In Search of Bisco (2 page)

I began going to the stockade on Sunday afternoons, not because of curiosity, but because I knew one of the Negroes. His name was Roy and he had been a yardboy for a neighbor in our part of town since he was fifteen years old. When he was sixteen, he had been accused of stealing a heavy iron wash-pot from the backyard where he worked. Even though such a pot was too heavy for any one man to lift, and it had not been sold for scrap iron at the junk-yard, Roy had been convicted of theft and sentenced to two years at hard labor on the county chain gang.

I was sure that Roy had not taken the iron wash-pot, not only because it was too heavy for a man to carry, but because he told me he had not taken it. I had known him for more than a year before he was sentenced to the chain gang and I was certain he was telling the truth.

Just the same, Roy was on the chain gang and there was no likelihood of his being released until he had served the two-year term. I began going to see him at work camp on Sunday afternoons and he shined my shoes and I would ask him what he wanted that I could get for him. Ever since I had seen Roy the first time, he had reminded me of Bisco. I had no idea what Bisco would actually look like at the age of sixteen, but the three of us were the same age, and I remembered Bisco being mulatto-colored, just as Roy was, and both of them had the same open-mouth grin and friendly squint of the eyes. It was almost like being with Bisco when I went to see Roy.

The price of a shoe shine in the stockade was five cents. This was the only money a convict was permitted to earn and he had to pay for shoe polish from his earnings. Since there were forty or more Negroes on the chain gang, and rarely more than a dozen white visitors on a Sunday, it was not often that many of them could earn as much as a nickel.

At first, each time I gave Roy a nickel for a shine he would hand it back and ask me to bring him a sack of makings—flaked tobacco and cigarette papers. I soon got into the habit of taking the makings with me on Sundays and giving them to Roy as soon as I got there. Never failing to thank me, he would then roll a cigarette and puff slowly with a grateful squinting of his eyes. After that, he would spend the next hour polishing and shining my shoes while we talked about everything we could think of.

Sometimes Roy and I talked about baseball and hunting and fishing, at other times it would be about a murder or a fire or an accident that had happened to somebody in town. The convicts on the chain gang were always making up jokes and Roy would tell me all the new ones he had heard. Some of the convicts around us would usually play-the-dozens, which was a continuous sing-song festival of improvised lyrics extolling sexual aberrations and yearnings, but Roy always said that kind of talk was too vulgar for him and that he did not want to have anything to do with it. He never failed to ask me before the day was over if I knew how his mother was and if I had seen any of his brothers and sisters. And then finally, when I was leaving the stockade, I would ask Roy what else besides makings he would like for me to bring him the next time I came.

As though he felt he would be asking too much of a favor, he would say that if he ever earned a dime on Sunday he would be able to pay for two sacks of makings and have enough tobacco to last a whole week. I was soon bringing him two sacks of makings and a can of shoe polish when he needed it.

Toward the end of summer, a little more than a week before the work camp was to be moved about fifteen miles to another part of the county, I asked Roy to tell me just one other thing he would like to have most of all. Without hesitation, and as though he had been thinking about it for a long time, he said other than makings what he wanted most of all were some of the biggest fried pork chops that ever grew on a hog.

The chain-gang guards permitted no packages or bundles of any kind, other than tobacco and shoe polish, to be brought into the stockade, and everyone who entered on Sunday afternoon was searched for a file or pistol at the gate. However, I was confident that I would be able to smuggle pork chops to Roy by putting them inside my shirt and holding my arms tightly against them. I cooked four of them at home the next Sunday morning, wrapped each one in a piece of newspaper, and placed them inside my shirt.

The usual guard was not on duty at the stockade that afternoon and a younger guard I had never seen before stopped me at the gate and told me to hold my arms above my head while he searched me for hacksaw and pistol. When I raised my arms, he looked at me with a knowing grin on his face while he was feeling the pork chops. The first thing he said was that the next time I ought to wrap pork chops in a different kind of paper so the grease would not ooze through my shirt the way it did. Then, as I was going through the stockade gate, he told me that if I did it again I was going to get the reputation around town of being a nigger-lover.

I asked Roy while he was eating the pork chops if he had ever known a colored boy named Bisco. Shaking his head, he said that was a new name to him, but that it sounded good and friendly. I told him about Bisco when we were playmates and said that he and Bisco were enough alike to be brothers.

Presently, Roy looked up and said that a colored boy with a name like that ought to be a mighty fine fellow and that he hoped nobody named Bisco would ever be wrongly accused of doing something against the law and be sentenced to the chain gang or shot down by a white man’s gun. Remembering what had happened to Sonny in Tennessee, and seeing the ball-and-chain shackled to Roy’s legs, I told him that I hoped so, too.

T
HE SOUTHSIDE OF
the United States is the geographically welded region of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It is also a state of mind—a local purgatory or an earthly paradise—and often an economic iniquity, a social anachronism, a political autocracy, and a racial tyranny.

After placing the bordering states of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee where they should have been relegated by a more realistic Mason and Dixon line in the beginning—which would still be north of the feudal Southerner’s horizon—the domain from South Carolina to Louisiana is the authentic Deep South of fact and fiction.

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.