In Search of Bisco Read online

  While I was eating the sandwich, Ramey, watching me with a pleased smile covering his wrinkled dark face, said it was the closest thing to home-cooking he could smuggle into jail. For the past three days I had eaten very little of the jail meal of boiled collards, boiled fatback, and soggy cornbread handed twice a day to each prisoner—white and Negro alike—in a quart-size tin bucket.

  After I had thanked Ramey for the sandwich, he went to his cell and sat down on the bunk. He was too far away for me to be able to see what he was doing, but presently he left his cell, which the jailers never bothered to lock, and came back to my cell with his hand pressing against something else inside his shirt. Coming close to the bars, he handed me a sheet of paper, an envelope, and the stub of a pencil he had collected. I could see some of the other prisoners watching us through the bars of their cells, but none of them said anything.

  Whispering to me in order to keep the jailer in the front room from hearing him and becoming suspicious, Ramey told me what he wanted me to do. He said he knew I had parents or relatives somewhere and that he was sure I would be kept in jail for the next three months or even longer if I did not write to somebody who would be able to help me get released. He told me that it would do no good at all to give the jailers a letter to mail, because he had seen them open letters other prisoners had written and then, after reading the letters, throw them into the wastebasket.

  The lights in the cell room had been turned off for the night and it would be morning before I could see well enough to write a letter. And by then Ramey would have left for the day and be unable to mail the letter for me. He did not want to waste a whole day getting my letter into the mail, and he told me to write it as soon as there was enough light in the morning. Then I was to climb to the top of the cell and look out the window for a small colored boy who would be playing in the weeds behind the jail.

  Ramey said all I had to do then was to whistle to the boy and drop the letter through the bars. He said the boy would take the letter to him at the barber shop and then he would take care of everything else after that.

  I asked Ramey why he was trying to help me the way he was doing since there were ten or twelve of us in jail and he offered no help to the others. He said everybody else ought to be kept where they were, because they had been jailed for stealing or knifing or doing something else just as bad, and that the only reason I was there was because I had been cheated and could not pay the four dollars I owed. That was when I told him about some other Negroes I had known—Bisco in Georgia and Sonny in Tennessee and Troy in Mississippi—and Ramey said he believed in friendship among the races and wished there could be more of it.

  That was when he asked if I had seen Bisco recently. After telling him that I had not seen Bisco since that time when I wanted to spend the night in his house, I said that I did not know if he would still be in Middle Georgia or if he had moved away, but that I hoped to find him sometime wherever he was. Ramey said that he was going to be sure to remember the name but that he hoped he would never see Bisco in the Bogalusa jail.

  When Ramey came back to the jailhouse at his usual time at the end of the day, he told me that the letter I had dropped through the window that morning had been stamped and mailed and that he was sure something good would happen within a few days. After a while he admitted that something had gone wrong in the beginning but that everything had worked out all right in the end. What had happened was that the colored boy who took my letter was not the one Ramey had sent. However, he had found out who the boy was and got the letter back and then had mailed it himself.

  In the afternoon of the fifth day after Ramey had mailed the letter, one of the jailers unlocked my cell door and told me I was free to leave. I had written the letter to my father in Georgia and I expected to see him waiting for me. Instead, the secretary of the Bogalusa YMCA introduced himself and said that my father had telegraphed money for the hotel bill and a train ticket to Atlanta.

  When we got to the YMCA, I took a shower, changed clothes—the secretary had already paid the four-dollar hotel bill and got my suitcase—and then I ate a meal of something other than collards, fat-back, and cornbread for the first time in nine days.

  On the way to the railroad station to take the train to Birmingham, and from there to Atlanta, I told the secretary I wanted to stop at the barber shop and see Ramey Salty before I left Bogalusa and thank him for all he had done for me. While I was eating dinner at the YMCA, I had told the secretary that Ramey urged me to write the letter and then mailed it for me.

  The secretary shook his head emphatically and said it would be better if I left town without seeing Ramey. Then he told me that the police were trying to find out how I had smuggled a letter out of jail and that they suspected Ramey of having mailed it for me. He said Bogalusa was a small town and that if I were seen talking to Ramey at the barber shop, the police would be certain to find out about it and would probably take away his privileges. I knew that if that happened he would have to leave jail and go back to the Negro quarter to live.

  I left Bogalusa without seeing Ramey Salty again. Knowing how much he wanted to live on the white side of town, I was sure thereafter that it was a favor Ramey would appreciate more than any other thing I could have done for him.

  18

  THERE ARE NOT MANY things in modern times that have had the endurance and tenacity to span fifty years without perceptible change. But, as if to prove that some things do resist mutation, the landscape surrounding an early homeplace in Coweta County in Middle Georgia can still present a familiar appearance even after a half-century.

  The red clay hills are undoubtedly more deeply eroded and gully-washed, the sky-line of jagged pines probably juts higher against the horizon, the stark spires of crumbling brick chimneys have become melancholy monuments to homes burned to ashes, briar thickets and clumps of beggar-lice have been quick to claim possession of abandoned cotton fields, and the gaunt granite gravestones in the cemetery have taken on the somber gray moss of age and oblivion.

  Just the same, here and now, and unyielding to time, meandering minnow-rippled creeks continue to run their age-old courses, the cut-bank clay is still bright red in color, sassafras saplings sprout bountifully in the hedgerows, crows caw mournfully in the corn fields, and, as always, the crooked dirt roads inevitably lead to back-country isolation and loneliness.

  Once, and not so long ago in history, either, this was Indian country—the hunting grounds of the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and the Creeks. Then for a century and longer it has been the home of the white landowner, the sharecropper, and the poor buckra, and, likewise, a place of living for the mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon descendants of the Geechee Negroes who migrated to the Middle Georgia uplands from the lowland plantations after freedom from slavery.

  This buckshot soil and wiregrass land between the rock-ledged Piedmont in the north and the fertile earth in the south has sustained life for generations but it has failed to enrich it. It is the nature of such medial land to ensnare the unwary with generous promises in the spring and then fail to fulfill its pledges in the autumn. Nevertheless, during all this time, people with valiant hope remain and wait for a better year to come.

  Bisco’s chink-log birthplace had disappeared from sight and without even a chimney brick remaining to show for it. The bucket-windlass well had been filled with the brick and rubble of the house and there were not even stumps left of the leafy chinaberry trees. Together with the cotton field and the blackberry thicket, all the land had been contoured and seeded and fenced for a cattle pasture.

  What was left of my own birthplace by the side of the road was merely a rubble of crumbled chimney brick. The ownership of the land had changed several times during the past decades and very few people remained who had knowledge or recollection of anyone, white or Negro, who had lived in the neighborhood so long ago. Some of the previous landowners and storekeepers of the community had moved to nearby towns or to adjoining counties and others were buried under the o
ak trees in the white cemetery at the crossroads.

  Also, many Negroes had left Coweta County in the nineteen-twenties to work in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia and had remained there to live. Later, others had gone to Atlanta and Washington to attend school or to seek jobs and had never returned.

  And so at first, no one could be found who recognized the name Bisco, or even Nabisco or Frisco or Brisco, although there were a few Negroes on surrounding farms who were between sixty and eighty years old and had lived in the community all their lives.

  A deeply wrinkled Negro woman, white haired and past seventy, was living alone in a one-room cabin at the end of a long path through a cotton field. Geechee-mulatto in coloring and stoop-backed after a lifetime of washing clothes and picking cotton, she said that she had always lived in the neighborhood and thought she knew everybody during that time who had been born and raised within three or four miles.

  If I only knowed his last name, or his daddy’s name, she said, I might could maybe put something enough together to figure out just who he’s apt to be and where to find him if he’s still alive and around here somewhere. Everybody colored I speak to goes to preaching at the China Grove African Church—leastways they go to preaching there when they get jobbed hard about it or had a bad nightmare about hell-fire and hurry to the church to save their souls.

  Nobody can’t keep from knowing folks if you make a habit of going to preaching at the church all the time like I do. I’ve been a sister in the church a good part of all my life and that’s the best way to remember folks by name and looks and the promises they make to support the preacher. That’s because a good sister has to help the deacons keep after the sinners and backsliders and pester them to reach down deep and put in some money so the preacher’ll have a little ready cash to live on.

  It just aint right to have to stand by and see a hard-up preacher get out in the field in the hot sun every day but Sunday and grow cotton and corn for a living like ordinary folks has to do.

  And it don’t look no better to go by and see a preacher slopping hogs and feeding chickens for his whole living, neither. But it looks like they had to do a little of that. None of them never gets enough cash money from the church collections to live on. Maybe somewhere else the preachers do, but not around here they don’t.

  What I was aiming to say was that who you’re talking about might come back to mind if I could just shut my eyes and see what he looked like sitting in a pew at the church or standing up singing. If I had that much of a lead, then I’d be sure to remember him, because he’d be bound to be somebody I used to have to track down in the field or follow home after the preaching to argue with him about paying a little more cash money to help keep the preacher and his family going.

  When folks don’t pay the preacher enough for him to get by on without having to do ordinary work on the side, the first thing you know he’s going to pick up and go off to some other place in a different part of the country where he can make a fresh new start all over again and get paid real cash money for praying and preaching. There’s been preachers right here at the China Grove African Church who stayed only two or three months or so and then picked up and left just for that reason and I couldn’t blame them none at all.

  I always worked hard and done my best to collect money for the preachers. But the way it’s now the young folks around here has got the habit of claiming they don’t have no spare money to hand out like that. That’s not exactly a sinful lie, neither. It’s mostly the truth when they say they don’t have no spare money.

  I know about that. The money’s all gone to pay for something before it gets to be spare. Nowadays when somebody gets hold of some money, they spend it as fast as they can. What don’t go to put down on the charges at the stores they sign up for, they spend to buy gas for their old car and drive down the road to Luthersville or up to Newnan to visit and have a good time.

  Now, when you come right down to it, I just can’t get my mind to remember nobody named Bisco or nothing like that. But I’m downright sure he wasn’t no preacher. There’s never been a preacher around here with a name like that.

  A mile farther down the narrow dirt road, a gray-haired tobacco-brown Negro who appeared to be at least seventy years old was sitting on a bench close to the sunny side of the two-room tenant house. He was wearing a tattered gray sweater, patched overalls, mud-caked shoes, and a shapeless black-felt winter hat. At the rear of the house, his wife was taking clothes from an iron washpot and hanging them on the garden fence. Wrapped in a colorful shawl, but shivering in the cool spring air, she too was elderly and her skin coloring was a faded shade of brown.

  Surrounding the weather-gray wooden house were several acres of sharecropping cotton land. Last year’s stunted brown cotton stalks were still standing in the field as if to be a forewarning of another year’s meager crop to come from the crusty buckshot soil.

  I seem to recollect a little bit about who you’re talking about, he said. I can’t remember nothing about what his whole true name was, besides Bisco and Nabisco or something like that, but I used to live over near there where you said the house was where he lived used to be. I used to see his daddy, too, but his daddy died a long time ago. After his daddy died, that old house just rotted away and fell down and the white man bulldozed it away to get rid of it for his cattle pasture. I don’t know exactly where his mammy went after that. I reckon she moved away to town somewhere.

  Anyhow. The white man who owned the land over there got rid of what was left of that old house and then plowed right through the yard and where the house was when he got ready to turn all his land to pasturing for some cows. That was while a big war was going on. That boy went away to the war and stayed somewhere a long time. Then when he came back, he went to work for wages at a sawmill not far from here. Then it seems to me like he got in some kind of trouble talking too much and went away again somewhere for a while.

  I just can’t think exactly what that boy’s trouble was about—except maybe talking back to a white man out of turn. Anyhow. He went up North somewhere, I heard, and stayed up there till he got word his mammy died. She’d already been brought back here from town and buried in the China Grove cemetery by the time he got here, but he bought a tombstone and set it on her grave.

  I know exactly where that tombstone’s at in the cemetery and I could show it to you if I had me a way to get there. My old legs aint what they used to be. I has a hard time following the plow out there in the field and that makes me have to sit down and rest a lot when I ought to keep on plowing but can’t.

  I still don’t remember what that boy’s trouble was at the sawmill, except talking. He didn’t steal nothing and he didn’t cut nobody and he didn’t try to fight nobody. There wasn’t no shooting or knifing, like it’s sometimes claimed by the white folks when a colored gets in trouble. And I’m positive it wasn’t nothing about molesting a white woman, neither. It was all done talking too much out of turn to a white man. That’s nearly always the way trouble gets started for the colored.

  Anyhow. Now I seem to remember more about it when I keep on thinking about it. Something about his wages. He said his pay was shorted. That’s what it was. He claimed he got short paid working overtime at the sawmill on a Saturday all day long and only got paid half-day regular wages. I don’t know the right about it. Anyhow. The white boss said he wasn’t going to pay him nothing more at all and told Bisco to shut his mouth about it or else get clear out of the country in a hurry. That Bisco was a big strong man then, but he had sense enough to walk off and not start a fight with the white boss. That’s when he left here and went up North somewhere, I reckon. Then like I said, he heard about his mammy being dead and he came back and put up that tombstone on her grave in the China Grove cemetery. He was good to his old mammy—both when she was alive and dead. That’s the kind of man Bisco was.

  The more I sit here and think about it now, more of it comes back to mind. Bisco settled down in Coweta County after that and went to
sharecropping and got married and had some children. That wife he married was a perky young one. Maybe no more than fourteen or fifteen at the time and mighty good looking. She wasn’t a real black girl. She was a heap lighter in color than some white folks I’ve seen. That Bisco wasn’t no black boy, neither. He was real tan and more so than me.

  Anyhow. Some white folks who moved here from somewhere else and bought some farm land got to talking about how his wife was too light-colored even for a Geechee and said Bisco married a white woman from the North and was trying to pass her off for colored so he could live with her. I never did know the truth about that and made it no business of mine to find out. Anyhow. These white folks said they wouldn’t stand for no colored man living with no white woman and getting in the bed with her and they told him to get shed of her or else get out of the country himself. White or colored, I don’t care which, nobody wants to get shed of his wife if she suits him and’s the kind he wants to keep. Anyhow. Bisco said he wasn’t going to do nothing about it like he was told.

  Some good white folks sided with Bisco and said they didn’t think it was right to make him get shed of his wife. But those other kind of white folks who started the trouble was the rich new people who owned a heap of the land and they stirred up some of the poor buckras to nightride.

  I didn’t think none of the whites who’d always lived around here would go against our people like that, but some of them did. That’s when the night-riders went to Bisco’s house one night and told him he had to sunrise the next morning to get clear out of Coweta County and never come back again as long as he lived.

  Anyhow. Everybody knows what some white men’ll do when they get a grudge against the colored and talk like that. If they go nightriding, they can make a colored disappear and you never see him again unless someday you happen to come across of what’s left of him in a swamp somewhere. Anyhow. Bisco went ahead and done what I’d done. He loaded up his automobile with belongings and put his wife and children in it and drove off to somewhere long before sunrise.