Blood Done Sign My Name Page 6
If anyone was getting a black eye at the Teel place, it certainly was not Teel. The establishment became known as a place where conflict was common and where Teel settled disputes in a brisk and direct fashion. “I have never been used to taking foolishness from people,” Teel told me a dozen years later. A local black political leader put it differently, though how accurately I do not know: “Didn’t nobody want to mess with him because the Klan was backing him.”
Herman Cozart, a dark-skinned black man who hauled pulpwood for a living, often stopped by the store at Four Corners in the early days, and he developed a low opinion of Robert Teel. Cozart recalled that Teel denied him change for a dollar on two separate occasions and cussed him for asking the second time—an odd posture for a man who owned a coin-operated laundry. Cozart, though he was an affable, easygoing fellow, could have passed for an NFL lineman. A massive, thick-chested hombre who spent his days handling huge timbers, Cozart was known to carry at least one gun almost everywhere he went. He was not afraid of Teel, but he watched him carefully.
Cozart’s account of one encounter he had with Teel in the barbershop revealed the degree of racial tension down on the corner. “One Saturday evening we were coming through there after I had got off work,” Cozart recounted, “and I figured, you know, I got to go to church tomorrow, and the boy in there was shining shoes.” Taking his dress shoes off the seat of his truck, Cozart walked into the barbershop. “I said, ‘I need a shoe shine here,’ and the head man looked at me and said, ‘We don’t shine y’all’s shoes in here.’ ” Miffed, Cozart pushed Teel a little. “Well, how about a haircut? You got a barbershop.” The black man flashed a roll of bills.
And Teel glared at him, saying, “We don’t cut y’all’s hair.” Cozart was slow to anger, but he wasn’t afraid, and he made his point before leaving.
“No problem,” he said, slipping the bankroll back into his pocket. “I got plenty of money and I can take it someplace else. Cutting hair ain’t nothing noways. I cut hair myself, and I’ve cut black hair and white hair. What’s the difference? Clippers ain’t gonna catch no germs, is they?”
Teel bristled. “He turned all red,” Cozart recalled, “and said, ‘I DON’T cut y’all’s hair!’ And I said, ‘All right, then,’ and I looked at him and I thought, ‘This booger-bear ain’t gon’ be up at this corner very long.’ ” Cozart strolled calmly out of the barbershop, feeling no need to prove himself in a fight with a little bantam rooster of a white man whom he regarded as a dangerous idiot. “I knowed Teel was a tough hog,” Cozart said, “and I knowed somebody was gon’ have to hurt him one day, or he was gon’ hurt somebody, one.”
It had taken Teel more than fifteen years to open the place at Four Corners. Arriving in town on a rainy Wednesday morning in 1953, Teel remembered, he had not known “one soul in Granville County.” In a town organically suspicious of outsiders, Teel had been determined to make good as a barber. He had not had much luck before he came to Oxford. He’d enlisted in the army just after World War II, but had left the service after a fellow soldier had knocked out all his front teeth with a rifle butt. Returning to eastern North Carolina in 1946 with a medical discharge and disability benefits, Teel got married and worked hard, first in a lumberyard at Mount Olive and then in a textile mill in Carrboro. These jobs paid little and did not satisfy Teel in any case. His first marriage fell apart quickly, and in an arrangement most unusual at the time, Teel retained custody of his toddler son, Larry Teel. After a few years, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend the Durham Institute of Barbering. Upon his graduation in 1953, an elderly bachelor from Oxford named C. R. Wells offered him a job cutting hair. “I had never heard tell of Oxford before,” Teel recalled. (Everyone called him Teel, even his wife and children.) “But my instructor and the state examiner both told me it was one of the best jobs in the state, and that Mr. Wells would do right by me.” Teel and his little boy moved to Oxford on March 11, 1953.
Wells, an elderly, effeminate bachelor, apparently fell in love with Teel and did everything he could to help the young man establish himself in Oxford. “Teel had a power over Mr. Wells,” recalled the gracious older woman in whose home Wells boarded. “It was like he wanted so badly for Teel to love him.”
The relationship paid off handsomely for the ambitious new-comer. Teel performed his duties well, attracted considerable business and eventually, with a coworker, bought the older man’s business. “We sort of more or less pressured him,” Teel said. The pair informed Mr. Wells that they were planning to open a barbershop down the street. “He said, ‘I won’t be no good without you at my age, and I’d rather sell to you than have you competitive against me.’ That’s how we done it.” Whatever Teel lacked in polish of education, he made up for in crude charm and raw cunning. He built up a reputation as a talented barber and began to cut the hair of Granville County’s economic and political elite at his shop downtown. “He cut my hair many times,” Mayor Hugh Currin recalled. “Good barber, and a right good fellow, too, though I would not advise you to cross him.”
Others saw Teel as “a man very much out for his own personal gain,” which rubbed some of the more traditional Southerners the wrong way. If grasping ambition ran against the grain of Granville County’s rickety agricultural elite, however, it was perfectly acceptable to the rising class of merchants and lawyers who had begun to lure industry into the county. The 1960s were boom years for Oxford. Despite some resistance from old planter families, who feared wages going up and Yankees coming down, Granville Developers Inc. recruited roughly 4,000 new manufacturing jobs to the county during the decade. Not quite all of the new jobs were reserved for whites. Teel fit into the new spirit well, his conversation ambling in the old tobacco-farming style but his aspirations honed to “New South” boosterism. “I’ve always had the ambition to want a nice home,” said Teel, “a ten-thousand-dollar brick home, a nice, big Cadillac, at least one boy, things like that.”
Having gotten a good start financially, Teel met and married Colleen Oakley, a high-strung widow from the nearby township of Berea. Oakley’s first husband had died in an industrial accident, leaving her with three children—Elbert, Jerry, and Roger Oakley. The first children Colleen and Teel had together were twins born prematurely; one of them, Alton, died almost immediately. The other twin, Alvin, Teel explained, “always had some hearing problems, and eye problems, and an allergy-type thing.” Two healthy boys followed the twins: Jesse and then Gerald, the last one born, like me, in 1959. Half of them were Teels and half of them were Oakleys, but they all seemed to be young men with dark hair, olive skin, and a reputation, deserved or not, for a bad temper.
It wasn’t just the men. Colleen Oakley Teel could cut quite a shine herself. When I was in the fourth grade at Credle Elementary, one of my mother’s fellow teachers gave one of the children a bad grade, and his mama reportedly came to school and beat the teacher over the head with a pocketbook. Black children who grew up in Oxford remembered Mrs. Teel chasing them after a disagreement over a tricycle. “Y’all black niggers!” they said she yelled. “I’m gonna kill every last one of you!” One of Teel’s lawyers, thinking back on the family twenty years later, considered the problem to be congenital. “I guess it just runs in the family,” the attorney told me. “He was hotheaded, his wife was hotheaded, and the children were hotheaded. I think it was just in their blood to be hotheaded. I mean, you just didn’t need to be messing with the Teels.”
As the Teel family grew, they also became quite prosperous. Teel bought a big, gracious home on the corner of Front and Main. It was a white two-story house with ample porches held up by carved pillars. Magnolias and crape myrtles perfumed Front Street in the summer, and the victorian-era homes on the broad, tree-lined avenue—one or two of them literally mansions—belonged to some of the county’s wealthiest families. Front Street was only one block over from Hancock, where we lived, but I realize now that it was a long way socially; houses on Hancock were far more humble, though I’d never e
ven noticed when I was growing up. But while the Teels had the money to live on Front Street, they lacked what their more aristocratic neighbors would have thought of as “background.” They were still uneducated and, like my family, they were still from somewhere else. And so perhaps it is not surprising that, apart from the youngest children, they kept to themselves. Besides, Robert Teel was too busy for social climbing, even if he had entertained such aspirations. He made his money not from an inherited plantation or a position at the bank, but with his own hands.
In fifteen years cutting hair downtown near the courthouse, Teel won the trust of a number of Oxford’s bankers and landowners. In 1969, these connections helped him buy the large lot at Four Corners, literally across the tracks from the rest of Oxford, in the heart of Grab-all. Beside the roughest part of Grab-all, “around the bend,” where many houses did not even have indoor plumbing, let alone washing machines, Teel erected four cinder-block storefronts. Before he knew it, Teel had managed to install what amounted to a little shopping center without investing a nickel of his own money.
The coin laundry was the most lucrative of Teel’s businesses. His convenience store offered his African American customers basic groceries at high prices, but within walking distance. Besides these, gas pumps, a car wash, a Yamaha motorcycle dealership, and a barbershop kept the Teel and Oakley boys busy and the money rolling in. “Out there it was a percentage black and a percentage white, it was near about a fifty-fifty deal, and people could decide whether they wanted to go all-black or all-white,” Teel recalled. The neighborhood was all black, of course, and so the walk-in customers were black, but the store’s location at the intersection meant that perhaps half his customers were white.
The grocery store and the coin laundry were open to anybody, but the barbershop was whites only. “And the races were mixing some out there,” Teel said, “and I figured I could just stand there and take up the money.” Before the killing occurred, Teel said, “Mr. Roger Page had told me he’d help me put in volkswagens to sell on that lot next door, and that would have been another business over there.” Even without the car dealership, Teel claimed, his road to becoming a millionaire was clear to him within the first year. Richard Shepard, the owner of a funeral home in the black community, felt that Teel was not exaggerating: “He would have been rich if he had stayed out of trouble.” But trouble always found its way to Teel’s door.
Between 1969 and 1977, Teel was arrested many times, charged with at least a dozen different offenses, including driving under the influence of alcohol; two separate counts of assault on a police officer; assault by pointing a gun; assault and battery; aiding and abetting murder; assault with a deadly weapon; assault on a female; and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury. Judges dismissed eight of these charges, and the other four netted Teel only suspended sentences and small fines. “It always seemed like there was some kind of loophole,” said one court official who had been present at most of the proceedings. “I don’t think it was by design, I just think that was how things worked out.” A local African American businessman saw things differently: “Had Teel been a black man, he would have been in jail after his first assault. There would have been no suspended sentences.”
Not all of the clashes at Teel’s place involved race. “He didn’t care who it was,” observed one young black man who frequented the abandoned Tidewater Seafood Market next door. “He was a mean person—to anybody. Didn’t make no difference who, black or white.” Other observers noted that Teel didn’t seem to like the poor whites that used his washing machines any more than the blacks. Boo Chavis claimed to have seen Teel bodily remove a troublesome white customer from the laundry. Herman Cozart, who knew something about physical labor, generously speculated that one reason Teel was testy was because he had to work so hard. “He had to pump gas and cut hair and run all them washers and take care of everything,” he noted. “He had to work like a man, I could see that much.”
Two notorious brawls exploded between Teel and Archie Wilkins, the white police lieutenant who later became Oxford’s chief of police. These fistfights, both of which Teel won handily, created bad blood between Teel and the police department. The first time, Wilkins pulled Teel over for drunken driving and quickly ended up on his back in the street, Teel standing over him with his fists cocked, asking did he want some more. Another time, Wilkins took a second officer along with him and went to the store to hassle Teel about something. “I saw the cops go over there,” Boo Chavis said later, “two of them, and he beat ’em up, both of ’em, beat both of ’em up pretty bad.” A state trooper came to the store and arrested Teel that time. “He didn’t respect the cops,” Chavis recalled. “He was his own law, as far as he was concerned.” After he beat up Officer Wilkins, Teel said later, he “couldn’t get no police protection for my businesses, no matter what.” It was certainly true that the police were not eager to come to Grab-all for any reason. Other blacks speculated that the police steered clear simply because they were afraid of Teel.
Each time there was violence, Teel called upon Billy Watkins, the powerful local attorney who served in the state legislature. “I think he had good legal representation,” one of the local courthouse gang sniffed when I asked him how Teel had managed to draw only small fines and suspended sentences for these clashes. Some local blacks believed that the police let Teel alone because many of them were his fellow Klan members.
The evidence seems strong that at some point Teel joined the Granville County klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Though the membership lists have never been public and I cannot prove he was a Klansman, the KKK held fish fries, barbecues, and square dances at which Teel was seen on any number of occasions by people who were loath to admit having attended themselves. “It was just how we rallied around in those days,” one local woman admitted, echoing a local refrain of remorse, “because of all the race trouble. I was afraid my daughter was going to bring home a black boy. My impression was that Teel was one of the leading people in the Klan. He asked me to dance one time, but I didn’t do it. I never went back to that thing again, either.” While remarks like these could be dismissed as hearsay, it is true that when Teel got in trouble in 1970, the Klan held rallies for him and protected his house and his place of business with armed guards. If he was not a member, he certainly had no trouble calling upon the organization’s resources when he needed them.
That was why Boo and I had seen the crowd of Klansmen all over the Teel family’s front porch the evening after the murder. We knew all too well what those robes and hoods were intended to say to the world: that Gerald’s daddy belonged to the evil order that our father had taught us was a force of pure hatred in this world. But Daddy had also taught us to confront hatred with love, and that some people you just had to leave in the hands of the Lord. “We just have to let God handle that one,” Daddy would say. “The Lord isn’t quite finished with him yet, or you either.” I knew that the Klan wanted people to fear them, but I never saw any evidence that my daddy was afraid of anyone or anything, and I walked through the world blanketed by his protection. Daddy didn’t tremble at a bunch of pointy hats and what my uncle Bobby laughingly called “those reversible choir robes.” If they were so dangerous, why did Daddy take us to one of their meetings?
I reckon we were not the first white Southerners whose daddy took them to a Klan rally, but our visit was probably different than most. One evening when I was about six, the year before we moved to Oxford, Daddy trundled my brother, Vern, and me into “Chief Pontiac.” Vern, who was almost ten, sat in the front seat and I perched in the back, my arms hooked over the seat between him and Daddy; back then, nobody wore safety belts. We rattled down Highway 87 through the peach orchards of the Sandhills, across Little River, to the county line where Lee meets Cumberland, near Peggy’s Fish House. Daddy stopped the car on a dirt road uphill from a big, grassy field. We watched the carloads of people arriving and looked down as they used cables to erect a
giant wooden cross. Chief Pontiac was parked close enough so that we could hear the fiery speeches and see the fiery cross, a scene that took on the air of some kind of strange county fair. But as the flames flickered below, Daddy told us about racism and hatred and evil. Riding home together in the darkness, we sang “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world / Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” At some point, one of us asked Daddy exactly why he had taken us to see the cross burning. “I wanted you to know what hate looks like,” he said.
In those days, the hooded order was having a revival in eastern North Carolina, barnstorming the countryside night after night. “North Carolina is by far the most active state for the United Klans of America,” a congressional investigation reported in 1965, listing 112 local klaverns. Taking advantage of the fear and resentment aroused by the civil rights movement, the Klan plunged for the mainstream. At their almost nightly gatherings across the state, the KKK served barbecue and fried fish plates. They raffled off cases of motor oil, coconut cakes, and trips to Myrtle Beach. Hooded Klansmen staffed a booth at the state fair, and the head of the Johnston County klavern, Billy Flowers, was invited to speak on “Today’s Problems” at a Methodist church in Smithfield, alongside the chair of the local Republican Women’s Club. Five thousand attended a 1965 Klan wedding in a cornfield near Farmville. A rally near Fayetteville drew almost fifteen thousand people in November. Speakers railed against “burr-headed niggers” who aspired to “sit beside our sweet little white girls in school.” The chair of the state Republican Party, Jim Gardner, attributed the Klan’s success to “a general dissatisfaction with the Johnson administration,” especially on matters of civil rights. But he warned against believing Klan claims to having members in the state legislature and against taking the huge rallies in eastern North Carolina as indications of the Klan’s actual size. “I believe there are many persons sympathetic to the Klan,” Gardner said, “who do not belong to it.”