Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  In Wilmington, the newly minted Reverend Chavis opened a storefront Black Power church called the Church of the Black Madonna. There and at nearby Gregory Congregational Church, Chavis stoked the fires of black revolt among the young, leading protest efforts against the closing of Williston Senior High School. Founded by local blacks as Williston Industrial High School in 1919, this revered and vital black institution had once drawn students from across the South whose parents could scrape up enough money to send them. One of the four college students who launched the sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960 was a Williston graduate and, according to local legend, at least, Dr. King had been scheduled to speak in its auditorium the day after he was assassinated. In 1970, white authorities transformed proud Williston into a junior high school, its school colors, teachers, coaches, and history seemingly cast aside by integration plans that had no regard for black educational traditions. The white-dominated plan for integration in Wilmington involved building new suburban schools in white communities and shipping black students from inner-city neighborhoods out to suburbs where they were not welcome. Discrimination against black students, the closing of cherished black institutions, and the demotions and dismissals of black principals and black teachers stirred deep resentments into this recipe for disaster.

  By the time we had been in town for six months, Wilmington hovered on the edge of racial cataclysm. As in Oxford, buildings burned almost every night. The chief of police reported more than thirty cases of arson during the first week of February 1971, with property damage that week at more than half a million dollars. A white terrorist group called the Rights of White People (ROWP) roared through the city, spraying bullets; with their own armada of trucks armed with CB radios and military weapons, the ROWP could put hundreds of men on the street at any given time. One city official noted that by comparison the Ku Klux Klan was, “believe it or not, a moderating force in the community.” In fact, a 1965 U.S. Senate investigation had revealed that the New Hanover County sheriff and most of his deputies belonged to the Klan. At the height of the conflict in early 1971, black snipers fired at police officers from rooftops downtown. Six hundred frightened National Guard troops patrolled the streets. Someone bombed a restaurant three blocks from our suburban home in the middle of the night, shaking our windows. The New Hanover County schools reported thirty-two bomb threats during a single month the first year I was enrolled there. Police officers frequented the hallways of my junior high school because of the incessant violence.

  I was attending Roland-Grise Junior High when the first busloads of black students arrived for full-blown integration, fifteen years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Roland-Grise had been named in honor of H. M. Roland, the recently retired former superintendent of schools, a rabid segregationist who spent his spare time writing “scientific” tracts that purported to prove that African Americans were, as he put it, “genetically inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race.” After I left Roland-Grise, in 1972, I was among the first white students to attend Williston Ninth Grade Center. ROWP terrorists smashed up the venerable old school just before I started classes. Someone shot and killed two security guards at the school one night soon afterward. Fistfights at school were common. To go to the bathroom, especially alone, was to risk being beaten up, or worse. One boy cut another with a straight razor. Several others bashed another boy’s head with a brick. Someone shot and wounded two boys in a racial clash after a basketball game. Many students carried knives and brass knuckles. Full-scale riots erupted several times a year; we would be sitting in the cafeteria, hear a loud crash of silverware and plastic trays clattering to the floor, and the bloodhounds of race would come flying off their leashes. We grimly referred to early spring as “riot season,” as though it were a varsity sport.

  I played basketball every day on the outdoor asphalt courts behind the school. Sometimes we played shirts versus skins, with whoever had called “next up” putting together five players to take on the winners of the previous game. Other times, we played “salt and pepper,” meaning that five black players faced five white ones. Would-be militants of both races, with their Black Power Afro picks and their Confederate flag patches, respectively, loitered elsewhere, smoking cigarettes and sometimes looking for trouble. Even in “riot season,” the basketball court generally remained congenial. But a hard foul or a hard word could start a scuffle, which would quickly become racial and sometimes turn into a big brawl. These outbreaks placed me in a difficult position. In a riot, it was always “salt and pepper,” and you either ran or fought; nobody stopped to check your political credentials.

  Neither running nor fighting were special talents of mine, however, and sometimes I tried to talk to the black boys who proposed to beat me up. This worked a great deal better if it occurred to them that they might not be able to beat me up without getting hurt. False bravado and “talking trash” as if the whole thing were a joke sometimes worked. One day at the close of sixth-period physical education class, a muscular black boy named Franklin Steele backed me up against the fence in a distant corner of the athletic field and began patting my pants pockets for loose change. He heard my dimes and quarters. “Gimme the money, boy, else I’m gon’ have to kick your ass,” Steele said. I pushed him away hard. “You know I can kick your ass,” he said, cocking his fist. “Give it up.”

  He may have had a good solid point. I was still a pasty little boy, stocky but short for my age, and Franklin seemed more like a grown man who unloaded trucks all day. I had seen him bloody another boy’s face in a fistfight, and even that boy could have clobbered me. I felt as outmatched as the Polish cavalry during the Nazi blitzkrieg. But I did not want to back down. “That’s right, Franklin,” I replied, “you can kick my ass. But I am going to hurt you more than fifty cents’ worth. I am going to hurt you bad.”

  Franklin looked at me with disbelief and delivered a speech about the full range and vast extent to which he would kick my ass, including a variety of gesticulations and false starts. But I had seen the doubt flicker in his eyes, and I pressed my hopes. “Come on, then, Franklin,” I told him. “Let’s just get it over with. You come over here and kick my ass. But remember one thing: I am going to hurt you.” I was even starting to believe it myself. And then I looked down and saw a Coca-Cola bottle against the fence behind my foot. And suddenly it occurred to me what Franklin wanted. He wanted to slip off campus through the trees behind the fence and buy a cold drink.

  What occurred to Franklin, however, was that I was about to pick up that drink bottle and bash him upside the head with it. Realizing that, I ran with the concept. I picked up the bottle quickly and held it by the neck like a hammer. For all I know, Franklin figured he could take it from me and kill me with it if he wanted, but his face read as clearly as a billboard: “This white boy is crazy.” My dimes and quarters were getting too expensive. And when I sensed that, I saw my way to rescuing both my neck and my would-be manhood.

  “Let’s just forget about it, Franklin,” I said, lowering the bottle. “We got nothing to fight about.” I saw his edge fading and his fists falling. He still had not quite figured out how to leave. I said, “Hey, Franklin, let’s just forget about this shit and go get a drink.” We both knew the way. We slipped off campus as though we were old friends and went to the vending machine, where I emptied my pockets and bought both of us a Nehi grape soda. On my way back to classes, just after Franklin and I slapped five and parted company, the gym teacher and the principal suspended me from school for three days for leaving campus without permission. I considered the whole episode a complete triumph, and spent three days reading on the couch, too. Daddy came home each day and took me out to lunch at the Neptune, our favorite spot at Wrightsville Beach, for clam chowder and cheeseburgers. I never even told him that I had left campus in order to defuse a bloody fracas.

  Having a friendly acquaintance with a number of black kids, a good jump shot, and a reputation as a decent white guy provided me some protection at school. But of
ten it was just a matter of luck. One morning between classes, I was getting something out of my locker, my head inside the metal door, paying no attention, when the floor began to rumble. Dozens of African American boys had massed at one end of the hallway and charged up the corridor, striking out at every white face that they saw. Before I collected my wits, someone ran into the locker door full tilt, slamming the door on my head. When I pulled myself out of the locker, a black boy swung a padlock on a string and hit me in the back of the head, splitting the flesh. The lights went out, and when I came to and touched my hand to the swelling knot on the back of my head, my fingers were bloody. I walked home and did not even mention it to my parents; I threw away the shirt I had been wearing to avoid having to explain the bloodstains.

  My experiences of race, at that point, were so complicated that my early-teenaged self found the subject hard to discuss, even with my father. Liberal pieties offered little help. In the 1970s, my father had little direct connection to the black struggle but, to his children, at least, he continued to talk about race problems in a “civil rights” paradigm, as though all that we had to do was pretend that black people were white and accept everyone as God’s children. In retrospect, I am sure that he did not believe it was that simple; he just didn’t want us to become haters. But Daddy’s approach of meeting anger with love did not help much at school.

  Though awkward friendships did sometimes occur, most of the African American kids I knew at school wanted no political solidarity from a white boy. My white friends and I lived in a kind of prison-movie terror in the hallways. Few days passed without some black boy who seemed much tougher than me trying to separate me from my lunch money or my dignity. It appeared to me that the black boys instigated most of the violence at school. It seemed equally clear that school authorities punished them more severely than they did white boys. Of course, even then I realized that we were in the middle of a social revolution gone sour. And I also knew that the ROWP and the Klan had their youthful counterparts throughout the student body. The ordinary conflicts that occur in every schoolyard in the world would suddenly explode into dangerous brawls when some idiot muttered a racial epithet. Black kids perceived the suburban Roland-Grise Junior High as white turf where they were unwelcome guests and Williston Ninth Grade Center as black territory now occupied by invading white power. “We’re in their school,” a black student at a suburban high school explained to a newspaper reporter in 1971. “They don’t like it because it’s their school and we had to join it. But our school was taken away from us.”

  With respect to the racial crisis, the mostly white teachers and administrators were a mixed bag. Many of them were dedicated, noble, tired human beings confronting tough problems the best way they knew how. Others revealed plainly enough their nostalgia for the segregated all-white schools where they had worked until recently and that now seemed paradise lost. And still other adults in my life defended their outraged sense of white privilege. One of my junior high school football coaches showed me the sawed-off, weighted baseball bat he kept in his car. “This is my nigger knocker,” he bragged. Some grown-ups encouraged white boys to antagonize their African American classmates. My shop teacher took me aside and urged me to beat up Robert Hardy, a troublesome, loudmouthed black boy about half my size who was giving him headaches. “You’re not afraid of Robert Hardy, are you, boy?” he taunted me. Small wonder that racial tension and open violence in the hallways nearly brought public education to a halt in Wilmington the year after we moved there.

  This local inferno was only a microcosm of the racial crisis at the height of the Black Power movement. In North Carolina and across the country, it was an agonizing time for white liberals, but my father tried hard to ease the violence and nurture interracial community. In matters of race and many other questions, he always taught us to walk a mile in the other fellow’s shoes before we passed judgment. Like many white liberals, of course, Daddy was still mired up to his ankles in racial paternalism. But unlike some white liberals, my father had guts enough to speak and brains enough to listen. And that is why he went to see Ben Chavis at the Church of the Black Madonna.

  Daddy regarded Chavis’s mother highly, knew the twenty-three-year-old reverend reasonably well, and often had recommended Chavis to white officials as someone they could trust. But the news coverage of the racial situation in Wilmington made Daddy wonder if Chavis had learned the wrong lessons in Oxford. As it had so often across the nation in the civil rights era, the question boiled down to the role of violence. In Oxford, Chavis may have used the black violence against white property to gain political leverage, but he had not been a man of violence himself. In Wilmington, however, many suspected that Chavis was encouraging a campaign of street violence to strengthen his political hand or, as young radicals used to say, to heighten the contradictions.

  Daddy was not willing to rely on hearsay. He went to the Church of the Black Madonna to see for himself whether it was possible to build a bridge across the color line, even at this violent and chaotic moment. He had to walk through a war zone; both the Rights of White People militia and the Church of the Black Madonna had their headquarters downtown on Castle Street. Sniper fire had recently killed a white man who’d tried to approach one of the movement’s churches. We knew at least a dozen white people whose windshields had been shattered by a brick or a bottle as they’d driven through downtown Wilmington. Although Daddy almost never wore his clerical collar, he put in on that day—he wanted everybody to know he was a preacher, not a combatant—and headed downtown. Parking about two hundred yards from the storefront church, Daddy walked down the middle line of the deserted street with his hands in plain view.

  When he got to the Church of the Black Madonna, about a dozen young black men blocked his pathway. No white people were allowed inside, they told him. Daddy slowly reached into his shirt pocket with two fingers and slid out his business card. “Just tell Reverend Chavis that Vernon Tyson wants to see him,” he told the guards, handing one of them the card. And there he stood, a middle-aged white preacher among young black revolutionaries in their berets and dashikis, wondering what kind of damn fool would even be here.

  Ben Chavis, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar with his stylish Afro, appeared in a few minutes, shook Daddy’s hand warmly, and led him inside, past the tables piled with Maoist and black nationalist literature, into the sanctuary where sixty or seventy people were sitting. The walls were bedecked with children’s artwork and political posters. He served Daddy grape Kool-Aid and a sugar cookie and apologized for the guards. “How are you doing, Reverend Tyson?” he asked. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I hadn’t seen you since Oxford,” Daddy replied, “and I just wanted to have a little talk.” Chavis indicated that he did not have much time but would be happy to hear anything my father had to say. “If all I believed about you was what I read in the newspapers,” Daddy told him, “I would think you were crazy. But I know you, and I know you are made of good stuff. I know you are a person of good judgment and leadership ability, and I am certain you have good reasons for doing what you’re doing.” They looked at each other uneasily, sipping their Kool-Aid from Dixie cups. “I have come so that if you’ll tell me what you’re doing and why you are doing it,” Daddy continued, “I will help interpret you to the white community. We have got to make it possible for white people, at least the ones who will listen, to hear what you have to say. All they’re hearing now is the language of war, coming from both sides. I don’t see that any good can come of it.”

  He’d gone to talk to Chavis, Daddy explained to me later, because there was hardly anyone else except the two of them who could build a bridge—and even their success was uncertain. “Most of the white people in Wilmington couldn’t cross the color line and get anything done,” he said. “The Uncle Toms couldn’t do it, because even if the white people heard what they had to say, the black community was not going to follow them. If peacemakers and community builders wer
e going to emerge, it would have to be people like us. It might not have helped much, but we had to try.” My father had feared back in 1962 that it was too late for those whom Dr. King called “people of goodwill” to come together for racial justice; unfortunately, most of those people took almost another decade to begin to grasp the problem.

  The delay was not because of a shortage of goodwill, exactly, but rather a gross imbalance of power. What needed to happen was for millions of Americans to find the political will and the material resources to help address slavery’s lasting legacy. What my father may not have understood at the time was that this could not happen without some measure of coercion. Unless the people who believed in racial justice could summon the resources to force change, the hour would remain too late. If we had insisted on waiting for popular consensus, it would have been too late ever since the first slave ship arrived at Jamestown in 1619. And if we could not remember how to form the interracial political coalitions necessary to the process, then it had been too late in North Carolina for at least the seventy years that had passed since the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, of which Daddy knew nothing at the time.

  We are all the captives of our origins, especially when we do not fully know and understand them. The conversation between my father and Ben Chavis at the Church of the Black Madonna drew its paradoxes and predicaments from deep in the American story. That American story does not begin with the blood of patriots at Lexington and Concord, though unlike my father, Chavis was descended from Revolutionary War soldiers. The American story did not start when Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men have certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, words perhaps penned by the light of a lamp fetched by his slave mistress or one of his slave children, human beings to whom he held a deed of ownership. The origins of the American story are much deeper, as deep as the dark Atlantic, where the bones of somewhere around ten million Africans settled into the sand, thrown overboard by the slave ships that plied those waters in the early days of the republic.