In Search of Bisco (19 page)

The more I sit here and think about it now, more of it comes back to mind. Bisco settled down in Coweta County after that and went to sharecropping and got married and had some children. That wife he married was a perky young one. Maybe no more than fourteen or fifteen at the time and mighty good looking. She wasn’t a real black girl. She was a heap lighter in color than some white folks I’ve seen. That Bisco wasn’t no black boy, neither. He was real tan and more so than me.

Anyhow. Some white folks who moved here from somewhere else and bought some farm land got to talking about how his wife was too light-colored even for a Geechee and said Bisco married a white woman from the North and was trying to pass her off for colored so he could live with her. I never did know the truth about that and made it no business of mine to find out. Anyhow. These white folks said they wouldn’t stand for no colored man living with no white woman and getting in the bed with her and they told him to get shed of her or else get out of the country himself. White or colored, I don’t care which, nobody wants to get shed of his wife if she suits him and’s the kind he wants to keep. Anyhow. Bisco said he wasn’t going to do nothing about it like he was told.

Some good white folks sided with Bisco and said they didn’t think it was right to make him get shed of his wife. But those other kind of white folks who started the trouble was the rich new people who owned a heap of the land and they stirred up some of the poor buckras to nightride.

I didn’t think none of the whites who’d always lived around here would go against our people like that, but some of them did. That’s when the night-riders went to Bisco’s house one night and told him he had to sunrise the next morning to get clear out of Coweta County and never come back again as long as he lived.

Anyhow. Everybody knows what some white men’ll do when they get a grudge against the colored and talk like that. If they go nightriding, they can make a colored disappear and you never see him again unless someday you happen to come across of what’s left of him in a swamp somewhere. Anyhow. Bisco went ahead and done what I’d done. He loaded up his automobile with belongings and put his wife and children in it and drove off to somewhere long before sunrise.

And he aint been back since, neither. I’ve heard it said he went over to Alabama or Mississippi, and maybe even more far off than that somewhere. I don’t blame him none for going off as far as he could get from here. A colored never has no chance once the nightriders come around and take out a grudge on him for being colored. If they don’t beat the life out of him to start with, they’re just as apt to stuff pure cement down his throat and then weight him down with scrap iron in a swamp somewhere. I sure was glad Bisco got away alive.

Some folks say they’ve got letters in the mail from Bisco’s wife and she says they’re doing fine where they’re at. I still don’t know if it’s Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere else. But every time I heard about it, it made me feel real good, because everybody knows what the nightriders would’ve done if he’d stayed here and kept his wife and not left like they told him to.

Anyhow. I’m none too pleased staying here myself where those same nightriding white men live all around and the colored still here about. They haven’t bothered nobody lately but that don’t mean they won’t if they take a notion. Anyhow. I keep my mouth shut tight when I’m around one of them. I’m too old now for me to pick up and make a move like Bisco done. I wouldn’t even know which way to go off somewhere to.

S
OME ROADS LEAD
out of the Deep South, some go around in inconsequential circles, others come to a dead end at the brink of sinister swamps, and a few roads go all the way to New Orleans.

A person who takes one of the roads to New Orleans and goes there after time spent in the countryside and in other cities of the Southern states is likely to get the impression that New Orleans is a little bit of everything the Old South was in the past and some of what the New South is now. Most of all, however, he is likely to get the immediate impression that New Orleans has the fortune to be unique among all Southern cities.

After the impression will come considerable evidence that the uniqueness of New Orleans is durable and memorable and incontestable. The humid climate of the city and its deep-water port are duplicated around the world. The conglomeration of modern architecture and ancient housing in New Orleans is similar to that of many American cities. But nowhere in the Deep South, or anywhere else in the United States, is there a comparable compound of people whose origins are French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, Mexican, Cuban, African, Indian, Cajun, Creole, and Gumbo.

This unique admixture of nearly a million people of the world has produced a New Orleans family of man that could be duplicated elsewhere only in the imagination of an anthropologist.

As the result of generations of racial commingling and assimilation, New Orleans is the one place in Bisco Country where social conflict has the best opportunity of being adjudged by intelligence and sympathy rather than by the agony of physical force and violence. New Orleans has had its share of racial disturbances in the past and, like other American cities in the Racial Sixties, it will be subjected to more in the future. Nevertheless, because of the sympathy and sophistication of its population, a mutually satisfactory adjustment of social and civil rights is likely to be achieved with more ease and quickness in New Orleans than elsewhere in the United States.

It has been the progressive blending of the city’s heterogeneous population for more than two centuries that accounts for the noticeable contrast between the human compatibility and cosmopolitanism of New Orleans and, differing so distinctly, the innumerable pockets of racial conflict and disparity in the hinterland beginning at its own city limits and extending all the way from Louisiana to South Carolina.

Beyond the city limits of New Orleans and throughout the hinterland there is fear and belligerency among Negroes and, most basic of all, cautious mistrust and suspicion of the white man and his motives. There is good reason for being mistrustful of the white man anywhere in Bisco Country, as Negroes have learned during years of painful experience, and parents have passed the warning along to their children. The fear has been generated over the years by threats and intimidation, by beatings and killings, and mistrust is a logical defense against injury.

The older generation of Negroes has been cowed by fear and their only refuge is in mistrust. Among the younger generation, belligerency takes the form of active protests and demonstrations and, in the extreme, physical retaliation with fists and sticks and stones.

In any form, this contention is a revolutionary step beyond fear and mistrust. Those who are actively belligerent are the new-age Negroes of the Racial Sixties who, unlike their parents and grandparents, have been freed from fear by education and visions of equality.

In the past, poverty and its miseries were described by romanticists—and by theorists—as being a sympathetic bond between underprivileged whites and Negroes. Such a common bond did not exist in actual life in the Deep South and it still has no basis of fact. What actually happened was that in a showdown between the two, it was customary for the white-skin man to receive favored treatment from landlord and politician at the expense of the black-skin man. This was a traditional bribe paid to the poor-white to help keep the Negro in economic bondage and political subjection. Consequently, it was inevitable that Negroes would eventually become suspicious of the motives of the whole white race.

The difference between being white-poor and Negro-poor in such an environment is that the former has had freedom of opportunity and movement and the latter has been a prisoner of discrimination and injustice. Long after civil rights legislation and conscientious efforts to enforce the law, this racial zoning in Bisco Country will continue to be as conspicuous as the distinct lines of demarcation between residential and commercial zoning of real estate in any American city.

This is why poverty in Bisco Country did not begin merely because there was insufficient money for an individual to buy adequate food and clothing for his family. Poverty actually began when the human spirit of the Negro American was impoverished by the denial of the rights of citizenship. Urban or rural in environment, physical hunger and distress might be endured by a man of any race with little alleviation, but withholding the Negro’s freedom and equality while granting it to others who happened to have been born with white skin was more tragic in its psychological consequences than material poverty.

The inevitable human reaction to this injustice was the cause of the rebellion of the Racial Sixties.

During the progress of the Negro rebellion, no community in the Deep South will be privileged to have immunity from violence in the contest between equality and superiority. On one side are willful men who take pride and comfort in racial hate and they are not about to give up life-long prejudice and accept equality with Negroes without a struggle. On the other side are Negroes whose long-promised sweet-by-and-by can no longer be denied or postponed. In another age, after prejudice has been buried with the last survivor of Old South traditions, such a controversy is not likely to exist and certainly not tolerated for long.

However, this being the nineteen-sixties, and an immediacy, the younger generation of whites and Negroes in New Orleans is not waiting for the future but is striving to reach truce and agreement now for the purpose of alleviating the aggravations that lead to conflict and riot. If such efforts are successful, New Orleans will have additional pride in its uniqueness.

In contrast to the contemporary sophistication of New Orleans and the racial blending of its population—as well as a reminder of the deep-seated traditions of its hinterland—it would be well to look back into the past and to recall the era of the old-time darky when he was groveling in the dust and then trotting off in feigned cheerful obedience to the white master’s command.

On a Deep South plantation even as recently as a generation ago he was an elderly Gullah or Geechee or Guinea or Gumbo, white-haired and stoop-shouldered, who was dressed in ragged clothing and had been trained from youth by lash or deprivation to live in constant fear of displeasing the whole white race. And, if he were a good darky, he received the favor of being called Uncle.

Because of his advanced age and failing health, he was no longer useful as a fieldhand. However, assumed to be senile, and therefore as trustworthy and harmless as a eunuch in the proximity of white women, his being permitted to be yardboy and buffoon was his ultimate reward for a lifetime of labor in the fields.

Knowing by years of experience what was required of him, he listened to orders, hat in hand, with abject humility. When dismissed, he backed away from the white master to a respectful distance before daring to turn around and go off to his chore. His day began at dawn when he went to the back porch of the master’s mansion to wait patiently for the first command of the morning. His day ended when he saw the last light in the big house turned off at midnight or later. His pay was left-over food from the kitchen, the shelter of a barnyard crib, and occasional gifts of discarded clothing.

In addition to his many regularly prescribed daily chores, such as saddling a horse, raking leaves, splitting firewood, plucking a chicken, butchering a hog, hoeing the garden, sweeping the porches, and cleaning the backhouse privy, the elderly yardboy and buffoon was often required to obey whimsical commands to perform antics on Sunday afternoons and holidays for the amusement of the master and his guests.

There were times when Uncle Ned—or Uncle Pete or Uncle Jack—would be told to climb a tree in the front yard and to sit there on a limb until he saw a buzzard fly overhead. Sometimes he would be told to run around in circles and howl like a hound treeing a possum. He could be ordered to get down on his knees and pray aloud for rain to fall on all the cornfields in the county without a drop of water falling on cottonfields. He might be told to make up words for a song, and to sing it as loudly as he could about a high-yellow girl begging a white man to chase her into the woods. Many of these musical laments and mournful prayers with improvised lyrics lived in memory to become the enduring folk songs of the South.

Now and then there were Sunday afternoon occasions—but always after the minister and his wife and children had finished eating midday dinner and had gone home—when the men left the women on the front porch or in the parlor and went down to the barn.

Going-to-the-barn was a special event for the men and usually it was an occasion that could be anticipated after hearing a casual hint several days in advance. There the men could drink bourbon from bottles and watch an exhibition on the corn-husking floor that the elderly Negro had been ordered to arrange. It was his duty at a time like that to use a shotgun if necessary to bring a young buck and a girl to the barn from the Negro quarter to strip naked and perform whatever sexually inciting acts the men said they wanted to see. Afterward, the older white men went back to the house and the younger ones could stay in the barn and take turns mounting the girl on the corn-husking floor. At a time like that, a white man had no qualms about crossing the color line with a Negro girl. In fact, on remote plantations it was often a customary ritual to celebrate achievement of Southern manhood.

It is not likely that the Old South plantation custom of going-to-the-barn is to be found anywhere in Bisco Country in the nineteen-sixties. However, whenever there is a portrayal of such a custom, it was probably conceived in satire by a little theatre group of composers, lyricists, singers, and musicians as an updated folk song called “Happy Integration—You-All,” and reminiscent of the tune to “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground.” And if the performance took place in New Orleans, in particular, there surely would be recognizable overtones of traditionally classic Negro blues and jazz in every rendition.