In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page A

money. Everybody has to scramble for it, but everybody ought to have equal chance.
    You’ll hear some people argue that the Negroes are better off now than they’ve ever been before and that they ought to be satisfied and quit complaining.
    They’ll argue that the colored people get paid in money now, and not in flour and lard and old clothes like they used to be. They’ll say there hasn’t been a lynching in the county in thirty years. They’ll tell you about how their taxes went up to pay the cost of new school buildings built just for the colored and how much tax money it takes to provide teachers for colored children.
    All that’s true enough as far as it goes, but times have changed and it still don’t amount to enough when you look around and see how the colored have to live in shacks and sheds all over the country.
    Another argument you’ll hear all the time is that if you let the Negroes have an inch about one thing it’ll encourage them to do as they please about everything and take a mile. They say that’ll lead to Negroes moving next door to white people and raping your wife and daughters. If that’s what they’re after, they would’ve been doing it for the past thirty years, because they’ve been living out there in the county on the farms side-by-side all that time.
    The only raping that I know about being done in this part of the country is when white men go after Negro girls, and there’s been plenty of that ever since I can remember. Of course, it’s not exactly fair to call it raping, because any female likes to have a man go through the motions of chasing her some. What happens then is something that ought to be called by some other name. Some want to be caught and some say they don’t, and that’s why I wouldn’t want to have to decide what the difference was between courting and raping. Either way, though, it’s all for the same purpose. I ought to know about that. I was a young man myself once.
    You’ve read a lot in the newspapers about picketing and demonstrations and sit-ins and such things in the big cities in Georgia. There hasn’t been anything like that here yet and there may never be. The reason I say that is because it’s something for the big cities where enough Negroes live to make it worthwhile.
    In small towns like this, people know the Negroes by name and they’d likely lose what jobs they did have if they organized something like that. That’s why I think the best places for Negroes to work at getting the rights they’re entitled to under the law are the big cities like Atlanta and Macon and Savannah, where they’ve got plenty of students and others at the right age not to be scared off. Their young people are the best ones for it. Their old people are going to be cautious till they can see daylight.
    Anyhow, no matter what the law says, it’s going to take time. Make no mistake about it. There’re plenty of white people in the cities who call themselves nigger-haters just like some do in the small towns, and they’re the kind who’ll find a way to make a lot of trouble for Negroes no matter what the civil rights law says. People who shoot doves out of season and bootleg liquor and steal gasoline from the state highway department won’t pay much attention to the civil rights law.
    The closest thing to that kind of trouble to happen here was when two Negroes from the North stopped in town and tried to get a room in a motel where the owner said he had no vacancies. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not about not having a vacancy in the motel, but, anyhow, the two Negroes started complaining and he called the police. The police took them to the city limits and warned them that if they came back to town they’d be charged with disturbing the peace and end up staying in jail for three months. They must have gone away because I never heard of a court case about it.
    People who call me a nigger-lover and all the other things say if I’d smell with my