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

nose as much as I talk with my mouth that I’d change my mind in a hurry about the way I take up for the colored. You hear things like that all the time. What they claim is that the Negroes belong to a race that the law shouldn’t allow to come anywhere near white people because they give off a bad odor. They don’t call it odor, though. They call it stink. Nigger-stink.
    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.

6
    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