Read Online In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Erskine Caldwell
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hope of being able to swap a gallon of corn liquor with his neighbor for a pig or to take a jug of it to the crossroads store to barter for a can of snuff.
Then, even more recently, came the time when a vagabond shirt-and-skirt sweatshop would open overnight with several dozen sewing machines in an abandoned barn and pay wives and daughters thirty cents an hour to stitch and hem mill-end cotton cloth. That short-lived industry came to an end when federal minimum wage laws eliminated that occasional source of cash income in the gravel hills.
The economic plight of Jasper and Cordova and other small towns in Walker County is not unique in this extreme southwestern region of Appalachia. Similar distress exists wherever the gravel hills of Northern Alabama have been eroded by mountain rains until only a few inches of topsoil remain to sustain scrubby pines, blackjack oaks, yellow broom-sedge, and May-pop vines. But as if to compensate for its hostile soil, the region is not lacking in an abundance of old-time religion of the whoop-and-holler sects and the die-hard politics of the run-nigger-run white supremists.
The affable, congenial, reddish-bearded storekeeper at the fork of the road in the intervale was eager to talk about life and hard-times in the gravel hills of Walker County.
I went to school off and on past seventeen, he said, and that was long enough to read and write past the sixth grade. But the best part was after I quit school I married the school teacher who could add, subtract, and multiply figures without never looking in the arithmetic book to go by.
There was talk about it all along between here and Jasper—about a white man like me marrying her—and it still comes up now and then, because she sure don’t look pure-white like most white people do. She told me she looks like she does because she’s part-Indian from Middle Georgia. I took her word for it from the start, even if some people do still claim she’s dark-skinned like a part-white Georgia Geechee and trying to pass for all-white. But that don’t bother me none. Not a bit. Marrying that school teacher was the smartest move I ever made in my whole life and I’m satisfied.
I asked her once what county in Georgia she came from, but she said she didn’t know because her folks brought her to Alabama when she was too little to remember. I never heard her say if her daddy was Bisco or anything like that, but it might’ve been for all I know. She won’t talk about kinfolks no more and it won’t do no good for a stranger to ask her about it.
Anyway, what she did was give me her year’s pay when she quit teaching to marry me and set up housekeeping. I took that money and went to Jasper and bought a whole load of canned goods and staple groceries and a few other things like nails and hinges. Then I hauled everything out here to this little old store I built out of sawmill slabs all by myself. Not many folks lived out here at the fork and hardly none of them had money to spend for canned goods and staples. But nearly everybody had a way of somehow finding a little cash to spend for snuff and so I hauled some of the canned goods back to Jasper and swapped for all the snuff I could get.
Getting that snuff to sell set me up in business right away and I never let the stock get short since. My wife was smart enough to learn me how to make the right change for a quarter or half-dollar so I wouldn’t cheat myself every time I sold a can of snuff. That started about twenty years ago and now I can make change as good as any storekeeper in Jasper or Cordova. Of course, now, I don’t have no big turnover like the other storekeepers, but that means I don’t have as many chances to make mistakes, neither, and short-change myself if I happen to count wrong.
The other big thing my school-teacher wife helped me out about was how to get along being poor like everybody else in the same fix. Everybody needs a true saying to fall back on when things get too
Then, even more recently, came the time when a vagabond shirt-and-skirt sweatshop would open overnight with several dozen sewing machines in an abandoned barn and pay wives and daughters thirty cents an hour to stitch and hem mill-end cotton cloth. That short-lived industry came to an end when federal minimum wage laws eliminated that occasional source of cash income in the gravel hills.
The economic plight of Jasper and Cordova and other small towns in Walker County is not unique in this extreme southwestern region of Appalachia. Similar distress exists wherever the gravel hills of Northern Alabama have been eroded by mountain rains until only a few inches of topsoil remain to sustain scrubby pines, blackjack oaks, yellow broom-sedge, and May-pop vines. But as if to compensate for its hostile soil, the region is not lacking in an abundance of old-time religion of the whoop-and-holler sects and the die-hard politics of the run-nigger-run white supremists.
The affable, congenial, reddish-bearded storekeeper at the fork of the road in the intervale was eager to talk about life and hard-times in the gravel hills of Walker County.
I went to school off and on past seventeen, he said, and that was long enough to read and write past the sixth grade. But the best part was after I quit school I married the school teacher who could add, subtract, and multiply figures without never looking in the arithmetic book to go by.
There was talk about it all along between here and Jasper—about a white man like me marrying her—and it still comes up now and then, because she sure don’t look pure-white like most white people do. She told me she looks like she does because she’s part-Indian from Middle Georgia. I took her word for it from the start, even if some people do still claim she’s dark-skinned like a part-white Georgia Geechee and trying to pass for all-white. But that don’t bother me none. Not a bit. Marrying that school teacher was the smartest move I ever made in my whole life and I’m satisfied.
I asked her once what county in Georgia she came from, but she said she didn’t know because her folks brought her to Alabama when she was too little to remember. I never heard her say if her daddy was Bisco or anything like that, but it might’ve been for all I know. She won’t talk about kinfolks no more and it won’t do no good for a stranger to ask her about it.
Anyway, what she did was give me her year’s pay when she quit teaching to marry me and set up housekeeping. I took that money and went to Jasper and bought a whole load of canned goods and staple groceries and a few other things like nails and hinges. Then I hauled everything out here to this little old store I built out of sawmill slabs all by myself. Not many folks lived out here at the fork and hardly none of them had money to spend for canned goods and staples. But nearly everybody had a way of somehow finding a little cash to spend for snuff and so I hauled some of the canned goods back to Jasper and swapped for all the snuff I could get.
Getting that snuff to sell set me up in business right away and I never let the stock get short since. My wife was smart enough to learn me how to make the right change for a quarter or half-dollar so I wouldn’t cheat myself every time I sold a can of snuff. That started about twenty years ago and now I can make change as good as any storekeeper in Jasper or Cordova. Of course, now, I don’t have no big turnover like the other storekeepers, but that means I don’t have as many chances to make mistakes, neither, and short-change myself if I happen to count wrong.
The other big thing my school-teacher wife helped me out about was how to get along being poor like everybody else in the same fix. Everybody needs a true saying to fall back on when things get too
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