In Search of Bisco Read Free

other than makings what he wanted most of all were some of the biggest fried pork chops that ever grew on a hog.
    The chain-gang guards permitted no packages or bundles of any kind, other than tobacco and shoe polish, to be brought into the stockade, and everyone who entered on Sunday afternoon was searched for a file or pistol at the gate. However, I was confident that I would be able to smuggle pork chops to Roy by putting them inside my shirt and holding my arms tightly against them. I cooked four of them at home the next Sunday morning, wrapped each one in a piece of newspaper, and placed them inside my shirt.
    The usual guard was not on duty at the stockade that afternoon and a younger guard I had never seen before stopped me at the gate and told me to hold my arms above my head while he searched me for hacksaw and pistol. When I raised my arms, he looked at me with a knowing grin on his face while he was feeling the pork chops. The first thing he said was that the next time I ought to wrap pork chops in a different kind of paper so the grease would not ooze through my shirt the way it did. Then, as I was going through the stockade gate, he told me that if I did it again I was going to get the reputation around town of being a nigger-lover.
    I asked Roy while he was eating the pork chops if he had ever known a colored boy named Bisco. Shaking his head, he said that was a new name to him, but that it sounded good and friendly. I told him about Bisco when we were playmates and said that he and Bisco were enough alike to be brothers.
    Presently, Roy looked up and said that a colored boy with a name like that ought to be a mighty fine fellow and that he hoped nobody named Bisco would ever be wrongly accused of doing something against the law and be sentenced to the chain gang or shot down by a white man’s gun. Remembering what had happened to Sonny in Tennessee, and seeing the ball-and-chain shackled to Roy’s legs, I told him that I hoped so, too.

2
    T HE SOUTHSIDE OF the United States is the geographically welded region of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It is also a state of mind—a local purgatory or an earthly paradise—and often an economic iniquity, a social anachronism, a political autocracy, and a racial tyranny.
    After placing the bordering states of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee where they should have been relegated by a more realistic Mason and Dixon line in the beginning—which would still be north of the feudal Southerner’s horizon—the domain from South Carolina to Louisiana is the authentic Deep South of fact and fiction.
    But, above all, this is Bisco Country. After a lifetime of being a Negro American, Bisco is probably as familiar with its joys and sorrows as anyone else and going in search of him through the Deep South has the prospect of seeing Bisco’s native land as he himself knows it.
    This region of fertile fields and flourishing factories has the appearance of being a pleasant segment of America far removed and remote from the social and economic ills elsewhere in the United States. Life is relaxed and unhurried. The climate is mild and the scenery is often spectacular. People are friendly and tax collectors are apologetic.
    All would be well in this land of apparent ease and pleasantry if there were only one Southerner to claim inheritance of this bountiful goodness of earth. But there is another Southerner with a rightful claim to his share of inheritance so well and deservedly earned after more than two hundred years of sweat, travail, hardship, and degradation. An equitable sharing of the reward is long past due.
    The unrewarded Southerner is the Negro. After this long period of slavery, servitude, injustice, and discrimination, the Negro of the South has finally dared to speak for the past due accounting. But easily incurred debts are always the last to be repaid, and the white Protestant Southerner of Anglo-Saxon origin,