In Search of Bisco Read Free Page B

engine ought to hum and how the exhaust ought to sound when you’re hauling a full load up a steep grade is the kind of driver I learned to be.
    That’s the sweet life for me and it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do since. When I came back home after those six years in the army, I thought sure I was going to get me a good steady job driving for a trucking company on the highways from one end of the country to the other. Like I said, that’s what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world and I still do and always will. But I ran smack-head-on into trouble. They won’t hire me. They don’t want nothing to do with my color.
    I used to get a job now and then driving a puny little half-ton pick-up for somebody and doing some hauling around town, when there was some trash hauling to be done, but the way it turned out was that a white man always came along who wanted a job and they’d take it away from me and give it to him. After that the only steady work I could get was washing and greasing cars at the filling station. Fridays and Saturdays—if you can call that steady—but I don’t want to spend my life working part-time at anything. The way it is now, I can’t make enough money to rent a better house for my wife and three daughters and there’s never enough money to buy the clothes they need. I hate to see those three girls go off to school every morning dressed in put-together clothes like they have to do.
    All I live for is to see the time come when I can get me a real job pushing a three-axle tractor-trailer down the highway and rolling it to Florida and back to New Jersey and then off to all the other places the white drivers can go. They haven’t built a rig yet that’s too big and heavy for me to handle—and the bigger the better. I know the driving laws from start to finish. I can follow the by-passes and truck routes through any city. And I’ve never ditched a truck I was driving or crowded a passenger car off the road in my life. I aint boasting about it—I’m just saying how it is. But I can’t get that kind of job. They say I aint the kind of driver they need. What they mean is they don’t want a Negro to work for them. Then they tell me I don’t know how lucky I am to have a steady part-time job at the filling station on Fridays and Saturdays. They know they aint fooling me with that kind of talk, but they say it, anyhow.
    I ask them how come what I learned in the army about truck driving don’t count. And they say the same thing every time. I’ll tell you about that. You know about the highway truck stops and cafés everywhere you go. There’re plenty of them all over the country. Anyhow, all of them in this part of the country used to have the nigger-go-away sign on the wall. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYBODY. Some places have taken them down, but that don’t mean a thing even when the civil rights laws say they can’t make you leave. They’ll find a way to keep you from eating. They can give you a little shove and then claim you’re scuffling. That’s all. Then all they have to do is phone the sheriff or the highway patrol and say you’re disturbing the peace or something like that. You know what that means to a black man like me. A big fine, or the jailhouse, and maybe both.
    The white-man superintendent at the trucking company mentions that every time I speak to him about getting a driving job. He says the company can’t run the risk of letting a truck load of valuable freight left stranded on the highway for anybody to steal while I go to jail for scuffling in an eating place. He says he can’t help it none, because it’s not his business to go all over the country and see to it that Negro drivers can get in truck-stop bunkhouses and eating places and not go to jail.
    That white man knows I’m a good driver. He said so himself. Once I got him to let me take one of the company’s big tractor-trailers out on the highway for three or four miles,