In Search of Bisco (7 page)

And there are always other boys waiting in line for a job, too.

That’s the kind of system it is. It’s maintaining a pool of subservient people to work at the lowest possible rate of pay. This keeps the average country and small-town Negro in economic distress and makes him constantly fearful of risking his livelihood by speaking up for his rights. And this is why there’s so little public protest or demonstration outside the larger cities.

However, a change is on the way. The younger generation of Negroes in the small community—those in their teens and attending school—are growing up without this fear. They’ll be the ones to do what their parents and grandparents were unable to do.

Education is something new and exciting to young Negroes everywhere. The doors to the world are opening before their eyes, revealing sights their parents never knew existed, and they have the spirit and enthusiasm of pioneers to explore it.

In my time, when I left my father’s sharecrop farm in East Georgia, with four half-dollars in my pocket and somehow managed to get to Atlanta, there was no schooling down there for us higher than the fifth grade. That was as far as anybody down there could go in those days.

It’s a lot different now, of course. We have our high schools and colleges all over the state and the young Negro is getting his education. However, Atlanta is still the center of higher education and our colleges and universities here are the goals of the ambitious ones.

But this is not a dead-end for students. Southern-born Negroes still migrate North and West in search of a better social environment and more economic opportunities. What we try to do is give them the best possible education so they will have a better chance to succeed in getting what they want wherever they go.

That’s why I like teaching. It’s a satisfying feeling to know that I’m helping this generation to learn how to be good citizens in the North and South.

T
HE LONG, SCRAWNY,
emaciated, poverty-shriveled arm of Appalachia thrusts southwesterly from West Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee into Northern Alabama. After this hopeful long reach over the border of Bisco Country, the supplicating hand of poverty opens palm upward for some token of sympathy. But it is too late for alms. The last coins of the kind-hearted have already been dropped into an imploring hand somewhere else with all sympathy spent.

The bone-hard thumb of the hand of poverty is the Arkadelphia Mountain in the Appalachian Range and its calloused soil covers all of Walker County in Northern Alabama. Like the four bony fingers of the Raccoon, Blount, Oak, and Beaver mountains which reach hopefully toward Birmingham and its outcroppings of coal and ore and limestone, the Arkadelphia region was never in its history an agricultural country.

The thin-soil gravel hills in Walker County are barren lands and the rocky ledges stubbornly resist the roots of vegetation. Whatever humus does accumulate under scrub pines and blackjack oaks is soon washed away by mountain rains and carried down the Warrior River to the Gulf of Mexico.

In the beginning, long before the Civil War, the Anglo-Saxon settlers came to the gravel hills of Walker County in search of cheap land. They found with ease what they sought and then, unfortunately, they were misled by the false promise of its brief summertime luxuriance. After that, with all money spent, they had no choice other than to make it the homeplace of their families. Now, after many generations of inbreeding, it is the birthplace of the handicapped people of Alabama’s Appalachia who are rarely able to find anything but misery at home or away.

The time has not yet come when such barren land on gravel hills can be industrialized to furnish employment for its people. There have been many attempts made without success to establish industries.

Cotton mills have been built and abandoned; furniture factories were built and abandoned. The prospect of failure was obscured in the beginning by the optimism of success, but it took only a short time to realize that it was uneconomical to install industries in a remote region that had neither access to supply nor local sources of material for manufacture. The one remaining hope of the people is that sometime in the future science will find a profitable way to convert scrubby pine and yellow broomsedge into paper and plastic.

After the failure of cloth and furniture manufacturing, other attempts, both realistic and visionary, were made to find a way for people to exist on such unproductive land. But home-tufted bedspreads and hand-braided scatter rugs soon glutted the tourist market. There was so much over-production of moonshine whisky that a man soon lost hope of being able to swap a gallon of corn liquor with his neighbor for a pig or to take a jug of it to the crossroads store to barter for a can of snuff.

Then, even more recently, came the time when a vagabond shirt-and-skirt sweatshop would open overnight with several dozen sewing machines in an abandoned barn and pay wives and daughters thirty cents an hour to stitch and hem mill-end cotton cloth. That short-lived industry came to an end when federal minimum wage laws eliminated that occasional source of cash income in the gravel hills.

The economic plight of Jasper and Cordova and other small towns in Walker County is not unique in this extreme southwestern region of Appalachia. Similar distress exists wherever the gravel hills of Northern Alabama have been eroded by mountain rains until only a few inches of topsoil remain to sustain scrubby pines, blackjack oaks, yellow broom-sedge, and May-pop vines. But as if to compensate for its hostile soil, the region is not lacking in an abundance of old-time religion of the whoop-and-holler sects and the die-hard politics of the run-nigger-run white supremists.

The affable, congenial, reddish-bearded storekeeper at the fork of the road in the intervale was eager to talk about life and hard-times in the gravel hills of Walker County.

I went to school off and on past seventeen, he said, and that was long enough to read and write past the sixth grade. But the best part was after I quit school I married the school teacher who could add, subtract, and multiply figures without never looking in the arithmetic book to go by.

There was talk about it all along between here and Jasper—about a white man like me marrying her—and it still comes up now and then, because she sure don’t look pure-white like most white people do. She told me she looks like she does because she’s part-Indian from Middle Georgia. I took her word for it from the start, even if some people do still claim she’s dark-skinned like a part-white Georgia Geechee and trying to pass for all-white. But that don’t bother me none. Not a bit. Marrying that school teacher was the smartest move I ever made in my whole life and I’m satisfied.

I asked her once what county in Georgia she came from, but she said she didn’t know because her folks brought her to Alabama when she was too little to remember. I never heard her say if her daddy was Bisco or anything like that, but it might’ve been for all I know. She won’t talk about kinfolks no more and it won’t do no good for a stranger to ask her about it.

Anyway, what she did was give me her year’s pay when she quit teaching to marry me and set up housekeeping. I took that money and went to Jasper and bought a whole load of canned goods and staple groceries and a few other things like nails and hinges. Then I hauled everything out here to this little old store I built out of sawmill slabs all by myself. Not many folks lived out here at the fork and hardly none of them had money to spend for canned goods and staples. But nearly everybody had a way of somehow finding a little cash to spend for snuff and so I hauled some of the canned goods back to Jasper and swapped for all the snuff I could get.

Getting that snuff to sell set me up in business right away and I never let the stock get short since. My wife was smart enough to learn me how to make the right change for a quarter or half-dollar so I wouldn’t cheat myself every time I sold a can of snuff. That started about twenty years ago and now I can make change as good as any storekeeper in Jasper or Cordova. Of course, now, I don’t have no big turnover like the other storekeepers, but that means I don’t have as many chances to make mistakes, neither, and short-change myself if I happen to count wrong.

The other big thing my school-teacher wife helped me out about was how to get along being poor like everybody else in the same fix. Everybody needs a true saying to fall back on when things get too discouraging and I didn’t have nothing like that till my wife provided it for me. When I’d complain about something or another and said I wished I could get hold of enough extra money to fix up the store a little bit, she’d say to me to quit worrying about it and be satisfied like it was. She had a way of saying something that calmed me down every time. I’ll tell you about that.

My wife sounded so educated when she said what she did that it made me want to learn it from her exactly. And now I can say it almost as good as she can. She says it just like I’m going to say it now. You listen to it. Poverty is a relative thing because it’s kin to so many people in the world.

For a while I couldn’t figure out just what it meant when it was said like that. Anyhow, I went ahead and learned to say it from her and now it makes me feel satisfied as soon as I say it to myself.

One of the times when that saying helped a lot was when there was a big train wreck. A few years ago a freight train jumped the track on a curve on the railroad about two miles from here near Cordova and three of the box cars loaded with sacks of flour and all kind of canned goods rolled off the track and busted wide open on a rock ledge down at the bottom of a high bank. I tell you, that’s a sight you don’t see a lot of in a lifetime. Anyhow, it wasn’t long before everybody for miles around heard about it and hurried down to the wreck with every kind of sack, poke, and tote-bag you can name.

Those people loaded up with all the sacks of flour and canned goods they could carry off. And then they didn’t stop at that, neither. They made as many as four or five trips, some of them. And they done that all night long, too. There was a creek down there where the three box cars busted open just like a May-pop when you step on it in June or July and all those canned goods got good and soaked in the creek water before they could all be carried off.

Anyhow, what I’m getting at is that all the paper wrapping came off of the cans soaking in the creek water and the folks who carried them off home couldn’t tell what in the world was on the inside of them. But that didn’t make no difference, because it was all free even if folks never knew when they opened up a can to eat if it was going to be beans or hash or some sort of juice. That made eating-time a pretty little trick to try and guess what you’d be putting in your belly.

But that’s only part of what I started out to tell you about. It all leads up to the main thing, though. What that was was that the folks around here got so much free flour and canned goods they didn’t have to buy none of that from me here in the store for almost a whole year and all I could sell them was a little snuff now and then and maybe a box of matches and a quart of coal oil and a few nails and some strap-hinges. Things got so bad for me with hardly no money coming in that I couldn’t help but complain to my wife about it. There’s nothing like hard-times to provoke a man to talking.

Now, I told you before that my wife was an educated school teacher when I married her, and she never lost none of her education being married to me. And so when I complained to her about people not buying much to speak of, she said that same thing again you know about. Poverty is a relative thing because it’s kin to so many people in the world.

I’ll tell you, when a man gets to know a saying like that by heart, it’s a mighty comforting thing, because the next thing you know you’ve got your mind off what you started to complain about. Of course, you keep on being poor as the devil like you always was, but having the comfort of an educated wife makes you able to go along with it a lot better than anything else could. I don’t know if a rich man needs an educated wife, but it sure makes things tolerable for a poor man like me.

Maybe rich men don’t have much of a chance to find out about it, but I know for a fact that an educated wife is the best kind to have around the cook-stove and in the bed besides when there’s an argument with the preacher.

And I’ll tell you why. I got to arguing with the preacher over at the church not a long while ago and he made me so mad I could’ve jumped him right there and then if it wasn’t for my wife. The way it ended up just goes to show how much good an educated wife can do for a man. I had my coat off and was getting ready to haul off and beat hell out of that preacher for saying I wasn’t acting religious enough to suit him, but she told me to put my coat back on and go home with her and let her calm me down like she knows how.

That all got started when the preacher said everybody in the church got down on the knees except me when he was praying and that a man who failed to do that needed religion more than anybody else. Even before I left home and went to church that Sunday I told myself I was wearing the first new suit of clothes I’d had for seven years and I wasn’t going to get down on no floor and get the pants all baggy in the knees the first time I wore them.

Anyhow, I told that preacher I’d whoop and holler and put a little something extra in the collection box but I wasn’t going to ruin a brand-new suit getting the pants baggy in the knees so soon. He got all shaky and shouting and said a man who talked the way I did ought to go to hell and stay there when he died.

It was right there and then when I shucked off my coat and would’ve jumped him if it hadn’t been for my educated wife. She said she wanted to take me home and calm me down. The preacher said he wanted her to stay after me and everybody else left so he could talk to her in private about my religion. She told him she wouldn’t do that, because it was plain to see he was looking her up and down with poontang in mind. If she hadn’t been an educated school teacher, and if I hadn’t been watching, he could’ve got her where he wanted her for sure.