Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  Perri’s mother, Doris Morgan, had been watching her daughter’s face in the choir loft. In a brilliant stroke of motherhood, she piped up from the front row. “I think Perri Anne could tell you,” she said, loudly enough for everyone in the church to hear.

  Fourteen-year-old Perri stood up right there in front of God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and declared, “I don’t understand how you can stand up there and announce a softball league for white kids only, and then preach a sermon ‘America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’ It doesn’t make any sense.” Perri sat down, and it was her mother’s turn to speak.

  Getting to her feet, Mrs. Morgan told the congregation that she had seen the faces of the young people in the choir during the announcement and the sermon. They were the future of the church, if it had one, she said, and their views needed to be expressed, which was why she had called on Perri Anne. And she wanted people to know that she agreed with her daughter. “I think this sets a terrible example for the young people,” she added. Some people started crying and others stomped out of the sanctuary. Maybe the minister never did figure out why the black freedom movement in the South had forced so many Christians to reexamine their white supremacist beliefs. But whatever it had accomplished, Perri became one of the leading lights of our merry band at Flat Branch. If her parents weren’t entirely happy about the company she kept—and who can blame them for that?—well, it does sometimes appear that our subsequent marriage and two lovely children have helped them recover.

  Though we bravely confronted some of the lies that the world had whispered into our ears even before we were born, the Flat Branch tribe rested upon our own fundamental falsehood: that we could find a hiding place outside of history. We could not secede from the South and build Utopia in the woods, safely beyond the hard history that had brought us there. What one friend laughingly called “the church of dissipation” offered no authentic moral center to sustain us. Though the liberal vision of my father had not proven adequate to the political collisions of the late 1960s, my dropout vision in the 1970s offered nothing more workable. There was no place to run from history; history was not just the past but also the present and the future. I was lost. I was utterly lost. When the Flat Branch gang fell apart, as inevitably we did after a couple of years, I wandered to Chapel Hill, apprenticed myself to a local culinary genius, and learned the craft of a restaurant cook.

  After I had drained the fryers, cleaned the grills, and mopped the concrete floors, I staggered around the college town in the best tradition of the Gator, doing my best to lose myself still more deeply. Not only had I failed to find a hiding place from history; I could not even find a place to hide from the rage that seethed inside me. I tried to rinse away that rage in gin to no avail. I lived in a rooming house full of drunks and misfits. My nights were passed among the stoned out, the lonesome, and the forlorn. I knew every tribe of junkies and every barroom rowdy in town, and took comfort where I could. My idea of a perfect night was to get off work, swill some beers at the Cave, toss back a couple of shots at Tijuana Fats, go dancing at the Cat’s Cradle, and persuade a carload of waitresses to go skinny-dipping at Clearwater Lake. My favorite song was Tom Waits’s “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,” in which he avows, “I don’t have a drinking problem, except when I can’t get a drink.”

  Local organizers from the Communist Workers Party, seeing a lost young man drawn by experience and temperament to a left-leaning politics of rage, invited me to attend some meetings in the fall of 1979. Led by a group of idealistic young medical professionals, the CWP worked among the poorest of the poor, offering free medical care and leftist agitprop to impoverished white working people and their underemployed black counterparts. If they had only been more fun, I probably would have joined, but I remained a reluctant recruit.

  Still, I promised to ride with a carload of CWP loyalists to a rally in a Greensboro housing project on Saturday morning, November 3, 1979. I was supposed to meet them at eight that morning, but I had poured down my last beer of the evening at about five A.M. By the time I’d finished my coffee early that afternoon, I heard on the radio that Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis had come to the rally, calmly retrieved their rifles from the trunks of their cars, and killed five of the CWP organizers I had met only a few days earlier. An undercover agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had ridden with the killers; the vigilantes had carried a police department map of the march in the car. Even though the five killings had occurred while television cameras were running, an all-white jury acquitted the murderers. Watching the videotape of the Greensboro massacre and reading news accounts of the acquittals, needless to say, did little to still my anger and ease my alienation. Meanwhile, the country lurched further and further to the right, Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a campaign that made blacks and the poor his scapegoats, and America seemed less and less interested in the visions of racial justice that had nurtured my early political consciousness. My favorite political slogan from those years was something spray-painted onto the ice plant next to my apartment by a housing-project poet: “Who need ice when you got Nancy Reagan.”

  One day soon after the Greensboro killings, I drove up to Oxford to see Thad Stem. At that point, he was beset with kidney failure and seemed pretty frail, and I was about twenty. He asked about my writing, and I told him I had scribbled some notes about what had happened in Oxford. I couldn’t answer any of his questions about the writing project, though, and finally he reached over, squeezed my hand with a strange and lovely tenderness, and said, “You’re too close to it, now, Tim, but you’ll write about it someday.”

  Leaving his house on Front Street, I walked to the graveyard, retracing the steps Thad and Daddy had made in 1970 on the day of Henry Marrow’s funeral, when they’d left the Black Power chants and gone home for lunch. It was almost summer, just as it had been back then, and the smells of fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle made the air thick and sweet by the cemetery. I didn’t know where he was buried. But I walked along the fence and straight to a small grave-stone in the back corner, as if I were family and knew the path by heart. The stone read, HENRY D. MARROW, JAN. 8, 1947–MAY 12, 1970. Vietnam.

  As I knelt beside his grave, I did not even try to pray. But some things came clear to me. My own scrawled indictment against the world had begun, though it did not end, with the words “Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger.” Some people’s worlds are organized around a wartime trauma, a lucky break, a crucial mentor, or a lost love affair. As the years pass, they come to see the whole world through that particular lens of loss or luck. In my case, what was lost was a kind of faith that I wondered if I would ever find again. I had not seen my family killed in front of my eyes. My village had not been obliterated from the earth. My people had not been categorically barred from acknowledgment as human beings. These cruelties occurred all over the world, but what held their place in my mind was the killing of a man I had not even known. The black veterans who’d buried Henry Marrow, having only a small stone on which to explain all that was wrong, had inscribed one word for a fellow soldier who had never left North Carolina: Vietnam. In the graveyard of my own hopes, on the stone that marked where I had buried my past and my future, I wrote his name. And I drove back to Chapel Hill one step closer to finding my way home, though I did not know it at the time.

  Soon after my trip to Henry Marrow’s grave, my life of disengagement ended when I almost killed myself in a moment of inspired stupidity. The night I was named head chef at a local restaurant, I came home plastered after a long procession of tequila shots and salty margaritas at Tijuana Fats. A woman at the bar had given me a couple of Seconals—powerful barbiturate tablets—to take home “for later.” Never one to procrastinate when it came to pleasure, I grabbed a bottle of white wine from the fridge, polished off the pills, and sat down happily at my typewriter, flush with chemical inspiration. Tonight, I thought, I might write the thing that illuminated it all somehow.
In the morning, when I woke up facedown on the floor beside my desk, there was a pool of dried vomit beside my face. In the middle of the pool sat half an undigested pill. If I had fallen backward instead of forward, I instantly understood, I would have drowned in my own vomit and never awakened. That day, I realized that I had to take control of my life. If I did not turn to confront the demons that drove me, they would eventually catch me from behind. I began to study and to contemplate the reasons why I was lost, and that process led me to examine what had happened to the movement that had once promised to redeem the soul of America from its original sin.

  Though I no longer lived in the woods, I still scribbled in my journals and read hundreds of books. I thought I had fled school for good, and I never once aspired to go to college. My girlfriend, a dark-eyed beauty and gifted poet who endured my boozy chaos for a couple of years, had studied English at Exeter, Yale, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She glanced up from her writing one day and said, “You’re completely wrong about college, you know. You will love college.” Something about her inflection was persuasive. A few weeks after that, Daddy drove me to enroll at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, mostly because they would admit anyone over twenty-two as a probationary “special student”; my D average and my indecipherable transcripts did not matter. And the first thing I did as a twenty-three-year-old freshman was to drive to Oxford, North Carolina, to ask Robert Teel why he’d killed Henry Marrow.

  CHAPTER 12

  “GO BACK TO THE LAST PLACE WHERE YOU KNEW WHO YOU WERE”

  IF, IN MOVING through your life, you find yourself lost,” said Bernice Johnson Reagon, the guiding spirit of the SNCC Freedom Singers and now Sweet Honey in the Rock, “go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.” Soon after I took her advice, I found myself with a straight razor at my neck—held by none other than Robert Teel. The first thing I had done as a college student was to arrange an independent study with one of my history professors. In the course of that study, I went back to Oxford and interviewed as many people as I could persuade to talk to me about what had happened back in 1970—starting with Teel.

  Though he had been the champion of white resistance in the summer of 1970, aided and applauded by the country club and courthouse crowd, those same people had dropped Teel like a dirty tissue after the trial ended. When they discovered that the changes the black freedom movement brought did not land a black man in every white woman’s bed or have Granville County declared a Soviet republic, the white upper classes did not wish to be reminded that they had sanctioned public murder and had turned a violent tragedy into a late-model lynching. Teel had lost his big white house on Main Street with the columns and the magnolias. At sixty, he lived in a small brick bungalow beside a barbershop he’d opened on the outskirts of Granville County, in a remote crossroads community called Stovall. As the tires of the old gray-blue Falcon I’d borrowed from Julia crunched the gravel of his driveway, I wondered who else would drive this far to get their hair cut. And I wondered if I should have come that far myself.

  Frankly, I was scared. At the courthouse earlier that morning, I had read Teel’s arrest record. Over the years, he had been charged with virtually every violent crime I’d ever heard of, more than a dozen different charges. Getting on the fighting side of Robert Teel was not hard, and it had landed several people, including two cops, in the emergency room. Pulled over for drunken driving on two occasions, each time he had pounded the arresting officer unconscious with his fists. Reading over the long list of charges, I had learned that Robert Teel had an enduring habit of attacking anyone who crossed him, with whatever weapon lay at hand. The fine legal distinctions between “assault with a deadly weapon” and “assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill” suddenly seemed very interesting, even compelling. How hard did you have to hit someone with the hammer to demonstrate “intent to kill”?

  Before I went to see him, I took an ice pick, impaled a marble-sized wad of duct tape on its tip to keep it from poking through my jacket, and slipped it into the pocket of my old gray suit. As I pulled into the driveway, my hand instinctively moved down to make sure that the ice pick was still there. I hadn’t come to fight with him, and I wasn’t even planning to argue with him. But if the sumbitch tried to hurt me, it was going to be blood for blood—or so I told myself.

  When I walked into the barbershop, Teel was sitting in his own chair, reading the newspaper as if he were waiting for a haircut. He was red-faced, short, and husky, a fireplug of a man, but hardly an imposing figure. Except for a certain hardness around his eyes, he did not look like a killer or the kind of fellow who coldcocks the same police officer twice. When I offered him my hand, he took one finger, very gingerly, as if he had never shaken hands before. My heart sank at his reluctant reception, but I lowered myself onto the red leatherette couch across from him. We had been neighbors years before, I explained, and I had been good friends with Gerald, his youngest boy. Teel plainly did not remember me or my family, which was some comfort, although I kept worrying that he was lying about that part. I lit a Marlboro to calm my nerves, but the glowing cigarette, waving visibly, only called attention to my sudden palsy. Teel saw my quaking hands at the same time I did, and I winced until I caught the unmistakable pleasure in his expression. I think he liked people to be afraid of him. “You’re shaking like a leaf, boy,” he said, with evident satisfaction.

  “I think I had too much coffee this morning. I’m not used to drinking coffee,” I lied. I was a restaurant cook, a college student, and a would-be writer at the time, and two pots a day was the minimum daily requirement. I explained to Teel that I was writing a history paper for school on all the stuff that had happened back in 1970—the death, the burning, the trial, and so on. That was true, as far as it went. I mean, that is how this all got started. It seemed an unlikely homework assignment to him, I could tell. At the same time, the murder had been his moment, and I could see that he wanted to talk about it. When I asked if I could tape an interview with him, he said, “Sure, I will talk to you. What do you want to know?”

  I started with some questions about his early life. Teel quickly began to narrate the history of his rise to success as a businessman in Oxford in the 1960s. The killing of Henry Marrow, it became clear, was the crucial point at which his life had fallen apart, and Teel saw himself as the principal victim in the matter. “People still ask me, ‘Why’d you have to kill him?’ ” Teel said, “and I say, ‘Yeah, if you’da told me he was coming I woulda been in Florida, why didn’t you tell me?’ ” But Robert Teel steered away from the particulars of the killing itself. “I could see my way clear to being a millionaire,” he told me, “before what happened happened.”

  I saw my opportunity. “So, what happened?” I asked him.

  Teel fell silent. I felt the blood rush to my face. He looked at me with a blank, strangely animal expression, his eyes darting back and forth. He thought hard, then let out a long sigh, reached over, and turned off my tape recorder. “I can’t talk to you about that,” he said. “I am sorry, but I just don’t remember you. I am sure you are who you say you are, but I just don’t remember you. It’s been a long time. No offense, I like you just fine, but for all I know you are working for the N-double-C-A-P.” N-double-C-A-P. I did not laugh. “Feller came out here some years back,” he said, “and he seemed like a nice enough feller to me, and I talked to him about it, and it turned out he was writing for some communist magazine up in New York City. I just can’t talk to you.” Teel walked over to the red metal icebox and fished out a seven-ounce Coca-Cola, thrusting it toward me. “You want a drink?”

  Making a note to check communist magazines for articles about Oxford, I decided to stick around and talk to him about sports, the weather, anything he wanted, until he asked me to leave. When he wanted me to leave, though, I didn’t plan on sticking around one minute longer. I was still scared half to death that he was going to sudde
nly remember that race-traitor preacher who’d lived around the corner on Hancock Street. Thank God the Teels had not been members of our church. A customer came in for a haircut, and I watched Teel work, taking careful mental note of his mannerisms and his rhythms of speech, hoping that it would help me describe him someday. I wanted to hold on to his every word and gesture, to forget nothing. The intensity of this hunger to understand surprised me; now that I was there, I had an almost physical craving to hear what Teel had to say, and I wasn’t going to leave until I had.

  Teel seemed to have a similar urge to tell the story. Once in a while, as he was working, he would be unable to restrain himself and would unleash an outburst about racial politics or the Marrow murder case. “I’ll tell you one goddamn thing,” he would say, then voice his festering resentment about how everyone had forgotten him or how much easier life would be if he had been a black man. Even the Klan came in for a scornful attack; the bedsheet boys, too, had abandoned him in his hour of need. “Oh, yeah, if you wanna drink a bunch of liquor and sit around talking about the niggers, they’re behind you all the way. They’re all behind you,” Teel snarled. “But if you wanna talk about shooting somebody or burning somebody out,” he continued despairingly, “the Klan is behind you, all right—waaaaaay behind you.”

  This was when I decided to have Teel cut my hair. Another barber had shorn most of my bushy curls the week before, so I wouldn’t look like a hippie, but there was still plenty left for Teel. I remembered as I was settling into the barber’s chair that he had given me several of the only crew cuts I had ever had, back on Saturday mornings in the 1960s. I smiled to myself as Robert Teel chattered on about race, politics, and local gossip and once more skinned me damn near bald with his electric clippers. Finishing my buzz cut and brushing the hair off the back of my neck, he turned to another task and I pondered the past.