In Search of Bisco Page 4

  Then when the Civil War was over and the Gullahs were freed, most of them went straight to Charleston and never left it. Charleston was where they landed when they were brought from Africa, and maybe they thought they could get on a ship and go back there to stay.

  Anyway, he said, Charleston is a pinched-in little place almost surrounded like an island by rivers and bays, and people who live there, white and Gullah, have grown to be satisfied to stay and die right there. A few Gullahs in Charleston who happened to be born mulatto are the only ones likely to leave it and go North. All this is why there’re enough pure-blooded Gullahs in Charleston to keep them being the blackest Negroes you’ll find anywhere this side of Africa.

  I asked my uncle if he thought Bisco’s parents or grandparents were Gullahs who had left Charleston and moved to Middle Georgia.

  That wouldn’t be likely, he told me. Gullahs never went far in that direction. They weren’t the roaming kind. They stayed close to home even after being freed slaves. That’s because they were always hoping that ship was coming to Charleston and take them back to Africa and they didn’t want to miss it and be left behind.

  The Georgia slaves were Geechees, and Geechees lost no time turning mulatto and quadroon and all the lighter colors. I don’t know where they came from in Africa, but they were called Geechees to start with and they’ve been Geechees ever since. They were given that name because when they were brought from Africa and landed at Savannah, they were shipped right away up the Ogeechee River for a hundred miles and more and then auctioned by the traders to plantation owners all over East and Middle Georgia. Those plantations were a lot smaller than the ones in the Carolina Low Country and slaves cost much more delivered there than they did at the seaports. That’s how they came to be so widely scattered over Georgia and so few of them to a plantation.

  What made the real difference in Georgia, he said, was that female slaves were just as valuable deep in the country as males were because it was cheaper to breed and raise slaves there than it was to buy them in Savannah.

  And one more thing. There weren’t many white women in Georgia in those days, but there were plenty of Geechee girls. It stands to reason that the white owners would put them to doing housework and such things instead of sending them to work in the fields. What I’m trying to say is that the best looking of them were probably kept close to the house so they’d always be available day or night for sex cooperation.

  And that’s my theory why it didn’t take the Geechees in Georgia very long to turn light in color.

  I asked him if he thought a Negro like Bisco would be glad to be light tan in color instead of being as black as a Gullah.

  My uncle said he had no way of knowing how Bisco felt about it, but that all the mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons he knew were uncomplaining about their color. He said some of them were so proud of their light color that they even had a high society of their own and that maybe Bisco would be a member of it.

  5

  THE FERTILE FARM LAND of East Georgia was a desolate expanse of human poverty in the nineteen-thirties. The countryside was devastated by merciless economic erosion. The people were ravaged by relentless hardship. It was a whole decade of widespread economic and psychological depression. Farm mortgages were foreclosed, business enterprises went bankrupt, doctors bartered services for chickens, lawyers gladly accepted fees in cows and hogs, life-long homes were lost to the tax collector, and hopes for the education of children were abandoned.

  That era of hard-times in the nineteen-thirties is still vividly remembered by many people in Bisco Country as being the time of day-to-day struggle to get food for physical survival. Dollar bills that were passed from hand to hand became limp and threadbare, and some of them were so tattered that they had to be held together with safety pins. The era will always be a shuddering memory to an older generation.

  Now, in the nineteen-sixties, a full generation later, the rich mulatto land from the Savannah to the Flint rivers has the appearance of a country untouched in all its history by adversity and a younger generation has come of age knowing of the past only by hearsay. The rutted tobacco roads have been paved, cattle graze on the sloping green fields, diversified agriculture has replaced one-crop farming, modern brick homes have been built where once there were weather-gray wooden shacks, and industrial plants, large and small, provide jobs that never before existed.

  A man who was born to the country sixty years ago and who has lived there through it all might be expected to appreciate the economic changes that have taken place during his lifetime and be content with his good fortune in an age of prosperity. He has thoughts, however, that disturb his peace of mind.

  Standing now in the bright Georgia sunshine, he turns and looks thoughtfully at the shadow on the ground behind him. He is a retired farmer, sufficiently well-to-do by his standards, but he is not happy about the social and economic plight of those whose labor helped him acquire wealth and ease. His shadow is the symbol of his concern. He says he can never walk away from it.

  I’ll tell you what it is that bothers me, he says. Tourists coming and going through this part of the country between Florida and the North see only the front sides of things. They never know about the people behind it. They look at the cattle in the pastures and pass the fine brick houses along the highway and see the new factories in town, but they never have a chance to find out that there are people hidden from sight behind the hills and woods who have no share in any of it. Not a piddling dime’s worth have those people back there got of it to call their own.

  The people I’m talking about are the colored. They’re the ones the tourists fail to see, and they’re not hiding out on purpose. They are out of sight because they’ve been told to live in their segregated part of town or down the side roads in the country in shacks and sheds hardly fit to keep cows and chickens in.

  That’s right. The Negroes are even worse off now in these days than a lot of white people were in the worst days of the depression thirty years ago. The fear is that they’d get some of the money in circulation and keep a white man from getting it. That’s why they can’t open a store and try to get trade from white people. They can’t get a job meeting white people face-to-face—unless you call collecting garbage that kind of job. They can’t buy a lot and build a house, or rent one, neither, outside the place they’ve been told to live for the past hundred years.

  If you mention my name around here, you’ll hear me called a lot of names. You’ll hear me called a crackpot, a trouble-maker, a lunatic, a nigger-lover, and a few other things, including being an out-and-out communist. They say I’m encouraging the Negro people to break down segregation and that if I know what’s good for me I’ll shut my mouth and keep it shut—or else move to the North or some other place like that.

  But I’m used to hearing what they say about me and it don’t bother me a bit now. I’ve lost some friends by speaking out the way I do and I’m likely to lose a lot more. My wife never opened her mouth about it one way or the other when she was around other people—she died not long ago—but they treated her the same way because of me right up to the day she died.

  I don’t worry about myself, now that my wife is dead and my children grown up and moved away. I’ve heard that some nightriders have been saying they’re going to burn a cross in my front yard and nail a warning on my door, but that’s not going to change my way of thinking. I’ve lived long enough and thought about it long enough to convince myself that I’m right. And when you’ve got the feeling that you’re right about something, you don’t have to boast about being brave—you just go ahead and do the way you think you ought to.

  I grew up in this country with colored people and I worked side-by-side with them all through the big depression and right up to the time I retired a few years ago. You just can’t know the Negroes like I’ve done for a lifetime and not treat them like you would anybody else. Not after you think about how you used to open up your dinner-pails together out there in a m
ean piece of newground or a blistering cotton patch and eat side-by-side with them in the shade of a persimmon tree at noon-time and listen to them tell you their troubles one minute and then tell a real funny story about something the next. And not after all the times when I’ve been too sick to get out of bed to feed my stock and have some of them come around to help out without being asked and then not take a dime for the favor they did. If you can’t get along in the world with people like that, you’ve got a mighty sorry excuse for living yourself.

  Once in a while, to be sure, one of them will get drunk and beat his wife and raise hell, but that’s no more than what some white men will do. And every time you show me a Negro who went off and stole something I can show you a white man who stole just as much or more some other way. When it comes to things like that, I’ve yet to see any difference at all between the races except color.

  It’s claimed all the time that the Negroes are trying to figure out ways to take what the white people have got. But that’s not exactly true. What they’re after is to make the same kind of living the white people do. That’s more like it. They want to get the things that are advertised for sale—like automobiles and furniture and new clothes. And they can’t do that if they’re not allowed to run a business in a part of town where they can make money or if they can’t buy a farm with the kind of land that’ll grow more on it than chiggers and cockleburs and beggar-lice.

  The storekeepers and farmers are scared of the competition and fear the Negroes will get ahead of them and make some of the money they’re getting now. The storekeepers want to take in the Negro’s dollar and the farmer wants him to keep on working for next-to-nothing shares or wages. That’s what the trouble’s usually about. And it’s the same in town or country. It’s the scramble for money. Everybody has to scramble for it, but everybody ought to have equal chance.

  You’ll hear some people argue that the Negroes are better off now than they’ve ever been before and that they ought to be satisfied and quit complaining.

  They’ll argue that the colored people get paid in money now, and not in flour and lard and old clothes like they used to be. They’ll say there hasn’t been a lynching in the county in thirty years. They’ll tell you about how their taxes went up to pay the cost of new school buildings built just for the colored and how much tax money it takes to provide teachers for colored children.

  All that’s true enough as far as it goes, but times have changed and it still don’t amount to enough when you look around and see how the colored have to live in shacks and sheds all over the country.

  Another argument you’ll hear all the time is that if you let the Negroes have an inch about one thing it’ll encourage them to do as they please about everything and take a mile. They say that’ll lead to Negroes moving next door to white people and raping your wife and daughters. If that’s what they’re after, they would’ve been doing it for the past thirty years, because they’ve been living out there in the county on the farms side-by-side all that time.

  The only raping that I know about being done in this part of the country is when white men go after Negro girls, and there’s been plenty of that ever since I can remember. Of course, it’s not exactly fair to call it raping, because any female likes to have a man go through the motions of chasing her some. What happens then is something that ought to be called by some other name. Some want to be caught and some say they don’t, and that’s why I wouldn’t want to have to decide what the difference was between courting and raping. Either way, though, it’s all for the same purpose. I ought to know about that. I was a young man myself once.

  You’ve read a lot in the newspapers about picketing and demonstrations and sit-ins and such things in the big cities in Georgia. There hasn’t been anything like that here yet and there may never be. The reason I say that is because it’s something for the big cities where enough Negroes live to make it worthwhile.

  In small towns like this, people know the Negroes by name and they’d likely lose what jobs they did have if they organized something like that. That’s why I think the best places for Negroes to work at getting the rights they’re entitled to under the law are the big cities like Atlanta and Macon and Savannah, where they’ve got plenty of students and others at the right age not to be scared off. Their young people are the best ones for it. Their old people are going to be cautious till they can see daylight.

  Anyhow, no matter what the law says, it’s going to take time. Make no mistake about it. There’re plenty of white people in the cities who call themselves nigger-haters just like some do in the small towns, and they’re the kind who’ll find a way to make a lot of trouble for Negroes no matter what the civil rights law says. People who shoot doves out of season and bootleg liquor and steal gasoline from the state highway department won’t pay much attention to the civil rights law.

  The closest thing to that kind of trouble to happen here was when two Negroes from the North stopped in town and tried to get a room in a motel where the owner said he had no vacancies. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not about not having a vacancy in the motel, but, anyhow, the two Negroes started complaining and he called the police. The police took them to the city limits and warned them that if they came back to town they’d be charged with disturbing the peace and end up staying in jail for three months. They must have gone away because I never heard of a court case about it.

  People who call me a nigger-lover and all the other things say if I’d smell with my nose as much as I talk with my mouth that I’d change my mind in a hurry about the way I take up for the colored. You hear things like that all the time. What they claim is that the Negroes belong to a race that the law shouldn’t allow to come anywhere near white people because they give off a bad odor. They don’t call it odor, though. They call it stink. Nigger-stink.

  Those same people claim there’s something in the Negro skin that will hardly wash off, but if it does, the smell will come right back again the next minute as strong as ever.

  Now, I’m no expert about a lot of things, and that’s one of them. And I don’t know what a real expert would say about that, neither. But if the expert was to explain it and proved it was true, I’ll bet you it’d be mighty close to the reason I’ve figured out in my own mind.

  I’ll tell you what my theory is. It’s something I’m convinced about for sure after working a lifetime side-by-side with both whites and blacks.

  The darker a man’s skin is—white man or Negro—the more he’s going to sweat when he’s out in the hot sun doing hard work. That’s where nobody’s sweat smells good and all sweat stinks. I’ve seen light-haired people with the palest kind of skin who could hardly sweat a drop when the rest of us had it running down our necks and getting our shirts sopping wet—and stinking so bad you’d puke if you hadn’t been used to it.

  On the hottest days of summer out there in the fields it was always the light-haired and pale-skinned in dry shirts who complained the most about the heat. They’d say they had to go sit in the shade ever so often to keep from getting a sunstroke while the rest of us kept on working in the heat of the sun and sweating with no trouble at all.

  That’s how I learned that anybody who sweats easy can work harder and longer in the sun than any other kind. I don’t know how it is in other places in the world and if the same thing holds true, because I’ve never been away from here to see for myself, but I know what happens here in Georgia.

  I’ve got real dark skin for a white man—and some people will say I’m eighth or sixteenth Geechee and could pass for white if I wanted to. Anyhow, I know how much I sweat. I sweat just like any Negro does. And you can’t tell me that one man’s sweat smells better than the next man just because he happens to belong to one race instead of another. If you believed that, you’d be the kind who’d believe a sweating Baptist smells different than a Methodist. Or a Democrat smells different than a Republican.

  I’m not going to say it happens to women the same way—depending on whet
her they’re light haired or dark haired. I remember hearing it said that women don’t sweat, anyhow—they only perspire. So all I’ll say is that heavy sweating is going to make a bigger stink for anybody than just a little bit of sweating— or perspiring.

  6

  ON THE GEOLOGICAL terrain map, Atlanta is located on sinuous oak-wooded hills at the stony edge of the Piedmont Plateau in North Georgia. On social, political, and educational maps, the sprawling city is situated in a region where the contrast between the progressive and the reactionary attitudes of all the Deep South is clear and sharply defined. In the category of population, it is the metropolis of Bisco Country.

  It has long been the tendency of Atlanta’s climate to inspire the family of man to propagate and nourish—without compunction—the extremes of progressive integration and reactionary discrimination. In such an environment there can be very little middle ground for the uncommitted man to stand on, and, as a result of this distinct division, Atlanta has come to be the prototype of contemporary urban Negro-white civilization in the United States. Cities every- where could profit by a study of the causes and effects of Atlanta’s racial conflicts and social harmony.

  Since there is undoubtedly a clear-cut dividing line between Atlanta’s two extremes of conflict and harmony, there must be a good and sufficient reason for it. The reason is an obvious one. On one side is white-race economic and social frustration erupting in irrational violence in words and acts. On the other side is white-race tolerance and intellectual perception. The tug-of-war between the two forces has been long and arduous.

  The plight of the uneducated and prejudiced white Southerner, or poor buckra, as he was sarcastically named by the Negro long ago, is a pitiful one. This man of ill will is between forty and sixty years of age, barely literate due to lack of educational advantages in his youth, who is economically handicapped in life because he is now and has always been an unskilled laborer.