Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  Those who tell us that nothing has changed have simply forgotten, if they ever knew, how bad things were for black people in this country only a few decades ago. From the day the first Africans accompanied European explorers into the Carolinas in the mid-1500s until sometime after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—for the first four hundred years of the African American experience— almost every white vision of the commonwealth excluded African Americans, even though they were inseparable from its destiny.

  Black Southerners forcibly altered that narrative in the 1950s and 1960s by stepping outside their assigned roles—and compelling a reluctant federal government to intercede on their behalf. As often as not, they had to be prepared to defend themselves physically from terrorism by white reactionaries. White liberals, with their hesitancy and quibbling, were sometimes very little help. In North Carolina, white liberal paternalists did not stand in the schoolhouse door as George Wallace had in Alabama. Instead, journalist Osha Gray Davidson observes, they “would quietly appoint a committee to deliberate for eternity over exactly which door, and of what dimensions, would best facilitate the ingress and egress of all students. The style of a Wallace was different, but the result was the same.” And so sometimes it was necessary to escape from an endless and pointless conversation with white paternalism by striking hard and sometimes violently against the architecture of their oppression—Oxford’s tobacco warehouses being only the local example.

  The struggle was far more violent, perilous, and critical than America is willing to remember. Those who tell themselves that white people of goodwill voluntarily handed over first-class citizenship to their fellow citizens of color find comfort in selective memory and wishful thinking. And those who believe that the federal government rode over the hill like the cavalry and rescued the poor black folks from white “rednecks” have forgotten or never knew what happened in the civil rights–era South. On the way to learning some truths, if not the truth, about these histories of all our hometowns, I managed to reexamine some of my own precious but partial narratives about race, politics, freedom, and morality.

  The freedom movement in Oxford did not end with the trial of Robert and Larry Teel. The acquittals shocked most black people in Oxford—even those who said they’d expected nothing different— and shamed many white people; the street battles and warehouse fires terrified even the shameless. But though it may have taken violence or the credible threat of violence to budge the racial caste system, it also required a coordinated, economically targeted, community-wide effort from the black community. Before the embers of arson had cooled, the newly founded Granville County Steering Committee for Black Progress met at the First Baptist Church and planned an economic boycott. “The economy of Oxford depended on black consumerism,” Ben Chavis said later, “and we decided we were not going to spend our money with businesses that were supporting injustice.” With African Americans making up more than 40 percent of the population, Oxford’s white-owned businesses could not afford to have the black community unified against them. The acquittal of Henry Marrow’s accused killers, terrible as it was, brought a new degree of unity to the black community, and Oxford business leaders were forced to take note.

  Presenting himself as the voice of that consensus, Chavis went before the all-white chamber of commerce and explained the threatened boycott: the problem went beyond just the killing, beyond even the lack of justice in court, he said. Whites still excluded blacks from jobs at the stores downtown. Banks refused to hire blacks except as janitors and were reluctant to give them loans for anything except automobiles. The movie theater remained segregated. Blacks were welcome downtown only as retail customers or night-shift janitors. Some of the people in this very room had donated money to defend Robert Teel, Chavis reminded the white men, even though their establishments depended upon black patrons. A black boycott, he warned, could bring the town’s economy to its knees. Though Chavis apparently was not himself a man of violence, he was not above using the fear of violence as a negotiating tool, and he hinted to the white businessmen that he could not be responsible for what might happen if they failed to respond. “They said they thought something could be worked out,” Chavis recalled, “but nothing was worked out, so we boycotted. The next week, Oxford looked literally like a ghost town.”

  As whites had rallied along caste lines after the murder, some wearing sheets, some writing checks, now blacks, too, seized the moment for solidarity. “Black people stuck together here,” recalled Linda Ball, one of the energetic organizers. “At least for that particular time. The murder and them letting the murderers go brought us together.” Black women were at the center of the boycott, partly because they did most of the shopping. “The women always be the first to come out anyway,” Ball explained. “The First Baptist Church would be filled with women.” The Steering Committee organized picketing at the department stores and the grocery stores. Women handed out flyers explaining the boycott to prospective shoppers. The committee arranged for a small fleet of private automobiles and volunteer drivers to take black shoppers to nearby towns. “How we had it networked,” said Eddie McCoy, “is we were carrying people to Henderson. People would call us and we’d take you to Henderson to buy your food, to buy your clothes.”

  In the early days, right after the murder and the acquittals, the anger in the black community made it easy to sustain the boycott. But when outrage began to fade toward apathy, the black women running the boycott were not above intimidation, either. Along with their signs and leaflets, they carried cameras. “We would take your picture when you’d come out the store,” one of them told me. “That way we would check and see who was going into the stores.” Someone might contact these people by telephone and explain the purposes of the boycott or make veiled threats; more often, the cameras furnished coercion enough. At the grocery stores, young black men and women would occasionally knock groceries out of black customers’ hands in the parking lots. This may seem appalling to those who grew up with the story of Rosa Parks and her tired feet, but the same story could be told from Montgomery to Memphis, from the earliest years of the movement; there were always black people too fearful, too attached to “their” white folks, too pessimistic or too beaten down by white supremacy to stand up for themselves. And black activists dealt with their dissenters emphatically, because freedom itself was on the line. “We’d bust a bag of sugar, break a couple of jars of jelly,” McCoy recounted. “Didn’t nobody try to hurt nobody. They just needed to know we weren’t playing that shit. Black people had to work together.”

  The picketing persisted into autumn. When virtually no blacks attended the county fair that fall, the white men of the chamber of commerce decided it was time to negotiate. The merchants agreed to hire blacks in retail positions. The movie theater quietly desegregated. The town’s one black police officer got a promotion, and the police department moved toward hiring others. The public schools underwent full-blown integration that autumn, though many white parents pulled their children out of the public schools and enrolled them at vance-Granville Academy, a “Christian” school that did not admit black children. And in an act that revealed the immensity of the shift in relative political power, the city of Oxford eventually moved the Confederate monument out of the main intersection in front of the courthouse and tucked it away among the cedars and magnolias behind the public library.

  In a real sense, the local black freedom movement had won. But it had taken the physical threat of “Black Power” to make the moral argument of civil rights mean anything on a local level. It had taken widespread violence to bring about an uneasy racial truce, let alone “voluntary” acceptance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under the terms of that truce, the courts in Granville County became much less a mechanism of white domination, though thirty years later African Americans still regard the judicial system with great suspicion. Nevertheless, most who remember the past with any clarity
concede that in some respects it is truly a new day. Eddie McCoy, once a dedicated Black Power revolutionary, eventually became the first African American elected to the Granville County commission, in small part because of a significant number of white allies; this was not the usual legacy of Black Power, of course, but owed much to McCoy’s remarkable combination of street credibility among blacks and easygoing business reputation among whites. As in many other towns, in Oxford it took a murderous and avoidable tragedy, and some luck, to summon the political will to change things a little.

  The social changes wrought by the black freedom movement came about by a complex mixture of violence and nonviolence, economic coercion and moral appeal. “A lot of what we did was wrong,” McCoy told a class of college students thirty years later, “but it worked. What one of those fellows that burned the warehouses might say to you if he was here is ‘I know it was not my property, but you wouldn’t hear me, and it did make a difference.’ ” That those hard-won and morally ambiguous victories generated a great deal of fear and resentment should surprise no one. “The black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar,” James Baldwin explains, “and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” And so one of the major by-products of the freedom struggle, in Oxford and across the country, was a white political backlash of sustained ferocity.

  In the end, that white backlash pushed my family to leave Oxford. The summer I turned eleven, that perilous summer of blood and fire, my father accepted a position at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, and we moved away. I hated to leave, and I had no idea of the logic behind my father’s decision to take a job far away. And so I clung to my old hometown. For several weeks that summer, and many weeks in a dozen summers to come, I worked and played on a farm in Granville County owned by Ben and Joy Averett, members of our church and the parents of my friend Ed.

  Ben was a brawny, forthright man whom I liked to call “Pharoah,” because he kept me and Ed busy picking up rocks, weeding the garden, and carrying wood for the fires. Ben worked us hard, but he also showed us how to ride horses, shoot guns, catch fish, and think for ourselves. Though he had a gruff manner and a quick temper, he was also gentle and kind, quick to forgive, and defied all stereotypes. Ben kept rifles, shotguns, and pistols of all descriptions, drove a pickup truck, and liked country music. He made the best barbecued chicken the South has ever seen. Possibility was his playground. “Anything that you ever want to do, there is a book about it at the library,” Ben liked to say. And his life bore testimony to his philosophy: he could build houses, do plumbing and electrical work, grow peaches, lay tile, and dance like nobody’s business. Growing up, I considered Ben a model for what a man ought to be and do, and I was not far wrong. One day Ben decided that writing a sonnet couldn’t be any harder than building a house, checked out a bunch of books about sonnets, and wrote a masterful sonnet—about building a house.

  Ben’s wife, Joy Burwell Averett, was a lovely and gracious woman with fair skin and beautiful red hair who taught English at Webb High School. I loved her from the moment I met her, when I was seven. Her language sashayed with a musical lilt, and she was one of the kindest people I have ever known. When Ed and I were mere tots, she would assign us to write poems and then tell us how good they were; the purpose of literature, it became clear to me, was to please Joy Averett. And I will always remember a moment when I was eleven or twelve and she walked into the kitchen, singing a playful little song and laughing. Suddenly I realized that she was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on, an angel walking the earth. She asked me what was wrong, and I could only stammer with the little air available to me. Though puberty came and went, Joy would always be my sweetheart and my first real teacher. I am sorry that she did not live to see me write books, since that would have delighted her so much.

  The farm where the Averetts lived was less than a mile from the spot where Henry Marrow died. My friendship with them has endured for the rest of our lives. But what also stayed with me is the story of Henry Marrow’s murder. When the adults would send us boys to the store for cold drinks, I would carry the sweating bottles of Coca-Cola through the dust where Marrow died. Every time I went to that store, which the Teel family no longer owned, I waded through Henry Marrow’s blood. And once again I would hear Gerald Teel’s words in my head: “Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger. ”

  During those summers I also began to learn more about why my family had left town. At first, it was just the occasional passing remark from other children. “Your daddy got run out of town,” a seventh grader taunted me at the swimming pool. “Why’d y’all have to move?” a little girl asked me from her family’s backyard trampoline, and it was clear from her tone that her parents must have already told her the answer and that she expected me to be ashamed. As I became a teenager, grown-ups in Oxford assumed that I knew that my daddy had been “run off” by church members alienated by the memorial service for Dr. King, the black preachers invited to share his pulpit, and the “race mixing” among the young people at Wesley House.

  Ben Averett, whom I regarded as an unwavering rock and something of an oracle, served on the pastor-parish relations committee at Oxford United Methodist Church during my father’s tenure there. When I was in my late teens, Ben informed me that several committee members had made it plain that they were tired of Daddy’s liberal politics. “They started getting ready to vote to not ask your daddy to come back the next year,” Ben told me. “And I told them they could go ahead and do it if they wanted to, but if they did I was never going to set foot in that church again.” More than twenty years passed before Ben set foot in Oxford United Methodist Church again, and then it was only for Joy’s funeral, at her request.

  Years later, when I returned to Oxford to research this book, Mary Catherine Chavis squeezed my hand warmly and said, “Your father was too good for this town.” Plainly out of respect for his sacrifices, though she is a generous soul anyway, Mrs. Chavis got on the telephone right away and lined up several interviews for me. I could overhear what she would tell her listeners: “He’s the son of Reverend Tyson,” she would say. “You remember, the white preacher that they run off after Teel killed Dickie.”

  This was not exactly how Daddy told the story. When I came home from talking to Ben, I asked him to tell me what had happened at the church. Daddy just shrugged and said it had been time to leave Oxford, and Wesley Memorial was a stronger church anyway. By his lights, Daddy told me, he had done all he could in Granville County, and it was time to move on. If he’d wanted to stay, Daddy said, he could have stayed. My father had no taste for losing, and in his story he had not lost. “Maybe some of those old boys were glad I left,” he said. “You know they were. And maybe some of them were trying to make me leave, and maybe they did some crowing after I was gone. You know, the rooster crows and the sun comes up, and the old rooster thinks he has done it. But the Lord sees it a little bit differently.”

  Over the years I came to see his account as a cheerful, bighearted liberal story that he clearly believed was true. That was just Daddy’s way. But I never shared his equanimity, nor did I feel much Christian forgiveness toward those who had scorned his expansive vision of God and humanity, and pushed our family into a harder history. That summer, as my hometown burned and my family moved away under a cloud, a curtain fell between that eleven-year-old boy and the adult world, a world that began to seem incorrigibly dishonest and cruel. As I grew into my late teens, I learned more about the circumstances of our departure, and my heart began to harden against the stupidity and hatred that had sent us away.

  When our family moved from Oxford to Wilmington, I had just turned eleven. We piled into my mother’s wood-paneled station wagon and drove through tobacco fields to Benson, a farming community in Johnston County where Mule Day every fall rivals Christmas. From Benson we rolled through more tobacco land to Spivey’s Corner and
stopped at the Green Top Grill for a barbecue sandwich and a bowl of banana pudding. In the booth, Daddy amused us with tales of the annual Spivey’s Corner Hollering Contest, which celebrated the dying art of hailing neighbors from half a mile away. From there, we turned down through the long, lonesome stretches of piney woods to Wilmington. The last fifty miles of low-lying coastal plain were almost desolate in those days, and my mother cried quietly in the front seat. “I felt like I was going to Siberia,” she said in later years.

  For us children, it was exciting to cross the bridge over the river and drive into Wilmington, a coastal city near the mouth of Cape Fear, whose river district of cobblestoned streets and rotting mansions evoked the Old South. Almost tropical, Wilmington seemed unimaginably distant from the tobacco-farming country where we had always lived. It had been the most important Southern port during the Civil War, and statues of Confederate generals loomed on street corners along the riverbank. From the old hulk of the battle-ship North Carolina, permanently anchored as a museum in the Cape Fear River, we saw alligators in the dirty water. The scrub-oak woods where we played were quick with red-winged blackbirds. In the pines we peered at trumpet plants and venus flytraps. The streets in our new neighborhood seemed all but paved with dead frogs, squashed by passing cars. Ruby-throated lizards darted all over our patio. Dangling Spanish moss, flowering oleanders and azaleas, and gracious antebellum architecture hinted at an unspoken history that still exerted a controlling influence on both sides of the color line.

  Distant and exotic though Wilmington was, the troubles in Oxford seemed to follow us all the way there. Ben Chavis, who had articulated the anger and aspirations of young black people in Granville County, became a field organizer for the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, which promptly dispatched him to Wilmington. Chavis, having become a leader in his early twenties, confronted a predicament for which no one his age could have been prepared. Controversy over school integration plans and the bloody legacy of an unacknowledged local history made Wilmington a racial tinderbox. Reverend Leon White, director of the Franklinton Center at Bricks—where Judson King had worked back in the 1950s, when he’d met my uncle Earl in the courtroom—took young Chavis as a protégé and soon ordained the talented young firebrand as a minister. But, as my father remarked years later, “Ben really put on that collar before he knew what to do with it.”