In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell Read Free Book Online

why they can’t open a store and try to get trade from white people. They can’t get a job meeting white people face-to-face—unless you call collecting garbage that kind of job. They can’t buy a lot and build a house, or rent one, neither, outside the place they’ve been told to live for the past hundred years.
    If you mention my name around here, you’ll hear me called a lot of names. You’ll hear me called a crackpot, a trouble-maker, a lunatic, a nigger-lover, and a few other things, including being an out-and-out communist. They say I’m encouraging the Negro people to break down segregation and that if I know what’s good for me I’ll shut my mouth and keep it shut—or else move to the North or some other place like that.
    But I’m used to hearing what they say about me and it don’t bother me a bit now. I’ve lost some friends by speaking out the way I do and I’m likely to lose a lot more. My wife never opened her mouth about it one way or the other when she was around other people—she died not long ago—but they treated her the same way because of me right up to the day she died.
    I don’t worry about myself, now that my wife is dead and my children grown up and moved away. I’ve heard that some nightriders have been saying they’re going to burn a cross in my front yard and nail a warning on my door, but that’s not going to change my way of thinking. I’ve lived long enough and thought about it long enough to convince myself that I’m right. And when you’ve got the feeling that you’re right about something, you don’t have to boast about being brave—you just go ahead and do the way you think you ought to.
    I grew up in this country with colored people and I worked side-by-side with them all through the big depression and right up to the time I retired a few years ago. You just can’t know the Negroes like I’ve done for a lifetime and not treat them like you would anybody else. Not after you think about how you used to open up your dinner-pails together out there in a mean piece of newground or a blistering cotton patch and eat side-by-side with them in the shade of a persimmon tree at noon-time and listen to them tell you their troubles one minute and then tell a real funny story about something the next. And not after all the times when I’ve been too sick to get out of bed to feed my stock and have some of them come around to help out without being asked and then not take a dime for the favor they did. If you can’t get along in the world with people like that, you’ve got a mighty sorry excuse for living yourself.
    Once in a while, to be sure, one of them will get drunk and beat his wife and raise hell, but that’s no more than what some white men will do. And every time you show me a Negro who went off and stole something I can show you a white man who stole just as much or more some other way. When it comes to things like that, I’ve yet to see any difference at all between the races except color.
    It’s claimed all the time that the Negroes are trying to figure out ways to take what the white people have got. But that’s not exactly true. What they’re after is to make the same kind of living the white people do. That’s more like it. They want to get the things that are advertised for sale—like automobiles and furniture and new clothes. And they can’t do that if they’re not allowed to run a business in a part of town where they can make money or if they can’t buy a farm with the kind of land that’ll grow more on it than chiggers and cockleburs and beggar-lice.
    The storekeepers and farmers are scared of the competition and fear the Negroes will get ahead of them and make some of the money they’re getting now. The storekeepers want to take in the Negro’s dollar and the farmer wants him to keep on working for next-to-nothing shares or wages. That’s what the trouble’s usually about. And it’s the same in town or country. It’s the scramble for