Read Online In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell - Free Book Online
Authors: Erskine Caldwell
Ads: Link
doors to the world are opening before their eyes, revealing sights their parents never knew existed, and they have the spirit and enthusiasm of pioneers to explore it.
In my time, when I left my father’s sharecrop farm in East Georgia, with four half-dollars in my pocket and somehow managed to get to Atlanta, there was no schooling down there for us higher than the fifth grade. That was as far as anybody down there could go in those days.
It’s a lot different now, of course. We have our high schools and colleges all over the state and the young Negro is getting his education. However, Atlanta is still the center of higher education and our colleges and universities here are the goals of the ambitious ones.
But this is not a dead-end for students. Southern-born Negroes still migrate North and West in search of a better social environment and more economic opportunities. What we try to do is give them the best possible education so they will have a better chance to succeed in getting what they want wherever they go.
That’s why I like teaching. It’s a satisfying feeling to know that I’m helping this generation to learn how to be good citizens in the North and South.
7
T HE LONG, SCRAWNY, emaciated, poverty-shriveled arm of Appalachia thrusts southwesterly from West Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee into Northern Alabama. After this hopeful long reach over the border of Bisco Country, the supplicating hand of poverty opens palm upward for some token of sympathy. But it is too late for alms. The last coins of the kind-hearted have already been dropped into an imploring hand somewhere else with all sympathy spent.
The bone-hard thumb of the hand of poverty is the Arkadelphia Mountain in the Appalachian Range and its calloused soil covers all of Walker County in Northern Alabama. Like the four bony fingers of the Raccoon, Blount, Oak, and Beaver mountains which reach hopefully toward Birmingham and its outcroppings of coal and ore and limestone, the Arkadelphia region was never in its history an agricultural country.
The thin-soil gravel hills in Walker County are barren lands and the rocky ledges stubbornly resist the roots of vegetation. Whatever humus does accumulate under scrub pines and blackjack oaks is soon washed away by mountain rains and carried down the Warrior River to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the beginning, long before the Civil War, the Anglo-Saxon settlers came to the gravel hills of Walker County in search of cheap land. They found with ease what they sought and then, unfortunately, they were misled by the false promise of its brief summertime luxuriance. After that, with all money spent, they had no choice other than to make it the homeplace of their families. Now, after many generations of inbreeding, it is the birthplace of the handicapped people of Alabama’s Appalachia who are rarely able to find anything but misery at home or away.
The time has not yet come when such barren land on gravel hills can be industrialized to furnish employment for its people. There have been many attempts made without success to establish industries.
Cotton mills have been built and abandoned; furniture factories were built and abandoned. The prospect of failure was obscured in the beginning by the optimism of success, but it took only a short time to realize that it was uneconomical to install industries in a remote region that had neither access to supply nor local sources of material for manufacture. The one remaining hope of the people is that sometime in the future science will find a profitable way to convert scrubby pine and yellow broomsedge into paper and plastic.
After the failure of cloth and furniture manufacturing, other attempts, both realistic and visionary, were made to find a way for people to exist on such unproductive land. But home-tufted bedspreads and hand-braided scatter rugs soon glutted the tourist market. There was so much over-production of moonshine whisky that a man soon lost
In my time, when I left my father’s sharecrop farm in East Georgia, with four half-dollars in my pocket and somehow managed to get to Atlanta, there was no schooling down there for us higher than the fifth grade. That was as far as anybody down there could go in those days.
It’s a lot different now, of course. We have our high schools and colleges all over the state and the young Negro is getting his education. However, Atlanta is still the center of higher education and our colleges and universities here are the goals of the ambitious ones.
But this is not a dead-end for students. Southern-born Negroes still migrate North and West in search of a better social environment and more economic opportunities. What we try to do is give them the best possible education so they will have a better chance to succeed in getting what they want wherever they go.
That’s why I like teaching. It’s a satisfying feeling to know that I’m helping this generation to learn how to be good citizens in the North and South.
7
T HE LONG, SCRAWNY, emaciated, poverty-shriveled arm of Appalachia thrusts southwesterly from West Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee into Northern Alabama. After this hopeful long reach over the border of Bisco Country, the supplicating hand of poverty opens palm upward for some token of sympathy. But it is too late for alms. The last coins of the kind-hearted have already been dropped into an imploring hand somewhere else with all sympathy spent.
The bone-hard thumb of the hand of poverty is the Arkadelphia Mountain in the Appalachian Range and its calloused soil covers all of Walker County in Northern Alabama. Like the four bony fingers of the Raccoon, Blount, Oak, and Beaver mountains which reach hopefully toward Birmingham and its outcroppings of coal and ore and limestone, the Arkadelphia region was never in its history an agricultural country.
The thin-soil gravel hills in Walker County are barren lands and the rocky ledges stubbornly resist the roots of vegetation. Whatever humus does accumulate under scrub pines and blackjack oaks is soon washed away by mountain rains and carried down the Warrior River to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the beginning, long before the Civil War, the Anglo-Saxon settlers came to the gravel hills of Walker County in search of cheap land. They found with ease what they sought and then, unfortunately, they were misled by the false promise of its brief summertime luxuriance. After that, with all money spent, they had no choice other than to make it the homeplace of their families. Now, after many generations of inbreeding, it is the birthplace of the handicapped people of Alabama’s Appalachia who are rarely able to find anything but misery at home or away.
The time has not yet come when such barren land on gravel hills can be industrialized to furnish employment for its people. There have been many attempts made without success to establish industries.
Cotton mills have been built and abandoned; furniture factories were built and abandoned. The prospect of failure was obscured in the beginning by the optimism of success, but it took only a short time to realize that it was uneconomical to install industries in a remote region that had neither access to supply nor local sources of material for manufacture. The one remaining hope of the people is that sometime in the future science will find a profitable way to convert scrubby pine and yellow broomsedge into paper and plastic.
After the failure of cloth and furniture manufacturing, other attempts, both realistic and visionary, were made to find a way for people to exist on such unproductive land. But home-tufted bedspreads and hand-braided scatter rugs soon glutted the tourist market. There was so much over-production of moonshine whisky that a man soon lost
Similar Books
