In Search of Bisco Read online

  That’s why we don’t want those part-white Geechees from Georgia coming over here. I don’t know none of them by name and wouldn’t want to. One of them might’ve been named Bisco or all of them might’ve been called that. Anyway, some of them say they’re preachers and others claim to have a college education, but all of them are trouble-makers just like the white Yankees with their mister-nigger television shows. You know what I mean. It’s those television shows that come down from the North with mister-niggers shaking hands and cutting up with white people—Mister Sammy Davis, Mister Harry Belafonte, Mister Louis Armstrong, Mister Nat King Cole. That’s the kind of thing that puts wrong notions in our colored people’s heads.

  I’ll tell you how good we treat the colored. Just last year we set aside some of our best city land and made it into a park just for them so they’d have a separate park just like the white people do. And that’s not all, neither. We’ve built new schools for them with our own tax money that are more modern now than the old ones the white children have to go to.

  Now, you can see why colored people don’t have the right to complain about how they’re treated. If anybody has a right to complain, it’s the white children who have to go past those fine modern colored schools on the way to their old run-down ones. The colored people would’ve been satisfied with the schools they used to have if it hadn’t been for all the agitation by the government in Washington about providing the colored with new school buildings as good as ours after we worked for what we’ve got all our lives and they didn’t. It wasn’t a fair thing for the people in Washington to make us take our tax money and do that. It looks like the votes these days somehow end up going to the wrong kind of politicians.

  An elderly Negro laborer wearing tattered overalls and shredded shoes came into the store and bought a pound of lard and a bag of grits. As the storekeeper took the money and put it into the cash drawer, he told the Negro to be sure to hurry back as soon as he had enough money to buy something else. Waiting until the Negro had left the store, he said that colored money was just as good as a white man’s money and that he was always glad to get as much of it as he could.

  I don’t know why it is that there’s so much talk against us down here in the South, he said. It’s bound to be either ignorance or meanness, though. You read in the newspapers all the time these days about somebody up North saying we discriminate against colored people. You saw me take that colored money just now. I sell to the colored just like I do to anybody else. I couldn’t stay in business to the end of the month if I didn’t sell to them. I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t. Half my trade is with the colored.

  I don’t know what in hell’s wrong with them up North. Trouble-making people up there are always saying we make the colored live where we want them to live and won’t let them live where they want to. That’s not the way it is. Colored people are used to living among themselves and that’s the way the good ones want it to be. We don’t have a single law keeping them from moving to a house in our part of town. There’s no law saying they have to stay down on the southside, neither. When you have a good custom like we do, the government has no business making laws, neither.

  It just wouldn’t happen that some colored people had enough money to pay high rent or buy a house in our part of town. The colored people are just too poor to do that. They have a hard time paying a few dollars a month rent to live in their part of town as it is. I own a few houses down on the southside and I know how hard it is every month getting them to pay me what they owe. They’re always complaining that they want city water piped inside the house and a flushtoilet instead of an outside privy or that the roof leaks when it rains or that the front porch is about to fall through, but that’s only their way of trying to put off paying the rent when it’s due and I don’t pay no attention to that kind of complaining.

  There’s no need to worry about a colored doctor or school teacher or somebody like that getting rich enough to rent or buy a house in the white part of town. That’s nothing at all to worry about and I can tell you why. All the property in our part of town belongs to white people and you won’t see white people renting or selling to the colored. Nobody of us would do a thing like that. I know that for sure.

  Here’s how I happen to know it. Some of us got together one night not long ago with the real estate people in town and talked it over. All the real estate people said on their word of honor they’d never touch a deal like that, no matter how much money it cost them in commissions.

  When we had this meeting, somebody asked what would happen if an estate came up for settlement and under the terms of the will the law required that a certain piece of property in our part of town had to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. That’s a serious thing, because if there is such a provision in a will, it’s enforceable by law. But that didn’t bother us for long. Some of the lawyers at the meeting told us how to get around it.

  What they said was for us to take care of anything like that in a quiet, orderly, business-like way and there wouldn’t be no trouble at all. I’ll tell you how the lawyers said for us to go about it.

  If one of the colored out-bid everybody else and got legal ownership of a house in our part of town, some of us would have a serious talk with him and convince him he’d better listen to what we said and sell it back to us in a hurry.

  That might take time and a lot of serious talking, because he might have the backing of some trouble-makers somewhere, but we’d pressure him enough till he ended up selling to us. We’d remind him how good we’ve been to his people in the past and tell him we’ll keep on being good to them as long as they cooperate with us. We wouldn’t let him forget about the colored park we set aside just for them and the big new high school we built for them with our own tax money. And we’d tell him we’d hate to have to take all that back.

  Then we’d remind him how we arranged for the colored to have a night of their own once a week at the drive-in movie out on the highway east of town so they could sit in their cars and see the pictures like anybody else. Even if everything else failed to convince him, he’d listen to reason then for sure. The drive-in movie is the one thing the colored don’t want taken away from them. That’s the one big night of the week for them now.

  The good colored people know what we’ve done for them and they don’t want to go back to having nothing again like they used to. Of course, there’s some trouble-makers among them who keep on saying they want more and more all the time. That’s the kind who don’t want to be satisfied with what they’ve got. As soon as they get one thing, like a park or new school building of their own, they turn around and say they want something more.

  But, all in all, the good colored people will listen to reason when we talk to them. They’re just like little children and you have to know how to treat them like you do your own children and give them some candy when you want them to do what you say. That’s why, if we didn’t know how to handle them, the colored in this country would go hog-wild in no time at all.

  If the government in Washington would quit passing laws favoring the colored, we wouldn’t have no trouble at all with them. Ever since I can remember, that café next door to here has had the no-service-to-colored sign on the wall. When the government says that sign has to come down to favor the colored, and the colored are let in, you won’t find me in there mixing with them.

  I do business with the colored here in my store, but they stand up and don’t sit down and they leave as soon as they hand over the money for what they buy. And I’m not going to that café next door and sit down and eat with them. That’s where I draw the color line and I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to make me step over it. They haven’t got enough soldiers in the army to make me go against my principles.

  And my principles are just as hard-shelled about living next door to them as they are about eating in the same room with them. Somebody mentioned at that meeting I was telling you about that everybody ought to be thinking about what to do if they sent s
oldiers here to help the colored to move in a house in the white part of town in case they somehow managed to get legal ownership of it and wouldn’t stand still to listen to reason.

  I don’t know all what might happen, even if he did have the law on his side and the soldiers backing him up, but something’d be bound to. I wouldn’t want to see that time come. Because I believe in peaceful living with the colored as long as they live separate. But if he went ahead and moved in anyhow after he’d been warned, and then wouldn’t budge—well, there’s just too many people in town like me who wouldn’t stand for it once the sun had set on him.

  I’m not coming right out and saying this or that about it now. But you remember that place in the Bible where it says something about somebody sitting on a pile of ashes. Well, that’s what I’m thinking about right now. I reckon you know what I mean.

  4

  IN THE EYES OF a twelve-year-old boy living many years ago in the Newberry County uplands of South Carolina, not far below the Piedmont Plateau, an uncle who said he knew the reason why all Negroes did not have the same shade of coloring was undoubtedly one of the wisest men in the world.

  As I remembered Bisco several years before in Middle Georgia, he had mulatto-tan coloring of skin and I thought Negroes everywhere were more or less the same in appearance. Then one day at the railroad station my uncle and I saw a Gullah-speaking Negro who had come to Newberry County on the train from Charleston to preach at the African Baptist Church.

  The evangelist with the shiny coal-black skin was no larger in size than any other Negro I had ever seen, and he wore ordinary clothing like everybody else, but he was so startlingly black that he looked as if he had been smeared with stove-pipe soot. I was sure he had come straight from Africa and not from anywhere in South Carolina.

  My uncle had been to Charleston and he said he would recognize a Gullah-speaking Negro from the Carolina Low Country at first sight anywhere in the world. More than that, he said, he would be able to recognize a Gullah in pitch-black darkness without even being able to see him, because Gullahs spoke in a strange mumbling dialect of their own that even baffled other Negroes. He said if you wanted to hear what a foreign language sounded like, all you had to do was close your eyes and listen to Gullah.

  The Negroes who went to the African Baptist Church were not able to understand a word of the Gullah preacher’s sermon. They said he talked in such an unknown tongue that there was no chance of their being able to get religion in a whole week of preaching. Instead of staying to preach for a week at the revival meeting, he delivered only one sermon, took up only one collection, and then got on the next train to go back to Charleston.

  As I recall what my uncle told me, the Low Country Negroes came to be called Gullah because that was the sound of the word they uttered when they tried to say they had been brought from Angola to America by slave traders. Since the Angola slaves on a Carolina plantation received no schooling whatsoever and had no opportunity to learn English, they created a dialect of their own by trying to apply the English pronunciation of their white overseers to the words of their African language.

  My uncle said that after many years of associating with Gullahs following the Civil War the white people of the Low Country acquired the same Gullah dialect in order to be able to do business with them in stores and to give them instructions as servants and laborers. Ever since then white Charlestonians have always been able to understand each other when they talk, and Gullahs likewise understand them, but Carolina uplanders have never been able to comprehend much of what they are trying to say.

  This was when I asked my uncle why some Negroes were brown or tan in color like Bisco and others were shiny coal-black like the Gullah preacher from Charleston. He said I was at the age when I ought to know about such things and that it was a good time to tell me.

  First of all, he said he was not going to tell me what he thought was right or wrong about race-mixing, because the best education a man could get was in learning how to think for himself about such things so he could form his own conclusions about what was good or bad in life.

  Then he said that when the first Negroes were brought from Angola in West Africa and sold at the slave markets in Charleston, all of them were as black as the Gullah preacher we had seen. Most of them were kept on the large plantations in the Low Country near Charleston and never got any farther inland than that, but that some of them were taken a hundred or two hundred miles away to work on the small farms in the uplands of South Carolina.

  The slaves that were brought to Newberry County were spread over the country in small groups of one female and two or three males to a farm. The farms there were much smaller in acreage than the plantations in the Low Country and a farmer did not need as many slaves as the planter who owned thousands of acres. The reason why there were girls and women among the Gullahs when they were brought to the uplands from Charleston was because every owner wanted a female slave so that children would be born.

  My uncle said this was a profitable system for the upland farmers. When the slave children grew up, they could be put to work in the fields or sold for a profit. By the time the Civil War ended, there were Gullahs spread over the whole state. And that was when the first mulattoes began to appear. The Confederate soldiers, and the Yankees, were the fathers of them, and whenever you saw a mulatto or quadroon or octoroon, you could be sure he would not have to reach very far back to claim kinship with a white family. He said he had seen quite a few whites and Negroes in Newberry County who looked almost like twins except in color.

  I asked him what the difference was between a mulatto and a quadroon or octoroon and why Bisco was much lighter in color than his mother and father.

  He said I might not understand everything until I was a little older, but that the mixing of races was something I was going to hear about for the rest of my life and that I ought to know all I could for my own good how it came about.

  The way he explained it was that if Bisco was lighter in color than his parents, it was because he had more white blood than they did. He said it was as simple as that. When you mix black and white, it’s going to be some shade in between that will vary with the proportions of the mixture. When the races mix the first time, the color is likely to be brown, and then the color becomes a lighter tan each time the races mix after that. If the mixing is kept up long enough, somebody will eventually be light enough in color to pass for a white person.

  Anyway, my uncle said, it’s no miracle and there’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s merely a natural result. One way it happens is when a white boy living in the country or a small town like this one is too bashful or can’t find a chance to do anything sexually with a white girl. But a boy can have a strong urge to do something about the call of manhood when he’s fifteen or sixteen and a good-looking Negro girl might coax him just enough to let him know that she’s willing for him to do what he wants with her.

  When that happens, color won’t have a thing in the world to do with it—it’s girl you want. You know about some of the older boys going off to the woods in the daytime after school or hurrying to get out at night after supper. It’s not always the same, because sometimes boys will make up masturbation clubs and put up a target to aim at. But a lot of times they go off like that because they’re either looking for a Negro girl or already know where to find one. And then if she has a baby, there’s another mulatto or quadroon born. Most white people don’t like to talk about such things and pretend not to notice it, but it’s something you ought to know about before you get to that age.

  After that I asked him if white girls ever had mulatto babies. He shook his head emphatically.

  I wouldn’t say so. That time may come somewhere in the future, but right now in South Carolina it’s something as rare as seeing an albino walking down the street. I’ve heard of it happening, but I’ve never seen proof of it. I don’t know why it is, but white girls just don’t seem to want to mix with the other race like white boys do. All I can
think of is they must have a good reason for not wanting to mix. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll have a mulatto baby and be sent away from home to live somewhere in secret.

  The risk of having a mulatto baby is one thing that would ordinarily stop a white girl, and they can be real strong about guarding their sex when they want to. Anyway, let’s leave it at that, because I’m not going around asking them about it. That would take more nerve than I’ve got.

  There was still one thing that had not been explained, and that was the reason why the Gullah preacher from Charleston was blacker than any Negro I had seen in any other place I had been in the South. My uncle, who had lived in Virginia and North Carolina, as well as in South Carolina, said he thought he could explain that.

  Those plantations down in the Carolina Low Country were the largest of all and the owners were the richest, he said. The plantation owners contracted with the slave traders to buy Gullahs straight from Africa, kept them in herds when they worked the crops, and put them under lock and key at night. There were only a few girls and women among them—only enough to do cooking and housework—and when one of them had a baby, it was as black as the rest of them.

  For another thing, the owners didn’t need females to breed like it was done on the small farms in the upland country. The owners down there could buy new slaves at auction or have them shipped from Africa a lot cheaper than they could be raised on the plantation. It would’ve hurt their profits if they’d had to provide living space and feed young ones till they were twelve or fourteen years old and strong enough to do a man’s work in the fields.

  And there’s still more to it. To keep the white overseers and guards from wanting to mix with the few Gullah slave females, which would’ve produced babies the plantation owner didn’t want to be burdened with, they paid white women to come from England and let the overseers and guards pick and choose among them to marry. This is the main reason why the Gullah females in the Low Country never had a chance to have mulatto babies and why the race stayed pure black.