Blood Done Sign My Name (16 page)

For years, I have told myself the story of Mrs. Allen and me on the day Dr. King died. Without thinking about it much, I have remembered it as a story of how, even at one of the worst moments in our nation's racial history, the color line could dissolve in redemptive love. Even now, the memory brings tears to my eyes. And yet I have to confess that my account erases some of the important truths about my relationship with Mrs. Allen and the moment. In a society where white men made decisions and black women made dinners, she was a black woman who worked for my white parents. Even if those barriers had not governed everything that passed between us, I was nine years old. Mrs. Allen, who understood her world clearly enough, did not need explanations about the power of redemptive suffering from me. She had a church, a family, and a whole life of her own of which I knew almost nothing. And she had already realized, as I would come to understand only many years later, that what had happened on that bloody balcony in Memphis threatened to destroy any path that could ever connect us. As I look back at the story, I still feel the enveloping love that she gave me. But what strikes me most is the soothing and self-congratulatory way that I interpreted the moment in my memory, and how much greater was the distance between us than I could possibly comprehend.

ONE SUNNY DAY in the terrible spring of 1968, the poet laureate of Oxford accosted me on the sidewalk. I was nine years old and had recently written my first poem, which I'd showed to my mother, who had immediately showed it to Thad without telling me. It is possible that I had not yet fully comprehended that adults are engaged in a relentless conspiracy against the privacy and dignity of their offspring. Thad was smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette, about half of which seemed to fester into smoke with every deep drag. The smoke swirled around his head and sometimes shot out his nostrils suddenly, which scared me a little. “I hear you wrote a poem, boy,” he growled at me. “I want to hear it.”

Terrified, I reluctantly admitted authorship but firmly denied any memory of the text itself. “Don't lie to me, boy,” Thad spat. “You remember every goddamn word you ever wrote.” I was stunned to hear an adult use the g-d word right there on the sidewalk, where lightning could strike at any second. But the language had the desired effect. After I stammered through all three stanzas of “March Winds Blow and Kites Fly High,” which I will spare the reader here, Thad walked me up to Hall's Drugstore and bought me an Eskimo Pie. Afterward, he escorted me up creaky stairs that smelled like an old trunk to his office above the drugstore, where his heavy black Underwood typewriter perched on a cluttered altar of books and papers. He pulled down several volumes and enchanted me with snatches of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Walt Whitman. His office charmed me utterly. Thad's musty sanctuary, like Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor, had improved upon God's work and given it miracle, mystery, and authority. I became a frequent visitor.

From that day forward, a writer was something you could be, like a plumber or a teacher. In order to preserve my standing in this secret fraternal order of the Word, I read all of Mr. Stem's published poetry and wrote more poems of my own to show him. Not long afterward, I penned something fanciful—a boy's romantic ditty about a distant war and a gallant soldier. In the late 1960s, as the
Vietnam War made more and more corpses and less and less sense, distant wars and gallant soldiers were considerably less romantic to Thad than to his young admirer. He praised my eloquence, but gently suggested that I write instead about the things that I knew—the people around me, what he called my own “little postage stamp of soil,” a phrase I would locate decades later in the works of William Faulkner. My next poem about a distant war was about dear Chuck Rose, the lifeguard at Green Acres swimming pool, who stayed after hours one summer evening to teach a nine-year-old boy to dive and came home in a coffin the following Christmas from a place called
Vietnam. But three years after I met Thad, my own little postage stamp of soil yielded up a story that changed my life forever. And I promised him that I would write it someday.

CHAPTER 6

THE DEATH OF HENRY MARROW

Henry D. Marrow Jr. did not normally go to Teel's place. “I never seen him before in my life,” Teel later told me, “until the day he come in here. I didn't really see him until I rolled him over with the butt of the gun.” Marrow was about five feet, nine inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. His family and friends called him Dickie. Soft-spoken and sweet natured, he was not a physically imposing twenty-three-year-old. “He would fight,” said one of his close companions, “but he won't no bully.” His friends thought of Marrow as quiet and reserved, though he liked to drink beer and laugh sometimes. “He was just a regular guy,” said Herman Cozart. “I knowed him right good, and I liked him all right. He didn't hurt nobody.”

Dickie Marrow's mother and father had separated when he was young. His father, Henry D. Marrow Sr., had moved to South Carolina, where he'd been killed in an altercation. His mother, Ivey Hunt Marrow, had gone to New Jersey to find work, leaving her son with her parents in Grab-all. As a teenager, Dickie had moved in with the Chavis family on West College Street, about a block from where Robert Teel would soon build his storefronts. After he'd finished at Mary Potter High, Marrow had attended Kittrell College in Kittrell, North Carolina, for a year or so, and had then come back to live with the Chavis family, although he still stayed with his grandparents some nights, and he saw his mother whenever she visited. Jimmy and William Chavis were both about his age, and the boys were all close friends. “We slept in the same room,” said William. “We wore each other's clothes. He was wearing my hat the night he died.”

The Chavis home was orderly. The Bible, good manners, and formal education were all highly valued. “They would lay that religion down,” said William, whom they called “Boo.” “They didn't play no mess.” Mary Catherine Chavis taught at Mary Potter High School and knew something about authority. “Mary Catherine and them was strict—they will tell you that,” Boo Chavis remembered. Mary Catherine Chavis developed a firm maternal attachment to Marrow. Beatrice and Roberta, her sisters, the other two adults in the household, were also fond of Dickie. Beatrice, whom they called “Fannie” or “Bee,” loved him with what seemed a special understanding of both his mischief and his merit. Marrow was the most reliable babysitter of all the older children, Mary Catherine thought, and helped out around the house more than the other boys.

“Dickie just adopted us,” said Mary Catherine Chavis. “We loved him.”

Like many teenagers, Marrow was restless and aimless, but he stayed out of trouble. At nineteen, he joined the army. Stationed at Fort Bragg, Marrow was less than a hundred miles from home—perhaps not far enough, Mary Catherine Chavis believed. He came to dislike military life and often visited home, sometimes slipping away without permission to court a young woman in Oxford. In the late 1960s, racial brawls involving hundreds of black and white soldiers occurred both in
Vietnam and at U.S. military bases around the country. The mostly white officers corps at Fort Bragg tried to maintain control, but the racial situation was extremely tense and volatile. Sometimes Marrow would overstay his leaves of absence and get in trouble with his superiors. And he did not want to go to
Vietnam; like most young African Americans of his generation, he considered this fiasco in Southeast Asia a white man's war and a black man's fight. Dickie's commanding officer took a personal interest in him, however, and did not throw the book at the young soldier. Discharged in 1968, having managed to avoid service in Southeast Asia, Dickie came straight home to Oxford.

Upon his return, Marrow resumed his life with the Chavis family. But even before he had left the army, the romance he had started with a local young woman named Willie Mae Sidney had blossomed, and by the time he moved back home they were on their way to the altar. Marrow landed a job as an orderly at Umstead Hospital in nearby Butner and settled into married life. Willie Mae gave birth to a daughter, Tammy, right after Dickie came home from the army and another girl, Tasha, a year later. Late in 1969, Willie Mae Marrow became pregnant again with a third daughter, whom Dickie Marrow would never live to see. Though he'd had a somewhat bumpy young life, Mary Catherine Chavis believed he was finding his way and had settled down to be a good father. “I thought he had picked up the pieces and was doing well,” she said.

On Monday, May 11, 1970, Marrow had dropped by the Chavis home after work to chat with Fannie, who was laid up on the couch after a minor surgery and wanted a cold drink. “I was sitting right out there on that porch, and he came through, messing with me, and playing, and I said, ‘Go on, Dickie, run up there and get a big Pepsi-Cola for me, and don't be all day getting back,' ” Fannie recounted. “When he got up there on the hill, halfway up to the Teel place, he called to me, and he waved to me, and I said, ‘You hurry back, now,' and he was gone.”

The old Tidewater Seafood Market sat on the corner beside the Teel place at Four Corners. Before the Teels had arrived, the old white wooden frame structure had been a service station, then a fish market, and by 1970 it stood empty. Its front overhang sheltered a Coca-Cola machine that still worked sometimes, and empty bottles were stacked in crates beside the machine. Young blacks sat on the curb where the gas tanks used to be or perched on the crates in the evening and talked. Cars would pull up and the drivers would roll down their windows and banter with anybody who might be around. When it was raining, the Tidewater provided shelter. A bottle of wine or a quart of malt liquor might make the rounds. “We stayed up on that corner all of the time,” Boo Chavis recalled. “We'd just sit up there chitchatting until two or three in the morning sometimes, if nobody didn't want to go home.”

A few minutes before nine o'clock that evening, Boo Chavis finished a hand of bid whist at a friend's house down the street and walked up toward the Tidewater. Dickie Marrow told the other young men under the awning that he was going over to Teel's store to get something to eat and to buy Fannie Chavis her big Pepsi-Cola. Dickie strolled unhurriedly across the thirty yards or so of gravel between Tidewater and the Teel place, past a cabin cruiser boat parked beside the store. Hidden from view, Robert Teel and his twenty-one-year-old stepson, Roger Oakley, were working inside the boat's cabin. As he continued toward the store, Marrow passed eighteen-year-old Larry Teel and his wife, Judy, who were in the parking lot near the shop, uncrating motorcycles that had been delivered that afternoon.

Rumor had it that Judy secretly enjoyed the company of young black men. “Everybody knew that,” one local black woman told me. Some people even claimed, after the fact, that she was involved with Henry Marrow. These rumors shaped the controversy that came afterward, but I have never found evidence that either of them was true. I personally don't believe she had ever laid eyes, let alone hands, on Henry Marrow before that day. Maybe her husband had heard the rumors, but it is just as likely that they were invented after the fact, in an effort to explain the inexplicable brutality that followed. But when Marrow violated a time-honored Southern taboo and appeared to make a flirtatious remark to Judy, Larry responded with instant rage. What Marrow actually said remains a matter of dispute and is probably unknowable. But it is clear that Larry Teel interpreted Marrow's words as a sexual remark from a black man to a white woman who belonged to him. “That's my wife you're talking to,” Larry yelled, reaching for a heavy length of wooden motorcycle crate that was lying on the gravel. Judy screamed, and Robert Teel and Roger Oakley clambered out of the boat and ran inside.

“We knew they was going for the guns,” said one onlooker.

Marrow tried to explain to Larry that he had not been talking to the white woman at all. “I was talking to the sisters,” he said, gesturing toward two young black women standing nearby. The young Teel did not accept the explanation and rushed at Marrow, swinging the heavy piece of wood. Marrow stumbled backward, dodging, and then snatched up a handful of rocks from the parking lot and hurled it into Larry's face. Behind the blast of gravel, Marrow quickly pulled a knife from his pocket. It was a folding pocketknife with an imitation bone handle and a four-inch blade. He opened it and held it forward menacingly, backing up slowly. “He didn't believe in running,” Boo Chavis explained. “And that's probably why he's dead.”

When the other young black men at Tidewater heard the commotion between Larry and Dickie, they came running with drink bottles. “We didn't like that goddamn Larry worth a damn,” one of them recalled. But when they saw the Teel boys racing into the barbershop, no one had to tell them what the white men were running to get. “We all said, ‘Hey, come on, Dickie, man,' but he just stood there,” Edward Webb recalled. The rest of the young black men fled just as fast as their legs would carry them. Robert Teel bolted out of the barbershop with a 12-gauge shotgun, and Roger Oakley was right on his heels with another gun, a combination .410-gauge shotgun and .22-caliber rifle, with the two barrels arranged over-and-under style.

Marrow finally fled, following the path his friends had taken around the fish market, running under the awning and starting toward the highway and the houses beyond. About half a dozen young black men were running full tilt well ahead of Dickie. Boo Chavis, however, knew nothing about what was happening and saw the first of them pass him on the other side of the highway as he strolled up to the Tidewater. They did not see him, and he crossed the road as they went by. “I thought they were racing, you know, sometimes we used to do that,” he recalled. “I didn't know where they were going so fast.”

Dickie ran for his life while all three of the white men gave chase, Teel with the 12-gauge, Roger with the other gun, and Larry still wielding the section of crate. Boo Chavis wandered directly into their path under the awning at the Tidewater, caught completely unawares, just as one of the pursuers opened fire. Two shotgun blasts in rapid succession splintered the air, and Boo felt a sharp burning on his face. Although the main force of the shot missed him, shotgun pellets peppered Chavis's head and face. “I put my hand up like this,” he said, touching his palm to his upper face and his forehead, “and it come down all bloody.” As the speechless Chavis brought his bloody hand down from his face, Robert Teel stopped three feet in front of him, staring with a vacant, animal gaze. They stood under the awning at the old seafood market perhaps twenty or thirty feet from where Marrow was stumbling, wounded in the buttocks. “What are you shooting me for?” Boo screamed at him. “I didn't do nothing!”

Teel made no reply, but simply aimed the gun at Boo's head. The red-faced barber “put a shotgun barrel in my face,” Boo testified later in court. It may be that Teel had simply mistaken Chavis for Marrow; the two men were roughly the same size and complexion, and Chavis was standing in exactly the wrong place. Why Teel didn't kill Chavis is hard to say. He had already fired the shotgun, for one thing, and even if he had pulled the trigger, it would have clicked on an empty chamber. Larry Teel, who ran up and swung the stick at Boo Chavis, may have interrupted his father before he pulled the trigger. In any case, Teel apparently saw Marrow, his intended target, running or perhaps already fallen face down in the dust and gravel on the other side of the Tidewater.

Saying nothing else to Boo Chavis, Teel dashed through the Tidewater's overhang, lowering the barrel of the shotgun and shooting again. “After I fired the twelve-gauge,” Teel told me many years later, “then Roger, he fires.” Roger emptied the upper shotgun barrel. Marrow had probably been hit by Robert Teel's first blast from the 12-gauge, though Roger's fusillade may have knocked him down. Boo Chavis could see what was happening as if it were in slow motion, but he could not make it stop. “I saw Dickie coming,” he told me years later, “and I heard the shots, and I saw him fall.” The young black veteran skidded onto his face in the dirt and gravel beside Highway 158.

Larry Teel, meanwhile, still swinging the stick, accosted the bleeding Boo Chavis, who had been trying to leave the scene, under the awning of the market. His face pouring blood, Boo wanted no part of whatever was happening. And Larry, too, may have mistaken Chavis for Marrow for a moment. But then Larry left Boo Chavis, threw down the stick, and ran to where his father and stepbrother stood over Dickie Marrow. Stunned, Chavis turned and watched the white men accost Marrow. “When we run around the building,” Robert Teel told me, “the boy was laying flat on his stomach.”

Dickie began to plead for his life, according to several witnesses. “Okay, okay, man, you got me,” he wept. “Let's just forget it, you got me.”

“He started getting up on his elbows,” recounted Teel matter-offactly, “and I had taken the gun and hit him with the butt across his head. Broke the gun butt half in two, and it wheeled him over on his back.” The blow fractured Marrow's skull and flipped his body like a pancake.

Larry Teel dived onto Marrow and began pounding him with his fists. “Larry jumped on him and hit him one or two licks,” said Teel. “Larry was hitting him and Teel and me was kicking him,” Roger Oakley testified later. “Larry got hold of the knife, and he told us he had it, and he got up.” They continued to beat the limp body beneath them.

“They kicked him in the head, and when it hit his head it sounded like knocking on wood,” said Boo Chavis, who was watching from under the awning. “They took the butt of the shotgun and started beating him in the face. I guess they did that for about five minutes.”

The three white men stood above the prostrate Marrow, kicking him. The barrel of the over-and-under rifle pointed toward Dickie's head. “They were right down on top of him,” recalled Boo Chavis. “The barrel was down on his head, touching it.”