In Search of Bisco (8 page)

Everything worked out just fine after that. The preacher left in a couple of weeks and went off somewhere else and the new preacher who came along said he wanted everybody to stand up in church while he was praying and not get down on their knees on the floor.

Keeping me from fighting the preacher wasn’t the only thing my wife had a hand in. Like it is, the politicians come around every year or two wanting promised votes, and just last spring one of them walked in here and paid me a dime for a soda pop and then started talking big like God Almighty who’d bought and paid for both me and my wife’s votes. He stomped around on his feet and said he was keeping the black folks in their place and not letting them get a chance to think they could act as good as white people. After a lot of that kind of talk he said me and my wife’s votes would help him keep up his good work against the black folks. That made me mad as hell and I’ll tell you why.

It was the way that politician came in here and spent a dime and then acting like he was doing me and my wife a favor to keep the black folks from acting like they was as good as white people but not asking me if I wanted that kind of favor done. He kept on talking like that about the colored and I got madder and madder.

That’s when I opened up and told him if he was so set against the Negroes and all colored people he ought to move clear out of Alabama himself and go somewhere they wouldn’t bother him. He said I talked like a nigger-lover and ought to be ashamed of my white face and that the whole state would go to hell and ruin if it wasn’t for politicians like him who kept the black folks from going to the same schools and churches with whites. Then he ended up saying if I didn’t vote right he was warning me that he’d get some men he knew in Jasper to come around some night and straighten me out for my own good.

I don’t take that kind of talk from nobody, not even a big politician, and I told him to get the hell out of my store and stay out.

Right then was when my wife happened to come in the store and she could tell right away how mad I was about something. She knew what to think about it, just like the time I was fixing to jump that preacher, and she went straight behind the counter where I keep my old shotgun handy in case it’s needed. She wasn’t saying a single word when she picked up the gun and breeched it open.

The politician took a good look at her and asked me who she was. I told him who she was and he said she didn’t look all-white to him and then wanted to know if I was race-mixing with a half-black. Just the same, even if he was a pure-white politician, I could see him looking her up and down with her kind of poontang in mind.

I was about to tell him plenty about minding his own business when he looked again and saw my wife holding up that breeched shotgun. She’d only done that to take out the two shells so I couldn’t kill nobody, but that politician didn’t know that. He thought she was loading the gun and he got out of there so fast he left his hat behind.

While he was getting in his car, my wife ran outside waving his hat at him, but he wasn’t taking no chances. He got his car started and turned it around to get back to Jasper. I grabbed the shotgun and jammed the shells in the barrels and then fired both of them up in the air one after the other.

When the politician heard the gun go off, I reckon he thought for sure he was getting shot at, because he ducked his head down as far as he could and drove that car up the road making so much noise it sounded like a gravel truck stuck in a mud hole and trying to get out.

The whole thing about it was I’d forgotten about that shotgun when my wife came in the store, but she remembered it as soon as she saw how mad I was. All I had in mind was to brain that politician with the empty soda pop bottle for trying to buy me and her votes for only a dime and then saying my wife’s looks didn’t suit him for politics because she’s not all-white. Maybe her color didn’t please him for his kind of politics, but he sure had his eye on her for the other thing. He acted just like the preacher when it came to that.

E
ARLY IN THE NINETEENTH
century, long before the Civil War, an act of Congress provided a land grant of several townships in area for two hundred French colonists to enable them to establish a settlement in America. Inspired by the revolutionary American theory of democratic government, and exiled from France because of their political beliefs, the colonists sailed across the Atlantic to Mobile and then came a hundred and fifty miles up the Tombigbee River in Western Alabama to seek realization of their dreams.

Being imbued with the spirit of democracy, and true to its principles of human freedom, the colonists brought no African slaves to the settlement they founded on the cliffs of the Tombigbee and which they called Demopolis.

It was in retaliation for their exile from France that the refugees used the Greek language instead of French to create an appropriately descriptive name for the place they expected to live in democratic freedom.

Demopolis, or The People’s City, was an idealistic experiment that failed so disastrously that all now left to show for it is the name of the town itself. The deceptive black topsoil, which became known as the Black Belt of Alabama, covered a rock-like hardpan of white clay only a few inches below the surface and was not suitable for growing grapes and olives as the colonists attempted to do. Besides, the malarial climate brought early death to men, women, and children, and there were no slaves for the hard labor of producing cotton in subtropical heat.

In the end, with their language being their only remaining possession, the few colonists who survived the ordeal returned to France after the Napoleonic Wars. Cotton planters, bringing their Guinea slaves from nearby plantations, were quick to take over the abandoned land.

Now, a century and a half later, Demopolis is just another Alabama town of less than ten thousand people with an equal number of white Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin and third- and fourth-generation descendants of Guinea slaves. Ironically, all of them, both white and Negro, are dominated by the antithesis of democracy—the lingering traditions of plantation slavery and white supremacy.

Since the only remaining evidence of the French colonists’ idealistic effort is a place name—The People’s City—it would not be unlikely if that too were obliterated. The possibility is that some of the white citizens, perturbed by the implication of the town’s name when translated from Greek into English, will successfully petition to have it changed from Demopolis to Wallaceville.

There were several people seated at tables in the roadside restaurant and eating a native noonday dinner of fried pork chops, black-eyed peas, cole slaw, and chitterling cornbread. And of course drinking the traditional year-around Deep South beverage—iced tea and sugar. On the wall, draped with a battle-size Confederate flag, there was a large framed placard in colorful show-card lettering. A black mourning band had been fastened to the gilded frame.

WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SEAT OUR PATRONS OR DENY SERVICE TO ANYONE. ANY PERSON CREATING A DISTURBANCE ON THESE PREMISES AFTER BEING DENIED SERVICE WILL BE PROSECUTED.

The ingratiating, fiftyish, florid-faced real estate salesman had finished eating his noonday dinner and a quick smile of concern came over him as he glanced at the elaborately-framed and flag-draped memento on the wall. He was one of the civic leaders of Demopolis. He had acquired that distinction by being a member of several businessmen’s clubs, chairman of a white citizens’ committee, a bank director, a Methodist, and by belonging to the country club and a fraternal lodge.

Such an impressive list of memberships and activities is just about average for a white citizen having the distinction of being known as a prominent civic booster in a Deep South town the size of Demopolis or a city as large as Birmingham. Doctors and lawyers rarely have the inclination to devote themselves to such a variety of activities, but merchants, bankers, and salesmen know that they have a better opportunity to make money if they become aggressive civic boosters.

It’s a sad thing about that sign up there on the wall, he said. But law or no law, and even if what it says can’t be enforced like it used to, it’s worth preserving just like the Confederate flag. Maybe it won’t keep blacks from coming in here, but it’ll keep them reminded of who’s still boss in this part of the South.

I’ll tell you what the whole trouble is. It’s all because people in the rest of the country just don’t understand the racial situation down here. They’re ignorant about it and we’ve got to educate them by showing them how to manage it. People up North think the blacks ought to be treated like anybody else and they criticize us for the way we handle them. They’ll learn some day that we know more about it than they do.

What they don’t understand up North is that niggers—or Negroes, as they say it—haven’t gone through evolution as far as white people. They’re still primitive—just like wild Indians used to be. They just don’t have the intelligence we’ve got and it’s going to take time for their brains to grow bigger so they can go through their cycle of evolution like we’ve already done.

We’re letting them get educated now, but that’s only a start. It’ll be three or four generations from now before their brains are fully developed like a white man’s. That’s why it don’t make sense to claim they ought to be paired with a white man when it comes to voting and living in the same part of town and everything else they say they want to do. It’ll be another hundred years before they can complete their evolution and grow more brains and be ready for things like that.

It’s just like I said. We know how to handle the blacks. We’ve been raised up with them and we know what’s good for them better than they do themselves. I can take you over to their part of town and you’ll soon see what I mean. The older ones—the real black Guineas—never went to school a day in their life. They can’t even speak English enough for you to make out what they’re trying to say. It’s all Guinea-mumble.

That’s the reason you won’t find niggers from Georgia living in Demopolis. They can’t understand Guinea-talk and they’d keep on the move till they got to Mississippi or somewhere else. You could spend a whole week in Demopolis looking for somebody named Bisco and still wouldn’t find him or any half-white Geechee. I never heard of a nigger with a name like Bisco, anyhow. And if you asked me, I’d say a name like that is too good for a nigger in this part of the country. We make our niggers have real common names and keep the good ones for white people.

We call our niggers Guineas because they came straight down from the old-time Guinea slaves brought over here from Africa to work on the cotton plantations in Alabama and that’s why all the old ones, and most of the young ones, too, talk a kind of Guinea-mumble. When we work with them, we can make them understand what we want them to do, but that’s about the limit you can go with them as far as talk is concerned.

Now, it stands to reason they don’t have the right to pair their votes with white people. They don’t know any more what the voting’s all about than a cross-eyed hoot owl. When the blacks get educated in a few more generations from now, then you’ll be able to reason with them so they’ll learn the right way to vote. But even that’s a long way off.

Right now the blacks talk among themselves about civil rights and integration. I’ve overheard some of that and most of them don’t even know what such things mean. I’ve heard some of them say civil rights was going to let them move anywhere in town to live next door to white people and integration was going to give them the right to pick out a white woman to marry.

If trouble-makers would only leave things alone, we could get the blacks educated in a few more generations and keep them in their place in the meantime. But it just don’t make sense to say we ought to let them go to the same schools with white children here and now—no more than saying they can live next door to you and marry your daughter.

It’s not that we don’t want them sitting in the same school room and mixing on the playground with our children just because they’re black and we’re white. That’s not the real reason. It’s because they don’t have the brain capacity to learn as fast as white children do and that holds the white children back so the colored can catch up. That’s the only reason we don’t want integrated schools now.

A big criticism you hear from outsiders is that we mistreat the colored people down here. That’s just not so. There’s not a bit of truth to it. If anything, it’s a big lie. We’ve got some Southern customs you don’t find in other parts of the country, just like people elsewhere have some customs that we don’t have—and don’t want, neither.

I’ll grant you there was a time when a Guinea would get flogged if he was sent to the field to do certain work and then didn’t do it like he ought to. And maybe one of them would get a beating if he didn’t pay off some little debt he owed a white man or if he claimed he was too sick to show up for work. But as far as I know nothing like that’s happened anywhere in Marengo County in the past eight or ten years. Outsiders who criticize us like that are unfair, because it gives us down here a bad name we don’t deserve any longer.

Now you take this thing about us wanting to keep the colored out of motels and restaurants. There’s a good sanitary reason for that. White people don’t want to eat out of the same dishes they eat out of and we don’t want to sleep in the same bed one of them slept in. That’s the whole simple story. It’s all right for them to cook for us and nurse white babies, but that’s something we need them to do.

Everybody ought to recognize facts like that. When you’ve lived with your customs all your life, you don’t want to give them up just because somebody a thousand miles away says he don’t like them and tells you to get rid of them. That makes no more sense than for me to tell somebody up North I don’t like boiled cabbage and baked beans for breakfast and say he’s got to do like I do and eat grits and sow-belly every morning instead.

That proves there’s a damn good reason for any custom and this thing of keeping niggers out of our restaurants started a long time ago and we learned them to know their place and they never dared step over the line. If the trouble-makers up North want to know the truth, we don’t give a God damn what they think. This’s the South, by God, and we’ll find a way to run it the way we please.