Blood Done Sign My Name (34 page)

Ben's wife, Joy Burwell Averett, was a lovely and gracious woman with fair skin and beautiful red hair who taught English at Webb High School. I loved her from the moment I met her, when I was seven. Her language sashayed with a musical lilt, and she was one of the kindest people I have ever known. When Ed and I were mere tots, she would assign us to write poems and then tell us how good they were; the purpose of literature, it became clear to me, was to please Joy Averett. And I will always remember a moment when I was eleven or twelve and she walked into the kitchen, singing a playful little song and laughing. Suddenly I realized that she was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on, an angel walking the earth. She asked me what was wrong, and I could only stammer with the little air available to me. Though puberty came and went, Joy would always be my sweetheart and my first real teacher. I am sorry that she did not live to see me write books, since that would have delighted her so much.

The farm where the Averetts lived was less than a mile from the spot where Henry Marrow died. My friendship with them has endured for the rest of our lives. But what also stayed with me is the story of Henry Marrow's murder. When the adults would send us boys to the store for cold drinks, I would carry the sweating bottles of Coca-Cola through the dust where Marrow died. Every time I went to that store, which the Teel family no longer owned, I waded through Henry Marrow's blood. And once again I would hear Gerald Teel's words in my head: “Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a
nigger.
”

During those summers I also began to learn more about why my family had left town. At first, it was just the occasional passing remark from other children. “Your daddy got run out of town,” a seventh grader taunted me at the swimming pool. “Why'd y'all have to move?” a little girl asked me from her family's backyard trampoline, and it was clear from her tone that her parents must have already told her the answer and that she expected me to be ashamed. As I became a teenager, grown-ups in Oxford assumed that I knew that my daddy had been “run off” by church members alienated by the memorial service for Dr. King, the black preachers invited to share his pulpit, and the “race mixing” among the young people at Wesley House.

Ben Averett, whom I regarded as an unwavering rock and something of an oracle, served on the pastor-parish relations committee at Oxford United Methodist Church during my father's tenure there. When I was in my late teens, Ben informed me that several committee members had made it plain that they were tired of Daddy's liberal politics. “They started getting ready to vote to not ask your daddy to come back the next year,” Ben told me. “And I told them they could go ahead and do it if they wanted to, but if they did I was never going to set foot in that church again.” More than twenty years passed before Ben set foot in Oxford United Methodist Church again, and then it was only for Joy's funeral, at her request.

Years later, when I returned to Oxford to research this book, Mary Catherine Chavis squeezed my hand warmly and said, “Your father was too good for this town.” Plainly out of respect for his sacrifices, though she is a generous soul anyway, Mrs. Chavis got on the telephone right away and lined up several interviews for me. I could overhear what she would tell her listeners: “He's the son of Reverend Tyson,” she would say. “You remember, the white preacher that they run off after Teel killed Dickie.”

This was not exactly how Daddy told the story. When I came home from talking to Ben, I asked him to tell me what had happened at the church. Daddy just shrugged and said it had been time to leave Oxford, and Wesley Memorial was a stronger church anyway. By his lights, Daddy told me, he had done all he could in Granville County, and it was time to move on. If he'd wanted to stay, Daddy said, he could have stayed. My father had no taste for losing, and in his story he had not lost. “Maybe some of those old boys were glad I left,” he said. “You know they were. And maybe some of them were trying to make me leave, and maybe they did some crowing after I was gone. You know, the rooster crows and the sun comes up, and the old rooster thinks he has done it. But the Lord sees it a little bit differently.”

Over the years I came to see his account as a cheerful, bighearted liberal story that he clearly believed was true. That was just Daddy's way. But I never shared his equanimity, nor did I feel much Christian forgiveness toward those who had scorned his expansive vision of God and humanity, and pushed our family into a harder history. That summer, as my hometown burned and my family moved away under a cloud, a curtain fell between that eleven-year-old boy and the adult world, a world that began to seem incorrigibly dishonest and cruel. As I grew into my late teens, I learned more about the circumstances of our departure, and my heart began to harden against the stupidity and hatred that had sent us away.

When our family moved from Oxford to Wilmington, I had just turned eleven. We piled into my mother's wood-paneled station wagon and drove through tobacco fields to Benson, a farming community in Johnston County where Mule Day every fall rivals Christmas. From Benson we rolled through more tobacco land to Spivey's Corner and stopped at the Green Top Grill for a barbecue sandwich and a bowl of banana pudding. In the booth, Daddy amused us with tales of the annual Spivey's Corner Hollering Contest, which celebrated the dying art of hailing neighbors from half a mile away. From there, we turned down through the long, lonesome stretches of piney woods to Wilmington. The last fifty miles of low-lying coastal plain were almost desolate in those days, and my mother cried quietly in the front seat. “I felt like I was going to Siberia,” she said in later years.

For us children, it was exciting to cross the bridge over the river and drive into Wilmington, a coastal city near the mouth of Cape Fear, whose river district of cobblestoned streets and rotting mansions evoked the Old South. Almost tropical, Wilmington seemed unimaginably distant from the tobacco-farming country where we had always lived. It had been the most important Southern port during the Civil War, and statues of Confederate generals loomed on street corners along the riverbank. From the old hulk of the battle-ship
North Carolina
, permanently anchored as a museum in the Cape Fear River, we saw
alligators
in the dirty water. The scrub-oak woods where we played were quick with red-winged blackbirds. In the pines we peered at trumpet plants and venus flytraps. The streets in our new neighborhood seemed all but paved with dead frogs, squashed by passing cars. Ruby-throated lizards darted all over our patio. Dangling Spanish moss, flowering oleanders and azaleas, and gracious antebellum architecture hinted at an unspoken history that still exerted a controlling influence on both sides of the color line.

Distant and exotic though Wilmington was, the troubles in Oxford seemed to follow us all the way there. Ben Chavis, who had articulated the anger and aspirations of young black people in Granville County, became a field organizer for the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, which promptly dispatched him to Wilmington. Chavis, having become a leader in his early twenties, confronted a predicament for which no one his age could have been prepared. Controversy over school integration plans and the bloody legacy of an unacknowledged local history made Wilmington a racial tinderbox. Reverend Leon White, director of the Franklinton Center at Bricks—where Judson King had worked back in the 1950s, when he'd met my uncle Earl in the courtroom—took young Chavis as a protégé and soon ordained the talented young firebrand as a minister. But, as my father remarked years later, “Ben really put on that collar before he knew what to do with it.”

In Wilmington, the newly minted Reverend Chavis opened a storefront Black Power church called the Church of the Black Madonna. There and at nearby Gregory Congregational Church, Chavis stoked the fires of black revolt among the young, leading protest efforts against the closing of Williston Senior High School. Founded by local blacks as Williston Industrial High School in 1919, this revered and vital black institution had once drawn students from across the South whose parents could scrape up enough money to send them. One of the four college students who launched the sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960 was a Williston graduate and, according to local legend, at least, Dr. King had been scheduled to speak in its auditorium the day after he was assassinated. In 1970, white authorities transformed proud Williston into a junior high school, its school colors, teachers, coaches, and history seemingly cast aside by integration plans that had no regard for black educational traditions. The white-dominated plan for integration in Wilmington involved building new suburban schools in white communities and shipping black students from inner-city neighborhoods out to suburbs where they were not welcome. Discrimination against black students, the closing of cherished black institutions, and the demotions and dismissals of black principals and black teachers stirred deep resentments into this recipe for disaster.

By the time we had been in town for six months, Wilmington hovered on the edge of racial cataclysm. As in Oxford, buildings burned almost every night. The chief of police reported more than thirty cases of arson during the first week of February 1971, with property damage that week at more than half a million dollars. A white terrorist group called the Rights of White People (ROWP) roared through the city, spraying bullets; with their own armada of trucks armed with CB radios and military weapons, the ROWP could put hundreds of men on the street at any given time. One city official noted that by comparison the Ku Klux Klan was, “believe it or not, a moderating force in the community.” In fact, a 1965 U.S. Senate investigation had revealed that the New Hanover County sheriff and most of his deputies belonged to the Klan. At the height of the conflict in early 1971, black snipers fired at police officers from rooftops downtown. Six hundred frightened National Guard troops patrolled the streets. Someone bombed a restaurant three blocks from our suburban home in the middle of the night, shaking our windows. The New Hanover County schools reported thirty-two bomb threats during a single month the first year I was enrolled there. Police officers frequented the hallways of my junior high school because of the incessant violence.

I was attending Roland-Grise Junior High when the first busloads of black students arrived for full-blown integration, fifteen years after the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision. Roland-Grise had been named in honor of H. M. Roland, the recently retired former superintendent of schools, a rabid segregationist who spent his spare time writing “scientific” tracts that purported to prove that African Americans were, as he put it, “genetically inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race.” After I left Roland-Grise, in 1972, I was among the first white students to attend Williston Ninth Grade Center. ROWP terrorists smashed up the venerable old school just before I started classes. Someone shot and killed two security guards at the school one night soon afterward. Fistfights at school were common. To go to the bathroom, especially alone, was to risk being beaten up, or worse. One boy cut another with a straight razor. Several others bashed another boy's head with a brick. Someone shot and wounded two boys in a racial clash after a basketball game. Many students carried knives and brass knuckles. Full-scale riots erupted several times a year; we would be sitting in the cafeteria, hear a loud crash of silverware and plastic trays clattering to the floor, and the bloodhounds of race would come flying off their leashes. We grimly referred to early spring as “riot season,” as though it were a varsity sport.

I played basketball every day on the outdoor asphalt courts behind the school. Sometimes we played shirts versus skins, with whoever had called “next up” putting together five players to take on the winners of the previous game. Other times, we played “salt and pepper,” meaning that five black players faced five white ones. Would-be militants of both races, with their Black Power Afro picks and their Confederate flag patches, respectively, loitered elsewhere, smoking cigarettes and sometimes looking for trouble. Even in “riot season,” the basketball court generally remained congenial. But a hard foul or a hard word could start a scuffle, which would quickly become racial and sometimes turn into a big brawl. These outbreaks placed me in a difficult position. In a riot, it was always “salt and pepper,” and you either ran or fought; nobody stopped to check your political credentials.

Neither running nor fighting were special talents of mine, however, and sometimes I tried to talk to the black boys who proposed to beat me up. This worked a great deal better if it occurred to them that they might not be able to beat me up without getting hurt. False bravado and “talking trash” as if the whole thing were a joke sometimes worked. One day at the close of sixth-period physical education class, a muscular black boy named Franklin Steele backed me up against the fence in a distant corner of the athletic field and began patting my pants pockets for loose change. He heard my dimes and quarters. “Gimme the money, boy, else I'm gon' have to kick your ass,” Steele said. I pushed him away hard. “You know I can kick your ass,” he said, cocking his fist. “Give it up.”

He may have had a good solid point. I was still a pasty little boy, stocky but short for my age, and Franklin seemed more like a grown man who unloaded trucks all day. I had seen him bloody another boy's face in a fistfight, and even
that
boy could have clobbered me. I felt as outmatched as the Polish cavalry during the Nazi blitzkrieg. But I did not want to back down. “That's right, Franklin,” I replied, “you can kick my ass. But I am going to hurt you more than fifty cents' worth. I am going to hurt you bad.”

Franklin looked at me with disbelief and delivered a speech about the full range and vast extent to which he would kick my ass, including a variety of gesticulations and false starts. But I had seen the doubt flicker in his eyes, and I pressed my hopes. “Come on, then, Franklin,” I told him. “Let's just get it over with. You come over here and kick my ass. But remember one thing: I am going to hurt you.” I was even starting to believe it myself. And then I looked down and saw a Coca-Cola bottle against the fence behind my foot. And suddenly it occurred to me what Franklin wanted. He wanted to slip off campus through the trees behind the fence and buy a cold drink.