In Search of Bisco (12 page)

My father had that fifty dollars’ undertakers’ insurance all paid up, but none of the graveyard insurance. That was the big trouble. The undertaker collected the fifty dollars of money to pay for the box and there wasn’t none left for the graveyard. You don’t know how poor poor can be till you get too poor to be buried in the ground.

When I couldn’t get nowhere trying to make the undertaker let some of the money he’d collected pay the graveyard, that’s when I came back out here from town and tried to get the white man to loan me the twenty-five dollars for the graveyard.

And that’s when the white man said he wouldn’t do it. I told him how the undertaker said the burying had to be done right away that same day like the law said and that I had to get rid of my father in the box by sundown or he’d put them both out the back door in the alley and leave them there. The white man said it was my business to bury my father and none of his.

Maybe not many other folks know it, but that’s how I found out there’s no way of being poorer than when you’re trying to bury somebody and can’t find the money to pay for a place in the ground to put him in. You might think there’d be a free graveyard somewhere for people like my father, but there wasn’t. They told me there’s a graveyard in town where poor city people can be buried free, but none for the country people who die poor.

The neighbors along the road here wanted to help me out, but they couldn’t raise that much cash money between them all. It was getting late in the day by that time and it wouldn’t be long before sundown. That’s when I went back to the white man one more time and asked him please if I could dig a grave and bury my father right here in the yard behind the house.

I reckon you might know what he said. The white man said if I dug a hole in the ground anywhere on his land and buried my father in it he’d bulldoze over it with a tractor so quick nobody’d never know where it was after that. I tried to tell him my father’s grave wouldn’t take up none of his farm land if he’d let me dig it sort of under the porch or at the underside of the house, but he wouldn’t hear to that, neither. He said he didn’t want no niggers buried on his land and rotting the ground.

Something had to be done about it quick after that. Time was getting real short. The sun was only about treetop high then and sinking fast. Three neighbors and me went down the road to the paved highway where the colored-man storekeeper had a little truck and he let us borrow it and go to town and get my father in the undertaker’s box.

It was past sundown before we could get to town and sure enough the box was out there in the alley just like the undertaker said it’d be by that time. We loaded it in the truck and got started back out this way. The four of us got to talking about what to do and the way it ended up was there wasn’t but one thing in the world about it to do.

By then it was a long time after dark with only a little moonlight showing down and it looked like it was getting ready to cloud up and rain some pretty soon. We drove the truck off the paved highway over to the side of it where it was widest and found the highest place on the bank where it was dry above the ditch and the standing water. That’s where we started digging with the shovels we’d brought along and dug the grave deep and wide enough to put the box down in it.

Nobody was a preacher or deacon in the church and all we could do about it was stand there and take off our hats and sing some of the songs. We didn’t sing too loud—just enough to make the songs sound right—because some white people who lived in a house not far off might get curious and want to come down there and find out what was happening alongside the state highway in the nighttime. Then we shoveled in the dirt and covered the box good and tamped the sod back on top of it to keep it looking natural so the highway people or nobody else would be apt to notice it.

The only way to mark the place to remember where it was was with a rusty old Holsum bread company sign that fell off a post and we laid that on top of it. That bread company sign made it look just like a natural part of the state highway.

When you go from here back down to the paved road and turn toward town, you can find the place about half-a-mile that way. Look on the right hand side close to the wire fence where there’s a scaly-bark tree and you’ll see that Holsum bread company sign flat on the ground and right beside it a little bitty fruit jar with some flowers in it.

My wife goes down there every Sunday and puts some fresh flowers in the fruit jar because my mother can’t get up out of bed to come out here to do it. What I’m doing now is paying a quarter-a-week graveyard insurance for my mother so when she dies she’ll have a place in the graveyard to be buried in. She’s already got the undertaker’s insurance all paid for.

I just wouldn’t feel right going off to New Jersey to stay and leave my mother here with no paid-for place in the graveyard. It wouldn’t be right to put her down in a grave by the state highway after dark when nobody was looking.

They keep the sides of the state highway nice and grassy and the weeds chopped down, and they pick up all the beer cans people throw away, but I’ve made up my mind for her to have the kind of burying my father couldn’t get. I want my mother put in the graveyard in the daytime with the preacher on hand and out-loud singing the way folks want it done when they have to die and be buried.

I don’t know nothing about any colored man from Georgia or Alabama ever coming to this part of Mississippi. If he knows what I know, he’d stayed where he was or else kept on going to Arkansas. It might not be a bit better over there for the colored, but it sure can’t be worse than right here.

If that fellow named Bisco asked me, I’d tell him to haul himself off to New Jersey like I’m going to do. I don’t mind being born in the Big South, but I don’t aim to be pushed to death in it.

F
OR A LONG TIME
the old Memphis road has been a narrow trace, occasionally dusty but usually muddy and rutted, that lies straight and flat on the soft dark earth of the Delta and goes alongside the railway tracks between Clarksdale and Coahoma in Northern Mississippi.

It was a busy thoroughfare for carriages and wagons long before the Civil War—and a profitable one for highwaymen, too—but nowadays it is no more than a back-country farm road between cotton fields. It has been unmarked for travelers and little used by automobiles since the construction of a paved highway several miles eastward.

Just the same, now in the nineteen-sixties, the old Memphis road is still as muddy and slippery and treacherous in rainy weather as I remember it being forty-some years ago when it was the only thoroughfare for cotton-wagon teamsters and an occasional automobile being driven from Clarksdale to Memphis.

In the summer of 1918 during the last year of World War I, I was fifteen years old and for two months I had been driving the YMCA staff car at the military training camp at Millington, Tennessee, about eighteen miles north of Memphis.

Being the only staff-car driver and on twenty-four-hour call, I was often sent to the Millington railway station to meet a lecturer or musician traveling the YMCA’s war-time circuit. More frequently, however, I was awakened between midnight and dawn and sent to bring a stranded soldier back to camp from a Millington speakeasy bar or a madam’s place so he would not be absent-without-leave at morning roll call. Once in a while a staff member wanted to go to church on Sunday and I took him to town and waited until the services ended.

However, my consistently regular duty that summer was to drive the secretary or some other member of the YMCA staff to Memphis for the week end when he wanted to visit friends or spend his leave in one of the hotels.

After two months on the job my driving record was still good, having neither been charged with speeding nor involved in an accident, and the YMCA secretary said he was so confident of my driving ability that he wanted me to take the train to Clarksdale and drive his own Ford touring car the whole distance of a hundred miles from his home back to Millington.

It was shortly after noon when I got off the train in Clarksdale on a Saturday in the heat of August. Within half an hour I had found the secretary’s home at the address he had given me and I knocked on the door of the small white bungalow to tell his wife that I had come to drive the car to Millington.

The secretary’s wife, who was slender and dark-haired and in her early twenties, opened the screen-door immediately as though she had been waiting for me to come. Then she said she had heard from her husband about my coming and had a dinner of fried chicken, field peas, sliced tomatoes, and spoon-bread waiting for me. She insisted that I would have to eat the meal she had cooked for me before I could start on the long trip back to Tennessee.

While I was sitting at the table, the girl ate nothing herself, and, while nervously fingering a knife and fork, she asked so many questions about her husband that it was an hour longer before I could finish eating. She wanted to know why he would need their automobile in Millington when he had the use of the YMCA staff car; she wanted to know how often he was in the habit of spending the week end in Memphis; and she asked several times if he often left the YMCA in the evening and spent the night somewhere else instead of sleeping in the YMCA dormitory. I told her that I was always so busy with my duties of washing, polishing, greasing, and driving the staff car that I had no opportunity to know where her husband went or what he did when he was away from the YMCA hall and dormitory.

When I got up from the table, she said it was very-late in the day and there might be an afternoon thunderstorm and that I could spend the night right there and leave early the next morning. She took me to a room where she said I could sleep and carefully smoothed the gleaming white counterpane on the wide bed. After a few moments she said that she and her husband had no children and that she was miserable being there alone all the time. When she looked up from the bed, there were tears in her eyes.

It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when I backed the Ford touring car from the chicken-house shed at the rear of the bungalow and waved good-by to the girl as she followed me to the street. When I looked back at her the last time, she had put her hands over her face as if crying again.

I drove slowly through Clarksdale, stopping frequently to ask directions, until I had found the old Memphis road going northward alongside the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. The hottest part of the August day had passed, but the dark clouds of the thunderstorm the secretary’s wife had warned me about were moving rapidly up the Mississippi River a few miles away as I began driving up the rough dirt road toward Coahoma.

During the first few miles I was able to go as fast as twenty miles an hour and I was confident that by driving all night I would be able to get to Memphis by sunup the next morning and then deliver the secretary’s car to him at the YMCA hall in Millington soon after breakfast.

The afternoon thunderstorm was moving faster than I could drive on the rutted road and I began to wonder if I should have stayed in Clarksdale as the girl had begged me to do. I had gone about nine or ten miles when the rain suddenly began coming down in tropical torrents and it was too late then to turn around and go back. The ruts were soon filled with water and the windshield became so splattered with muddy water that I had to lean over the side of the car in order to see where I was going.

Then all at once the road was an endless mud puddle and the rear wheels began spinning helplessly in the slush. Even then I thought I could manage to keep the car going by driving slowly and carefully in the slick Delta mud. But suddenly I felt the wheels slide from the road and an instant later the car went into the ditch and turned upside down before I could get out and keep from being pinned under it. I heard the windshield crack and splinter at the same moment the oilcloth top was flattened upon me and the steering wheel. At first there was a faint gurgling of running water not far away and then I felt it flowing against my head.

The engine had stopped when it was submerged in the ditch water and I could hear the beating of rain upon the overturned car and the frequent sharp cracks of lightning striking trees in the cypress swamp beside the road. It was not long until I smelled gasoline leaking from the tank over my head and I was afraid the car would catch on fire.

When I tried to move, there was a stinging pain in my left arm. I kept on struggling to pull my arm free so I could crawl out, even though the pain became more intense each time I moved, and I realized that I was trapped under the weight of the car. Then, with drowsiness coming over me, all I could think of was the cool white counterpane on the soft bed in Clarksdale.

I remembered nothing after that until sometime during the morning of the next day.

When I opened my eyes and looked around me that morning, I was in a small narrow room with roughly raftered ceiling, unpainted board walls, a single window, and a large smoke-blackened brick fireplace. After that I could see that I was in a wood-posted wide bed and covered with a colorful patchwork quilt.

Gazing at the high-posted bed and patch-work quilt, and not knowing how I had come to be there, I wondered if I were dreaming or if I were actually in bed in Bisco’s house in Georgia. Closing my eyes, I could see the room in Bisco’s house as clearly as I had always remembered the night I wanted to get into his bed.

I had no idea about how much time had passed when I opened my eyes again, but I saw a large and fleshy Negro woman standing at the side of the bed and watching me with solemn concern. Her skin was shiny-black and her heavy breasts lay on the bulge of her stomach. When she saw me look at her, she leaned over the bed and put her hand on my forehead. Her hand was cool and comforting and I hoped she would never take it away.

Presently she straightened up, her teeth gleaming with a motherly smile, and nodded confidently. Waking up and seeing her like that in a familiar-looking room, she looked exactly as I remembered Bisco’s mother long before in Coweta County in Georgia when I wanted to spend the night in Bisco’s house and sleep in the quilt-covered bed. I raised my head from the pillow and looked around the room to see if Bisco were there, too. Nobody else was in the room.