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house so they’d always be available day or night for sex cooperation.
    And that’s my theory why it didn’t take the Geechees in Georgia very long to turn light in color.
    I asked him if he thought a Negro like Bisco would be glad to be light tan in color instead of being as black as a Gullah.
    My uncle said he had no way of knowing how Bisco felt about it, but that all the mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons he knew were uncomplaining about their color. He said some of them were so proud of their light color that they even had a high society of their own and that maybe Bisco would be a member of it.

5
    T HE FERTILE FARM LAND of East Georgia was a desolate expanse of human poverty in the nineteen-thirties. The countryside was devastated by merciless economic erosion. The people were ravaged by relentless hardship. It was a whole decade of widespread economic and psychological depression. Farm mortgages were foreclosed, business enterprises went bankrupt, doctors bartered services for chickens, lawyers gladly accepted fees in cows and hogs, life-long homes were lost to the tax collector, and hopes for the education of children were abandoned.
    That era of hard-times in the nineteen-thirties is still vividly remembered by many people in Bisco Country as being the time of day-to-day struggle to get food for physical survival. Dollar bills that were passed from hand to hand became limp and threadbare, and some of them were so tattered that they had to be held together with safety pins. The era will always be a shuddering memory to an older generation.
    Now, in the nineteen-sixties, a full generation later, the rich mulatto land from the Savannah to the Flint rivers has the appearance of a country untouched in all its history by adversity and a younger generation has come of age knowing of the past only by hearsay. The rutted tobacco roads have been paved, cattle graze on the sloping green fields, diversified agriculture has replaced one-crop farming, modern brick homes have been built where once there were weather-gray wooden shacks, and industrial plants, large and small, provide jobs that never before existed.
    A man who was born to the country sixty years ago and who has lived there through it all might be expected to appreciate the economic changes that have taken place during his lifetime and be content with his good fortune in an age of prosperity. He has thoughts, however, that disturb his peace of mind.
    Standing now in the bright Georgia sunshine, he turns and looks thoughtfully at the shadow on the ground behind him. He is a retired farmer, sufficiently well-to-do by his standards, but he is not happy about the social and economic plight of those whose labor helped him acquire wealth and ease. His shadow is the symbol of his concern. He says he can never walk away from it.
    I’ll tell you what it is that bothers me, he says. Tourists coming and going through this part of the country between Florida and the North see only the front sides of things. They never know about the people behind it. They look at the cattle in the pastures and pass the fine brick houses along the highway and see the new factories in town, but they never have a chance to find out that there are people hidden from sight behind the hills and woods who have no share in any of it. Not a piddling dime’s worth have those people back there got of it to call their own.
    The people I’m talking about are the colored. They’re the ones the tourists fail to see, and they’re not hiding out on purpose. They are out of sight because they’ve been told to live in their segregated part of town or down the side roads in the country in shacks and sheds hardly fit to keep cows and chickens in.
    That’s right. The Negroes are even worse off now in these days than a lot of white people were in the worst days of the depression thirty years ago. The fear is that they’d get some of the money in circulation and keep a white man from getting it. That’s