In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell Page B

neither. What they’d want to do is strip her naked and then go on from there. Given a chance, they’d make whores out of all white women—and then tell white men to keep hands off. You let a crowd of niggers stand around on the street corner and watch a white woman walk by and you don’t have to guess a second time what they’ve got in mind. You’d be right the first time when you said what they were thinking about was getting their hands on her titties and their balls between her legs.
    It used to be that white men would go after good-looking young colored girls whenever they felt like it. There were plenty of them all around and easy to get between sundown and dark. They could always be counted on being better honeyfuckers than ordinary white girls, too. But that’s not the way it is any more—there are plenty of easy-to-get honeyfucking white girls these days.
    But what’s happening now is that things have got turned around and nigger men want white women. But nobody’s going to tell me it’s all right for a white girl to intercourse a nigger man. And anybody who’d say that is a Yankee and a communist and ought to be run out of the country.
    All this proves we’ve got to keep up all the segregation we’ve already got—and even that’s not enough in these times. What we’ve got to do is to have more of it and make it stick. The way to do that is to find ways to make it legal by law so the government can’t come along and put white people in jail for doing what we know is right.
    The niggers don’t know it, because that’s how ignorant they are, but everybody else knows they were a hell of a lot better off in the old days when they couldn’t even read and write. That’s when they were trained to know their place and never made trouble thinking they were just as good as white people and ought to have the same privileges. That’s why when you have hard-and-fast segregation it works for everybody’s best interest—and for the niggers most of all. Then they don’t have false notions when they’re kept segregated—that’s when they damn well know their place and stay in it.
    Down here we get too damn much unasked-for advice from Yankees about how to handle the niggers. I don’t mind being criticized by somebody who knows more than I do about something and who can show me where I’m wrong. I’m open-minded about such things. But what I don’t like is being criticized by somebody who don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Up there, Yankees won’t likely see a nigger in a week’s time and he lives as far away from niggers as he can get and won’t eat in the same place with one of them even if the meal was free.
    Just the same, the Yankee will be the one to make a big to-do about the way we say nigger children have got to stay out of our white schools and how we try to keep the race from eating in our restaurants and sleeping in white motels. But I’ll tell you something about that. And I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. You let a Yankee come down here to live and he’ll be the biggest talker of all in favor of segregation before the year’s out. He don’t want no nigger getting close enough to fool around with his wife.
    The main thing we’re criticized about all the time is what Yankees up North call civil rights. They’re not really talking about segregation and such things when they say that. They’ve got segregation of their own up there and they want to keep it that way just as much as we do down here. What they’re talking about is voting. They want to use the nigger votes down here so they can control our politics. That’s the only thing they’re after. They don’t give a damn about whether the niggers go to white schools and sleep in white motels in the South. They’re after the nigger votes and nothing else.
    You hear those people up there swear-to-God and hope-they-may-die that they’re sincere about all the other things they criticize us about. Like hell they