In Search of Bisco Read Free Page A

resisting to the end, continues to postpone settlement by promising payment in economic opportunity and democratic citizenship in the sweet by-and-by of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
    The practice of devising methods for preventing a Negro from working in a trade or occupation or profession for which he qualifies is default by design and not by oversight. The long-standing promise of payment remains unfulfilled. It may never be said in so many words, but the implication is obvious. He is a Negro. To hell with him.
    The forty-five-year-old truck driver lives in an aging hovel of weather-cracked boards and shingles on a water-puddle dirt street in the South Carolina sand hill town of Kershaw. The sand hill country has never been productive of much other than yellow sedge and scrub pines, but people live there because they were born there and it is a place to call home. It is a state-long belt of sandy land at the fall fine of the Piedmont Plateau of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains, rarely more than fifty miles in width, that has impoverished many generations of people long before the nineteen-sixties.
    The Negro truck driver has a job washing and greasing automobiles at a gasoline station on Fridays and Saturdays. It is the only job he has been able to get, and he sits at home five days of the week hoping that someday he will be able to get a full-time truck driving job. He goes to the loading dock of the long-distance trucking company as often as he dares, being careful not to annoy the white superintendent by going too frequently, and asks when there might be a chance for him to go to work for the company. Not now, he is always told, but maybe someday. And now is the time when he is becoming fearful that he will be too old to drive a truck by the time the company finally will hire a Negro for long-distance driving.
    He has a recent newspaper with a want-ad set in bold type. He looks at it and shakes his head. QUALIFIED DRIVERS WANTED IMMEDIATELY BY LONG-DISTANCE TRUCKING COMPANY. GOOD PAY AND ALL BENEFITS. MEALS WHEN AWAY FROM HOME. FULL-TIME WORK AND NO LAY-OFFS.
    If I didn’t know better by now, he said, I’d be up there banging on the door instead of sitting here. They don’t say white and they don’t say black and they don’t say nothing about color, but everybody knows what they mean. It takes a white skin to satisfy the company. You can have a clean driver’s license and a white doctor swearing you’re as healthy as a buck rabbit in a clover patch and be able to jack a twenty-wheel tractor-trailer rig in a nine-foot-wide loading dock with six inches to spare on both sides, and they still won’t hire you if you’re black like me.
    They wanted me in the army when I was about twenty years old and I went in there just a little while after the war started the last time. The army put me through engine overhauling at first, then on the grease racks for a while, and after about six months I was running pick-up trucks around the camp. That wasn’t much to brag about, but then came the best part of all. They gave me a big ten-ton refrigerator rig to make a hundred-and-forty-mile round-trip highway run for the commissary every night. Man, that’s what I call living in the Promised Land.
    That’s what I did in the army for just about two years and then when the war was finished they couldn’t get me out of that tractor cab. What I did was turn right around and join up for four more years just so I could keep on driving the big rigs. And I sure did keep those big engines humming like brand-new sewing machines and never once let a speck of paint get scratched all that time. I was the proudest man in that whole camp.
    By the time I finally left the army and came back home, I could take down a truck engine, diesel or gasoline, and put it back together with my eyes shut. That’s what the army taught me about engines and I can still do it as good as any driver rolling a truck on the highway. Knowing how your