Blood Done Sign My Name (3 page)

In Oxford, black people lived in several distinct neighborhoods, all of which came under the rubric of “niggertown,” as my playmates on Hancock Street called it. The older boys and even some of the younger ones on our street knew about that side of town because they had visited uninvited many times. On warm nights, they would pile into the back of a pickup truck and go “nigger knocking.” The teenaged boys filled the truck bed with Coca-Cola bottles and rocks, then roared through the African American neighborhoods hurling them at pedestrians, windshields, and windows. I heard secondhand tales of these vicious adventures many times from Jeff Daniels, who was my age and lived across the street from me. Neighborhood boys older than us were a regular part of these attacks. And then one Christmas, when I saw my cousins from Laurinburg at my grandmother's house, they told me about some white high school boys near Maxton who had thrown a beer bottle out of a moving car and hit an elderly black man in the head, killing him. It seemed so awful. But I knew exactly what had happened. It didn't matter that it wasn't our town or our boys who had killed someone. I knew even as a little boy that it was all part of the same ordinary evil that divided us into separate and unequal worlds.

The Orpheum Theater, where my friends and I went to the movies on Saturday mornings, was segregated, and black customers sat in “the buzzard's roost”—the balcony upstairs. We often slipped up through the ratty seats and sticky aisles to throw popcorn over the railing onto the white children below. To transgress the color line was disreputable and therefore periodically irresistible for otherwise respectable white boys such as ourselves. White girls would have been much more carefully policed. And for blacks to challenge that line was not only criminal but mortally dangerous; when they did, white policemen—virtually all police officers were white men—punished them for breaking custom as well as law.

The law meant little in Oxford. Many people nowadays think that after the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations, café owners and city officials read the news in the morning paper and took down all those WHITE ONLY and COLORED signs by lunchtime. But this landmark legislation did not make a dent in Oxford. The town's leaders immediately elected to close most city parks, the municipal baseball diamond, and the public swimming pool. Rucker Pool, a fine structure built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s with tax dollars and local fieldstone, had been “public, yes,” explained Mayor Hugh Currin, “but whites only.” Rather than obey federal law, Oxford chose to sell Rucker Pool to some local white businessmen for pocket change. These men operated the pool as a whites-only “private club.” Dues were not prohibitive, but the board barred all blacks. Neither the chamber of commerce nor the local Merchants Association opened their ranks to black members. “There's no question about it,” Mayor Currin explained years later, when I asked him about how blacks and whites got along in Oxford. “By and large the larger portion of white people looked down on black people. I don't think there was any hostility between the races—it was just an accepted way of life.”

Though black citizens had their own lives, families, churches, and social institutions, which they had little desire to abandon, they did not accept this “way of life” that relegated them to a lower caste. In the spring of 1970, blacks in Oxford complained bitterly about the lack of parks. Most of the parks in white neighborhoods had been closed to avoid integration, while the city had never built one single park in a black neighborhood. Mayor Currin explained that most of the land for Oxford's city parks had been bequeathed to the city with legal clauses that would rescind the gift should the parks ever be opened to black people. The United States Supreme Court had ruled in the late 1940s that such restrictive covenants were unenforceable, but the law did not matter. In any case, the city government ignored several offers from private citizens of free land for public parks. It rejected an offer from Carolina Power and Light Company to provide free basketball goals. The town's Recreation Committee never drew a quorum for meetings, said local blacks, because there was a tacit understanding that no recreational facilities would be provided so that none would have to be integrated.

A few weeks before the killing of Henry Marrow, city workers closed one of Oxford's few remaining public parks in a white residential area and removed the basketball goals, alleging that “noise” bothered the neighbors. According to local blacks, however, the reason the city closed the park was because it had begun to draw interracial basketball games—playing “salt and pepper,” the boys called it. During one such game, a white man had emerged from one of the nearby houses and told the boys, “Niggers can't play here—y'all got to leave.” One of the black youths talked back to him and he slapped the young man hard across the face. Two days later, the city truck arrived and workmen uprooted the basketball goals. Years afterward, one of the neighbors admitted to me, “The grown-ups were all scared. We should have listened to the children.”

If my own mother, Martha Buie Tyson, ever sought the guidance of her children on racial matters or anything else, I do not remember it. She stood along the banks of our lives like a tree. What she believed and what she did was between her and the Lord, and what we believed and what we did was between us and the Lord and Martha Buie Tyson. Mama was a quietly beautiful woman with pretty brown hair, cream-colored skin that deepened past beige in the summertime, and rich brown eyes. She'd grown up in a big white house, the oldest daughter of the leading family of a small mill town not far from Oxford. “The bell cow of Biscoe,” my father sometimes called her, although he only said that when she was visibly sunny; one did not trifle with my mother.

Her telephone voice sang in that sweet lilt of the Southern belle, but there was nothing merely ornamental about her. She wore a gold charm bracelet that jingled decorously when she walked. It had one charm for each of her children, a little brass schoolhouse, my father's high school ring, and a small gold medal she had won in a county-wide speaking contest in high school for her oration on world peace. She had been the president of the senior class at Greensboro College and was brilliant, too, I realize now. When I was ten, women could be virtuous and kind, but who knew they could be brilliant?

Mama read constantly, and her first visit to the local public library gave her a taste of the embattled racial atmosphere in Oxford. She picked up a copy of
Jubilee,
by Margaret Walker, a black novelist and poet from Jackson, Mississippi. Everyone who worked in the public library was white in those days, except the janitor, and it was segregated, although there were no signs to that effect. When Mama handed
Jubilee
to the librarian behind the counter, the woman peered over her glasses and said, “You don't want to read that,” setting the book aside as though my mother were a little child who'd found a poisonous mushroom. “I
do
want to read it, actually,” my mother insisted, reaching past the librarian for the book. The librarian reluctantly handed over the novel, shaking her head at Mama's disreputable choice. “They tried to segregate your mind,” my mother recalled of the incident, looking like she wanted to spit.

If Mama's mind was flint and steel, her hands were soap and sympathy. I loved to share a hymnal with her at church. She always held the red leather book low so that I could read it, and her soprano was sweet milk to me. Her mothering style was quickstep and unwavering. Chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches materialized as if she had summoned them by sorcery; heads were patted, cheeks were kissed. In love and work, her household moved at a brisk and consistent pace. Though she resisted playing any set role as “the preacher's wife,” Mama also took care of dozens of other people, in ways large and small, without any fanfare. “I do the preaching, she does the practicing,” Daddy liked to say, though she preached and he practiced more than the joke acknowledged.

Mama's congregation was a classroom of third graders at C. G. Credle Elementary School. In those days some people at church considered it somewhat disgraceful for a white woman—especially the preacher's wife—to work after she got married. But Mama paid them no mind and remained a consummate professional. She wore long skirts, practical shoes, and cotton sweaters with things stitched onto them—ribbons, bells, wreaths, one-room schoolhouses. It did not bother me that she taught right down the hall from the classroom where Miss Sue Bryan ruled me with an iron hand. Mama belonged at school. Every time the bishop appointed my father to a new church—my baby sister Julie once pointed to the bishop's name on a church bulletin and muttered bitterly, “I do not like that man”—we would cart dozens of boxes of her teaching supplies out to her station wagon and into her new school. It never struck me as odd that Mama was at Credle Elementary, nor did I notice that it conferred certain advantages when I got in trouble with Miss Bryan, as I often did.

Miss Bryan had been teaching the fourth grade at Credle since large reptiles walked the earth. She was an utterly unreconstructed Confederate. When she talked about the Civil War, which she firmly insisted that we refer to as “the War Between the States,” I was pretty sure that she had marched up Cemetery Ridge with Pickett, though this could not have been true or the Yankees never would have won at Gettysburg. I had run afoul of Miss Bryan early in fourth grade, when she gave a true-false quiz on North Carolina history, the final question of which was “Granville County is the best place to live on earth.” Methodist ministers moved every few years, and so I considered myself a man of the world. My grandmother's house, for example, was only eighty miles from Oxford, and anything that I wanted at her local drugstore lunch counter—fresh-squeezed orangeades and limeades, a “cherry smash”—was charged to “Miz Buie” without my even asking. And so I naturally marked the statement false, a mistake that Miss Bryan designated with a big red X and for which she deducted ten points. No discussion. As far as she was concerned, this was a simple point of historical fact.

My ardor for books did not impress Miss Bryan. I think my mother and Mrs. Patsy Montague, the rosy-cheeked woman with white hair and pink suits who served as principal, both realized that the less time Miss Bryan and I spent together, the better off everyone would be. For the rest of the year, “Miz Patsy” would periodically summon me out of Miss Bryan's class and wave me on into the library, where my mother conducted storytime with her pupils. Her students considered me something of an honorary classmate, since they knew I was her subject, too, even though I was never in her class. (Once, when she pressed one of her slower pupils for the answer to a social studies question, he scratched his head and finally said, “I reckon Tim would know.”) I loved the sound of Mama's resonant reading voice and her deep brown eyes, even though she could seem mighty proper at times.

My mother had been raised by lovely people who believed that white people belonged on top and that white people, especially the better classes, had an obligation to treat blacks charitably and help lift them up, though not to the point of “social equality.” But Mama had grown out of this mold long before the spring of 1970. When she'd attended Greensboro College in the early 1950s, her professors had quietly organized interracial meetings with African American coeds from Bennett College, a historically black institution, which had helped to open her eyes to certain realities on the other side of the color line. Over the years, she'd continued to peel back the white supremacist assumptions of her well-kept world and to throw them off layer by layer. She never shook her mother's convictions about our responsibilities to “those less fortunate than ourselves,” but Mama went far beyond her own mother's worldview. It was not that she was untainted by the white supremacy that marked her world and all the people she knew, black and white. All of us breathed it in unconsciously, like we did the smell of curing tobacco. But like her mother, if not in precisely the same ways, Mama was an independent thinker who was never content to tack her thoughts to the prevailing winds and declined to let the world dictate her opinions.

Her own mother, Jessie Thomas, a shrewd and lovely sharecropper's daughter, never went to college, even though she followed her father's plow down the furrows of spindly cotton and begged him to send her to Women's College so she could become a teacher. But there was not enough money for that, and even if there had been cash stacked up like stove wood, most farmers in those days would have been reluctant to spend it educating a girl. What seemed much more likely was that Jessie would end up working in the textile mill. As willful as her daddy, Jessie Thomas refused to yield herself to the mill. Instead, she found a clerical job at Efird's Department Store in Charlotte and began saving her pennies. Impressed with her wit and presence, Mr. Efird spoke highly of her to Charles Buie, the bright and amiable bookkeeper at the textile mill in Biscoe. Buie began by asking her parents if he could drive Miss Thomas back to Charlotte one Sunday and ended by marrying her. Soon afterward, the mill owners selected Charles Buie as general manager, offered him a handsome salary, and gave Mr. and Mrs. Buie a big white house in the middle of town.

By December 7, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans that the Japanese had bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Jessie Thomas Buie had already saved enough money to open the Biscoe Sandwich Shop, which sat right beside the bus station in the little mill town. Those years were the heyday of bus travel, and tiny Biscoe was situated at the intersection of the major routes connecting Charlotte to Raleigh and Greensboro to Wilmington. As the country mobilized for war, soldiers, draftees, and workers poured through the bus station, hundreds and hundreds each day. Many of them bought Jessie's yeast rolls stuffed with pimento cheese, chicken salad, or egg salad, each one carefully wrapped in wax paper with a napkin tucked into the fold. Though she never went to college, Jessie paid college tuition for both of her sisters, partly out of generosity and partly, perhaps, to spite her father. The first time Jessie set foot in the textile mill, she wore a plumed hat and handed out free ham biscuits.