In Search of Bisco Read online

  Some of the young colored people right here in Jackson are getting restless and say they want to do something about their civil rights and organize demonstrations and such things. So far, nothing like that’s been done and some people like me keep on telling them not to be too quick about it. I don’t care what the law says, this is still a white man’s town. I’d want to hear what Martin King advised before starting anything like that in a little place like Jackson. Some white men never pay attention to any law and they can be real mean to all colored people when they want to be.

  The way I see it, action like that ought to start in bigger cities like Birmingham and Mobile and Montgomery where the colored live in bigger numbers and have some good leadership. The young people in Jackson need a leader with real good judgment before they start something like that and right now there’s nobody to take charge. Without some good leadership, the young people run the risk of not being able to control a demonstration up on the bluff where the white people are. That could start a race riot quicker than anything else I know of. And if things ran wild, all the colored would end up with more harm than good.

  It’s the same way about the Black Muslims in Jackson. Some of our people talk about wanting to join the Black Muslims, but there’s no leader for them here so far, and you can’t run that kind of organization without leadership no more than you can have a worthwhile church without a minister.

  To tell the truth, I’m suspicious of the Black Muslims, anyhow. I just don’t like their kind of talk. And when you look them straight in the face, they look mighty close to being something exactly like the Ku Klux Klan for the colored.

  Some people argue that we need the Black Muslims to give Negroes the courage they need to stand up and claim their rights.

  I’m in favor of us getting up all the courage we can, because that’s what we’re going to need a lot of from now on, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable with my courage if I got it from Martin Luther King.

  Maybe it’s because I’m proud of being a Georgia-born Geechee with my kind of tannish color, but anyway I always tell people I’m not black enough to be a Black Muslim.

  10

  TO COME UPON IT in the lingering twilight of a balmy summer day, Laurel is a languorous tree-shaded town with a name of romantic implications in the pine-crested hills of Southern Mississippi. Flowers bloom profusely in stately gardens and a stranger in town is likely to be mesmerized by the flower-scented air. Under the tall spire of an elegant church there is fervent praise of God, unoffending mention of the brotherhood of man, and a prayer for the less fortunate people in the world.

  In the bright light of day, however, the reality of Laurel is made plain and revealing. It is then a place of thirty thousand people arbitrarily confined within inflexible zones allotted to wealthy white citizens on the northside, segregated Negroes on the southside, and impoverished whites in the middle.

  Any such socially, racially, and economically regulated allotment of residence is not an unusual custom in Bisco Country. In fact, it is a traditional way of life rigidly maintained and enforced from South Carolina to Louisiana; nevertheless, the contrasts between classes and races are more sharply defined and rigidly fixed in Mississippi than elsewhere.

  The stranger in town might say that Laurel, in particular, is remote and isolated from the mainstream of American life and that its people are pathetic in their solitude. But a prideful white citizen of the northside will insist that all of Mississippi, and particularly Laurel, has been endowed with a fortunate heritage that less privileged people living in other states scorn because of envy and ignorance.

  All might be well in Laurel, as it could be elsewhere in Mississippi, if prideful residents of the northside would look at least as far away as the southside of their town even if they do not wish to see beyond the borders of their own state. As it is, and as though it is a way to avoid embarrassment, they fail to acknowledge their responsibility for the poverty and degradation of the Negro families on the southside and ignore the fact that it was the labor of Negroes that enabled them to accumulate wealth and social pretensions.

  But customs prevail. And arrogance predominates. Instead of acting upon his responsibility as a citizen in modern America to alleviate and adjust economic and social discrimination imposed upon the Negro for generations, the white supremist is intent upon striving by any means to enforce a perpetuation of racial injustice that originated long ago in the time of slavery. As long as this custom can be maintained, the conscience of the white supremist will be quiet and undisturbed. Enforcement of the custom ranges from intimidation to physical punishment to violent death.

  The Citizens’ Council, or, as the white supremist organization is more aptly called, the White Citizens’ Council, was founded as recently as the nineteen-fifties in Mississippi. The purpose of the organization is to legalize segregation and prohibit by law any form of integration and racial equality and to relieve the individual white supremist of the do-it-yourself chore of run-nigger-run intimidation.

  The White Citizens’ Council is a white-collar club striving by day in business suits—and often in judicial robes and clerical garb—to attain by subtle propaganda and forthright political pressure the same discriminatory results that the Ku Klux Klan might fail to achieve by night in bed-sheeted paraphernalia with acts of intimidation and premeditated violence.

  In such a racist environment, membership in the White Citizens’ Council quickly became a status symbol for both the dedicated white supremist and the political opportunist. And, because of the organization’s unconcealed appeal to prejudice and opportunism, local chapters were soon founded in towns and cities throughout Mississippi.

  Now, after ten years, there are White Citizens’ Councils in all states of the Deep South and, in addition, there is a mail-order White Citizens’ Council of America to sell memberships and provide pamphlets and insignia for the racist minded in all parts of the United States. In Mississippi and elsewhere, the only purpose of the organization is to incite racial prejudice and promote political action for the establishment of legalized segregation and discrimination in every state in the nation.

  The dedicated advocate of white supremacy spoke with the fierce-eyed evangelistic fervor of a revivalist preacher at a country church in Mississippi on a hot summer night.

  I’m going to tell you some plain facts. The fate of this whole nation is in the hands of people like us who are working day and night to keep the two races from mixing. That’s us, by God, and you can look at me and say I’m one of them. And I’m damn proud of it, too.

  We’re working like hell to save the whole white race from getting wiped off the map. If we don’t have segregation, and have it now, this’ll be a nation of mongrels—not white like us and not black like them. We’d be a dirty gray color in between. It’s up to us to put a stop to that for the good of the white race.

  You hear a lot about integration and what a fine democratic thing it is and all that kind of damn radical talk. But we won’t be fooled. We know it’s the Yankees who’re pushing it. It’s a communist trick. When you first hear about integration and don’t stop and think, you might even take it for granted that it’s a natural thing to let the niggers live where they please and go where they please and do what they please. But when you come right down to it in actual practice, no pure-blooded white man is going to be in favor of it.

  It’s undemocratic to force integration on pure-blooded white people and make them mix with niggers. Segregation gives a white man the democratic right to choose the kind of people he wants to eat with and do business with and even talk to. That’s why it’s a communist trick to say whites and niggers ought to mix in all sorts of ways. I hope those Yankees get mixed and come out with the half-color they ought to be.

  I’ve heard all the Yankee talk about people like us in the White Citizens’ Council being nigger-haters and reactionaries and such things. But there’s no truth to that. Not one little bit of truth. It’s the same old communist tri
ck to call us things like that. We’re loyal white Americans who are brave enough to speak out and do something about the way the niggers are trying to move in on us and take what don’t belong to them. We’re a hell of a lot more patriotic than the Yankees who criticize us.

  You hear the niggers say they want to sleep in our hotels and motels, but they don’t have no more right to do that than go to my house and sleep in my bed. They say they want to eat in our cafes and restaurants, but they don’t have no more right to do that than they have to walk in my house and sit down at my table and tell my wife to feed them.

  And it’s the same about everything else they make a claim about wanting to do. You go ahead and give the niggers just one little foothold and there’d be no end to what they’d want next.

  For one thing, every nigger man in town would want to bed a white woman. That’s right. And it’s not that they’d want to marry your sister, neither. What they’d want to do is strip her naked and then go on from there. Given a chance, they’d make whores out of all white women—and then tell white men to keep hands off. You let a crowd of niggers stand around on the street corner and watch a white woman walk by and you don’t have to guess a second time what they’ve got in mind. You’d be right the first time when you said what they were thinking about was getting their hands on her titties and their balls between her legs.

  It used to be that white men would go after good-looking young colored girls whenever they felt like it. There were plenty of them all around and easy to get between sundown and dark. They could always be counted on being better honeyfuckers than ordinary white girls, too. But that’s not the way it is any more—there are plenty of easy-to-get honeyfucking white girls these days.

  But what’s happening now is that things have got turned around and nigger men want white women. But nobody’s going to tell me it’s all right for a white girl to intercourse a nigger man. And anybody who’d say that is a Yankee and a communist and ought to be run out of the country.

  All this proves we’ve got to keep up all the segregation we’ve already got—and even that’s not enough in these times. What we’ve got to do is to have more of it and make it stick. The way to do that is to find ways to make it legal by law so the government can’t come along and put white people in jail for doing what we know is right.

  The niggers don’t know it, because that’s how ignorant they are, but everybody else knows they were a hell of a lot better off in the old days when they couldn’t even read and write. That’s when they were trained to know their place and never made trouble thinking they were just as good as white people and ought to have the same privileges. That’s why when you have hard-and-fast segregation it works for everybody’s best interest—and for the niggers most of all. Then they don’t have false notions when they’re kept segregated—that’s when they damn well know their place and stay in it.

  Down here we get too damn much unasked-for advice from Yankees about how to handle the niggers. I don’t mind being criticized by somebody who knows more than I do about something and who can show me where I’m wrong. I’m open-minded about such things. But what I don’t like is being criticized by somebody who don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Up there, Yankees won’t likely see a nigger in a week’s time and he lives as far away from niggers as he can get and won’t eat in the same place with one of them even if the meal was free.

  Just the same, the Yankee will be the one to make a big to-do about the way we say nigger children have got to stay out of our white schools and how we try to keep the race from eating in our restaurants and sleeping in white motels. But I’ll tell you something about that. And I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. You let a Yankee come down here to live and he’ll be the biggest talker of all in favor of segregation before the year’s out. He don’t want no nigger getting close enough to fool around with his wife.

  The main thing we’re criticized about all the time is what Yankees up North call civil rights. They’re not really talking about segregation and such things when they say that. They’ve got segregation of their own up there and they want to keep it that way just as much as we do down here. What they’re talking about is voting. They want to use the nigger votes down here so they can control our politics. That’s the only thing they’re after. They don’t give a damn about whether the niggers go to white schools and sleep in white motels in the South. They’re after the nigger votes and nothing else.

  You hear those people up there swear-to-God and hope-they-may-die that they’re sincere about all the other things they criticize us about. Like hell they are. It’s just a trick to take over our politics and put their own politicians in the government in Washington from the president on down. And if they ever have their own way about it up there, white voters in the South might as well spend their time howling at the moon for all the good voting will do them.

  I can tell you one thing that’s sure as hell to happen and it won’t be long, neither. The niggers keep moving to the North by the hundreds and multiplying twice as fast. And they’re not doing it because they like living with Yankees up there better than living down here. They’re moving up there where they can get jobs that pay them two or three times more than they’re worth down here or anywhere else.

  And so one of these days before too long the whites up North will wake up and open their eyes and see niggers everywhere—in their schools, churches, stores, houses, restaurants, and everywhere else they look. That’s going to make Yankees stop and wonder what the hell happened. When they come to their senses, you’ll see the Yankees running around like crazy and wringing their hands and trying to figure out what in hell they can do to keep the niggers away from them. They don’t know it yet, but what they’ll end up doing is the same thing we’ve been doing here right along—keeping the niggers in their place and making them stay out of ours.

  You can tell that some of the smarter white people up North are already getting ready for that by joining the White Citizens’ Council by mail and studying our way of doing things. There’s no great number of them signed up so far, but they will. They’re bound to as things get rougher for them every day. They know we’ve got the experience and know-how for dealing with niggers and they’ll be coming to us and begging us for God’s sake to help them out.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yankees acted sheepish about it at first, after the way they’ve been criticizing us, but we’ll help them out. A good professional always likes to help out amateurs when they’re in a jam and show them how to do a thing right and proper.

  11

  THE DEEP, DANK, dark-brown alluvial soil of the flood plains of the Lower Mississippi River Valley covers a region of the Deep South fifty miles or more in width and nearly four hundred in length between Memphis and New Orleans.

  The fertile alluvial deposits of humus, loam, mold, and mulatto-earth erosion, washed downstream to Bisco Country by centuries of rain and melting snow from the fields and forests of a third of the United States from Montana to Tennessee, created an agricultural paradise on both sides of the constantly flooding Mississippi River. But paradise would have been unproductive without Negro labor, and so first there was legally instituted slavery and then illegally imposed servitude.

  This extensive region of alluvial flood plains, warmed by sub-tropical climate and watered by abundant rainfall, has always been called the Delta even though the actual geological delta of the Mississippi is far to the south of it.

  It was nature’s unquestioned right to skim the richness of soil from a wide expanse of America and deposit it in the Delta. However, it was a questionable privilege that permitted plantation owners to acquire extraordinary wealth from the land by ruthlessly impoverishing the people who labored on it. Ownership of the land changed from generation to generation, but the feudal system went unchanged. The agricultural paradise also remains, as likewise does the family of man which has labored without equitable reward in a sociological and economic hell-hole since the days of slavery
.

  The Yazoo Basin is one of several flood plains formed by nature on the east side of the Mississippi River—and wholly within the State of Mississippi—and its plantation land is now securely protected from over-flowing river waters by dikes and levees. The Yazoo River itself—like the Big Black and the Bayou Pierre—is one of the many muddy tributaries of the Big River.

  More than half of the people living in the Yazoo Basin are Negroes of Angola and Guinea slave descent who are employed seasonally for a few months of the year to plant, pick, and bale its cotton. However, even though the Yazoo Basin is thickly populated by Negroes, they are only a small portion of the Delta Negroes living on both sides of the Mississippi River between Memphis and New Orleans whose extreme poverty makes ordinary American poverty elsewhere appear enviable by comparison.

  The unemployed and destitute person of either race in a city slum or Appalachian ravine can stand in line and receive government-issued food stamps or welfare relief checks. Agricultural workers in the Delta, by unconscionable legislation, are excluded from government relief programs.

  The unemployed and destitute Negro farm laborer in the Delta can only hope that the rumors he occasionally hears will come true and that he will be one of the fortunate who will receive a donation of food and clothing from somebody somewhere who is concerned about his plight and knows where to find him. Food and clothing collected in Memphis or Nashville by churches, labor unions, and civic clubs are always sufficient to spread a hopeful rumor in the Delta, but the supply has never been sufficient in quantity to reach all who hear of it.

  There is want of food and clothing in many places other than in the Delta and able-bodied people usually manage by some means to survive hunger and cold. And in the Delta in particular, a meager amount of food of some kind can usually be found and clothing can be patched and held together. But lack of adequate food and clothing is only one of the misfortunes inflicted by poverty in the Delta Country. This is where definitions of poverty and destitution are to be rewritten for American usage.