In Search of Bisco (16 page)

None of this trouble would’ve started in the first place if people up North had had the sense to leave well enough alone. But no—they came down South to Little Rock and New Orleans and Birmingham and other big cities and started talking like a bunch of damn fools about segregation and discrimination and civil rights. The whole country was getting along fine up to then. We had the niggers in their place all over the South and they damn-well stayed in it.

But those bleeding-heart Yankees from the North—and even some from Washington, too—started stirring up trouble by telling the niggers they ought to have more civil rights. That’s when the niggers started thinking they were as good as white people. So it wasn’t long till they claimed they had to have equal rights in everything. They started out wanting to send their black-assed kids to white schools and eating in white restaurants. But that was only the beginning and there’s no end to what they’ll try to get after this.

Now the Yankees up North are getting a whopping big dose of their own medicine and it’s gagging them in the gullet. While they’re trying to puke it out, it makes them realize they don’t want to associate with niggers up there no more than we do down here. That’s why they are wishing to God they’d never started this thing.

All right. So now they’ve got the civil rights law. But before this thing started, the niggers were peaceful and quiet and satisfied. They didn’t expect no more than what they already had. Now there’s no end to what they’ll try to do from now on. They already talk like they think they can take over the whole country and run it as they God damn please. If it keeps on, the next thing’ll be that they’ll say they want a law passed that’ll make it a crime for white whores not to give them equal rights.

The government in Washington can pass all the laws they want and print them in letters a foot high and nail them to every God damn telephone pole in Arkansas, but nigger-loving laws won’t make us change our ways of handling them. We’ve got our own way of doing things. You’ll never find me living in a house next to niggers shitting and pissing all around the place. If that’s what the Yankee nigger-lovers want, they can have it, but by God nobody’s going to make me put up with all that nigger stink. Before I’d put up with it, I’d set fire to their house or dynamite it to-hell-and-gone.

It sure was a lucky thing for us that we got rid of the niggers on the Grand Prairie long before this trouble started. The way it is now, we can feel sorry for the Yankees in the North and be glad about our own selves at the same time. It’s a God damn pity about the Yankees, but they asked for it and now they’re stuck with it.

T
HE TOWN OF
B
ASTROP
has been built on a gritty hummock that rises a few feet above the perennial green flatland of delta grass in Northeast Louisiana.

The courthouse square is Bastrop’s principal business district and, like small-town county seats throughout Bisco Country, it is surrounded by the usual predominance of fifty-dollar loan company offices, cubbyholes of ubiquitous white-shirted lawyers, drug stores selling lawn furniture and little red tricycles, and variety shops with fly-specked window displays of women’s twenty-nine-cent pink rayon panties.

This is where white merchants solicit the Negro’s dollar, and then, as soon as it is in hand, and with the practiced brusqueness of a practical whore, send him back to confinement in his segregated shantytown until he earns another dollar to spend.

Beyond the courthouse square and along its tree-shaded, white-skin residential streets, Bastrop is still not unlike many other towns in the Deep South where the white half of nine or ten thousand people live, work, and conform to the century-old social, religious, and political customs of the community.

As elsewhere from South Carolina to Louisiana, absolute white skin and either a pretense of wealth or assumed aristocratic ancestry are necessary prerequisites in Bastrop for acceptable economic status and social standing. Likewise, unfailing church attendance and unwavering loyalty to the entrenched political machine are required to be posted as public records before full citizenship is granted. Non-conformists and other dissidents in Bastrop quickly find out that they have the choice of doing either of two things—conform or suffer social and economic boycott.

It was Bastrop’s fate in its beginning to be geographically isolated in a hip pocket of Louisiana. Consequently, it is its misfortune to have been culturally by-passed since its days of plantation glory in the nineteenth century. The town’s few paved roads come from the backwoods of Southern Arkansas and its local roads disappear somewhere in the swamps between the Mississippi and Ouachita rivers. The one access the town has to the rest of the world is a forty-mile highway to Monroe, the only place within nearly a hundred miles that has a city-size population.

However, Bastrop does continue to exist and prosper with good reason. It is in the center of an extensive region rich in cotton, timber, cattle, and chemical industry and it is populated by an abundant supply of thirty-cent-an-hour and fifteen-dollar-a-week Gumbo Negro laborers. With such a combination of wealth-producing natural and human resources, it is as content now as it was a century ago to be geographically remote and culturally isolated in America.

Contentment is likely to continue among Bastrop’s cotton planters, timbermen, and cattlemen as long as the Negro laborer can be kept under social, economic, and political domination—which even in the nineteen-sixties means keeping the Negro in his place—and as long as ingenious means can be devised to perpetuate sub-standard wage scales.

All this is a familiar way of life to many Southerners of both races who live in the states bordering the Mississippi River from Memphis to New Orleans. However, the white Northerner, and particularly the New Englander, who moves to this region of the Deep South to work as a technician or engineer or supervisor in an industrial plant often finds it difficult, if not impossible, to condone expressions of racial hatred and acts of spite. Usually, Northerners soon discover that the famed Southern hospitality so graciously offered guests at the front door can be transformed immediately afterward into tirades of ruthless abuse and intimidation forced upon Negro servants at the back door.

The forty-year-old college-educated wife of a petroleum engineer had lived in Bastrop with her husband and three children for nearly two years. They had always lived in New England before moving to Louisiana and she and her husband had never been able to afford to employ a servant until they came to Bastrop. Her husband’s increase in salary, and the prevailing low wages for servants in Bastrop, had made it possible for them to employ a full-time Negro maid.

The first time I realized something was wrong was about a year ago, she said. My husband and I had made many friends in town and I knew some of our closest neighbors very well by then. It was one morning soon after breakfast when one of the neighbors came to the door and said she and another neighbor were having coffee at her house and they wanted me to join them. I was pleased to be invited and of course I went.

The three of us talked casually about nothing in particular for about five minutes while we were drinking coffee. Then one of the women suddenly spoke in a sharp tone of voice and said she and several other women on our street were having trouble with their maids and that it was all my fault. I was so taken by surprise that I thought she was joking and I laughed.

There was a long silence in the room and I could see the tense expressions of anger on their faces. Realizing then how serious they were, I asked what I had done to cause any trouble. Asking that one question was the only chance I had to speak again for what seemed like a full half-hour. They were so angry that both of them were trying to talk at once during most of the time.

Even so, it didn’t take long to find out why they were so angry and upset. I had been in the habit of giving our Negro maid a little extra money whenever my husband and I had guests for dinner. Kathy’s salary of fifteen dollars a week was exactly the same as the other full-time maids in town received, but I just could not let her work several hours longer than usual at night without paying her extra for it. And even when we had just a few people come for cocktails, I always gave Kathy something extra then, too.

Kathy had never complained about the salary we paid her, and I’d been careful to find out what the prevailing wages were before I offered her the job, but the pay was so small for the work she did—and for the long hours, too—that I was ashamed to pay her so little. I suppose you could say my husband and I wanted to conform to local customs because we intended to live here for a long time.

Anyway, I was always glad when we invited guests to dinner or cocktails and had a good reason to give her a few dollars extra to make up for the small salary.

Then, besides that, I’ve always had a weakness for wanting to make small gifts to people I knew well, and so once in a while I’d buy something at a store that I knew Kathy wanted or actually needed. She has five children and her husband is a janitor who also makes only fifteen dollars a week. The gifts never cost more than two or three dollars, but I know they were worth many times that much to her.

What had happened was that some of the Negro maids who worked for our neighbors found out that I was giving Kathy something extra now and then, as well as occasional gifts, in addition to her salary. I couldn’t blame Kathy for talking about it and I couldn’t blame the other maids, either, for wanting some extra pay when they had to work longer than eight or nine hours.

I’d supposed that everybody would feel obligated to pay a servant something extra for working as late as midnight, after working all day, too. I was so upset that morning when those two women talked the way they did that I told them that anybody who’d make a Negro maid work much longer than her usual hours, and then not pay her something in addition, should not be permitted to have a servant. I was damn mad about it.

I don’t know what else I said that morning, because I was so upset I might’ve said anything. Whatever it was I did say, it must’ve been to the point, because neither of those two women has spoken to me or invited me to her house since. That means I’m on their outcast list and I’m glad of it.

I’ve been told by some of my other neighbors during the past few months—the friendly ones, of course—that those two former acquaintances are saying all sorts of things about me. For one thing, they delight in calling me a Northerner, which they consider a disdainful epithet, and they spread rumors that I’ve lost all my friends in Bastrop and that I’m so miserable that I’m begging my husband to resign from his position at the chemical plant so we can leave town.

If anybody’s looking for an example of a closed society, you wouldn’t have to go any farther than Bastrop to find it. I don’t know if it’s typical of the South, but it’s sure plain hell to be surrounded by what’s right here.

Some of the other gossip in Bastrop about me is that I have an immoral past and came South because I thought I could hide it here. One story is that I was somebody’s mistress in Boston while I was going to college. And I was. And I’m proud of it. I’ve been my husband’s only mistress since the first time I met him. That’s something some of the gossiping matrons couldn’t truthfully boast about—not if they knew their husbands as well as other people in town do.

Another thing I’ve heard is that I’m said to be partly Negro because I have dark skin and curly black hair and think I’m fooling everybody by trying to pass for a white person. What they don’t know is that whatever I am suits me perfectly and I wouldn’t want to be any different. I have no idea what they’ll try to think of next to say about me, but it’s sure to be the meanest thing they can think of.

There are only a few of us Northerners—as we’re called—living in Bastrop right now and occasionally two or three of us will get together and talk about the gossip that’s circulating about us in town. We have a few drinks, sympathize with each other, and then sometimes have a good cry together. Or a big laugh about it all. Either crying or laughing helps a lot. After that we can go home feeling like human beings again and not like diseased untouchables.

But that kind of feeling never lasts long. After a few days there’s sure to be some new despicable gossip in circulation. Not long ago it was said that I was going to try to desegregate our church by encouraging my maid, Kathy, and other Negroes to organize a sit-in demonstration during a Sunday morning service. I’d never thought of such a thing and had no such intention, even though I do think Negroes should have the right to join any church they wish and attend services like any other member.

Anyway, what happened was that the minister heard about it and he said it was up to the membership to decide if the church was to remain segregated or be desegregated. He said that instead of taking a standing vote during services, he had decided it would be better to circulate petitions among the members.

It was a foregone conclusion, as the minister knew, that very few people would sign a petition favoring integration of anything in Bastrop. Social and economic pressure against such a thing in a Southern town like this is too strong. But my husband and I signed in favor of it. And that did it. The whole thing was a trick, of course. It was all some people wanted to know when they saw our names on it and the petitions were immediately withdrawn before anybody else was asked to sign. The church is all-white—just as it’s always been.

Ever since then I’ve been called a Negro-lover—or, as they delight in saying it, nigger-lover—civil rights agitator, communist organizer, and, of course, a Northerner. When my husband and I attend church services now on Sunday mornings, we get a very icy-cold reception. Our best friends speak to us, and the minister shakes hands as though performing a distasteful duty, but you’d think by the way everybody else manages to look in some other direction that my husband and I had committed all the unpardonable sins in the book and were not only untouchable but also unlookables.