Blood Done Sign My Name (11 page)

CHAPTER 5

KING JESUS AND DR. KING

IN THE BEGINNING, the Bible says, was the Word. And Oxford's leading man of the Word became my father's friend and ally as soon as we arrived. “You've got great gifts,
Vernon,” Thad Stem, Oxford, North Carolina's only known author, once told my daddy, “and people love you, too, even if you are a dupe of the international communist conspiracy.” Thad grinned. There was a conspiracy, all right, and they were both members of it, but it had precious little assistance from Moscow or anywhere else, and could have held its meetings in a booth down at the Three-Way Diner. Not that Thad would have made a very good liberal crusader: “I really dig sharks,” the poet once wrote, “because when they bite your goddamn head off, they never say it was for a good cause.”

The ever-irascible Thad must have been around fifty when I met him. He had silver hair and wore black turtlenecks and blue jeans, tweed jackets and white Converse All-Stars, strange attire for a grown-up. (I had never heard of bohemians or intellectuals. There were only grown-ups and kids, near as I could tell, and I knew who was in charge. But this man seemed to belong to neither category.) Thad, who called himself “a militant, if not particularly sophisticated, New Dealer,” soon visited Daddy's office regularly to rail against the “tithing racists” and “mealy-mouthed miscreants” who beset them both and to remind his new friend to keep the faith.

The real problem with most liberals and do-gooders in general, Thad thought, was that they were faint of will and fuzzy of purpose. “You're going to win if you don't weaken,
Vernon,” Thad liked to say, grinning at his preacher pal as he turned to leave. “Just stick to your guns and keep preaching like the angel Gabriel and kissing up on everybody's grandmama, and you're gonna win.” And with that, our writer friend, who once signed a letter, “Thad Stem, Jr. If Not The Best Poet in Granville County, Certainly The Best On Gilliam Street,” would take his ambling leave.

Our own pathway from Sanford, where Miss Amy and Dr. Proctor had rescued my father from his good intentions, to Oxford, where Thad gave us aid and comfort, ambled in its own way. Even though Miss Amy had won the day, and Dr. Proctor had mopped them up from the pulpit, Daddy had paid a price. “There's still so much talk about
Vernon having Dr. Proctor here,” Mama wrote a month later. “I hear a lot of catty remarks.
Vernon seems a little discouraged, though he has not said it.” But Daddy did not back off. On July 19, she observed, “Vernon preached a very good sermon on race relations but strong. I am so proud of him.” Later that summer, my father confided in his diary, “Since February, I have had my most troublesome time in the ministry. Some stopped giving to the church. Some stopped attending worship. One man moved his membership. I have tried to weather the storm, but the ‘Dr. Proctor' episode has taken its toll.”

Within a few months, however, the dust of battle settled and the landscape of victory became clear. Even though many people had been upset, in the end only one man actually left our church in Sanford over the race issue. “He was a tobacco farmer, hadn't really been in the church since I had been there,” Daddy said, “but if I would show up in the fall after he'd sold tobacco, he would give me a check for two hundred dollars.” When Daddy went to see him that fall, the farmer said he wasn't going to be a part of any church mixed up in that integration mess. But another woman, an unmarried schoolteacher, showed up at Daddy's study one day. “She told me, ‘I know what this church is standing for in this community and I want to move my membership here,' ” Daddy recalled. “And she did some church work and was a tither,” he added, meaning that she gave 10 percent of her income to the church. Daddy grinned. “I traded a two-hundred-dollar farmer for a tithing schoolteacher.”

More happiness arrived at the end of the Freedom Summer of 1964. On the morning of August 12, Mama “woke up having some pretty hard pains,” she scribbled. “Got to hospital at 12:00. Our lovely little Julie born at 3:00. Am so happy to have another girl. Got along fine.
Vernon sent red roses. We love each other so all is well.” Though I am tempted to high-hat Daddy about this—my generation of fathers was expected to do a lot more than send flowers—I can't say I was paying much attention at the time. I was too absorbed in my duties as Daniel Boone, friend to the Indians and enemy to the redcoats, to pay very much attention to the arrival of a new sister. Daddy brought
Vern and me to see Mama in the hospital, and Grandmother Jessie brought three-year-old Martha Buie. “She is so precious,” Mama noted. Julie would be her last child, and somehow seemed a signal that the storm clouds had passed.

Daddy had not only weathered the gale over Dr. Proctor's visit; he had come out of it strong enough to build a new sanctuary and fill its pews. Curiously, he thought, no one had asked the bishop to move him away from Sanford. In fact, the bishop told him that his office had received a number of letters asking him to keep Daddy in his pulpit— probably from parishioners who assumed that our enemies would try to be rid of us. But apparently there was nothing to fear. “I am definitely returning to Sanford for my sixth year,” Daddy noted in his diary in June 1966. “I am as happy in my ministry here as I ever hope to be. The longer I stay the more I appreciate this congregation.”

Apparently the Lord had other plans.

One Sunday that fall, my father looked out over his congregation and noticed four or five strangers sitting together near the back of the church. After the service, they quietly let him know that they were the pastor-parish relations committee from the Oxford United Methodist Church, and that they were shopping urgently for a new minister.

Their previous minister—the Reverend Smith, as I shall call him—apparently had become spiritually and perhaps otherwise entangled with one of the more prominent women in his congregation. Counseling the good sister on matters of the Spirit, alas, Reverend Smith had wandered into the realm of the flesh. And the poor fool, intoxicated by love, had written Herself an amorous and wistful letter, which had fallen into the hands of her husband. Mr. Jones, as I shall call him, was a shopkeeper in a nearby town who sold, among other things, shotguns and pistols.

While Mr. Jones's response to the illicit overture is perfectly understandable, we should not rush to harsh judgment of the unfortunate pastor. Falling into such a dalliance, if that is what it was, is common enough among preachers to constitute a professional liability. Of course, not all hatters are mad, and not all preachers run off with the church organist. But ministers tend to be impassioned men of the Word, large of ego, expansive of spirit, persuasive by profession, and admired by their flocks. Their status and their gifts offer them many temptations, and theological training does not transform a man into an angel.

Preachers counsel with their congregants, more of them women than men, on personal matters and in intimate settings. People pour out their souls to the preacher, and attachments develop easily. And if a lonely woman hankers to have an affair, the minister is the safest object in town. The minister is one fellow whom a woman can be certain won't kiss and tell, since he is very likely to lose everything should the matter become public. As Martin Luther King Jr. himself wrote in his “Advice for Living” column in
Ebony
magazine, “almost every minister has the problem of confronting women in his congregation whose interests are not entirely spiritual.” But if we should not be shocked that a man of the cloth can have feet of clay, neither should we expect Mr. Jones to have taken these mitigating factors into account when he found the minister's love letter among his wife's things.

Selecting a large and compelling revolver, Mr. Jones called upon the improvident parson, not so much to seek Divine guidance, but to deliver a sermon of his own. His homily has come down to me verbatim, at least third-hand, and hence the language may be mere legend, though it carries the ring of veracity. “You sorry son of a bitch,” the merchant is said to have said. “You have been loving up on my wife.” When impassioned denials were offered, Jones waved his text for the morning, written in the minister's own hand, and lifted his .357-magnum. “You Bible-thumping bastard,” Jones continued. “You are going to stay the hell away from my wife.” On this point, the brothers in Christ appeared to be reaching a spirit of unity. “And there you are standing up in there in that pulpit, passing yourself off as a man of God, lifting up prayers to the Lord, and then trying to persuade a good woman to leave her husband.”

Cocking the pistol and pressing the barrel against Reverend Smith's forehead, Mr. Jones outlined the conditions under which the improvident parson might live to preach another day. “This is my church,” the merchant said. “My mama went to this church, I was baptized here, and I am not leaving. But if I go to church Sunday morning and see you standing in that pulpit, I am going to kill you right then and there. In fact,” Jones asserted, “if you ever set foot in that pulpit again, I am going to blow your brains out and watch you bleed to death right there between the pulpit and the altar.” After prayerful consideration, the Reverend Smith decided it might be time for him to take that late-summer vacation he had been considering. He spent the next week or two sleeping in a tent up near Kerr Lake, slipping into town from time to time to help his own wife pack their household belongings. It is hard to say, of course, whether or not his impassioned parishioner would have carried out the threat, but Reverend Smith lit out for parts unknown without offering any final wisdom to his Oxford congregation except, perhaps, by example.

And so the committee had come to see Vernon Tyson, a promising minister whom they hoped to lure into the pulpit that Reverend Smith had vacated so hastily. Daddy came highly recommended, the Oxford pastor-parish relations committee told him, and now that they had heard him preach they certainly understood why. Would he consider moving to Oxford, if the bishop would send him? My father thanked them for coming but told them that he thought the Lord had called him to remain in Sanford.

The thing you have to understand about Daddy is that he wasn't just saying that stuff about the Lord. His God was a God who had a plan for your life, but who left you room to make your own mistakes. Your job was to watch for signs and to listen for guidance. What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine. Every step was part of a ballet too large for you to see it all, a provisional choreography perhaps not even intended for you to understand, and the key was to move into its rhythms with both humility and boldness, never mistaking yourself for the director. When he found himself in a car headed straight for Oxford a few days later, he felt a strong premonition that maybe the Lord had changed His mind. “Lord, I've got no business in Oxford, but I am here, and I am trying to cooperate with your leading,” as he wrote in his diary later, recounting his prayer. “If you have any leadership for me, send someone who can guide me.”

Daddy could literally inhale Oxford's history as he rolled into town that afternoon. The strong, sweet aroma of the world's finest cigarette tobacco filled his nostrils as he passed the wooden warehouses stacked with brightleaf gold. He drove past McCoy's Pool Hall and the Moonlight Cab Stand, where black men stood around on the corner, talking and telling jokes. At the center of town, in front of the courthouse, Daddy circled the bronze Confederate soldier in the middle of the intersection. Much like his comrades in nearly every town in the South, the old Rebel sentry had stood at the center of Oxford since 1909, when the Granville Grays chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy had erected the monument
To
Our Confederate Dead
. Turning back at the monument, Daddy passed the Orpheum Theater, where black moviegoers were relegated to the segregated balcony.

On College Street, he drove past the gracious old homes that were their own kind of monument to Southern grace and tobacco money. Shaded with magnolias, maples, and dogwood trees, College Street was picturesque in the antebellum style. Some houses looked like Tara in
Gone With the Wind,
with the white columns and brick walkways. More recent victorian homes, with their wraparound porches, gingerbread woodwork, and beveled-glass windows, also lined the broad avenue. As Daddy passed the Oxford orphanage on the edge of town, he turned back through a more modest neighborhood and saw the dull orange bricks of Timothy Darling Presbyterian Church, where Reverend Roscoe “Rock” Walls preached the ancient faith to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves. And then he pulled up in front of Oxford United Methodist Church at the corner of McClanahan and College Streets.

Daddy got out of his car and paused beneath the stained-glass windows. Oxford Methodist was a beautiful old brick church. Some parts of the building were older than others, and the brick did not quite match up, so the administrative board had decided to paint the whole thing a dull red. Sandblasting would fix that, he thought to himself, and make this a truly pretty church, with its quaint slate roof and gracious shade trees. He had a compelling, almost overwhelming sense that the Lord was telling him to come here, even though it made no practical sense. “I don't know when I have ever heard the voice of God so clearly,” he told me years later.

As Daddy stood in the churchyard wondering if he had really heard the Lord right, a car pulled up over the curb and parked in the grass right in front of the church office. A primly dressed woman stepped out of the car and started briskly inside. It was Frances Talton, the church secretary, although
Vernon did not know that at the time. “Can I help you?” she asked, looking a bit uneasy. He explained who he was and told her that he had just come down to see the church. “There's nobody here,” she stammered. “We don't have a preacher right now. And I don't like to come down here during the tobacco market, not without a preacher here. The whole town is full of nigger men and I just don't feel safe down here by myself.”