In that little classic, The Mind of the South, the late W.J. Cash
described the underlying Southern misfortune as "too great
attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and
injustice in the name of those values." Twenty five years later,
the description still holds, though it's certainly expressively
tame compared to the current stereophonic versions, everything from
the jeremiads of Baldwin to jumbo confections like Hurry Sundown.
Now Caldwell, who more than twenty five years past made his name
with Tobacco Road et al., follows suit with a slow-winding,
fault-finding journey through Lower Dixie (South Carolina, Georgia,
Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana). It is the same stretch
where he struck artistic (and financial) pay dirt, where he grew
up, and which furnished material for a somewhat similar
documentary, the quite forgotten share-cropper epic of the New Deal
era, You Have Seen Their Faces. In this one, nostalgia is turned on
its head via a well-worn gimmick: Caldwell in an actual (and also
symbolic) search for a long lost childhood buddy, the Negro Bisco.
He revisits sites and mores of the past, records the monologues of
the whites and blacks he spoke with, sketches in some
socio-economic backdrops, and lets the depressing picture speak for
itself. The Negroes are largely noble and put-upon; the whites
(storekeepers, poor buckra, and Citizens Council die-hards) are so
bigoted, self-deceiving or paranoid that they come off as
vaudeville turns. True, Caldwell meets more enlightened whites, but
the overall impression is of cracker mania. It is all fairly
sharply observed. (Kirkus Reviews)
In 1965, more than five decades after his forced estrangement from
his black boyhood friend Bisco, Erskine Caldwell set out across the
South to find him. On the journey, which took him from South
Carolina to Arkansas, Caldwell spoke to many people on the pretense
of asking Bisco's whereabouts: a black college professor in
Atlanta, Georgia; a white real estate salesman in Demopolis,
Alabama; a black sharecropper in the Yazoo Basin of the Mississippi
Delta; a transplanted white New England housewife in Bastrop,
Louisiana; and others. Eighteen of those conversations, with
Caldwell's commentary, make up this book.
Caldwell made his journey at the zenith of the civil rights
movement. Bisco, whom Caldwell never found, becomes a symbol for
the South's race problem, to which he sought an answer in the
emotions, experiences, and attitudes of those he encountered.
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