In Search of Bisco (11 page)

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.

T
HE 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.

A young Negro farm laborer and his wife and three children had lived on a cotton plantation four miles from the nearest Yazoo Basin town for several years. The dwelling, for which he was charged ten dollars a month rent, was a sagging, slab-sided, weather-warped, two-room tenant house more than twenty years old. The glass panes of two of the four windows had been broken for many years and were covered with sheets of rusty tin that had been ripped from the roof by a windstorm.

The white owner of the land and dwelling had furnished no material for repairs and the tenant and his wife had chosen to protect the children and themselves from wind and rain by covering the broken windows with the tin roofing and to endure the leaking roof. The building was similar in size and condition to several other inhabited tenant houses spaced twenty feet apart in a row beside the muddy farm road. Behind each shack was a doorless lean-to back-house privy screened with burlap sacking. There was one pump-well to supply water for all who lived in the settlement.

Unlike the cautious and suspicious older Negroes in the settlement who were fearful of the consequences of complaining about anything and risking the white landowner’s wrath and vengeance, the young Negro talked freely and boldly about his life.

I haven’t worked none for seven months since last September and I’m five months behind in rent already. And me and my family are a heap more behind in eating than that. We’re empty-belly people most of the time.

The white man promised me two months of cotton chopping and two months of picking this year and I’m going to stay around here for that. Then I’ll leave for sure. My mind’s made up good and plenty about that. I’ll make me about five dollars a day for those four months and pay the white man the back rent I owe him for living in this shack and then keep up with the new rent till the picking’s all finished.

Me and my wife don’t want no more of this—working all summer to pay the white man a year’s rent and going hungry-belly in this old house all winter long. That don’t make sense. And it wouldn’t do no good to move to town, neither. Rent’s just as much in town and there’s no more work there than there is here.

I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to New Jersey. I sure am. You can count on that. From then on I’ll be through working for the white man for only four months a year and paying him rent twelve months to live in this shack and go hungry half the time, too. I’m going off to New Jersey and stay there. That’s where I’m going to do my living—and not here no more.

I went up there to New Jersey once before. That was about two years ago. But I had to come back down here when my father took sick and I was sent for just when he was dying. I had a fine job in New Jersey working in a zipper-making factory and making two dollars an hour all the time I stayed there and not just half that much working for the white man down here for only four months the year.

My brother’s up there in New Jersey and he got me that job I had. He stays, too. He don’t come back down here none at all. He says he’s a Northern man now and don’t want nothing to do with things down here in Mississippi. I don’t blame him none. He almost got killed to death once down here when a white man got mad at him about a little nothing and shot him twice with a shotgun. He was lying in ditch water all night and the next day where the white man thought he was dead and left him. But he crawled out and drug himself a whole half-mile to somebody’s house to help him. That’s why he won’t come down here to Mississippi no more.

When I finish up working for the white man four months and paying off the rent, my brother’s going to send me the money so me and my family can move to New Jersey and stay there like he does. That’ll be the big day. My brother lives in a fine place up there that has a real bathroom and inside running water and plenty of heat for cold weather. He wouldn’t live in a shack like this one here is. And I won’t no more, neither. Not after I finish up working for the white man this time and paying off the back rent I owe.

The white man said to me he’ll get the sheriff after me if I move off the place and don’t pay up all I owe him before I go. But he don’t need to worry none about that. I’ll pay up before I go off. You won’t see me getting trapped like that and put in jail and kept from going to New Jersey. I’ve got that too much on my mind.

I’d gone to New Jersey last year after finishing up working the crop for the white man and paying up the rent I owed then, but my mother’s been ailing pretty bad and I’ve got to do something about looking after her first. She’s got the insurance for the undertaker all paid up, but she don’t have no insurance for a place in the graveyard. She lives with her sister in town and can’t work no more to get money.

A heap of folks fail to think about that graveyard insurance before it’s too late. I reckon that’s because they’ve been on top of the ground all their life and fail to think about providing for where they’ll have to be put in the ground when they’re dead.

That’s the only reason I’m still here now and not already up in New Jersey. But I’m going just as soon as I can get that graveyard insurance fixed up for my mother. Won’t nothing stop me this time to going up there to stay and work at the good job my brother’s going to get me and make real money enough to eat and buy clothes for my family.

I don’t have nothing much against the white man, except he won’t fix up this old house and wouldn’t let me dig a grave on his land to bury my father in when he died without the graveyard insurance.

I told the white man I’d do every bit the work myself fixing up the house and it wouldn’t cost him nothing except for a little roofing and boards and a few nails. But he said he couldn’t spend no money on no old house like this here that was going to fall down soon, anyhow. After he argued like that, I told him all he’d have to do was let me take some old roofing and boards off another old house of his that wasn’t fit for nobody to live in. He wouldn’t do that, neither.

I don’t know if the white man’s just naturally stingy or mean or don’t care none what happens to the colored who work for him. But there’s something like that bout it because he sure don’t act right dealing with the colored. I said to him once the colored who work for him and pay him ten dollars a month rent ought to have a place to live in that don’t leak through the roof when it rained and have busted windows where the field rats can get in and crawl all over you in the night.

But saying that to him didn’t help none at all. It just made him mad. Spitting mad. He told me I’d better shut my mouth and stay quiet if I wanted to stay out of trouble. Looks like it don’t never do a bit of good for the colored trying to talk to the white man about nothing. There’s some fine white people in the country but he sure aint one of them.

My father lived down the road yonder in that fourth house and he’d worked for the white man and the white man’s daddy most of his life right here on this plantation. He was better off than some of the colored who died on the place, because he’d paid the undertaker’s insurance up. But he didn’t have a dime’s worth of the graveyard insurance.

That’s why I asked the white man if he’d loan me twenty-five dollars to pay the graveyard for a place to bury my father in. The white man’s daddy used to let the colored be buried somewhere on the place when they died, but the young white man wouldn’t do that.

I promised the white man I’d work it out just as soon as the cotton was ready to chop and he’d be sure to get the money back that way. But he just wouldn’t do it. There wasn’t enough time to write a letter to my brother in New Jersey for the money to pay the graveyard. My father’d already been dead two days then and the undertaker said it was the law that he had to be taken somewhere and buried in the ground before the third day was up.