and has never opened it since. Of course, the other washateria, the one for whites only, remains in business as usual.

  That’s the way it is. And with that kind of hate and spite in the atmosphere, it’ll be a long time before anybody else will risk investing money in separate, but equal, washaterias for white and Negro.

  I’ve been told that there’s no longer a typical Southern way of life. I’m not so sure about that. Being a Northerner, now I’ll have to be shown, instead of being merely told, after what has happened here.

  17

  THE TIME-SCARRED red-brick walls of the old Bogalusa city jail have been neatly plastered with cement and coated with gleaming white paint. The stately appearance of the building in the tree shaded plaza of the Bogalusa civic center might easily mislead a stranger in town to assume at first glance that it is either one of Louisiana’s well-preserved ante-bellum mansions of historical importance or else a modern motel that had been expertly designed in neo-colonial architectural style.

  Even the white-painted iron bars over the narrow windows of the jail look as if they had been placed there as a final ornamental touch to make sure that the outward appearance of the building would be architecturally authentic in every detail.

  The Bogalusa jail looks much different on the outside in the nineteen-sixties, to be sure, but on the inside the dingy gray walls and the rusty iron cages and cell blocks look the same now as they did in the early nineteen-twenties.

  I ought to know, because long ago I spent nine days and nights in one of the ceiling-high cages. I was there because I had no money, no job, and was four days and four dollars behind in rent at a Bogalusa walk-up hotel across the street from the railroad tracks.

  It is likely that I would have spent ninety days and nights in the Bogalusa jail, and possibly even longer than that, if I had not been befriended by a fifty-year-old blue-black Negro trusty named Ramey Salty. Ramey said he might be too black-skinned to look like a real Gumbo, even if he did have straight hair and a French-English name, but that on the inside he felt just like an ordinary human being.

  When I told Ramey how I came to be there, and without prospect of being released, he volunteered to help me get out at the risk of losing his own limited freedom. He said police were good people in some ways when they wanted to be, but that it was wrong of them to keep an eighteen-year-old white boy in jail because he owed somebody four dollars and not let him get back to college and finish his education.

  Ramey Salty had been informally and unofficially sentenced to an indefinite term in jail for failing to stop making moonshine corn liquor with a homemade still in his shantytown house in the Negro quarter after several warnings by the police. He had admitted to the police that he had an uncontrollable weakness for making moonshine for himself and his friends and he himself had suggested that he be locked up in jail from dusk to dawn every night so he could keep out of trouble.

  The only condition Ramey had proposed, and it was an acceptable one to the police, was that he would be permitted to leave jail during the daylight hours to work at his shoe-shining job in a barber shop near the railroad station. After two years it was still a satisfactory arrangement to both Ramey and the police.

  As Ramey said about the arrangement, he was so well satisfied that he hoped he would never have to move out of jail and go back to shantytown in the Negro quarter. He said he had no wife to fuss at him for staying out at night and no house rent to pay every Saturday. There was running water and inside toilet in jail and he received two free meals of collards, fatback, and cornbread every day of the week. Besides, he made enough money shining shoes at the barber shop to pay for the clothes and tobacco he needed and to buy a pint of ready-made whisky whenever he pleased.

  But there was even more to it than that. Ramey told me in confidence, after making me promise not to say a word about it to the police, that he had a secret reason for being so pleased about the arrangement he had made. His secret was that he was the only Negro in Bogalusa who could work and live in the segregated white part of the city and not have to go back to the Negro quarter to sleep at night. He said his ambition was to keep that distinction as long as he lived and then take the secret with him to his grave without white people in Bogalusa ever realizing that he had crossed their color line.

  However, Ramey Salty was unhappy about my being in jail. He had told me the first time we talked about it that a colored man had to get used to being put in jail for little or no reason, but that he did not think it was right for the police to lock up a white boy who had been cheated out of his pay by a dishonest boss and left stranded in town without enough money to pay four dollars for room rent.

  I had told Ramey about not having been paid after working for three nights selling magazine subscriptions to sawyers and papermakers in the Bogalusa lumber and pulpwood mills and that I owed four dollars at the hotel where I had been living. The owner of the walk-in hotel had locked me out of my room, taken my suitcase for nonpayment of rent, and then called the police and told them that I was planning to leave town without paying what I owed him.

  Ramey is dead now, more than forty years later, and I regret that I did not have an opportunity to see him again and tell him once more how grateful I was for his helping me get out of jail. Once I did send twenty dollars in a letter addressed to him in care of the Bogalusa jail, but I never knew if he received it.

  It is good to know, though, that Ramey Salty never lost his dawn-to-dusk freedom from jail and did succeed in maintaining his residence in the segregated white section of Bogalusa. He continued to be a trusty until he died and was buried by the police in the Negro cemetery adjoining the Bogalusa Country Club. His grave is only a chip-shot over the fence from the restricted white-only golf course.

  What had happened before I was befriended by Ramey was that spring had come early that year to South Carolina, where I was a student, and in the first week of April, without informing my parents or leaving a forwarding address, I had packed my suitcase and gone to New Orleans. There I soon found out that shucking oysters was a specialized job that required considerable training, that stevedoring was work that was done with seasoned muscles, and that dishwashing in a French Quarter café was monotonous and confining and something easily eliminated as even a temporary trade.

  A want-ad in a newspaper offered exactly the kind of position I considered suitable. Three young men and two young women, no experience necessary, and college students preferred, were to be offered the opportunity to join an executive staff engaged in conducting a circulation campaign for a major magazine.

  I was among the first applicants to knock on the crew manager’s hotel door that morning in New Orleans and become one of the five new members of the executive staff. At midnight all of us got on the train to Bogalusa, a sawmill and pulpwood town on the Pearl River in Southeast Louisiana, and we were given free copies of the magazine to look at along the way. We arrived at six o’clock the next morning and got rooms on the second floor of the walk-up hotel near the railroad station.

  The crew manager, a blond young man who appeared to be about twenty-seven or twenty-eight and who carried a very small suitcase for what he had said would be a month of travel, told us that it was against the company policy to advance money for meals and other personal expenses. However, he promised us that the circulation campaign would begin promptly at seven o’clock that evening when the night shifts went to work at the mills and that we would begin earning commissions right away.

  While sitting at the window of my room in the hotel and waiting for night to come so I could make some money for a meal, I saw the crew manager take the two girls to a café across the street for breakfast. After a while the three of them came back to the room next to mine, locked the door, and stayed there until late in the afternoon. Just before dark, after several hours of squeaking bedsprings, loud giggling, and the slam-bang of upset chairs, they left the room and went across that street again f
or an early dinner.

  That night while the two girls entertained the shift superintendent in his office, we went through the mill selling dollar-a-year subscriptions to the magazine devoted to hunting, fishing, diagrams of home hobbies for men, and pictures of girls posing as artists’ models. The crew manager, right behind us, collected the subscription orders and the money after each sale. When we finished at midnight, he tore up all the subscriptions we had sold to Negroes, saying most of them could not read and none of them had any business looking at pictures of naked white girls, and told us that we would be paid the commissions we had earned—including the sales to Negroes—after he had made up his accounts in a day or two.

  After three nights of the circulation campaign, and still not having settled with us, the crew manager and the two girls disappeared. The other two salesmen had enough money of their own to pay their hotel bills and buy train tickets back to New Orleans. All I had was about forty cents in nickels and dimes.

  I had been in the Bogalusa jail for two days and nights when Ramey Salty said one of the jailers had told him that I would probably be charged with failure to pay the four-dollar hotel bill and be given a three-month sentence. Ramey said he had asked the jailers to let him pay the four dollars for me but that they would not accept the money from him. He was warned that he would get into serious trouble himself and might even lose the privilege of living there if he did not stop trying to help me get out of jail.

  On the third day at sundown when Ramey came back from the barber shop, he stopped at my cell and gave me a ham-and-cheese sandwich he had smuggled past the jailers by hiding it inside his shirt. When I saw him take out the sandwich, it was a startling reminder of the time I took pork chops to Roy at the chain-gang stockade in Georgia.