In Search of Bisco (3 page)

The white-man superintendent at the trucking company mentions that every time I speak to him about getting a driving job. He says the company can’t run the risk of letting a truck load of valuable freight left stranded on the highway for anybody to steal while I go to jail for scuffling in an eating place. He says he can’t help it none, because it’s not his business to go all over the country and see to it that Negro drivers can get in truck-stop bunkhouses and eating places and not go to jail.

That white man knows I’m a good driver. He said so himself. Once I got him to let me take one of the company’s big tractor-trailers out on the highway for three or four miles, and then when we came back to the loading dock, he said I was a heap better driver than he was himself and sure wished he could hire me. That’s exactly what he said. But he didn’t hire me. He said he was sorry about it, but just couldn’t do it as long as things stayed the way they are. I asked him how long did he figure that was going to last. He said only God knows for sure and God won’t talk for fear of making some white folks so mad they’d stop going to church and paying the preacher.

He was real friendly about talking to me and that’s how come I mentioned to him that nearly every town on the highways has eating places for Negro people and I could stop at one of those kind to eat and not go nowhere near the places where white people don’t want me. He said he knew all about that, but it still wouldn’t do. He said the heavy trucks his company runs have to stay on their routes on the pavement and not be pulled off on dirt streets where they might get mired down in rainy weather or tip over in a ditch while I was eating.

I reckon he was right about that. Nearly everywhere you go the eating places for the colored are on a side street nowhere near the main highway. I learned about that when I was driving in the army and I know what could happen to ten tons of truck on a soft dirt street. I wouldn’t want to take a risk like that and see my rig get ditched and harm my driving record. It just wouldn’t be like me. Anyhow, there ought to be some way to go about it so a colored man can work at that kind of job. It just don’t seem right to me like it is. Any man on the highway ought to be able to stop and eat and wash up once in a while without risking a scuffle and ending up in jail for disturbing the peace.

The civil rights laws can say certain things, but some white people can figure out ways to get around the law. I don’t know what’s going to happen from now on, but something’s bound to, because our people are working at it as hard as they can. When the young people started sit-ins and things like that all over the country, it didn’t look like it’d amount to much at the time, but that’s turned out to be a big boost ever since. The way they go about it might not look like much, but every inch counts, because the colored people never had even a toe-hold to start with.

And now we’ve got a real good toe-hold. Some of the old people are scared to their bones about it for fear of making the white folks mad, but that’s all right. I can’t blame the old people for being scared, because they’ve been bossed by the white folks all their lives and don’t see how times can change. The young colored people are getting a good education these days and nothing’s going to scare them. That’s the best thing about it these days for all us colored.

The big trouble right now is because the white folks have got the habit of having their way about things and they still take first-call. I don’t say all whites are like that. A lot of them are on our side. It’s the ones who do the most talking and get it printed in the newspapers who make the worst trouble for us. One of the things they boast about all the time is building some fine schools for our children, which is true, but that’s still not enough. They stop right there and don’t do a thing about getting the teachers better educated in the colleges. Most teachers don’t know a bit more than the children have already learned. I know about that, because my three daughters go to high school and I hear all about it.

It’s those same politicians you read about in the newspapers who won’t let me drive a truck from here to Florida for a load of oranges and stop to eat when I’m hungry. I don’t want to eat in their fancy cafés and sleep in their fine motels. That’s what they keep on saying we’re after. Looks like they’d know that a man like me, even if I had a good-pay trucking job, wouldn’t waste my money doing that just for the spite of it. I’ve got too much sense to waste hard-earned money like that.

I’ll tell you what I’d do with that money. I’d take it and rent me a house I’d be proud for my family to live in. And it wouldn’t be over there in the white folks’ part of town, neither. I’m just proud enough in my own right to segregate myself over here on this side with my own people.

I
T WOULD NOT BE
unusual for an unsuspecting stranger in Bisco Country to find himself feeling sympathetic toward the conviction of a native-born white Southerner who argues, with all evidence of sincerity in voice and word, that he is the best friend the Negro American will ever have in this world. He is evidently convinced, and he would have a stranger believe likewise, that the Negro himself knows by experience, and willingly accepts the fact, that his only opportunity for happiness and security is possible when he lives in segregated social, political, and economic isolation.

Either with or without a twinge of sympathy for such a conviction, a first-time visitor soon becomes aware that this point of view of the racist-minded white Southerner is traditional in the Deep South. It is a state of mind that has dominated Southern life for many generations. From the beginning, the feudal attitude was motivated by assumed racial superiority and indisputable economic selfishness; and later, shamed by the appalling evidence of feudal treatment, the Southern attitude was slightly adjusted to provide for fashionable expressions of pity and compassion for the Negro. Nevertheless, in the years following the Civil War, and regardless of motives, well-meaning or otherwise, the Negro still had no choice other than to exist in a modified form of slavery.

For the next hundred years in the agricultural South, and in particular wherever cotton was grown, slavery by intimidation continued to be the way of life for the Negro. By necessity working for token wages, he was unable to earn more than a mere minimum of food, clothing, and housing. Thus after freedom from a century of physical bondage, he was immediately enslaved in economic bondage for another century.

During all this time, Negroes were looked upon as being hostages of fortune or predestined orphans of inferior parentage who should be forever grateful for being protected from a hostile outside world. Payment for protection by their self-appointed benefactors was required to be rendered in groveling obeisance and uncomplaining servitude. Withholding food and clothing or the use of the lash could be the punishment for failure to make payment. And when this was not enough to bring about compliance, nightriders or the Ku Klux Klan could be called upon to enforce rule by fear.

A new generation of Negroes, educated and aware of their human rights, came of age in the Racial Sixties and rebelled against continuation of imposed isolation and discrimination. This awakening of a once docile race is disturbing to traditional attitudes of Southern whites from South Carolina to Louisiana. Century-old traditions are threatened with extinction.

As a consequence, one white Southerner will become a self-styled nigger-hater and white supremist; another, more politically astute, will cater to a calculated moderation of racial prejudice; and others, who claim a majority, will loudly proclaim that they know what is best for the child-like Negroes and vow to guard them against dangerous agitation by outsiders who have no understanding of a situation indigenous to the South. Though presently outnumbered, there are men of perception and foresight throughout the Deep South who are striving to make it possible for the Negro American to obtain his rightful first-class citizenship.

There is a wide belt of fertile mulatto soil lying diagonally across the central region of South Carolina between the northern sand hills and the southern coastal plain. This rich land was first put under cultivation in the eighteenth century by Gullah slaves working from the Pee Dee to the Savannah rivers and creating fortunes for scores of plantation owners.

This mulatto soil, so named for being a mixture of sand, clay, and organic loam, is ideal for growing tobacco, cotton, and grain. Even the great wealth extracted from the earth in the decades of slave-labor plantations failed to exhaust its richness, and now in these centennial years of the Civil War, scientific and mechanized farming is making the yield from the land even more valuable than it ever was in the past.

This modern agricultural operation progressively replaces hand labor with chemicals and machinery, and the descendants of Gullah slaves are gradually forced from their jobs and homes. As earning of the worker decreases, his standard of living goes down and down; he becomes another victim of modern poverty in a land of plenty.

Displaced by chemicals and machinery and his cabin bulldozed into extinction by other machines to provide additional acreage for farming or pasturage, the Negro field laborer has no choice to make. Inevitably, he and his family go to the nearest town as a place to live and to seek employment. There, as is probable, he will live in a dilapidated house of two or three rooms on the segregated southside. If he is fortunate, he will find seasonal farm work for a few months during the year, or he may be able to find occasional work tending lawns or collecting trash. And while he and his family are existing in squalor, all around him will be the fertile mulatto land producing its new abundance of wealth.

The native-born white Southerner, a devout Protestant in his mid-fifties and eighth-grade educated, sits on the counter in his small grocery store and talks earnestly about his convictions.

I know what I’m talking about and it’s time everybody else knows the truth, he said. We take good care of our colored people. If you hear them complaining about something, it’s because outsiders put them up to saying it—or thinking it.

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.