Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  Their ethos of paternalism gave my grandparents a sense of doing what was good and right, a feeling far more luxurious than the crisp, clean sheets, “angel biscuits,” and tomato-asparagus aspic that Betty Clegg made for them. I have never doubted the sincerity of Joe Dunlap’s gratitude to my grandfather, and I am proud of the Buies, and of course I love them. But the hierarchy of white supremacy, at its heart, was as rotten as that pile of old shoes, and the generations that follow will be many years cleaning it up.

  One way my grandmother Jessie instructed me in the obligations and rewards of racial paternalism was through her favorite story about the Civil War. Many times over the years she told me that our family had always treated their slaves like family members. In fact, she always said, our slaves had loved us so much that they’d hidden the family silver from General Sherman’s Yankee marauders. When I got old enough to research the history myself, I discovered that we’d owned no slaves, no silver, and that General Sherman’s army hadn’t come within a hundred miles of the family homeplace. But I know in my heart that she believed this to be the unvarnished truth, and that it had come to her from people she loved and admired.

  In Oxford, white children often grew up with family stories about the antebellum South, like my grandmother’s gentle hand-me-down fiction, stories that portrayed slavery as a largely benign and sometimes even beneficial social order. “My mama told me that our slaves were just like family to us,” one local white woman recounted, “and that after the war they didn’t want to leave. And my father always said [slavery] was the first chance they got to experience anything like civilization or to learn anything.”

  African Americans in Granville County grew up with a set of slavery stories that reflected a wholly different view of what was civilized. Black people old enough to have heard tales of slavery from their grandparents told their own children and grandchildren stories about families being broken up and sold, black women used by white men as concubines, and slaves whipped mercilessly. Novella Allen, whose grandparents had been slaves, grew up hearing her grandfather recount how their master had announced his intention to sell their family. “His daddy and his mama was going to be sold from the Lawsons to the Thorpes,” she said. But her grandfather’s father had refused to accept the sale, and tried to thwart his master by mutilating himself with an axe. “His daddy went and cut his hand off,” she said, “because he didn’t want to be sold. Papa said that’s what he cut it off for, because he didn’t want to be sold from the people he had been with all his life. But they took his wife and child on anyway.”

  Annie Bell Cheatham, born in 1891, learned from her grandfather about his despair at being sold away from his mother as a boy and having his name forcibly changed to Cheatham, the name of his new owner. “That child crying, him looking back and wanting to go with his mama,” she recounted, “and the mama crying, too, but she couldn’t do nothing. Yeah, we have been through something in this world. Not just me and you,” she said, “but just think about the black folks—Lord, have mercy.” Even though he had been young, her grandfather never forgot the agony of losing his mother and his name, and repeated the story often when Annie Bell Cheatham was growing up. “He told us, he said, ‘We are not Cheathams, we ain’t no Cheathams.’ And then he would tell how they sold him and everything.”

  Judge Chavis, a local black man born in 1898, was raised on his grandmother’s stories about having her brothers sold away from her family. “My grandmother on my mama’s side,” Chavis recalled, “she said there were eight of them. Said she had seven brothers, you know. And they had a sale and they sold all seven of them to a man down east somewhere, bought all seven of them, but didn’t want the girl, and she never did see them no more.” Johnny Crews had been told as a youngster that his family name had been Mayhew and that they had lived in Wendell, North Carolina, but that the family had been separated and some of them sold to a white farmer named Crews in Granville County. “So colored people do not know what they is,” Crews said.

  But enslaved African American families in Granville County remembered who they were, and whose they were, through the distinctive Afro-Christian faith they adapted from the religion their masters sought to impose on them. To the South’s four million slaves, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “God was real. They knew Him. They had met Him personally in many a wild orgy of religious frenzy, or in the black stillness of the night.” And in that stillness and tumult, the enslaved sons and daughters of Africa met their God and their neighbors, and affirmed that they were all children of the same Lord who’d brought the Israelites out of bondage, the same Lord who’d rescued Daniel from the lion’s den, the same Lord who’d given a little shepherd boy a slingshot to bring down mighty Goliath. In the “brush arbor,” as some called their invisible church, they sang their own songs, drawn from the Scripture and from the lives of their slave ancestors. They knew that God, in His grace, had sent Jesus to be nailed to the cross to raise them up, and that their names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life: “Ain’t you glad, ain’t you glad, that the blood done sign my name,” they would sing.

  “You got a right to the tree of life,” their voices would ring out. “I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s children got shoes,” slaves and descendants of slaves would sing, standing together, often barefoot, in the woods. “When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes and gonna walk all over God’s heaven.” And of course they sang some of the songs they learned from white Christians, too. According to Judge Chavis, his father’s mother, Lou Chavis, born in bondage, explained carefully the sharp difference between the religion the masters taught and the faith the slaves practiced. Though the slaves had no formal church of their own, she told him, their masters would cart them to the white church and have a separate meeting for them. “And that white preacher would preach at them, ‘Now, y’all obey y’all masters, like the Bible says.’ ”

  But the slaves’ own secret church meetings had nothing to do with obedience. Lou Chavis told her grandson that the slaves would pass the word that there was going to be a meeting; they’d “just notify one another when they get a chance in the daytime, and then what they done was meet at one another’s shack, and had their singing.” If they did not meet in a slave cabin, they would meet in the woods. “They would do their praying and singing while [the whites] was asleep—they better not catch them singing.” Elders in the community still remembered how their ancestors would place a cooking pot on the ground outside the meeting place in the folk belief that it would keep whites from hearing their songs and prayers. “Sometimes they would turn a pot down at the door,” Judge Chavis said his grandmother told him, “to catch the sound.”

  Though whites typically grew up hearing that their slaves had been treated kindly, the inherited memory among African Americans included many stories of brutality and abuse. Lou Chavis told her grandson that their white master would fasten disobedient slaves to a tree using a wide leather belt, then whip them. Chavis never forgot his grandmother’s account of having seen a fellow slave beaten to death. “She said she had seen them do that, and they unbuckle the man, and him fall dead and die.” Chapel Royster, born a slave, told his granddaughter Mary Thomas Hobgood that he had wanted to learn to read but had been too terrified of the punishments. “My grandfather lived with us,” Hobgood said. “His master told him if he tried to read and study, [the master would] cut his hands off, cut his fingers off. And when he died he was ninety years old, and he couldn’t read a line.”

  Despite the bitter memory of slavery, some black people in Oxford always enjoyed fairly good relationships with whites. Mary Catherine Chavis, who took Henry Marrow into her house when he was a teenager and acted as a mother to him, grew up around white people in the 1930s and 1940s and had very little trouble from them. Her maternal ancestors had been free blacks and well educated. Her mother attended North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham and then came back to Oxford to teach school, and Mary Catherine followed in her footsteps, graduating from Shaw
University and then coming home to teach at Mary Potter High School. “We really didn’t have a lot of problems with white people when I was growing up,” she recalled. William Baskerville, born at the turn of the century in a small, racially mixed neighborhood near the railroad tracks, had close attachments to his white neighbors. “I would go over there and they would say, ‘Come on in here, William, and get you some dinner.’ They would invite us in and we would sit down and eat together.”

  While very few whites during the Jim Crow era invited black people to sit at their dinner tables, leading whites in Oxford invoked warm memories of their paternalistic relationships with African Americans in defense of the “good race relations” that they insisted had forever prevailed. “A black man was my hunting partner,” explained Billy Watkins, Oxford’s leading attorney and a representative to the General Assembly. “He kept the dogs and fed them, and I bought the feed.” In his mind, this proved that “relations were always good here,” he told me. “A black man keeps my horses now. I’ve got horses, and was raised on a farm, and we had some blacks out there who stayed on our farm for fifty years and more.” This was undoubtedly a sincere description of Watkins’s vision of his relationships with the loyal family retainers who worked on his family’s plantation. But these ties, even when the affection was genuine on both sides, were like a clay pot that had to be shattered for the tree inside to grow. What kind of fruit that tree would yield, in the long run, remained an open question.

  My mother grew up in the shade of that spreading paternalist oak of “good race relations,” but she herself broke free of it. By the time I had children of my own, I saw what a fearlessly self-reliant person she was. And if Mama sometimes seemed a little starchy to me when I was growing up, this was not the case with my father, partly because she married so far beneath herself. Jack Tyson, my father’s father, was a fiery New Dealer with unconventional views on race, and had only recently left tenant farming when he moved his family to Biscoe. “I don’t have but three cents,” Granddaddy Tyson would laugh, “and I got to mail a letter with that.” In 1946, Mama was fourteen when she saw Daddy, a sixteen-year-old, ride into town sitting in a chair in the back of the truck. “I thought he was the best-looking thing I had ever seen,” she laughed later.

  Her diary from the late 1940s confirms her opinion. “Vernon sat with me in the picture show,” she wrote a few months later, “winked at me, held my hand, and wore my hat. I LOVE him!” At fourteen and fifteen, she wrote about him in her diary nearly every day, even when there was not much to say: “Saw Vernon today,” or “Vernon wasn’t there,” or less persuasively, “Vernon is dating Betty Charles but I don’t care!” When she turned fifteen, her parents reluctantly permitted her to begin dating, and she never dated anyone else, at least not seriously. On the flyleaf of her diary, “Vernon Tyson” is scribbled over and over, in different versions of the same hand, and then the words “I do,” and then in the same handwriting but much older, “You bet I do.”

  In the spring of 1948, when it became clear that the young couple was pointed toward the altar, the Buies tried to send Martha to Europe for the summer, hoping to derail their romance. “Mother said she wished I would get over my ‘Vernon’ crush,” Mama confided to her diary that year. “That hurt me so much.” Several weeks later, on May 17, it looked like Jessie Buie was out of luck with respect to her love-smitten teenaged daughter. “Dear Diary,” Martha wrote, “Vernon said he was gonna hit a home run for me in the baseball game, and sure enough he did. I love him! I love him!” On May 28, however, things were looking up for Jessie’s campaign. “Vernon makes me sick,” Martha wrote. “He can’t be decent.”

  But opposites attract, so they say, and my mother’s cleaned and pressed upbringing may have made my father seem all the more appealing to her. “I just can’t help liking Vernon,” she wrote soon afterward. “Sometimes I wonder if it is right to feel this way or not. We’re so very different. But I love him so much I just don’t think anyone else will do. I love every inch of that fine boy.” And so it was that when I was growing up, my mother loomed as the guardian of manners, while my father’s eyes laughed as he drank out of the milk jug—when she wasn’t looking.

  When my father walked through the door in the evening, his children jumped on him and held on tight, laughing and squealing. No one was more fun than Daddy, and when he turned his charm on a child, the effect was as powerful as a narcotic. If you stayed home sick from school, Daddy was likely to show up and take you out to lunch, a gesture that all of the children interpreted as a sign of his special pleasure in our delightful company. His presence in the house was raucous, rollicking, warm, and attentive, except on those frequent occasions when it was cloudy, oblivious, foreboding, or even threatening.

  That fact, in itself, was not strange. In the small-town South where I grew up, we children were afraid of everybody’s daddy. Vernon Tyson’s rich baritone was the voice of God. The only problem was that you never knew if you were going to get the Old or the New Testament. Six feet tall with shoulders seemingly half that wide, Daddy could be tender and impish, and he plainly loved my mother like a hound dog loves a bone. I remember lying beside him in their bed, his massive arm under my neck. My brother, Vern, lay on the other side of Daddy, but with my father’s chest between us, heaving up and down as he snored softly, Vern might as well have been on the yonder side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Daddy’s hands seemed roughly the size of chuck roasts. Those meaty paws tenderly stroked our faces and patted our backs and tousled our hair whenever we went near him. But on those rare occasions when he roared into a room in anger, we froze in terror. “Child abuse” had not yet been invented, and every father I knew obeyed the biblical injunction not to “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Not all of them, however, were built like a freight car and wired like a bomb.

  Though he seemed to us an iron-fisted disciplinarian, he was also remarkably gentle and intuitive for a man of the John Wayne generation. One Saturday morning when I was seven, Vern, Gerald, Jeff Daniels, Burton Gibbs, and I were secretly smoking cigarettes down by the creek. We perched on the muddy bank, cupping our palms and fumbling with the matches. Jeff had stolen a pack of Tareytons from his mother and on that authority, presumably, commanded everyone not to “nigger-lip,” an admonition that meant we must not suck the cigarette too far into our mouths and get the filter soggy. My brother was twelve years old and took charge in his capacity as the senior member of the expedition. Certain rules were necessary, even here in the wilderness. It was permissible to cuss and talk “dirty,” Vern said, since we were smoking cigarettes anyway. When men were smoking cigarettes and cussing, we reckoned, they could talk about anything they damn well pleased. After all, since the penalty for smoking cigarettes was undoubtedly death and then hell, talking about “you-know-what” couldn’t make things much worse.

  We had been down by the creek smoking when Gerald had first told me about sexual intercourse, though he’d used another word. That was when a man “puts his you-know-what between a woman’s you-know-whats,” he’d said in a tone of grave authority. Gerald’s account of coitus, which had seemed to draw on direct observation, explains how I’d come to think that a woman’s private parts resided between her breasts. This tantalizing misunderstanding had prevailed for several weeks, fascinating my seven-year-old mind until the fateful day that we got caught smoking cigarettes.

  One of the neighbors saw us down by the creek and called each of our parents. When we came home for supper, Daddy solemnly ushered us into the living room and left us there on the couch for what seemed like several months. No one ever used the living room at our house. We’d always thought it had been reserved for Sunday afternoon company, but now it appeared that it had actually been set aside for executions. Death Row at Central Prison would have been more cheerful. Vern whispered something to me along the lines of “We’re dead,” but otherwise we sat silently, huddled under a cloud of iniquity darker than the grave, pondering our demise.

>   We could hear Mama and Daddy talking in hushed tones in the kitchen. And then suddenly that huge bear of a man lumbered into the room, sat down in front of us, and so began the sermon. The voice was calm but the content was indecipherable. They knew, of course, exactly what boys talk about while smoking cigarettes down by the creek. Rather than punishing us, Daddy and Mama had decided that it was time for him to tell us about the birds and the bees. Daddy’s lips continued to move, but I had no idea what he was saying. He never even mentioned cigarettes. It seemed cruel, in a way, to burden condemned men with this prattle about God’s plan for Creation.

  Our one comfort was that as long as Daddy kept talking, he was not whipping us to death. Maybe our reprieve would last for only a few minutes, but why not make the most of it? So I nodded at what seemed appropriate times, and tried to appear alert and attentive, even as I peered into the abyss. The whole idea was to keep him talking. Daddy still hadn’t said one word about cigarettes. And then suddenly, without my having apprehended a single sentence, Daddy’s momentous speech ended. Did we have any questions? he asked us. Any questions at all? Was there anything we wanted to know about anything?

  The moment of death drew nigh. I tried to telepathically urge my brother to ask Daddy something, anything to save our lives for another few minutes. Perilous silence gripped the room. Seconds ticked by. If I’d only had the remotest idea what Daddy had been talking about, I would have asked him a hundred questions, as slowly as possible, like that woman in my “Arabian Nights” book who told the sultan long, interwoven stories to keep him from chopping off her head. But I couldn’t even identify the topic, let alone ask a pertinent question. Why didn’t my stupid older brother think of something, anything, to ask Daddy? Finally, positive that further delay would move us straight to the End, I blurted out, “What is my front tooth made of?”