In Search of Bisco Read Online Free Page B

working from the Pee Dee to the Savannah rivers and creating fortunes for scores of plantation owners.
    This mulatto soil, so named for being a mixture of sand, clay, and organic loam, is ideal for growing tobacco, cotton, and grain. Even the great wealth extracted from the earth in the decades of slave-labor plantations failed to exhaust its richness, and now in these centennial years of the Civil War, scientific and mechanized farming is making the yield from the land even more valuable than it ever was in the past.
    This modern agricultural operation progressively replaces hand labor with chemicals and machinery, and the descendants of Gullah slaves are gradually forced from their jobs and homes. As earning of the worker decreases, his standard of living goes down and down; he becomes another victim of modern poverty in a land of plenty.
    Displaced by chemicals and machinery and his cabin bulldozed into extinction by other machines to provide additional acreage for farming or pasturage, the Negro field laborer has no choice to make. Inevitably, he and his family go to the nearest town as a place to live and to seek employment. There, as is probable, he will live in a dilapidated house of two or three rooms on the segregated southside. If he is fortunate, he will find seasonal farm work for a few months during the year, or he may be able to find occasional work tending lawns or collecting trash. And while he and his family are existing in squalor, all around him will be the fertile mulatto land producing its new abundance of wealth.
    The native-born white Southerner, a devout Protestant in his mid-fifties and eighth-grade educated, sits on the counter in his small grocery store and talks earnestly about his convictions.
    I know what I’m talking about and it’s time everybody else knows the truth, he said. We take good care of our colored people. If you hear them complaining about something, it’s because outsiders put them up to saying it—or thinking it.
    That’s why we don’t want those part-white Geechees from Georgia coming over here. I don’t know none of them by name and wouldn’t want to. One of them might’ve been named Bisco or all of them might’ve been called that. Anyway, some of them say they’re preachers and others claim to have a college education, but all of them are trouble-makers just like the white Yankees with their mister-nigger television shows. You know what I mean. It’s those television shows that come down from the North with mister-niggers shaking hands and cutting up with white people—Mister Sammy Davis, Mister Harry Belafonte, Mister Louis Armstrong, Mister Nat King Cole. That’s the kind of thing that puts wrong notions in our colored people’s heads.
    I’ll tell you how good we treat the colored. Just last year we set aside some of our best city land and made it into a park just for them so they’d have a separate park just like the white people do. And that’s not all, neither. We’ve built new schools for them with our own tax money that are more modern now than the old ones the white children have to go to.
    Now, you can see why colored people don’t have the right to complain about how they’re treated. If anybody has a right to complain, it’s the white children who have to go past those fine modern colored schools on the way to their old run-down ones. The colored people would’ve been satisfied with the schools they used to have if it hadn’t been for all the agitation by the government in Washington about providing the colored with new school buildings as good as ours after we worked for what we’ve got all our lives and they didn’t. It wasn’t a fair thing for the people in Washington to make us take our tax money and do that. It looks like the votes these days somehow end up going to the wrong kind of politicians.
    An elderly Negro laborer wearing tattered overalls and shredded shoes came into the store and bought a pound of lard and a bag of grits. As