In Search of Bisco (15 page)

There’s been some other old folks like me and my wife who’d been sent off the plantations and come to Pine Bluff when the white man said he didn’t need none of us no more, but I didn’t know how to locate none of them in such a big city where everybody was a stranger to me. When me and my wife got here to Pine Bluff in the truck, the best I could do was look for a friendly man and ask him please let me unload the furniture in his front yard. I had to do something like that quick because the boy driving the truck said he’d been warned to unload and hurry back to the plantation before dark and he was scared not to.

There wasn’t much furniture on the truck—only some chairs and kitchen table and my wife’s old sewing machine and things like that. But when it was all piled up on that truck with the bedstead on top, people seeing us drive around looking for a place to stay must’ve thought a big flood was on the way and time for everybody to find a place safe from the high water.

Anyhow, I don’t know what I’d done if I hadn’t come across a friendly colored man who took pity on me. He let me and my wife unload the furniture in his front yard and said we could put some quilts down and sleep on his front porch. We stayed there four days cooking on his cookstove and sleeping on his porch before I could locate a house to move to and rent for four dollars.

The big trouble about that was the rats. I’m used to some rats, but not like the big fat ones that come out at night here in Pine Bluff and crawl all over you when you’re trying to sleep like they own the whole world. Country rats don’t bother me none, but these city rats sure make me nervous.

My big worry besides the rats is making a living, because I’m getting old fast. Not many white folks want to hire an old man like me. They say the young colored boys work harder and faster for the same pay. But I’ve just got to make a living somehow if I can’t get the social security. I’ve been told about state welfare pay, but that don’t amount to much, nohow.

The way it’s been, I’ve had about twenty or more yardboy jobs in nearly a year and a half and can’t find a steady job to save my life. I work two or three days in a week sometimes and then get paid off and told not to come back no more after that. Then I have to go looking for another yardboy job somewhere in town. The longest lasting job I had was three weeks. And that only added up to six whole pay-days of work.

I know I do good yard work. People tell me so, too. But somehow they just don’t want me working steady for them. I’ve asked some of the white people why they had to let me go. One of them told me it was some kind of trouble about the social security. A white lady said if I worked steady all the time for her, and kept it up for two or three months she’d have to pay out extra money to the government for the social security. She said she’d rather hire a different yardboy every two weeks or so and not pay the social security money.

That’s something else that bothers me all the time. If anybody needs the social security, it sure is me. But I just can’t find a way to get connected with it so I can draw some of the welfare money. Looks like everybody else except me is connected with it somehow, because just about everybody I work for says they has to deduct about a dollar from my pay for the tax. It’s hard on me to lose a dollar out of my pay like that nearly every week and never get none of it back.

I don’t like to come right out in the open and say some white people do something wrong. I wasn’t raised to talk like that. But if it aint wrong it still don’t look exactly right. I went to the social security place not long ago and asked the people down there when I would be due to get some government security money because I was already past sixty-five. I didn’t expect it to amount to much but I sure thought I’d get something. They said it’d likely be nothing at all because I wasn’t covered with it.

I told those people I’d worked on the plantation all my life up to a year or more ago and had been doing yard work in Pine Bluff for the past year and that sometimes when I got paid off I was short a whole dollar they told me was the deduct to pay the tax.

But the people at the social security place said the whole time I was working at farm work on the plantation didn’t count none and the deducts from yardboy pay don’t mean nothing at all because I didn’t work steady for the same people long enough at a time to count. They told me I ought to keep people from making the deducts till I got a steady job and worked at the same place three or four months. That’s what they said exactly. But they don’t know how hard it is for an old colored man like me to speak up and tell white folks the right thing they ought to do.

If I was a lot younger, I’d start right in and say to the white people they ought to pay me all the money when I do work for them and don’t hold some back and call it deduct for the social security for me that aint. I hear the young colored people talk like that, but I’m an old-timey darky and I just can’t make myself say it at my age.

The benefit security pay is the big thing I want to get hold of. If they’d put that in the civil rights, I’d sure have something to be thankful about. And then while they’re about it, I wish they’d put something in the law about those rats down there where all us colored live. My feet stick out the end of the bed because it’s shorter than me and hardly a night goes by when I don’t get a rat bite on one or both my big toes. I can put up with a lot of hardship, but I just can’t get used to those rats that come out from somewhere in the dark of night.

F
OR MORE THAN A
century and a half the Deep South was wholly dependent upon the servitude and muscle of the Negro to do its work and produce its wealth. Cotton farming, the principal source of wealth for the white Southern landowner, could not have prospered without the labor of the Gullah, Geechee, Guinea, and Gumbo. But now times have changed and mechanized agriculture is replacing human muscles with tractors, harvesters, and combines.

There are already many regions in the agricultural South where the Negro laborer is no longer useful as a worker and, as it follows, is no longer wanted as a citizen. Among these regions—other than the mechanized cotton belt—is the Grand Prairie of Eastern Arkansas. This is one place in Bisco Country where cotton, because of unsuitable soil, will not grow and thrive; now it is also hostile ground for the Negro American.

The Grand Prairie is a small empire in the bayou region between the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers that has produced more rice during the past fifty years than any other region in the United States. Few Americans rely upon rice as a basic food, but beer drinkers would go thirsty and put up a loud clamor if brewers could not have an ample supply of it.

The three necessary natural elements for the production of rice—thin soil on hardpan base, abundant water, and sub-tropical climate—have always been present in this region of Arkansas. And now rice farming on the Grand Prairie has become the most completely mechanized of all agricultural operations in the nation. This combination of natural circumstances and perfected technology has made the production of rice relatively effortless, highly profitable, and no longer dependent upon the use of human labor.

Rice paddies on the Grand Prairie are contoured and terraced by levee machines; flooding and irrigation are electronically timed and controlled; seeding and fertilizing are done by airplanes; and the largest combines that have yet been devised for such agricultural purposes harvest the rice crop. Such specialized machinery and techniques require skilled operators, and the stoop-labor Negro was not one of those privileged to receive the essential training in a white man’s country. Like the mules that were no longer useful and were sold to the dog food cannery, the Negro laborers too were sent to their destiny elsewhere.

The wealthy owner of nearly five hundred acres of riceland paddies on the Grand Prairie between Stuttgart and DeWitt is a soft-spoken, friendly-mannered, white Protestant Southerner in his fifties. He was born in Arkansas, he was educated in Arkansas, he inherited the land from his father, he is untraveled beyond the Mid-South, he is fiercely imbued with the Southerner’s hatred of the Negro, and he has been a rice grower for thirty years. During the first twenty years, all the work of raising rice was done by mules and Negroes; now neither a mule nor a Negro remains on the farm.

Nowadays the owner employs a land-leveling company to terrace his paddies; he uses an aerial farming service to seed and fertilize; and the contracts with still another company to harvest with combines. Each third year, as scientific rice growers do, he leases his flooded paddies in a rotation of acreage to a commercial fish hatchery for the purpose of restoring fertility to the soil. Such expert management of rice farms is not unusual on the Grand Prairie. After all, the owner is not a mere dirt farmer; he is an efficient businessman in stylish country clothing.

I’ll tell you exactly how it is, he said. We don’t need niggers around here. We finished using them a long time ago when we changed over from mules to machines. The niggers know it, too. They’ve gone away and won’t never come back. That’s why you don’t see their black asses around shacks on rice farms like you still do in some parts of the cotton country in Arkansas.

I bulldozed some of their stinking shacks and set fire to the rest of them when I stopped hiring niggers about five years ago and told them to pick up and get the hell off my land. Some of the old niggers put on a pitiful face and said they didn’t have nowhere to go. I told them I didn’t give a good God damn where they went and the country would be better off if they went to hell or back to Africa. You have to talk like that to niggers to get any sense through their thick black skulls.

Some of the younger niggers tried to get me to let them learn tractor driving, but I wouldn’t listen to that, neither. You let fucking niggers stay on your place and before you know it every one of them has a sackful of bastard kids, maybe eight or ten or more, and that means you’d have to pay more taxes to build their schools and hire their teachers. When I pay school taxes, I want my money to go to educate white children—not black-assed niggers. And that’s how it worked out. We got rid of them and kept our school taxes down at the same time.

I don’t know where all of them went when they left here. They just disappeared. Went somewhere out of sight. Thank God. That’s why we’ve got a lower percentage of niggers in our county than you’ll find anywhere in Arkansas. The few niggers left here in the county now are no more than ten or fifteen per cent of the whole population. That’s good. It’s a damn good showing when you think that nearly everywhere else in Arkansas the black bastards are fifty per cent or more.

You’ll find a few of them working around the rice mills in Stuttgart doing the heavy work and others will be janitoring and hauling garbage. We need a few to stay and do that kind of work. I wouldn’t want to see a white man shoveling garbage and cleaning toilet stools. That’s nigger-work. The same about cooking and house-cleaning, too. We couldn’t get along without enough nigger women to do that for us.

What happened to most of the dinges who left the rice farms was that they went to Little Rock and Memphis and somewhere up North. It’s hard on the white people in Little Rock and Memphis, but I’m glad a lot of them went up North and gave the bleeding-hearts up there a whopping big dose of what they’ve been begging for.

We never had Georgia niggers living here. When we needed niggers on the Grand Prairie in the old days—hell, we raised our own. That was no trouble—we had plenty of fucking niggers around here for that. And that’s why we didn’t need to get them from Georgia. I know all about those Georgia niggers—most of them are half-assed whites and we don’t want them coming to Arkansas and stirring up our niggers with wrong notions. Whenever I saw one from Georgia or Alabama, I’d tell him to go back where he came from or else keep on moving to Texas. I don’t know if one of them was named Bisco or not. I never heard that name for a nigger, but it sounds like one of those half-assed whites from Georgia.

They talk real big up North about segregation and discrimination down here and now we’ll see how smart they are about handling niggers. They’ve been doing their fault-finding up North for a long time and now we can sit back and watch the Yankees squirm and run for cover and holler for help.

I’ll pass the hat any day, and match anybody’s money with my own, to buy bus tickets for any nigger and his wife and ten bastard kids to go North and live with the Yankees. That’s a standing offer with me and I’m always glad when I have a chance to do it.

I’ll tell you why it makes sense to do that. This country around here is just as safe to live in now as it is pretty. There’s nothing to be scared of, day or night, like it is where the niggers live by the thousands in the big cities and where they’ll knife a white man for his money and get their hands on a white woman for rape. You can go out after dark here and think nothing of it. There’s no black bastards prowling around at night now to hit you on the head or stick a knife in you. Even a white woman without her titty-bags on is safe to go where she pleases day or night anywhere on the Grand Prairie and not get stripped naked and thrown down and nigger-raped. I dare the Yankees to make a claim like that and try to prove it.

Everybody knows what happens up North all the time where a lot of niggers went. You read about it in the papers and hear about it on television. And I’ll bet you that’s only the half of it. Robbing, killing, raping, and everything else you can think of. But even that’s only the beginning. Just wait a while. It’s going to get a hell of a lot worse all over the country. And a lot of people are going to get hurt—if not killed. The only way to stop it now is for the nigger-lovers to wake up and find out it’s this thing about civil rights that’s the cause of it.

The only civil rights the niggers ought to have is what they already had—and that was too many for them. They could ride on the highways and watch the same television shows the white people did and buy what they wanted in the stores. But when the law tells them they can live in any part of town they please and eat in the same restaurants you do—then that’s encouraging them. And that’s what they want. Encouragement. You give them an inch of that and they’ll stop at nothing. They’ll claim it’s discrimination unless they can get white women next. I know what I’m talking about. I wasn’t born and raised in Arkansas for nothing.