Free In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell Page A

hell out of my store and stay out.
    Right then was when my wife happened to come in the store and she could tell right away how mad I was about something. She knew what to think about it, just like the time I was fixing to jump that preacher, and she went straight behind the counter where I keep my old shotgun handy in case it’s needed. She wasn’t saying a single word when she picked up the gun and breeched it open.
    The politician took a good look at her and asked me who she was. I told him who she was and he said she didn’t look all-white to him and then wanted to know if I was race-mixing with a half-black. Just the same, even if he was a pure-white politician, I could see him looking her up and down with her kind of poontang in mind.
    I was about to tell him plenty about minding his own business when he looked again and saw my wife holding up that breeched shotgun. She’d only done that to take out the two shells so I couldn’t kill nobody, but that politician didn’t know that. He thought she was loading the gun and he got out of there so fast he left his hat behind.
    While he was getting in his car, my wife ran outside waving his hat at him, but he wasn’t taking no chances. He got his car started and turned it around to get back to Jasper. I grabbed the shotgun and jammed the shells in the barrels and then fired both of them up in the air one after the other.
    When the politician heard the gun go off, I reckon he thought for sure he was getting shot at, because he ducked his head down as far as he could and drove that car up the road making so much noise it sounded like a gravel truck stuck in a mud hole and trying to get out.
    The whole thing about it was I’d forgotten about that shotgun when my wife came in the store, but she remembered it as soon as she saw how mad I was. All I had in mind was to brain that politician with the empty soda pop bottle for trying to buy me and her votes for only a dime and then saying my wife’s looks didn’t suit him for politics because she’s not all-white. Maybe her color didn’t please him for his kind of politics, but he sure had his eye on her for the other thing. He acted just like the preacher when it came to that.

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    E ARLY IN THE NINETEENTH century, long before the Civil War, an act of Congress provided a land grant of several townships in area for two hundred French colonists to enable them to establish a settlement in America. Inspired by the revolutionary American theory of democratic government, and exiled from France because of their political beliefs, the colonists sailed across the Atlantic to Mobile and then came a hundred and fifty miles up the Tombigbee River in Western Alabama to seek realization of their dreams.
    Being imbued with the spirit of democracy, and true to its principles of human freedom, the colonists brought no African slaves to the settlement they founded on the cliffs of the Tombigbee and which they called Demopolis.
    It was in retaliation for their exile from France that the refugees used the Greek language instead of French to create an appropriately descriptive name for the place they expected to live in democratic freedom.
    Demopolis, or The People’s City, was an idealistic experiment that failed so disastrously that all now left to show for it is the name of the town itself. The deceptive black topsoil, which became known as the Black Belt of Alabama, covered a rock-like hardpan of white clay only a few inches below the surface and was not suitable for growing grapes and olives as the colonists attempted to do. Besides, the malarial climate brought early death to men, women, and children, and there were no slaves for the hard labor of producing cotton in subtropical heat.
    In the end, with their language being their only remaining possession, the few colonists who survived the ordeal returned to France after the Napoleonic Wars. Cotton planters, bringing their Guinea slaves from nearby plantations, were quick to take over the