Blood Done Sign My Name Page 32

  The ghosts of 1898 walked among us in the 1970s, and the fact that so few of us knew the past did not loosen its compelling hold on the present. Late one afternoon my junior high school friends and I were playing baseball in Hugh McCrae Park, named for one of the leaders of the massacre. As the day dimmed toward evening, my comrades and I huddled in a dugout to smoke cigarettes and discuss the mysteries of sex. As we chattered in the dark, we began to hear car engines racing and car doors slamming. At first we thought that it was just the first stirrings of a Little League baseball game. But when we looked out, hundreds of white men and a few women had gathered on the baseball diamond, many brandishing rifles and shotguns and waving American and Confederate flags. Several held up a banner that proclaimed the name of the organization: THE RIGHTS OF WHITE PEOPLE. Suddenly I realized that these were the people who had fired their guns in the air near my junior high school. These must be the people who’d threatened to lynch the school superintendent, Heyward Bellamy, whom my mother considered a hero. For the ROWP, the memory of 1898 was not chilling but bracing. Their paramilitary leader, Leroy Gibson, walked up to a makeshift microphone and began bellowing about how the “niggers” and “nigger lovers” had all the rights and white working people had none. “The niggers keep talking about how Waddell said in 1898 they were gonna clog up the river with carcasses,” he jeered. “I don’t know if they did or not. But if this integration and rioting business doesn’t stop, we’re going to clog that river with dead niggers this time, and I mean it.”

  The lies that instantly seemed so transparent to me in that dugout were part of the craziness that sent me into a long tailspin as those Wilmington years wore on. Everywhere I turned, a new falsehood seemed to stare me in the face. I loved to read and write, but I hated school, and started skipping classes frequently. The authorities at school carried no meaningful authority for me. From the news reports on television, it became clear that President Nixon was a crook, despite his assurances to the contrary; the men who spoke for him on television spewed phrases that would have fit into the mouth of a Mafia lawyer. Racism stained the nation. Hypocrisy infested the church. Anyone who set out to challenge the corruption of the system seemed to get assassinated. And it appeared clear to me—partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks—that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.

  At fourteen, I began partying heavily on weekends, trying to numb my misfit’s agonies. The inevitable adolescent distance between my father and me became a yawning chasm. From a distance, he blurred into the backdrop of the world that had caused all this mess. In those years, fathers and sons across the country fought bitterly about the war in Vietnam, the chaos in the streets, the length of people’s hair, and the icons of music, religion, and popular culture. Daddy and I never hated each other. But we did lose touch. By the time I was sixteen, I had abandoned school and soon left home, careening into a counterculture that promised a gentler world but failed to deliver it.

  One snapshot from the period helps explain what happened between my father and me. When I was about sixteen, I began wearing bib overalls every single day, no matter where I was going, including church. I’d latched onto bib overalls by way of the sixties counterculture, but I knew the etymology of the uniform; that is, I knew that I was wearing bib overalls in imitation of Abbie Hoffman, the jester of the New Left, who was wearing them in homage to Bob Moses and the organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced “Snick,” who had adopted bib overalls from the black sharecroppers they were trying to organize in Mississippi. It never occurred to me that my father, himself a sharecropper’s son, had worn these every day of his early life.

  One day Daddy walked into our suburban house and saw his son wearing those overalls again. He shook his head in bemused contempt, muttering, “I worked for twenty-five years so I would never have to wear those damn things again.” I tried to explain, but of course in my boundless sixteen-year-old understanding of the world, I was far too enlightened to communicate with someone who probably didn’t know about Bob Moses or Abbie Hoffman or SNCC. I can’t remember what I said to him, but it must have been insufferable. I liked my father immensely but regarded him as another benighted member of a hopeless generation, those ineffectual and naive people whose liberal optimism blinded them to the perniciousness of “the System.” Hadn’t “the System” killed both the Kennedys and Dr. King? Hadn’t “the System” lied about Vietnam and slaughtered a couple of million Vietnamese rice farmers and sixty thousand American boys for nothing? Hadn’t Watergate demonstrated that “the System” was hopelessly corrupt? Somehow my father managed to retain not only some of his patience but all of his sense of humor, and eventually we developed a running joke about the difference between “Snick” overalls and “hick” overalls.

  My hippie friends and I tried to escape the South and ended up finding it. Rob Shaffer and Stacy Weaver, fledgling radicals and aspiring writers whom I met in high school, shared my belief that America’s promise had foundered on the rocks of race and Vietnam. Though they were two years older than me, we all shared books, music, basketball, and a utopian vision of eluding this terrible history and making a brand-new world. Together we braved suburban conformity and suffered the persistent efforts of our high school’s principal to censor our school newspaper and, even worse, force us to attend classes like everyone else. Though we were children of the suburbs, we cast ourselves as lonely dissenters who defied a hard-hearted world, easing our anguish by founding a happy tribe. This worked fairly well for me until Rob and Stacy left for college.

  A year later, though, when I was almost seventeen, the three of us made a pact to drop out of our respective schools and move to a remote corner of northeastern North Carolina, where we lived in an old two-story tenant farmhouse not unlike the ones where my father had grown up. Rob and Stacy packed up their dorm rooms at Duke and UNC and rolled down the road feeling good, arriving some months before me. I crawled out the window of my parents’ suburban home in the dead of night with what I liked to think of as all of my worldly possessions—Tom Sawyer pretending to be Huck Finn— in a duffel bag and lit out for Flat Branch, North Carolina, where they had rented this broke-down palace surrounded on three sides by enormous cornfields and backed up by the Great Dismal Swamp. I left my parents a note explaining that school and suburbia were driving me crazy (a short trip, I might have noted) and that I loved them very much but there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, it becomes necessary to dissolve the political bands, which—I have a dream! Remember the Alamo! Don’t trust anyone over thirty! And so on.

  Daddy found me near the bus stop in Ahoskie, where I was just starting to walk the remaining twenty-seven miles to Flat Branch. In the front seat beside him was Roscoe Wainwright, an elderly homeless man who was his closest companion in those days. My grandfather Jack Tyson had performed Roscoe’s wedding some decades earlier. Roscoe had left eastern North Carolina to serve in the army in France during World War I. When he returned from France, Mr. Wainwright developed quite an enthusiasm for some of our less expensive American wines. When the weather was good, Roscoe slept in the bushes at our church; on cold nights, he frequented a crawl space near the boiler room. Roscoe lived on a monthly check from the veterans Administration. After Daddy discovered that the other street people would often rob Mr. Wainwright after he cashed his check, he arranged to have the check sent to the church office, and Daddy would give him five dollars a day. “It was the perfect example of a well-intended liberal social program gone awry,” my father chuckled years later. “He used to get drunk once a month, and then get robbed and have a hard time finding a drink the rest of the month. After I saved him from the muggers with my five-dollars-a-day program, he got drunk every single day the rest of his life.” Sometimes, in those days, I would come home and find Mr. Wainwright in the other twin bed
in my room, sleeping off one of his benders after Daddy had brought him home, fed him, and given him a bath.

  My parents, of course, were mortified when they discovered that I had run away from home. But something told them that things would only get worse if they tried to make me stay home. And they also thought that a couple of years of paying my bills by the sweat of my brow would not hurt me too much. Mama and Daddy talked it over and decided to let me follow my own lights, once they knew that I was safe, so Daddy and Roscoe set out that morning to find me. Roscoe perched in the front seat of my father’s car, the Bible between them, and he’d pull out the pint of Wild Irish Rose and take a drink every few miles. When night had fallen and still no one knew my whereabouts, Daddy became truly worried and began to wonder out loud where on earth his idiot son could be at this hour of the night. “Carload of niggers probably picked him up and dragged him up in the woods and knocked him in the head,” Roscoe speculated as they sat near the roadside bus stop in Ahoskie.

  “Shut up, Roscoe,” Daddy said. “Just shut up.”

  My father’s deep voice startled me as I plodded down the darkened roadside. But when I saw his face in the car window, he was beaming at me. “Hey, Little Buck,” he said. “Let’s go to Flat Branch.” I climbed into the back seat, scarcely able to comprehend what he had just said. But it became faintly imaginable when I saw that he had brought a gallon bucket of peanut butter, several dozen pairs of outlet socks, an ancient black-and-white television set someone had given him, and an old black leather Bible. We rolled down the two-lane blacktop through the swamp, turned onto unpaved Flat Branch Road, and then rumbled up the long driveway to the falling-down farmhouse where my long-haired friends waited excitedly, having already talked to Daddy and Roscoe earlier in the day. Standing between the cornfields, my father and I wrapped our arms around each other and held on tight for a long time. He laid his thick hand on my head and thanked God for giving him this fine son—one is not under oath when delivering such prayers—and asked Him to stand by me in the days and years to come. Then he pressed into my hands the Bible that Jack Tyson had given him on the day he’d left home, and drove away.

  Like many people in the mid-1970s, my young friends and I were trying to escape from history. We loved Dr. King and the black-and-white film footage we’d seen of the movement in the streets of the civil rights–era South. We loved the idealism of the young people who’d gone to Mississippi and died, some of them, to change America. But that was not our generation. The dreams of the civil rights movement and the New Left that inspired us, even though we’d been too young to go to Selma or Chicago, had soured into agonies of assassination, defeat, and delusion. Taught to believe in leaders, we came to believe that anybody with a fighting chance to alter the reactionary trajectory of American political history ended up assassinated. Trained to revere democracy, we saw the American presidency disintegrate on television in an electronic haze of lies.

  With our vast teenaged overview of world history, we children of the middle class saw that American society was insane and, in fact, doomed, and we became profoundly “alienated,” as people used to say. The answer was simply to quit, let the world go by, and make our contribution through moral example (translate: growing tomatoes with manure instead of chemical fertilizer) and artistic statement (translate: scribbling in my journals for two or three hours a day, singing folk songs, and composing love letters to a revolving array of angels of the female persuasion). One day, I thought, the world would find my box of scribbling and regret that it had failed to heed my blistering social critiques or relish my poetic meanderings. The fact that all this seemed gravely political to me at the time reflects both the charmed innocence of the young and the confused legacy of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance” that “to be great is to be misunderstood,” and I suppose that we were tempted back then to take the inverse to be equally true. We called ourselves a “commune,” though that seems a little pretentious now, given that there were only three of us and we could not have been less deliberate. Our hairy tribe founded a new world that demanded a great deal from us in some ways and virtually nothing from us in others. We planted a large garden and grew much of our own food. The crumbling tin woodstoves that heated the house consumed enormous quantities of wood, which we cut and hauled without chain saws or even a wheelbarrow. To take a shower, we pumped water from the well by hand, heated it on the stove, and poured it over each other’s heads from the front porch with a five-gallon watering can. Even in the South, this gets rather bracing in February. In my journal that spring, I copied from the Dhammapada: “Let us live happily then, though we call nothing our own. We shall be like the bright gods, feeding on happiness.” And, though I made no note of it at the time, feeding also on the chocolate-chip cookies and fresh-baked bread my mother shipped to us. Thoreau would have understood.

  If our material circumstances demanded great exertion, our countercultural lifestyle was morally less strenuous. Entirely persuaded of our own rectitude, we reveled in our superiority to “the South” all around us. In our minds, “the South” was white, and therefore hypocritical, uptight, and censorious. Black people, by contrast, were noble, soulful, and fun. It never occurred to us that black people could be Southerners or respectable or that Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard were only working different sides of the same street. And it was years later before any of us knew much of anything about our political ancestors—dissenting white Southerners from whose mistakes and achievements we could have learned. Instead, we drew our haphazard, well-meaning politics from thin air and the anger of betrayed children. We wore bib overalls in the style of the SNCC organizers who had lived in the rural South fifteen years earlier, but we knew little of their politics except to assume that they were, like ourselves, firmly on the side of the angels. Up and down Flat Branch Road, the black, rural poor lived in squalor; I remember the falling-down tenant houses, all but unheated, and the outhouses slumped behind them. The house where we sometimes bought moonshine liquor from a woman with ten children had fallen open to the weather at one corner and had collapsed at another. None of the black families on Flat Branch Road enjoyed running water or indoor plumbing; for the runaway children of the suburbs, poverty could seem romantic. But we did little to alleviate the abject deprivation all around us and rarely even contemplated it. It was enough that we were good, to say nothing of hip.

  One source of self-congratulation was our racial politics. Here we actually achieved some things that still make me proud of that boy in overalls and his bleary-eyed band of brothers and sisters. To a degree that was almost unknown in that time and place, we managed to create meaningfully interracial lives. In a remote rural county, our farmhouse became a place where black and white young people gathered to laugh out loud without fear of the world. On the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, we built a basketball court where salt met pepper and forgot to keep score. The intelligent daughters of the leading white families in the county, the kind of young women who soon would be off for UNC or Duke, gathered at our house. We would sing and talk into the wee hours. Though there were only a few white boys in the community who wanted to get to know us, the young black men who partied at Flat Branch were charming rogues like ourselves. Friendships and romances developed across the color line, providing an education that was sometimes bountiful and occasionally cruel. All the girls knew about a local girl who’d ended up getting shipped away to boarding school the year before I got there because she had dated a black boy. Some white parents banned their daughters from our company. Young black men and women feared reprisals for hanging around with us. Occasionally, white boys with their trucks and guns threatened us for allowing “their” girls to meet black men at our house. In retrospect, I am astounded that our flouting of the color line caused as little trouble as it did.

  One of the guiding angels of our secession was Perri Anne Morgan, the feisty and sumptuous daughter of one of the county’s leading farm fa
milies. The year she turned fourteen, Perri helped cause a furor in Parker’s Fork United Methodist Church, which her family had attended since antebellum days. It was Memorial Day, and the minister at Parker’s Fork announced the formation of a whites-only softball league for the county’s white children. The men of the community had decided to announce it through the churches only, he said, to avoid including “the other segment of the population.” After he had made his plug for segregated softball, the minister preached a sermon entitled “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” Most people probably didn’t even think about the contradiction, but Perri and a few others grew more and more enraged. After his allegedly patriotic drivel was over, Beth Polson, who had grown up in Parker’s Fork but had moved to California to work as a television producer some years earlier, stood up in the back row. “I have spoken in this church many times,” she said, “and I am afraid that what I have to say this morning won’t be as welcome. But I have never heard such hypocrisy here before, and I am really disappointed.”

  The misguided minister was clueless. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he replied.