In Search of Bisco Read online

  I’ll grant you there was a time when a Guinea would get flogged if he was sent to the field to do certain work and then didn’t do it like he ought to. And maybe one of them would get a beating if he didn’t pay off some little debt he owed a white man or if he claimed he was too sick to show up for work. But as far as I know nothing like that’s happened anywhere in Marengo County in the past eight or ten years. Outsiders who criticize us like that are unfair, because it gives us down here a bad name we don’t deserve any longer.

  Now you take this thing about us wanting to keep the colored out of motels and restaurants. There’s a good sanitary reason for that. White people don’t want to eat out of the same dishes they eat out of and we don’t want to sleep in the same bed one of them slept in. That’s the whole simple story. It’s all right for them to cook for us and nurse white babies, but that’s something we need them to do.

  Everybody ought to recognize facts like that. When you’ve lived with your customs all your life, you don’t want to give them up just because somebody a thousand miles away says he don’t like them and tells you to get rid of them. That makes no more sense than for me to tell somebody up North I don’t like boiled cabbage and baked beans for breakfast and say he’s got to do like I do and eat grits and sow-belly every morning instead.

  That proves there’s a damn good reason for any custom and this thing of keeping niggers out of our restaurants started a long time ago and we learned them to know their place and they never dared step over the line. If the trouble-makers up North want to know the truth, we don’t give a God damn what they think. This’s the South, by God, and we’ll find a way to run it the way we please.

  But I’m willing to be reasonable and try to help them understand how it is. One thing they don’t realize up North is that in this part of the South the blacks outnumber the whites in a lot of places. We’re just about even here in Demopolis now, but they’re gaining on us every day—even if we are bleaching them and their bastard babies get lighter in color all the time.

  I’ll tell you what would happen if we let them have the right to do as they pleased. Suppose you stopped at a motel here in Demopolis to get a room for the night and was told it was all sold out, but while you were being told that a nigger drove up in his car and got a room right away to sleep in because he’d already made a reservation in advance. Now, that’s something that’d send a shiver running up your back and make your hair bristle and stand on end.

  I’ll tell you something about Northern people they sure don’t even know themselves till they move down here to live. I’ve seen it happen time after time when a big company transfers a plant manager or sends a salesman to work the territory.

  No matter where they come from up there, it takes no time at all for them to start thinking like we do about the blacks. In the beginning, before they get accustomed, they might say they don’t see no harm in letting a black family move to a house in our part of town or letting the black children go to the white schools. But that won’t last long. After they’ve lived here a while and seen some of the Guinea niggers around here they soon see the light and change their minds in a hurry. After that, when something along that line comes up, they’ll back us up every time. That shows it’s a natural thing for all white people to want to keep the blacks separate. Even the few Jews go along with that.

  If you didn’t know me better, you might think to hear me talk that I’m what some people call a nigger-hater. But I’m not. I get along with them fine as long as they stay in their place. I don’t do much business with them, except collect some rents on a few houses I own over in their part of town. They don’t have the money to buy the kind of real estate I sell, anyway.

  There’s not many people in Demopolis who have hard feelings against the black race. Those who do speak up about it in a sincere way are only trying to do what they think is best for the blacks and advise them to pay no attention to the trouble-makers and outsiders who’re egging on the blacks to integrate the schools and churches and everything else that belongs to white people. People like us want to promote harmony between the races and we’re working on it all the time.

  If we can just put things off and hold our own in our lifetime, we’ll be all right. The only trouble is that it looks like we’re losing ground little by little. The government in Washington is doing everything it can to push us against the wall and make us give up by ranting and raving about civil rights and discrimination.

  Every time the government in Washington makes a move like that, it encourages the blacks to put in a claim for more and more. Then the government steps in and helps them get what they want and it undoes all the good we do to keep things quiet and normal and the way they should be.

  All I can say is that the people in other parts of the country had better wake up before it’s too late and help the white citizens in Alabama, and all over the South, too. If we don’t get some outside help, and a lot of it, we can’t keep on carrying the whole load much longer.

  What white people everywhere ought to do is vote the right men into office, just like it’s done in Alabama and Mississippi, to run the government for us. If they don’t hurry up and do that, and keep on doing it, the white people all over the country in every state are going to be sorry.

  It’d be an awful thing to let the blacks chuckle and laugh about how they turned things around and put the white people in their place. And that’s sure to happen if we don’t watch out.

  9

  IF THERE ARE PLACES that can be called typical small towns in Bisco Country, there are several reasons why Jackson in Southern Alabama would be named as being one of them. There is even a good possibility that Jackson might be entitled to the distinction of being the most typical of all.

  This pineland town has a population of approximately twenty-five hundred Negroes and twenty-five hundred whites; it is situated in the center of one of the Deep South’s distinct geological zones; it is frequently a target for destructive winds in the broad tornado alley between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River; and its climatic extremes can bring sunstroke in summer and frostbite in winter.

  The only reason that Jackson might be disqualified in a contest for pre-eminence among typical small towns is because it is in Clarke County. Unlike similar local-option liquor-dry counties in Southern Alabama, Clarke County produces more moonshine corn liquor than its people have the capacity to consume.

  Fifty miles northward of Jackson are the rich cattle grazing ranges and fertile lands of the Black Soil Belt. Fifty miles southward is the varied agricultural plain of the Gulf Coast. Chambers of commerce and civic boosters everywhere might understandably be envious of the town’s stable and prosperous year-around economy—pine lumbering, brassiere manufacturing, and ’shiny whisky distilling.

  But, typical or not, either economically or geographically, Jackson does maintain strict conformity with the traditional racial customs of the Deep South. The unwritten law of white supremacy is more strictly enforced than the posted law on the parking meters along the town’s main street.

  The white citizens of Jackson live on the bluff above Bassett Creek; the Negro citizens live under the hill in a country slum beside the sprawling sawmills. On the bluff are the wide, paved, tree-bordered streets and modern houses surrounded by green lawns; under the hill are the narrow, rutted, dirt paths and sagging slab shacks clinging to the bright orange-colored clay.

  And, just as in many similar Deep South towns, white citizens are quick to say they are ashamed for visitors to see the squalor of the country slums under the hill. Nevertheless, they are the ones who make no effort to eliminate the enforced degradation of Negroes who continue, as necessity compels them, to pay ten or fifteen or twenty dollars a month rent to the white landlords on the bluff because they are prohibited by unwritten law to live elsewhere in a segregated town.

  The elderly, gray-haired Negro storekeeper on one of the orange-colored clay paths under the hill has a meager stock of soft drinks, tobacco,
and candy. His customers are Negro school children with pennies for candy and sawmill workers with dimes and quarters for cokes and tobacco. The light-skinned Georgia-born Geechee is almost seventy years old and he has lived in Jackson for nearly a quarter of a century. During that time he was a sawyer in one of the lumber mills on Bassett Creek until he was no longer useful when he became sixty-five.

  I’m a Geechee and proud of it, he said. I don’t claim that I’m better than the Alabama-born colored—the ones the whites call Guineas—but if anybody starts talking about their families and kinfolks, I’m going to put in a claim for my Geechee people in Georgia.

  I grew up on my daddy’s sharecropping farm in Coweta County in Georgia. That’s where I was born and I lived there till I was about fifteen. I had three younger brothers and my daddy and mother said it was too late for me to get a college education but not for my three brothers. I’d been going to school till I was fifteen, and I got pretty far along with my education, but not enough of it to get me into college. That’s when we left Georgia and moved to Alabama so my brothers would be closer to Tuskegee and have a chance to go to college later.

  My daddy rented a farm about twenty miles from Montgomery and started raising cotton and I was big enough then to work right along beside him. My brothers went to school and raised pigs and calves at the same time so there’d be some cash money to save for their college education. That was enough to get started one by one up at Tuskegee and they worked at jobs in town and at the college so they could pay their way and graduate.

  My mother was proud of them getting a college education but always sorry about me. However, all that time she was keeping after me to do all the reading I could so I’d educate myself as much as possible. That got me into the habit of studying and I never wanted to quit after that. That’s why I always scrape up enough money right to this day to subscribe to two daily newspapers, one in Montgomery and one in Mobile. I found out long ago that the more you learn the more you want to keep on learning and I don’t want to quit now. There’s too much going on in the world for me to want to be left out of it.

  Over there in Coweta County in Georgia, we lived on a little farm between Moreland and Luthersville, but I don’t remember anybody named Bisco. A lot of colored people lived there then, and I might’ve known him, because I knew nearly everybody in muleback distance in those days. There was a light-skinned Geechee boy over there with a name something like Brisket or Bristol, and he might’ve been the one. We went to the same school together for a while, but I don’t remember much about him now. That was a long time ago.

  Before my mother died, she used to hear from folks in Coweta County, and she might’ve known who that boy was and what happened to him. A lot of colored people left Coweta County to live someplace better, and some of them moved to Alabama, too, just like we did. He might’ve been one of those who came to Alabama. The next time I run across people from Coweta County I’ll try to find out if they know anything about somebody named Bisco or any name sounding close to that.

  I traveled around a lot myself in my younger days after my folks moved over here to Alabama. I was in the army for about two years in the first big war. They sent me all the way to Europe for almost a year. Then before the war was over they sent me to a lot of different places all over the United States. That was a real good part of my education—finding out first-hand what it was like in the rest of the world outside the South.

  After I got out of the army, I was a fireman on the Frisco Railroad for about seven years out of Birmingham and I stayed with the Frisco till they wanted me to move to Mississippi and work on a division over there. I always liked it here in Alabama, a lot more than working for the Frisco in Mississippi.

  The white people over there in Mississippi treat the colored like dirt—and I mean dirt. A colored man can get killed for nothing in Mississippi—and a lot of them do. You see somebody you know one day and the next day you don’t. He gets covered up in an old dry well or they weight him down with some scrap iron in a swamp. That’s the best place in the world to stay away from—or get out of—if you’re colored. I’m not saying it’s good enough here, but so far it’s better for the colored than Mississippi. That’s why I left the Frisco after staying in Mississippi only a month and came back to Alabama and got a good job here at the sawmill.

  After nearly twenty-five years right here in Jackson at the sawmill I liked it so much I hated to quit working when the company said I had to quit when I was sixty-five. That was about three years ago. I’d saved a little money all that time and bought my own house for my wife and me and our children. Which is a lot better than paying up to twenty dollars a month rent to live in the slab shacks the other colored people down here under the hill have to do.

  All three of my children were girls and they wanted to get married instead of going off to college. I was sorry about that. A good college education is the greatest thing in the world when you’re going to be colored all your life. But the girls wanted to get married and raise families of their own. I can’t quarrel with them about that now. They’re all settled and happy with their families. Maybe girls are meant to be smarter about things like that than a man is and know from the start what’s good for them.

  Besides saving enough money to buy my own house while I was working at the mill, I put aside enough to buy an acre of land and build my own store on it. It’s all paid for now and I don’t owe a dime to anybody. You can’t have a better feeling than that when you get to be my age.

  Of course, I don’t make much money selling a little candy and tobacco, but it’s enough for my wife and me. Best of all, I get a chance this way to talk to all the people in the neighborhood. Everybody comes in here to spend a nickel or dime once in a while.

  Getting to know all the people in the neighborhood was how I got interested in doing something to help all the youngsters who live around here. They didn’t have a real playground and there wasn’t much they could do. Youngsters can get in trouble if you don’t keep them busy—they start throwing rocks, if nothing else—and that’s why I went to work and organized a Boy Scout troop for them.

  Of course, I was a little too old to be the Scoutmaster. So I turned that over to a younger fellow I trusted. But I signed up sixty-two youngsters for the troop and cleared off some of my acre of land I didn’t need and made tables and benches for them out of slabs they gave me at the mill. These youngsters here are too poor to buy the complete Boy Scout outfit and so what I did was see to it that every one of those sixty-two boys had something to show for being a Boy Scout. One of them would have a regulation hat, another one would have the official belt buckle, somebody would have the Boy Scout manual, and so on like that.

  My three younger brothers who graduated at Tuskegee left Alabama a long time ago. Now and then one of them comes to visit me and tries to get me to move up North where they live. But this is my home right here now and it’s where I want to stay. One of them is the principal of a school in Connecticut. One is a professor in Pennsylvania. The third and youngest of all is the pastor of a church in Michigan.

  Except for being better educated, all my brothers are just like me in most ways. They stay with our race and don’t try to live outside it.

  I know a lot of colored people go to the North thinking they’ll be living outside the race, but they soon find it just won’t work out that way. As long as a man looks colored, that’s the way he’s going to be no matter where he lives and he ought to be proud of it. And if he’s a Geechee like me, he can boast about it, too. The only real way the colored can live outside the race is to be light enough in color to pass for white, and that’s something a real black man just can’t do.

  I know my color and I’m proud to stay with it and be what I am. Some of my grandchildren have got a lot lighter color than me and my wife and the time may come when they’ll go up North to pass and leave our race. That’d be all right with me. You can’t expect the younger generation to keep the same old-fashioned ideas I’ve got.<
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  I was born and raised in the South and I’ve been colored for sixty-eight years. That means I’ve lived within my race all my life and I’m accustomed to it. And that’s why you won’t see me at my age getting out and demonstrating for integration and civil rights. That’s something for the young people to do and I’m not going to blame them for trying to change things for the better as long as they use good common sense about the way they go at it. I’ll stand behind them every step of the way as long as they do that.

  What I hope about it is that our young people will stick with Martin King and listen to him. If it wasn’t for Martin King, we’d still be back where we started from—which was ’way back nowhere. I don’t want to see some scatter-brain colored people do the wrong kind of agitating and do us more harm than good. If everybody will listen to Martin King, we’ll be all right.

  There’s something in the newspapers nearly every day about integrating the school so the colored and white children can get the same education. I’m in favor of both races getting a good education, but the big trouble is that nobody’s going to get a good education if the schools don’t provide better teaching. It’s a shame the way some of the white teachers misuse the English language.

  Those teachers have been to college and they should’ve learned the correct way to use the language if they’re going to be teachers. I’m not educated enough myself to explain what the right way to say something is, but I can tell when something they say sounds wrong. Maybe I ought to watch what I’m saying right now, but the way I feel about it is I wouldn’t want my children or grandchildren go to a school and come out of it speaking the kind of grammar some of the teachers do. And I’ll say that about any teacher—white or colored.