Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  The stories of freedom-movement veterans like Eddie McCoy and twenty years of research in dusty archives and around dozens of kitchen tables taught me that the life-and-death struggle in Oxford that summer was inextricably bound up with much larger and more enduring conflicts about the meanings of race and nation and freedom. Only a week before Henry Marrow’s brains were blown out, National Guard troops fired into a crowd of antiwar protestors at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding eleven. The day after Marrow died, a mentally retarded black teenager was beaten to death in an Augusta, Georgia, jail, setting off riots in which white law enforcement officers killed six blacks and wounded dozens more. On May 16, 1970, five days after the killing in my hometown, Mississippi state troopers fired 350 rounds into a women’s dormitory at historically black Jackson State University, killing two students and wounding twelve. In Vietnam, racial clashes in the U.S. Army made America’s misbegotten war almost impossible to pursue. The country seemed to teeter on the brink of apocalypse. “This is a dangerous situation,” the editors of Business Week declared. “It threatens the whole economic and social structure of the nation.”

  So while this is the story of a small boy in a small town one hot Southern summer, it is also the story of a nation torn apart by racial, political, social, and cultural clashes so deep that they echo in our lives to this day. The cheerful and cherished lies we tell ourselves about those years—that the black freedom movement was largely a nonviolent call on America’s conscience, which America answered, to cite the most glaring fiction—do little to repair the breach. There are many things we never learned about the civil rights struggle, and many others things we have tried hard to forget. The United States could find work for a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission like the one that has tried to mend the scars of apartheid in South Africa; any psychiatrist can tell you that genuine healing requires a candid confrontation with our past. In any case, if there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.

  The truth will set us free, so the Bible says, and my own experience bears witness. This story has carved changes in my life as deep as the enduring chasm of race in this country, but far more fortuitous. My search for the meaning of the troubles in Oxford launched me toward a life of learning, across lines of color and caste, out of my little boy’s vision of my family’s well-lighted place in the world and into the shadows where histories and memories and hopes abide.

  CHAPTER 2

  ORIGINAL SINS

  MY FAMILY WAS as Southern as fried okra and sweet tea. Because my father was a Methodist minister, we moved from town to town every few years. But we always stayed in eastern North Carolina, where my father’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him had planted tobacco and preached the gospel. We ate collards and cornbread, pork barbecue and banana pudding. On car trips, Mama and Daddy taught us to sing “Dixie”— though mostly we sang spirituals like “Trampin’” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” Tyson children often had double names—I had cousins called “Thomas Earl” and “George Hart” and so on. We called my sister Martha Buie “Boo,” and everybody referred to my uncle Charles as “Bubba,” even though his mama had never been in prison and he did not even drive a truck. We called my father “Daddy,” which rhymes with “ready.” When we said we were going to do something “directly,” which is pronounced “dreckly,” we meant we were going to do it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don’t ask again. If I hadn’t learned to read, I might never have found out that “damn Yankee” was two words. But I already knew how to read pretty well by the time the big green-and-yellow Mayflower moving truck carried our household belongings to Oxford late in the summer of 1966.

  We followed the moving vans in “Chief Pontiac,” Daddy’s old gray sedan with the webbed seat covers and the musty smell and the Indian’s head symbol on the center of the steering wheel, singing our car songs and pestering Daddy to tell us when we were going to be there. Coming into town, I greatly admired the old Confederate soldier that stood guard atop a high granite pedestal in the center of the main intersection; my friends and I played “Civil War” just like we did “cowboys and Indians,” and we were always the Rebels. All the Yankees were imaginary. I mean, somebody might want to be a cowboy, but there were limits. Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were bighearted and friendly, though it was not the hardest place in the world to get murdered for having bad manners. Even our main crop would kill you.

  Every fall, the sharp, sweet smell of bright leaf tobacco wafted through the wide streets of Oxford as the farmers brought their crops to market. Trucks piled high with great burlap bundles rumbled in and out of the massive warehouses in the middle of town. This tobacco market town was the county seat of Granville County, which lay sleeping in the sun just south of the Virginia border. Oxford was home to about eight thousand people, roughly half of them descended from the slaves who had been brought there two hundred years earlier to cultivate the precious leaf. Tobacco farming was a job of many hands, which was why Granville had had the highest slave population of any county in North Carolina. Throughout the antebellum period, and often afterward, it was said, Granville County produced more tobacco than any other county in the nation. Inside those capacious wooden warehouses, the auctioneers still chanted their singsong staccato of profit and loss.

  Millions of dollars changed hands on the spit-stained pine floors of the warehouses. And when the harvest was over and the auctioneers fell silent, black and white alike—but rarely together—celebrated with eastern North Carolina barbecue, marinated in red pepper vinegar and smoked with hickory wood in greasy pits beside the empty barns. Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.

  A hundred years after the fall of slavery, C. G. Credle Elementary School still didn’t open until mid-September, after the farm children were finished “priming” and “putting in” tobacco—picking the leaves and hanging them in wood-fired barns to cure. Bright golden leaves blew off the trucks and littered the streets every autumn. My friends and I would pick them up and tie them in bunches and hang them from the ceiling of our lean-to forts in the woods. When we played baseball, we chewed the dark, acrid stems and pretended not to get queasy. We forever tried to devise ways to smoke the fragrant leaves, without much success. Mostly we puffed store-bought cigarettes, not being adept enough to roll our own or to manage the corncob pipes that sounded so good when Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer talked about them, though we tried. When Gerald and Jeff and I rode with Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, we were Rebel soldiers smoking around the campfire.

  Smoking cigarettes, much like the racial slavery that had originally made tobacco profitable, was regarded as sinful by a substantial minority of folks, even though the entire economy rested upon it. Sin or no sin, anybody tall enough to see over the counter at Monk’s Grocery could buy a pack for thirty-five cents. Me and my brother, Vern, bought them regularly, though we lived in terror of getting caught. “I need a pack of Tareyton’s for my mama,” I would say to the man at the register, as if my mother would be caught dead sending a child out for cigarettes. The lie was superfluous. Monk probably would have sold me the smokes if I had said they were for the little baby Jesus. I would stuff the pack into the pockets of my cutoffs and light out for the woods, where neither my mama nor the lie seemed likely to catch up with me.

  Since Mama and Daddy had not grown up in Oxford but had only just brought us to town, many people seemed to regard us as “not from here.” That was part of being a Methodist preacher’s family in those days, because it was an itinerant system, but Granville Co
unty was a harder place to belong than the others we had known. “Oxford,” my mother remembered, “was sort of a little blue-blood town and it was hard to really get in it.” People whose families had been in the county for anything less than several generations remained forever outsiders. The chamber of commerce erected a sign at the city limits that read WELCOME TO GRANVILLE COUNTY— OUR HOME, YOUR OPPORTUNITY, as if to say that outsiders with money to invest were welcome, but they should understand from the outset that they would never be from here.

  And then there was the race thing. The color line in Oxford was as bright as blood. Though I had no way to know it at the time, the birth pangs of the black freedom struggle were terrifying whites everywhere. And even most grown-ups did not realize that neither these fears nor the African American self-assertions that provoked them were new.

  In the late 1880s, after the fall of slavery but before African Americans lost their voting rights, white conservatives had felt similarly threatened by an earlier freedom movement. The Knights of Labor had organized both black and white workers in Granville County to support child labor laws, a shorter workweek, and federal funding for public schools; Democrats responded by denouncing whites who voted with blacks as “traitors to their race and color.”

  In the spring of 1887, when a white woman accused a local black man, Albert Taborn, of attempted rape, a charge many questioned, a white mob threatened to lynch him. Armed black men surrounded the jail to prevent the lynching; others vowed to burn the town. When it became clear the local authorities remained determined to see Taborn hanged, someone torched the tobacco warehouses downtown. Taborn was hanged nonetheless, and soon what remained of interracial political action was equally dead. Yet when similar events occurred in 1970—challenges to the color line, a controversial trial, and tobacco warehouses going up in flames—white people seemed amazed. “We always had good race relations here,” they said to anyone who would listen.

  Maybe it was misplaced nostalgia, or maybe it was because the town was half black, but white folks in Oxford seemed especially determined not to relinquish any part of what they thought of as “the Southern way of life.” White people who sympathized with the movement could either keep quiet or risk being seen as traitors.

  Even as a little boy, I already knew somehow that the Tysons were not always part of what white newspaper editors of the day called “the South,” as in “the South will not submit to forcible destruction of its customs and its culture.” I suppose they never stopped to consider that black people might be Southerners, too, or that people like my parents might love the South and hate segregation. But most of the time I did not think about those things and, unlike my parents, perhaps, I quickly adopted Oxford as my hometown.

  When I was a little boy in Oxford, I am told, our friend Thad Stem asked me if I knew what my father did. “He goes to meetings,” I answered. My parents repeated the remark, maybe bragging sideways that Daddy worked so hard, but perhaps with a twinge of guilt that he was not home as much as the children wanted him to be. My father tended his flock at Oxford United Methodist Church with passionate attentiveness. He learned the names of his parishioners and their children, polished his sermons into the wee hours, burned up yards of shoe leather visiting the sick and the elderly, and did attend meetings several nights a week. Daddy was always a curious mixture of personal ambition and deep spirituality, though he leaned more and more to the latter. “I want to be and do what an ideal minister would be and do,” he wrote in his diary, “the Lord being my helper.” But even though Daddy felt that the Lord had called him to sow the seeds of the Spirit in Oxford, he did not hesitate to acknowledge that it was a tough row to hoe. He told me years later that serving the church in Oxford reminded him of driving an old Model T Ford on a muddy country road; the steering column had so much play in it that turning the wheel didn’t do much good and the car just followed the ruts anyway.

  “This is not an easy church to serve,” my father confided to his diary soon after we moved there. “I have visited in the homes and preached but it has been difficult. There is little spiritual vitality in this church that I can discern. The leadership is staid and conservative.” Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls. The first time Daddy mentioned the race issue in a sermon, one of the church elders accosted him at the door. “I’m accustomed to being served barbecue after a political speech,” the man growled, refusing to shake Daddy’s hand.

  “Most of the people are reluctant about church work. No one is willing to keep the nursery,” Daddy complained to his diary. “No counselors for Methodist Youth Fellowship. I am reminded of St. Paul, who once wrote that a large door of opportunity had been opened but that there were many adversaries.”

  When Daddy did finally find a young married couple to lead the Methodist Youth Fellowship, trouble immediately ensued. The young people swept out the boarded-up former parsonage next door to the church and opened Wesley House, a meeting place and recreation center. Its pool table and old overstuffed furniture soon made it a haven for Oxford’s youthful counterculture, such as it was. “I thought all the hippies came out of New York City and San Francisco,” my father said later, “but here they were. They were our children, and they began to show up with their long hair and strumming their guitars.” And a few of them, oddly enough, had black friends. Soon Wesley House became the only voluntarily integrated social space in Granville County, a fact that pleased my father.

  “And then some of my members came in and asked me to keep the blacks out,” Daddy recalled. One man kept trying to persuade everyone that the Santa Claus figure hanging in the window, which had a red light bulb for a nose, was the drug signal—if there was dope available, he conjectured, the bulb in Santa’s nose was lighted. But the whole uproar was really about the handful of black teenagers who came into Wesley House from time to time. “I was so afraid my daughter was going to come home from there holding hands with a black boy,” one woman explained to me years later, shaking her head as though she no longer understood what she had meant back then, exactly. “Race mixing” at the church was creating a problem, a number of the men in the church told Daddy, demanding that he put a stop to it. “I told them, ‘I will just ask one thing of you,’ ” Daddy said. “ ‘Just find me a racial formula from the New Testament and we’ll follow that, if you find one.’ ” Well, that was pretty much the end of that, but his adversaries neither forgave nor forgot that he had betrayed his race.

  The power of white skin in the South of my childhood was both stark and subtle. White supremacy permeated daily life so deeply that most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water. Our racial etiquette was at once bizarre and arbitrary, seemingly natural and utterly confusing, inscribed in what W. E. B. Du Bois termed “the cake of custom.” White people regarded “Negroes”—they often pronounced the word as “nigrahs”—as inherently lazy and shiftless, but when a white man said that his employer worked him “like a nigger,” he meant that he had been engaged in dirty, backbreaking labor to the point of collapse. Nearly all jobs were either “black” or “white,” though no one said so. To say “black maid” or “black janitor” would have been entirely redundant; there were no other kinds. Black people did not work at the bank or at the stores downtown, nor anywhere where they might have direct contact with white customers. Restaurants did not hire blacks to wait tables—and white diners would not have wanted black hands to bring them their meals, although everyone knew that black hands in the kitchen had patted out the biscuit dough and fried the chicken.

  In Oxford, black people lived in several distinct neighborhoods, all of which came under the rubric of “niggertown,” as my playmates on Hancock S
treet called it. The older boys and even some of the younger ones on our street knew about that side of town because they had visited uninvited many times. On warm nights, they would pile into the back of a pickup truck and go “nigger knocking.” The teenaged boys filled the truck bed with Coca-Cola bottles and rocks, then roared through the African American neighborhoods hurling them at pedestrians, windshields, and windows. I heard secondhand tales of these vicious adventures many times from Jeff Daniels, who was my age and lived across the street from me. Neighborhood boys older than us were a regular part of these attacks. And then one Christmas, when I saw my cousins from Laurinburg at my grandmother’s house, they told me about some white high school boys near Maxton who had thrown a beer bottle out of a moving car and hit an elderly black man in the head, killing him. It seemed so awful. But I knew exactly what had happened. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t our town or our boys who had killed someone. I knew even as a little boy that it was all part of the same ordinary evil that divided us into separate and unequal worlds.

  The Orpheum Theater, where my friends and I went to the movies on Saturday mornings, was segregated, and black customers sat in “the buzzard’s roost”—the balcony upstairs. We often slipped up through the ratty seats and sticky aisles to throw popcorn over the railing onto the white children below. To transgress the color line was disreputable and therefore periodically irresistible for otherwise respectable white boys such as ourselves. White girls would have been much more carefully policed. And for blacks to challenge that line was not only criminal but mortally dangerous; when they did, white policemen—virtually all police officers were white men—punished them for breaking custom as well as law.

  The law meant little in Oxford. Many people nowadays think that after the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations, café owners and city officials read the news in the morning paper and took down all those WHITE ONLY and COLORED signs by lunchtime. But this landmark legislation did not make a dent in Oxford. The town’s leaders immediately elected to close most city parks, the municipal baseball diamond, and the public swimming pool. Rucker Pool, a fine structure built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s with tax dollars and local fieldstone, had been “public, yes,” explained Mayor Hugh Currin, “but whites only.” Rather than obey federal law, Oxford chose to sell Rucker Pool to some local white businessmen for pocket change. These men operated the pool as a whites-only “private club.” Dues were not prohibitive, but the board barred all blacks. Neither the chamber of commerce nor the local Merchants Association opened their ranks to black members. “There’s no question about it,” Mayor Currin explained years later, when I asked him about how blacks and whites got along in Oxford. “By and large the larger portion of white people looked down on black people. I don’t think there was any hostility between the races—it was just an accepted way of life.”