In Search of Bisco (6 page)

Those same people claim there’s something in the Negro skin that will hardly wash off, but if it does, the smell will come right back again the next minute as strong as ever.

Now, I’m no expert about a lot of things, and that’s one of them. And I don’t know what a real expert would say about that, neither. But if the expert was to explain it and proved it was true, I’ll bet you it’d be mighty close to the reason I’ve figured out in my own mind.

I’ll tell you what my theory is. It’s something I’m convinced about for sure after working a lifetime side-by-side with both whites and blacks.

The darker a man’s skin is—white man or Negro—the more he’s going to sweat when he’s out in the hot sun doing hard work. That’s where nobody’s sweat smells good and all sweat stinks. I’ve seen light-haired people with the palest kind of skin who could hardly sweat a drop when the rest of us had it running down our necks and getting our shirts sopping wet—and stinking so bad you’d puke if you hadn’t been used to it.

On the hottest days of summer out there in the fields it was always the light-haired and pale-skinned in dry shirts who complained the most about the heat. They’d say they had to go sit in the shade ever so often to keep from getting a sunstroke while the rest of us kept on working in the heat of the sun and sweating with no trouble at all.

That’s how I learned that anybody who sweats easy can work harder and longer in the sun than any other kind. I don’t know how it is in other places in the world and if the same thing holds true, because I’ve never been away from here to see for myself, but I know what happens here in Georgia.

I’ve got real dark skin for a white man—and some people will say I’m eighth or sixteenth Geechee and could pass for white if I wanted to. Anyhow, I know how much I sweat. I sweat just like any Negro does. And you can’t tell me that one man’s sweat smells better than the next man just because he happens to belong to one race instead of another. If you believed that, you’d be the kind who’d believe a sweating Baptist smells different than a Methodist. Or a Democrat smells different than a Republican.

I’m not going to say it happens to women the same way—depending on whether they’re light haired or dark haired. I remember hearing it said that women don’t sweat, anyhow—they only perspire. So all I’ll say is that heavy sweating is going to make a bigger stink for anybody than just a little bit of sweating— or perspiring.

O
N THE GEOLOGICAL
terrain map, Atlanta is located on sinuous oak-wooded hills at the stony edge of the Piedmont Plateau in North Georgia. On social, political, and educational maps, the sprawling city is situated in a region where the contrast between the progressive and the reactionary attitudes of all the Deep South is clear and sharply defined. In the category of population, it is the metropolis of Bisco Country.

It has long been the tendency of Atlanta’s climate to inspire the family of man to propagate and nourish—without compunction—the extremes of progressive integration and reactionary discrimination. In such an environment there can be very little middle ground for the uncommitted man to stand on, and, as a result of this distinct division, Atlanta has come to be the prototype of contemporary urban Negro-white civilization in the United States. Cities every- where could profit by a study of the causes and effects of Atlanta’s racial conflicts and social harmony.

Since there is undoubtedly a clear-cut dividing line between Atlanta’s two extremes of conflict and harmony, there must be a good and sufficient reason for it. The reason is an obvious one. On one side is white-race economic and social frustration erupting in irrational violence in words and acts. On the other side is white-race tolerance and intellectual perception. The tug-of-war between the two forces has been long and arduous.

The plight of the uneducated and prejudiced white Southerner, or poor buckra, as he was sarcastically named by the Negro long ago, is a pitiful one. This man of ill will is between forty and sixty years of age, barely literate due to lack of educational advantages in his youth, who is economically handicapped in life because he is now and has always been an unskilled laborer.

One of the common evidences of the poor buckra’s frustration is his gullible eagerness and fanatical desire to be duped by inflammatory exhortations of the designing, scheming, rabble-rousing, opportunistic, professional politician. These are the shrewd politicians who pander to the poor buckra’s prejudice for the purpose of perpetuating themselves in office.

Having little within himself in which he can take pride, and habitually frustrated by his awareness of his past, present, and future economic and social poverty, the poor buckra resents any achievement of the Negro and retaliates by doing anything within his cunning to restrict and deny the rights of all Negroes. It is not unusual for men of such prejudice to instigate wily and overt violence in an effort to enforce and perpetuate racial injustice and discrimination.

The urbanized Atlanta Negro, in contrast to the frustrated poor buckra, is the fortunate beneficiary of the most extensive educational complex of any American city. This educational system has been segregated from the beginning, not by the desire of Negroes but by the discriminatory customs of the politically dominant white race.

Atlanta’s many schools, colleges, and universities for Negroes came into existence as the result of determined efforts of Negroes themselves to provide higher education and professional training for Negro teachers, lawyers, and doctors barred from enrollment in the public and private institutions reserved exclusively for the white race in the State of Georgia. This determination to provide higher education for Negroes has made possible the present trained leadership of authentic spokesmen for civil rights in Atlanta, in Georgia, in the South, and throughout the nation.

A forty-five-year-old professor of history in one of Atlanta’s Negro colleges has the calm confidence of an educated man who strives to attain an ideal by gentle persuasion and temperate argument. He is a tan-skinned octoroon, being of East Georgia Geechee and South Georgia white ancestry, and without bitterness toward fanatical advocates of white supremacy and racial discrimination.

It took us a long time, he said, and we’re on our feet at last. But now that we’re on our way, there’s one thing we don’t want to forget. The progress of the Negro up to this point is due to the collaboration by the enlightened younger generation of whites and the Negro religious leaders. That’s why we were able to come to life after waiting a hundred years since slavery for what turned out to be nothing. And now we’ve got something for the first time in the Negro American’s history.

I’m convinced that without the leadership of our ministers in the beginning we would’ve been the blind leading the blind. That means we would’ve made mistakes in judgment and walked right into damaging excesses. We’ve had little, if any, political leadership in all our history. But, fortunately for us, we did have the Negro preacher to guide us with his kind of experienced leadership when we began taking our first steps toward racial freedom.

The Negro preacher I’m talking about was not always an educated man, but, one of the educated or not, he was a thoughtful man. He advised our people to seek equal rights slowly and within reason and he himself went along with us to sit-ins and demonstrations—and to jail, too—but all that time he was cautioning us to keep our heads and not be tempted to resort to force and violence as a policy. This was the kind of leadership we needed at the critical stage when we were emerging from bondage and had the opportunity to consolidate our social and economic gains.

If we can keep this ideal of persuasion in mind and not resort to violence, it won’t be long before we get our complete democratic freedom as Americans.

But there’s danger ahead. There’s already evidence that well-meaning but hot-headed fanatics—and I mean Negroes themselves—are trying to get rid of the calm and proven leadership of the Negro preacher, charging him with being slow-footed and behind the times, and institute a gangster-type racket by putting goons and hoodlums in his place. The white man can jeopardize his cause, too, just as much as the Negro, by indulging in violence.

Maybe I have this attitude about it because I’m not a black man. Some white people have the idea that all Negroes have a common ancestry. That might have been said about African slaves two hundred years ago, but not about us today. I’m a Geechee man myself—a Georgia-born octoroon—and I’m proud of it. This is why the Negro blood in me wants to keep the peace with the white blood that shows in my skin—or vice versa, if you wish. Judging from what I’ve heard about Bisco, he and I have a lot in common as Geechee men. Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s striving to keep peace within himself just as I am.

Anyway, I’m convinced that we can gain more for ourselves by persuasion—since we are a minority—and gain it sooner—than we can by violence. This is something that can only be done by voting in every election. Our religious leaders know this and they are constantly reminding us of it. This is why more harm can be done to our cause by hot-headed Negroes throwing their weight around than by the rabid white supremists. You can’t make anybody be your friend by pulling a knife or pointing a gun at him.

As it’s been, we’ve had set-backs when we tried to integrate a school or a hotel or a restaurant, but that was only temporary. History teaches that time is on our side. That’s been proved. It was only a very short time ago when the law of the land forced Negroes to ride in Jim Crow railroad coaches and at the back of the bus. It was Jim Crow this and Jim Crow that wherever a Negro went. All of that’s now been wiped from the books and a Negro can even sleep in a berth on a train if he’s got the money to pay for it.

And another thing. Only a short while ago it would’ve been impossible for a Negro to get a room in any Atlanta hotel or motel and sit down to eat in the restaurant. But now, if he’s suitably dressed, he’ll be accommodated nearly everywhere he wants to go.

The main trouble for us in Atlanta is that there are still some die-hard and over-my-dead-body hold-outs who maintain segregation and so far have been able to resist sit-ins and demonstrations. It’s going to take the civil rights law to budge them, and they’ll go to court and try to get delays on that, too.

Some of those white people run advertisements in the newspapers boasting about their segregation policies—intimating that the Civil War of a hundred years ago may be revived if we don’t go away—and defying fate to force them to conform to the realities of the twentieth century.

We’re using persuasion on those die-hards, and time and civil rights laws are on our side. We’ve come a long way already in just a few years and we’re proud of what we’ve got so far. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop now and be satisfied halfway. The only thing we’ll settle for now is total accomplishment.

Sometimes I get to thinking how ironic it is that in our segregated part of Atlanta, over here on this side of the railroad tracks, we have Negro-owned restaurants and night clubs with Negro performers attracting so much white patronage that on busy week-end nights Negroes sometimes have to be turned away at the doors because white people have taken up the seating space.

So when you talk about integration, don’t forget that white people of Atlanta came over here and integrated our restaurants and night clubs a long time ago without even going through the formality of asking us if we had any objection to being integrated by them. Of course, we think we do have the best night clubs and singers and musicians in Atlanta and we’re proud of it all.

The white people can’t be blamed for wanting the best in night life, and they’re always welcome and they receive special attention. Just the same, it is an ironical situation to have our clubs integrated by some of the white people who make violent protests when we say we’d like to enter some of their places of business over on their side of the railroad tracks.

White merchants want our trade, and they advertise for it in Negro newspapers, because anybody’s dollar is worth exactly one hundred cents. And yet they claim they ought to have the right to draw the color line at the lunch counter and the washroom door in a department store.

The real hardship of Negro life is in the country and small town and not in the city. I know about this because I’ve lived in all three places. I was born in a South Georgia small town and lived on an East Georgia sharecrop farm until I came to Atlanta to get an education. It’s the same in Alabama and Mississippi. In the larger cities, such as Birmingham and Mobile and Jackson, Negroes have been having their troubles with integration and civil rights, just as we do in Atlanta, but for the most part the Negro’s social and economic bind is in the country and small town. That’s where a colored man can be too scared to call his soul his own.

Very little is heard about life in the country. The big city gets the newspaper headlines when something happens in the Negro slums. Just the same when you break down the Negro population figures in the Deep South, the country outnumbers the city two to one. Servants in small towns, restaurant kitchen-boys, sawmill hands, day-wage laborers, and sharecrop farmers are so dependent upon their jobs for housing and survival that they live year after year in subjection to the whims of their white employers. Negro urban life is concentrated in side-by-side dwellings and floor-upon-floor flats. That makes it much more conspicuous than that of twice as many people living in desperation elsewhere.

I don’t mean to say our people are physically mistreated in the country and small town any more than a poor buckra is mistreated. Whipping and lynching are becoming things of the past, thank God. What does happen, though, is that as Negroes they are the victims of a kind of psychological hardship or bondage. I’m talking now mostly about the older generation—those who are forty and fifty and older. The white employer tells them to take the pay offered, the housing provided, the working conditions demanded—or he’ll get another boy who will.