Blood Done Sign My Name (4 page)

Black soldiers who stopped in at the Biscoe Sandwich Shop, of course, bought their food to go and ate it standing outside, while whites could enjoy the red-checked tablecloths and comfortable chairs inside. My uncle Bubba, thinking back and asking for a fair-minded understanding of Grandmother Buie's segregationist ways, called his mother “a woman of her time and place,” but Jessie both defied and defined her time and place. Though she refused the place that society had set for her, the presumptions of white paternalism seemed as natural to her as segregation itself. She clearly did not consider any black person in the world to be her social equal, but she took seriously her responsibility to “those less fortunate than ourselves.”

Paternalism was like a dance whose steps required my grandmother to provide charity to black people, as long as they followed the prescribed routine—that is, coming to the back door, hat in hand; accepting whatever largesse was offered; furnishing effusive expressions of gratitude; and at least pretending to accept their subordinate position in the social hierarchy. For white people, paternalism provided a self-congratulatory sense of generosity and superiority; for blacks, it supplied dribs and drabs of material sustenance—shoes and books and hand-me-down clothes for their children. Paternalism strengthened the system of white supremacy by softening its sharper edges and covering its patent injustices with a patina of friendship. Accepting black expressions of gratitude at face value, whites congratulated themselves on their friendly relations with “their” Negroes. But paternalism rendered the candor that real friendships require virtually impossible. Grandmother Jessie did not invent or even endorse paternalism. When she and Mr. Buie moved into the big white house that the mill gave them, she merely assumed its privileges and rituals.

It was more a matter of privilege than responsibility that Grandmother Jessie employed five local blacks at her house. Betty Clegg cooked everyday meals, polished the silver, and prepared the tables for fancy dinners when Mr. Brooks, who owned the mill, came to visit or when “Miz Buie” held a family wedding or hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Mary Alston scrubbed the family's clothes, first on a tin washboard and later in the electric tub with its hand-cranked, roller-style wringing attachment. Ida Jowers dissolved gluey starch in water and sprinkled Mr. Buie's shirts with it before the iron hissed over the cotton cloth, creating a wonderful pasty smell. Charlie Ledbetter mowed the grass, scrubbed and waxed the wide porches, washed Mr. Buie's Lincoln Continental, and trimmed the ivy that lined Mrs. Buie's brick walkways. Joe Dunlap, who also worked as a handyman at the mill, tended my grandmother's rose garden.

One day when my mother was perhaps twelve or thirteen, she was in the laundry room helping Mary Alston, the middle-aged black woman who came every Monday to wash the family's clothes by hand. As young Martha sorted the clothing into piles, the white girl idly sang, “When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there,” from a familiar hymn. Her hands plunged deep into a galvanized tin tub filled with hot, soapy water, Mary Alston said in a low voice, “Do you really think you will be?”

The white girl who would grow up to be my mother looked at Mrs. Alston in surprise, thinking she must be joking. “It just kind of shocked me,” Mama explained to me many years later. “I didn't know what to say.” There was no sign of mirth in Mrs. Alston's dark face; she had asked a serious question, and she would neither back off nor discuss it further. The tremor was sufficient that Mama always remembered the moment and wondered exactly what Mary Alston had been thinking. This was the first sign for Mama that there existed a world on yonder side of the color line, where white eyes and ears could not readily penetrate and where black people did not necessarily accept white valuations of moral worth.

From the early days of slavery, in fact, African Americans had forged a Christian faith that affirmed their own humanity and sometimes called their masters to judgment: “Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven ain't a-goin' there,” the unknown poets of the spirituals observed. This was the faith that rejected what Dr. King called the “thingification” of human beings, and that he evoked for the world when my mother became Mary Alston's age. By that time, Mama would be ready to hear and understand it.

I never knew my mother's father, Charles Buie, who died when I was an infant. But I grew up knowing that Grandmother Jessie was a woman of vast and immeasurable wealth. Stacked in her basement, for example, stood eight or ten wooden crates of small, seven-ounce Coca-Cola bottles and taller, light-green Frescas. To a small boy, these seemed like riches that Arab oil sheikhs and European monarchs could only envy.

When I was seven or eight, I saw Mr. Dunlap sweating in the sun amid Jessie's rosebushes, and I carried him one of the Coca-Colas and a glass of ice. “You're just like your grandfather,” he said, smiling at me. And then his face became grave. “I want you to know something, son,” he told me. “Back during the Depression, when nobody had any money, Mr. Buie kept me working at the mill when he didn't have anything for me to do. They weren't selling any cloth, but he would have me out there planting flowers or working over here in Miz Buie's garden so my children would have something to eat.” As he sipped his Coca-Cola, Mr. Dunlap's eyes began to water. “Your granddaddy put shoes on my children's feet, and they wouldn't have had any to wear to school if he hadn't done it.” Mr. Dunlap pulled out his handkerchief, swabbed his eyes, and handed me the empty glass. “You ought to be proud of your granddaddy, son.”

The Buies bought truckloads of shoes, “seconds,” at cut-rate prices and gave them away. Even after my grandfather died, Jessie Buie kept the trunk of her car filled with shoes and clothes, which she handed out to poor families, most of them black. Many years later, when I was cleaning out her garage so that we could move Jessie to a nursing home, I found an enormous pile of what once had been shoes. There must have been several hundred pairs of them, their laces knotted together, but they were molded and matted into a thick mulch, rotting into their original elements, and I had to toss them into the dumpster with a pitchfork. But “Miz Buie,” teetering around behind me, her mind wandering back through nine decades, kept repeating, “I do wish we could find some nice colored people who might like to have those shoes.”

Their ethos of paternalism gave my grandparents a sense of doing what was good and right, a feeling far more luxurious than the crisp, clean sheets, “angel biscuits,” and tomato-asparagus aspic that Betty Clegg made for them. I have never doubted the sincerity of Joe Dunlap's gratitude to my grandfather, and I am proud of the Buies, and of course I love them. But the hierarchy of white supremacy, at its heart, was as rotten as that pile of old shoes, and the generations that follow will be many years cleaning it up.

One way my grandmother Jessie instructed me in the obligations and rewards of racial paternalism was through her favorite story about the Civil War. Many times over the years she told me that our family had always treated their slaves like family members. In fact, she always said, our slaves had loved us so much that they'd hidden the family silver from General Sherman's Yankee marauders. When I got old enough to research the history myself, I discovered that we'd owned no slaves, no silver, and that General Sherman's army hadn't come within a hundred miles of the family homeplace. But I know in my heart that she believed this to be the unvarnished truth, and that it had come to her from people she loved and admired.

In Oxford, white children often grew up with family stories about the antebellum South, like my grandmother's gentle hand-me-down fiction, stories that portrayed slavery as a largely benign and sometimes even beneficial social order. “My mama told me that our slaves were just like family to us,” one local white woman recounted, “and that after the war they didn't want to leave. And my father always said [slavery] was the first chance they got to experience anything like civilization or to learn anything.”

African Americans in Granville County grew up with a set of slavery stories that reflected a wholly different view of what was civilized. Black people old enough to have heard tales of slavery from their grandparents told their own children and grandchildren stories about families being broken up and sold, black women used by white men as concubines, and slaves whipped mercilessly. Novella Allen, whose grandparents had been slaves, grew up hearing her grandfather recount how their master had announced his intention to sell their family. “His daddy and his mama was going to be sold from the Lawsons to the Thorpes,” she said. But her grandfather's father had refused to accept the sale, and tried to thwart his master by mutilating himself with an axe. “His daddy went and cut his hand off,” she said, “because he didn't want to be sold. Papa said that's what he cut it off for, because he didn't want to be sold from the people he had been with all his life. But they took his wife and child on anyway.”

Annie Bell Cheatham, born in 1891, learned from her grandfather about his despair at being sold away from his mother as a boy and having his name forcibly changed to Cheatham, the name of his new owner. “That child crying, him looking back and wanting to go with his mama,” she recounted, “and the mama crying, too, but she couldn't do nothing. Yeah, we have been through something in this world. Not just me and you,” she said, “but just think about the black folks—Lord, have mercy.” Even though he had been young, her grandfather never forgot the agony of losing his mother and his name, and repeated the story often when Annie Bell Cheatham was growing up. “He told us, he said, ‘We are not Cheathams, we ain't no Cheathams.' And then he would tell how they sold him and everything.”

Judge Chavis, a local black man born in 1898, was raised on his grandmother's stories about having her brothers sold away from her family. “My grandmother on my mama's side,” Chavis recalled, “she said there were eight of them. Said she had seven brothers, you know. And they had a sale and they sold all seven of them to a man down east somewhere, bought all seven of them, but didn't want the girl, and she never did see them no more.” Johnny Crews had been told as a youngster that his family name had been Mayhew and that they had lived in Wendell, North Carolina, but that the family had been separated and some of them sold to a white farmer named Crews in Granville County. “So colored people do not know what they is,” Crews said.

But enslaved African American families in Granville County remembered who they were, and whose they were, through the distinctive Afro-Christian faith they adapted from the religion their masters sought to impose on them. To the South's four million slaves, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “God was real. They knew Him. They had met Him personally in many a wild orgy of religious frenzy, or in the black stillness of the night.” And in that stillness and tumult, the enslaved sons and daughters of Africa met their God and their neighbors, and affirmed that they were all children of the same Lord who'd brought the Israelites out of bondage, the same Lord who'd rescued Daniel from the lion's den, the same Lord who'd given a little shepherd boy a slingshot to bring down mighty Goliath. In the “brush arbor,” as some called their invisible church, they sang their own songs, drawn from the Scripture and from the lives of their slave ancestors. They knew that God, in His grace, had sent Jesus to be nailed to the cross to raise them up, and that their names were written in the Lamb's Book of Life: “Ain't you glad, ain't you glad, that the blood done sign my name,” they would sing.

“You got a right to the tree of life,” their voices would ring out. “I got shoes, you got shoes, all God's children got shoes,” slaves and descendants of slaves would sing, standing together, often barefoot, in the woods. “When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes and gonna walk all over God's heaven.” And of course they sang some of the songs they learned from white Christians, too. According to Judge Chavis, his father's mother, Lou Chavis, born in bondage, explained carefully the sharp difference between the religion the masters taught and the faith the slaves practiced. Though the slaves had no formal church of their own, she told him, their masters would cart them to the white church and have a separate meeting for them. “And that white preacher would preach at them, ‘Now, y'all obey y'all masters, like the Bible says.' ”

But the slaves' own secret church meetings had nothing to do with obedience. Lou Chavis told her grandson that the slaves would pass the word that there was going to be a meeting; they'd “just notify one another when they get a chance in the daytime, and then what they done was meet at one another's shack, and had their singing.” If they did not meet in a slave cabin, they would meet in the woods. “They would do their praying and singing while [the whites] was asleep—they better not catch them singing.” Elders in the community still remembered how their ancestors would place a cooking pot on the ground outside the meeting place in the folk belief that it would keep whites from hearing their songs and prayers. “Sometimes they would turn a pot down at the door,” Judge Chavis said his grandmother told him, “to catch the sound.”

Though whites typically grew up hearing that their slaves had been treated kindly, the inherited memory among African Americans included many stories of brutality and abuse. Lou Chavis told her grandson that their white master would fasten disobedient slaves to a tree using a wide leather belt, then whip them. Chavis never forgot his grandmother's account of having seen a fellow slave beaten to death. “She said she had seen them do that, and they unbuckle the man, and him fall dead and die.” Chapel Royster, born a slave, told his granddaughter Mary Thomas Hobgood that he had wanted to learn to read but had been too terrified of the punishments. “My grandfather lived with us,” Hobgood said. “His master told him if he tried to read and study, [the master would] cut his hands off, cut his fingers off. And when he died he was ninety years old, and he couldn't read a line.”