In Search of Bisco

by Erskine Caldwell

  But, above all, this is Bisco Country. After a lifetime of being a Negro American, Bisco is probably as familiar with its joys and sorrows as anyone else and going in search of him through the Deep South has the prospect of seeing Bisco’s native land as he himself knows it.

  This region of fertile fields and flourishing factories has the appearance of being a pleasant segment of America far removed and remote from the social and economic ills elsewhere in the United States. Life is relaxed and unhurried. The climate is mild and the scenery is often spectacular. People are friendly and tax collectors are apologetic.

  All would be well in this land of apparent ease and pleasantry if there were only one Southerner to claim inheritance of this bountiful goodness of earth. But there is another Southerner with a rightful claim to his share of inheritance so well and deservedly earned after more than two hundred years of sweat, travail, hardship, and degradation. An equitable sharing of the reward is long past due.

  The unrewarded Southerner is the Negro. After this long period of slavery, servitude, injustice, and discrimination, the Negro of the South has finally dared to speak for the past due accounting. But easily incurred debts are always the last to be repaid, and the white Protestant Southerner of Anglo-Saxon origin, resisting to the end, continues to postpone settlement by promising payment in economic opportunity and democratic citizenship in the sweet by-and-by of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  The practice of devising methods for preventing a Negro from working in a trade or occupation or profession for which he qualifies is default by design and not by oversight. The long-standing promise of payment remains unfulfilled. It may never be said in so many words, but the implication is obvious. He is a Negro. To hell with him.

  The forty-five-year-old truck driver lives in an aging hovel of weather-cracked boards and shingles on a water-puddle dirt street in the South Carolina sand hill town of Kershaw. The sand hill country has never been productive of much other than yellow sedge and scrub pines, but people live there because they were born there and it is a place to call home. It is a state-long belt of sandy land at the fall fine of the Piedmont Plateau of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains, rarely more than fifty miles in width, that has impoverished many generations of people long before the nineteen-sixties.

  The Negro truck driver has a job washing and greasing automobiles at a gasoline station on Fridays and Saturdays. It is the only job he has been able to get, and he sits at home five days of the week hoping that someday he will be able to get a full-time truck driving job. He goes to the loading dock of the long-distance trucking company as often as he dares, being careful not to annoy the white superintendent by going too frequently, and asks when there might be a chance for him to go to work for the company. Not now, he is always told, but maybe someday. And now is the time when he is becoming fearful that he will be too old to drive a truck by the time the company finally will hire a Negro for long-distance driving.

  He has a recent newspaper with a want-ad set in bold type. He looks at it and shakes his head. QUALIFIED DRIVERS WANTED IMMEDIATELY BY LONG-DISTANCE TRUCKING COMPANY. GOOD PAY AND ALL BENEFITS. MEALS WHEN AWAY FROM HOME. FULL-TIME WORK AND NO LAY-OFFS.

  If I didn’t know better by now, he said, I’d be up there banging on the door instead of sitting here. They don’t say white and they don’t say black and they don’t say nothing about color, but everybody knows what they mean. It takes a white skin to satisfy the company. You can have a clean driver’s license and a white doctor swearing you’re as healthy as a buck rabbit in a clover patch and be able to jack a twenty-wheel tractor-trailer rig in a nine-foot-wide loading dock with six inches to spare on both sides, and they still won’t hire you if you’re black like me.

  They wanted me in the army when I was about twenty years old and I went in there just a little while after the war started the last time. The army put me through engine overhauling at first, then on the grease racks for a while, and after about six months I was running pick-up trucks around the camp. That wasn’t much to brag about, but then came the best part of all. They gave me a big ten-ton refrigerator rig to make a hundred-and-forty-mile round-trip highway run for the commissary every night. Man, that’s what I call living in the Promised Land.

  That’s what I did in the army for just about two years and then when the war was finished they couldn’t get me out of that tractor cab. What I did was turn right around and join up for four more years just so I could keep on driving the big rigs. And I sure did keep those big engines humming like brand-new sewing machines and never once let a speck of paint get scratched all that time. I was the proudest man in that whole camp.

  By the time I finally left the army and came back home, I could take down a truck engine, diesel or gasoline, and put it back together with my eyes shut. That’s what the army taught me about engines and I can still do it as good as any driver rolling a truck on the highway. Knowing how your engine ought to hum and how the exhaust ought to sound when you’re hauling a full load up a steep grade is the kind of driver I learned to be.

  That’s the sweet life for me and it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do since. When I came back home after those six years in the army, I thought sure I was going to get me a good steady job driving for a trucking company on the highways from one end of the country to the other. Like I said, that’s what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world and I still do and always will. But I ran smack-head-on into trouble. They won’t hire me. They don’t want nothing to do with my color.

  I used to get a job now and then driving a puny little half-ton pick-up for somebody and doing some hauling around town, when there was some trash hauling to be done, but the way it turned out was that a white man always came along who wanted a job and they’d take it away from me and give it to him. After that the only steady work I could get was washing and greasing cars at the filling station. Fridays and Saturdays—if you can call that steady—but I don’t want to spend my life working part-time at anything. The way it is now, I can’t make enough money to rent a better house for my wife and three daughters and there’s never enough money to buy the clothes they need. I hate to see those three girls go off to school every morning dressed in put-together clothes like they have to do.

  All I live for is to see the time come when I can get me a real job pushing a three-axle tractor-trailer down the highway and rolling it to Florida and back to New Jersey and then off to all the other places the white drivers can go. They haven’t built a rig yet that’s too big and heavy for me to handle—and the bigger the better. I know the driving laws from start to finish. I can follow the by-passes and truck routes through any city. And I’ve never ditched a truck I was driving or crowded a passenger car off the road in my life. I aint boasting about it—I’m just saying how it is. But I can’t get that kind of job. They say I aint the kind of driver they need. What they mean is they don’t want a Negro to work for them. Then they tell me I don’t know how lucky I am to have a steady part-time job at the filling station on Fridays and Saturdays. They know they aint fooling me with that kind of talk, but they say it, anyhow.

  I ask them how come what I learned in the army about truck driving don’t count. And they say the same thing every time. I’ll tell you about that. You know about the highway truck stops and cafés everywhere you go. There’re plenty of them all over the country. Anyhow, all of them in this part of the country used to have the nigger-go-away sign on the wall. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYBODY. Some places have taken them down, but that don’t mean a thing even when the civil rights laws say they can’t make you leave. They’ll find a way to keep you from eating. They can give you a little shove and then claim you’re scuffling. That’s all. Then all they have to do is phone the sheriff or the highway patrol and say you’re disturbing the peace or something like that. You know what that means to a black man like me. A big fine, or the jailhouse, and maybe both.

  The white-man superintendent at the tr
ucking company mentions that every time I speak to him about getting a driving job. He says the company can’t run the risk of letting a truck load of valuable freight left stranded on the highway for anybody to steal while I go to jail for scuffling in an eating place. He says he can’t help it none, because it’s not his business to go all over the country and see to it that Negro drivers can get in truck-stop bunkhouses and eating places and not go to jail.

  That white man knows I’m a good driver. He said so himself. Once I got him to let me take one of the company’s big tractor-trailers out on the highway for three or four miles, and then when we came back to the loading dock, he said I was a heap better driver than he was himself and sure wished he could hire me. That’s exactly what he said. But he didn’t hire me. He said he was sorry about it, but just couldn’t do it as long as things stayed the way they are. I asked him how long did he figure that was going to last. He said only God knows for sure and God won’t talk for fear of making some white folks so mad they’d stop going to church and paying the preacher.

  He was real friendly about talking to me and that’s how come I mentioned to him that nearly every town on the highways has eating places for Negro people and I could stop at one of those kind to eat and not go nowhere near the places where white people don’t want me. He said he knew all about that, but it still wouldn’t do. He said the heavy trucks his company runs have to stay on their routes on the pavement and not be pulled off on dirt streets where they might get mired down in rainy weather or tip over in a ditch while I was eating.

  I reckon he was right about that. Nearly everywhere you go the eating places for the colored are on a side street nowhere near the main highway. I learned about that when I was driving in the army and I know what could happen to ten tons of truck on a soft dirt street. I wouldn’t want to take a risk like that and see my rig get ditched and harm my driving record. It just wouldn’t be like me. Anyhow, there ought to be some way to go about it so a colored man can work at that kind of job. It just don’t seem right to me like it is. Any man on the highway ought to be able to stop and eat and wash up once in a while without risking a scuffle and ending up in jail for disturbing the peace.

  The civil rights laws can say certain things, but some white people can figure out ways to get around the law. I don’t know what’s going to happen from now on, but something’s bound to, because our people are working at it as hard as they can. When the young people started sit-ins and things like that all over the country, it didn’t look like it’d amount to much at the time, but that’s turned out to be a big boost ever since. The way they go about it might not look like much, but every inch counts, because the colored people never had even a toe-hold to start with.

  And now we’ve got a real good toe-hold. Some of the old people are scared to their bones about it for fear of making the white folks mad, but that’s all right. I can’t blame the old people for being scared, because they’ve been bossed by the white folks all their lives and don’t see how times can change. The young colored people are getting a good education these days and nothing’s going to scare them. That’s the best thing about it these days for all us colored.

  The big trouble right now is because the white folks have got the habit of having their way about things and they still take first-call. I don’t say all whites are like that. A lot of them are on our side. It’s the ones who do the most talking and get it printed in the newspapers who make the worst trouble for us. One of the things they boast about all the time is building some fine schools for our children, which is true, but that’s still not enough. They stop right there and don’t do a thing about getting the teachers better educated in the colleges. Most teachers don’t know a bit more than the children have already learned. I know about that, because my three daughters go to high school and I hear all about it.

  It’s those same politicians you read about in the newspapers who won’t let me drive a truck from here to Florida for a load of oranges and stop to eat when I’m hungry. I don’t want to eat in their fancy cafés and sleep in their fine motels. That’s what they keep on saying we’re after. Looks like they’d know that a man like me, even if I had a good-pay trucking job, wouldn’t waste my money doing that just for the spite of it. I’ve got too much sense to waste hard-earned money like that.

  I’ll tell you what I’d do with that money. I’d take it and rent me a house I’d be proud for my family to live in. And it wouldn’t be over there in the white folks’ part of town, neither. I’m just proud enough in my own right to segregate myself over here on this side with my own people.

  3

  IT WOULD NOT BE unusual for an unsuspecting stranger in Bisco Country to find himself feeling sympathetic toward the conviction of a native-born white Southerner who argues, with all evidence of sincerity in voice and word, that he is the best friend the Negro American will ever have in this world. He is evidently convinced, and he would have a stranger believe likewise, that the Negro himself knows by experience, and willingly accepts the fact, that his only opportunity for happiness and security is possible when he lives in segregated social, political, and economic isolation.

  Either with or without a twinge of sympathy for such a conviction, a first-time visitor soon becomes aware that this point of view of the racist-minded white Southerner is traditional in the Deep South. It is a state of mind that has dominated Southern life for many generations. From the beginning, the feudal attitude was motivated by assumed racial superiority and indisputable economic selfishness; and later, shamed by the appalling evidence of feudal treatment, the Southern attitude was slightly adjusted to provide for fashionable expressions of pity and compassion for the Negro. Nevertheless, in the years following the Civil War, and regardless of motives, well-meaning or otherwise, the Negro still had no choice other than to exist in a modified form of slavery.

  For the next hundred years in the agricultural South, and in particular wherever cotton was grown, slavery by intimidation continued to be the way of life for the Negro. By necessity working for token wages, he was unable to earn more than a mere minimum of food, clothing, and housing. Thus after freedom from a century of physical bondage, he was immediately enslaved in economic bondage for another century.

  During all this time, Negroes were looked upon as being hostages of fortune or predestined orphans of inferior parentage who should be forever grateful for being protected from a hostile outside world. Payment for protection by their self-appointed benefactors was required to be rendered in groveling obeisance and uncomplaining servitude. Withholding food and clothing or the use of the lash could be the punishment for failure to make payment. And when this was not enough to bring about compliance, nightriders or the Ku Klux Klan could be called upon to enforce rule by fear.

  A new generation of Negroes, educated and aware of their human rights, came of age in the Racial Sixties and rebelled against continuation of imposed isolation and discrimination. This awakening of a once docile race is disturbing to traditional attitudes of Southern whites from South Carolina to Louisiana. Century-old traditions are threatened with extinction.

  As a consequence, one white Southerner will become a self-styled nigger-hater and white supremist; another, more politically astute, will cater to a calculated moderation of racial prejudice; and others, who claim a majority, will loudly proclaim that they know what is best for the child-like Negroes and vow to guard them against dangerous agitation by outsiders who have no understanding of a situation indigenous to the South. Though presently outnumbered, there are men of perception and foresight throughout the Deep South who are striving to make it possible for the Negro American to obtain his rightful first-class citizenship.

  There is a wide belt of fertile mulatto soil lying diagonally across the central region of South Carolina between the northern sand hills and the southern coastal plain. This rich land was first put under cultivation in the eighteenth century by Gullah slaves working from the Pee Dee to the Savannah rivers and creating fortune
s for scores of plantation owners.

  This mulatto soil, so named for being a mixture of sand, clay, and organic loam, is ideal for growing tobacco, cotton, and grain. Even the great wealth extracted from the earth in the decades of slave-labor plantations failed to exhaust its richness, and now in these centennial years of the Civil War, scientific and mechanized farming is making the yield from the land even more valuable than it ever was in the past.

  This modern agricultural operation progressively replaces hand labor with chemicals and machinery, and the descendants of Gullah slaves are gradually forced from their jobs and homes. As earning of the worker decreases, his standard of living goes down and down; he becomes another victim of modern poverty in a land of plenty.

  Displaced by chemicals and machinery and his cabin bulldozed into extinction by other machines to provide additional acreage for farming or pasturage, the Negro field laborer has no choice to make. Inevitably, he and his family go to the nearest town as a place to live and to seek employment. There, as is probable, he will live in a dilapidated house of two or three rooms on the segregated southside. If he is fortunate, he will find seasonal farm work for a few months during the year, or he may be able to find occasional work tending lawns or collecting trash. And while he and his family are existing in squalor, all around him will be the fertile mulatto land producing its new abundance of wealth.

  The native-born white Southerner, a devout Protestant in his mid-fifties and eighth-grade educated, sits on the counter in his small grocery store and talks earnestly about his convictions.

  I know what I’m talking about and it’s time everybody else knows the truth, he said. We take good care of our colored people. If you hear them complaining about something, it’s because outsiders put them up to saying it—or thinking it.