In Search of Bisco Read Online Free PDF

been to his people in the past and tell him we’ll keep on being good to them as long as they cooperate with us. We wouldn’t let him forget about the colored park we set aside just for them and the big new high school we built for them with our own tax money. And we’d tell him we’d hate to have to take all that back.
    Then we’d remind him how we arranged for the colored to have a night of their own once a week at the drive-in movie out on the highway east of town so they could sit in their cars and see the pictures like anybody else. Even if everything else failed to convince him, he’d listen to reason then for sure. The drive-in movie is the one thing the colored don’t want taken away from them. That’s the one big night of the week for them now.
    The good colored people know what we’ve done for them and they don’t want to go back to having nothing again like they used to. Of course, there’s some trouble-makers among them who keep on saying they want more and more all the time. That’s the kind who don’t want to be satisfied with what they’ve got. As soon as they get one thing, like a park or new school building of their own, they turn around and say they want something more.
    But, all in all, the good colored people will listen to reason when we talk to them. They’re just like little children and you have to know how to treat them like you do your own children and give them some candy when you want them to do what you say. That’s why, if we didn’t know how to handle them, the colored in this country would go hog-wild in no time at all.
    If the government in Washington would quit passing laws favoring the colored, we wouldn’t have no trouble at all with them. Ever since I can remember, that café next door to here has had the no-service-to-colored sign on the wall. When the government says that sign has to come down to favor the colored, and the colored are let in, you won’t find me in there mixing with them.
    I do business with the colored here in my store, but they stand up and don’t sit down and they leave as soon as they hand over the money for what they buy. And I’m not going to that café next door and sit down and eat with them. That’s where I draw the color line and I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to make me step over it. They haven’t got enough soldiers in the army to make me go against my principles.
    And my principles are just as hard-shelled about living next door to them as they are about eating in the same room with them. Somebody mentioned at that meeting I was telling you about that everybody ought to be thinking about what to do if they sent soldiers here to help the colored to move in a house in the white part of town in case they somehow managed to get legal ownership of it and wouldn’t stand still to listen to reason.
    I don’t know all what might happen, even if he did have the law on his side and the soldiers backing him up, but something’d be bound to. I wouldn’t want to see that time come. Because I believe in peaceful living with the colored as long as they live separate. But if he went ahead and moved in anyhow after he’d been warned, and then wouldn’t budge—well, there’s just too many people in town like me who wouldn’t stand for it once the sun had set on him.
    I’m not coming right out and saying this or that about it now. But you remember that place in the Bible where it says something about somebody sitting on a pile of ashes. Well, that’s what I’m thinking about right now. I reckon you know what I mean.

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    I N THE EYES OF a twelve-year-old boy living many years ago in the Newberry County uplands of South Carolina, not far below the Piedmont Plateau, an uncle who said he knew the reason why all Negroes did not have the same shade of coloring was undoubtedly one of the wisest men in the world.
    As I remembered Bisco several years before in Middle Georgia, he had mulatto-tan coloring of skin and I thought Negroes everywhere