Blood Done Sign My Name Read online

  Daddy laughed out loud and long, shook his head, and handed each of us a Christian book about where babies come from. Late that night, with a flashlight under the covers, I read both my book, which was called Wonderfully Made, and then Vern’s book, which I was not supposed to see until I got older, read them cover to cover and still never found out that a woman’s vagina was between her legs. Apparently, while a man and wife lay sleeping, something horrible crawled out of him and into her—into her ear, for all I knew. Anyway, right after he gave us our books, Daddy took the whole family out for dinner at the new Hardee’s drive-in. Sucking on a chocolate milk-shake, I contemplated the mysterious grace of God.

  Neither Divine mercy nor threat of punishment actually made us stop smoking cigarettes, in part because this taboo was inextricably linked with our haunting prepubescent sense of ourselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God. If we couldn’t smoke the whole pack in one sitting, we’d hide them under a fallen tree, just like the dirty magazines we sometimes found there. We would repent predictably and promise God never to do it again, though we knew we would be back. But you couldn’t be taking that kind of stuff home with you, and it was hard to escape the deep uneasiness that it might somehow follow you and disrupt the warm goodness of family dinners, saying grace and singing hymns and hugging Mama good night. It was no accident that our father had made the leap from cigarettes to sex. This seemed appropriate—sin was sin, whether you smoked it or just peered at it with the fearful awe that gives way to the dry tightness in your throat and the strange stiffening in your pants.

  Sex was sinful. And sin was sexual. Both of them were inextricably bound up with race, which was something we all knew, the way we knew that Robert E. Lee was a hero and North Carolina was the basketball capital of the world. I could not help but notice that grown-ups always talked about both race and sex in exactly the same whispered tones. Hymns we sang in church promised that the blood of Jesus would wash our sins “as white as snow,” cleanse our souls of “one dark blot,” or help our “dark passions to subdue.” And I knew, without knowing how I knew, without ever being told, that the color line throbbed with sexual taboo.

  Segregation, I understood without ever having been told, existed to protect white womanhood from the abomination of contact with uncontrollable black men. Whites who questioned segregation confronted the inevitable and, for most people, conclusive cross-examination: Would you want your daughter to marry one? The answer never came, and it never had to come. Everybody knew that would be the most horrible thing imaginable, because interracial sex was inherently pornographic, unnatural, and perverted. If sex was sinful, interracial sex was the most sinful—and therefore the most sexual—that sex could get. And the worst abomination of all, of course, was sex between a black man and a white woman. It was that sin—or the faint hint of it—that got Dickie Marrow murdered.

  It took me many years and a Ph.D. in American history to find my way toward the roots of this strange folkway. The sexual obsessions of white supremacy, which were so evident to the children of Jim Crow, had their origins in the fundamental structure of the colonial economy three hundred years earlier. In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a statute that read, “Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother.” This reversed English common law, under which the status of a child followed that of the father.

  The new statute meant that white men who fathered children by their slave women increased their own material worth. violating their own deeply held beliefs, they sired offspring that would work in their houses and fields without fee and care for them in their old age without fail. Children born of white fathers and black mothers became black, not white, and remained slave, not free. Without that provision, growing numbers of apparently “black” people who were legally “white” would have populated the American colonies. The whole system of racial bondage rested upon the fact that free white men could father “black” slave children, while black men could never father “white” children. The children of slave mothers or fathers must always inherit that status. If large numbers of white women had birthed mulatto children by black fathers, the system of slavery based on racial caste would have been undermined and might have been rendered unworkable. Some form of unfree labor would have persisted for a time, but racialized slavery, justified in the name of white supremacy, might well have never evolved the way that it did. “Race” itself could have meant something entirely different without these rules about sex.

  It was a different thing, of course, for a white man to father “black” children. Annie Bell Cheatham remembered her grandfather, born a slave in Granville County, telling her that white men would often have sexual relations with the slave women who worked in their houses, even if the woman had a black husband. “They would keep the woman in the house,” Cheatham said, “and she would do the cooking, and the white men would go with the black women. They didn’t have no choice.” The slave husband, her grandfather explained, “better not say anything about it—they will hang him.” Some white men who had black families on the side chose to free their black children, who were often called “free-issue Negroes.” “ ‘Free-issue’ people was white men taking black women and them having children,” Rachel Blackwell, born in Oxford in 1891, remembered. “And they would call them ‘issued free.’ The white man would help support that old colored woman and them children, and they would be real light-skinned but the other children would be black. My mother told me about this,” Blackwell continued, “but she couldn’t say or do anything about it.”

  The sex and race taboo that grew from these roots in slavery remained a mighty oak in my boyhood. The challenge to segregation that arose in those years shook that tree like a hurricane, and the white supremacists clung to its trunk for dear life. “What the white man fears and what the white man is fighting to prevent at any cost,” the editor of the Warren Record wrote in 1955, “is the destruction of the purity of his race. He believes that integration would lead to miscegenation, and there is some basis for his fears.” Of course, “miscegenation” was not the real concern; a system that gave all the power to the men in one group and virtually no power to the women in another group made “race mixing” in one direction almost inevitable, as many African Americans in Granville County could attest. The social order permitted white men in the South, by virtue of their position atop the race and gender hierarchy, to take their liberties with black women, while white women and black men remained strictly off-limits to each other. The much traveled sexual back road between the races was clearly marked “one way.”

  When I was growing up, many whites assumed that “race mixing” in schools would lead to rampant interracial sexual activity and that the “death of the white race” would inevitably follow. White purity and white power were imperative, all things good and decent hung in the balance, and sex was the critical battleground. Mainstream white conservative James J. Kilpatrick, whose national influence would persist well into the Reagan era, declared that white Southerners had every right “to preserve the predominately racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two hundred years.” William F. Buckley’s National Review agreed, and justified not merely segregation but disfranchisement for blacks, arguing that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in those areas where it does not predominate numerically.” The race-sex complex, with all its hypocrisies and contradictions, underlay the entire struggle. James Baldwin’s was one of the few public voices that could pierce the fog of “miscegenation” rhetoric, and he offered a timeless retort to the question “Would you want your daughter to marry one?” In a television debate with Kilpatrick, he explained, “You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter—you’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter since the days of slavery.”

  The fall of Jim Crow te
sted these deeply rooted taboos. In 1970, for example, when I was eleven years old, the county fair just up the road in Yanceyville began to admit black people on the same day as whites; in the old days, the fair in Oxford and other towns nearby had set aside a day or two for “Negroes,” and whites otherwise had their run of the place. The new arrangements may have seemed unthreatening; black and white Southerners, after all, lived and worked in close proximity to one another, and it was only the county fair, for goodness sake. Why couldn’t black and white shuffle through the turnstiles together, munch cotton candy, and throw up on the Tilt-A-WHIRL? What the authorities had failed to consider were the “girlie shows,” carnival burlesque performances in which pale white girls from somewhere else danced out of their skimpy clothing and bumped and grinded for a hooting tent full of men. When the ticket taker admitted a group of young African Americans to the show, things inside the tent got tense. After one of the black men yelled out his appreciation for the white dancers, a white man behind him smashed a wooden folding chair across the black man’s head. Fists flew, knives flashed, and blood flowed both ways across the color line. The fighting spread from the fairgrounds to the streets of Yanceyville, and the mayor had to call a curfew and bring in state troopers for several days to stop the violence.

  The central political fact that hung over the spring and summer of 1970 in Oxford, rooted in four hundred years of history, was that the Granville County schools were scheduled to undergo full-blown racial integration that fall. Three years earlier, Oxford had taken the first ineffectual and involuntary steps toward desegregation. Two African American children had left Orange Street School, the segregated all-black elementary school, to enroll at previously all-white C. G. Credle Elementary. The school board had carefully selected two middle-class black boys and assigned them, just like me, to Mrs. Emily Montague’s third-grade class at Credle, where they said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning like the rest of us.

  Thirty years later, when my own children were learning the Pledge of Allegiance, I suddenly remembered another set of words that schoolkids had chanted in unison at my elementary school: “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street.” It just came to me in the shower, a singsong echo in my mind, like a forgotten football cheer or an unwelcome snatch of music that would neither finish nor stop: “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street.” At first I had no idea where it came from—my first theory was that it was from “Goin’ Back to Indiana,” an old pop tune by the Jackson Five. I called my sister Boo, who reminded me that Orange Street was the black school in Oxford, the school that those black children at Credle would have attended had the Supreme Court held its tongue. And then, of course, I knew very well where I had learned the words. I have no clear recollection of any protests against integration at Credle Elementary. But standing in the shower, thirty years later and a thousand miles away, I could still hear a chorus of schoolchildren chanting, “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street,” and I cannot help but ponder how those two brave and unfortunate black children must have felt as they made their way up the sidewalk to a school where they were not wanted.

  My first memory of being in school with black children was standing behind one of the two black boys at the water fountain on the playground at Credle. It was an old cast-iron fountain with a foot pedal, and a couple of seconds after you stepped hard on the pedal, bitter-smelling water gurgled up from the primordial depths of the earth, tasting like iron. I hadn’t noticed the black boy in the line, and suddenly there he was in front of me, bent over the old iron spout. Deep down, I did not want to drink after him. Without really understanding why, and even though I knew better, somewhere inside I had accepted white supremacy. The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain, at the core of the lie a crucial silence, since there was no why. Black was filthy, black was bad, I had somehow managed to learn. Many of my white classmates turned away from the fountain in disgust rather than drink after a black child. And even at that moment, because I had been taught to know better, I knew that my revulsion was a lie, someone else’s lie, and an evil thing. This time, I decided not to give the lie the power it demanded. I suppose I was both resistant and complicit, in the same moment. I could not turn away—I lowered my head and drank after him. But I succumbed slightly; when he moved, I took my turn and pressed the pedal down, and let the water run for a few seconds before I drank, bending over the arc of cool water but pausing for a moment to let the water rinse the spout before I touched my lips to the acrid stream. I guess that made me a “moderate.”

  It was the logic of moderation that permitted schools across the nation to evade the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling for almost twenty years, but when defiance and evasion finally became untenable, “seg academies” sprouted across the landscape. Fearful white parents flocked to the all-white Christian academies, abandoning the public schools in the hour of their deepest need so that their children would not have to attend school with black children. This set a terrible and enduring example and undid any possibility that integration might work. At the molten core in the very center of white fears of school integration was the specter of sex between black males and white females. That simmering sexual subtext overwhelmed the feeble official efforts to ease racial tensions in Oxford after the killing.

  “We had tried to do everything we could to get things quieted down after the riot,” said Mayor Currin, “and finally we decided, ‘Let’s get the ministers together.’ ” Reverend Don Price, a white Baptist minister, recalled that the mayor “was trying to say, ‘Hey, we’ve had enough violence in this community, let’s talk to our congregations and try to be peacemakers.’ ” Currin contacted most of the ministers in the county, black and white, and invited them all to meet at my father’s church. “We were talking about the situation,” the mayor remembered, “and we got back to what had brought on the trouble at Teel’s place, and somebody said something about the black man saying something to a white woman, and that was all she wrote.”

  The visceral reaction among some of the white ministers was so strong, Currin recounted, that “I will never forget this as long as I live. I will never forget this. This white preacher rears up in his chair and yells, ‘What did you say, brother? What did you say?’ And then he made his little speech about race mixing.” According to the mayor, his official efforts to turn preachers into peacemakers “ended right then and there, as soon as he made that statement.” For many whites, the allegation that Henry Marrow had made a lewd remark to a white woman turned public murder into justifiable homicide, transforming a crime of passion into a late-model lynching that fateful May.

  CHAPTER 3

  “TOO CLOSE NOT TO TOUCH”

  THE FORCE THAT drove the bullet through Henry Marrow’s brain, if you were searching for something more explosive than gunpowder and more specific than that Cain slew Abel, was white people’s deep, irrational fear of sex between black men and white women, any single instance of which was supposed to abolish the republic, desecrate the Bible, and ring in the Planet of the Apes. But we should also consider the strange and nearly inexplicable fact that a man like Robert Teel had decided to open a store in Grab-all, a black neighborhood nestled on the northwest edge of town.

  My boyhood image of Teel is of how he walked into his house: eyes locked ahead, his gait more like that of a man the power company had sent to disconnect the electricity than a man coming home for dinner, his shoulders braced as if he were going to walk through the side of the house instead of the door. In four years of playing with his son nearly every day, I never heard his voice. And now I realize that the white supremacy that clouded all of our minds back then must have raged like a tornado in his. Looking back, I cannot imagine what he might have thought it would be like to run a store on the busiest corner of a black shantytown.

  There were some tidy middle-class homes in Grab-all—the neighborhood was mixed. Both segregation and strong community ties kept the black middle class rooted there. “We were all like family in Grab-all
,” Nelda Webb recalled. But some parts, like the area behind Teel’s store, called Around the Bend, were hard scrabble and hand-to-mouth. “Those were some of the poorest people in the world,” a local black man explained. And everybody knew “Lynching Hill” near the Browntown section of Grab-all, a hill whose bloody history haunted the area.

  Some of the roads were unpaved, and car wheels churned clouds of dust in the summer and muddy ruts in the winter. Streetlights and sidewalks were few. Some of the houses in Grab-all were ramshackle wooden frame structures with swaybacked porches, most of them dilapidated and many of them painted the same rusty shade of red. “Those rental houses all belonged to one person, Mr. Bennie Watkins,” Mayor Currin explained to me, “and he got hold of a lot of red paint one year, I reckon, and just painted them all red.” It was a rough territory in spots. “It was hard even for a black to walk in Grab-all that didn’t live there,” William A. “Boo” Chavis told me years later, “much less white folks. The cops didn’t want to go out there no way.”

  When Robert Teel opened his store at Four Corners, the main intersection in the neighborhood, it is fair to say that Grab-all did not welcome him. “When he first come out there,” said Chavis, “didn’t nobody like the idea.” When I asked Teel about it years later, he freely admitted that “sometimes there was a little violence, sometimes there was some ugly words said,” but he maintained that accounts of the clashes were always exaggerated. “Sure, I had some trouble with a few blacks come up,” he conceded, “but when you’re running four or five businesses, you’re gonna have a percentage. If you have one place of business, and you have trouble with one person a year,” Teel argued, “then if you have five businesses, and you have trouble with one person per business per year, then that’s five per year. And it looks like you’re getting a black eye, when you’re not having trouble but with one person per business per year.”