Blood Done Sign My Name (45 page)

I am also grateful to students in the Afro-American Studies Department at Yale University, the Folklore and History departments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for reading parts of this book and engaging me in helpful discussions. Martha Bouyer at Body of Christ Deliverance Ministry in Birmingham and Joanne Bland at the National voting Rights Museum in Selma were generous hosts who became fast friends. I also want to thank Leslee Gilbert and the students at St. Mary's College of Southern Minnesota, Ed Pavlic and the folks at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and the students at Welcome Middle School in Greenville, North Carolina, and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham for receiving these stories so warmly. I am also grateful to Emily Auerbach and Norman Gilliland of Wisconsin Public Radio's “University of the Air” for letting me yammer on to their listeners.

A special word of appreciation is necessary for my former colleagues at Manuel's Tavern and the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club, two world-class watering holes in Atlanta, Georgia. Wisely or unwisely, they believed in me at a time when more sober and less discerning judges sometimes did not. When I was getting ready to drop out of graduate school, they got on their motorcycles and drove all the way to North Carolina to see that I did not. They threatened to kick my ass but I am pretty sure they would not have done it. A hearty shout goes out to Don Sweet, whatever star the Lord has let him ride into glory, and to Hippy, Michelle, Fay Lynn, Shawn, Big Jeff, ol' Pete, Curtis, and all the gang. Part of me will always stand behind the bar, right beneath William James: “Sobriety divides, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness unites, affirms, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.”

I began telling this story in the spring of 2001, when I was supposed to be doing something else, naturally. In this context, I should thank the Institute for Research in Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which gave me that spring semester off, even though (actually,
because
) I promised to write something quite different. Tom Rankin at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke sheltered me for a crucial week of writing and editing. I am also grateful to the staffs of Perkins Library at Duke, the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the North Carolina Division of Archives and History in Raleigh, and the Richard H. Thornton Library in Oxford, North Carolina.

Many people in the book publishing business have been a great help to me. David Perry and Kate Torrey at the University of North Carolina Press have been steadfast friends and trusted advisers. Tom Campbell at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, my home-court bookseller, gave me solid guidance. Allen Ruff at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, is a mensch. At Crown Publishers, Steve Ross and Chris Jackson placed their chips on the book, and made it happen. Emily Loose, with her strong narrative sense, worked wonders as editor before she moved on. And Doug Pepper, the final editor, won the heavyweight title with his deft advocacy and dazzling literary judgment. Thanks also to Genoveva Llosa, Amy Boorstein, Alison Forner, copyeditor Bonnie Thompson, Lauren Dong, and Laura Duffy for their fine work.

Above all, I want to thank my agent, the wise and beautiful Charlotte Sheedy, who defended the author against all enemies, foreign and domestic, even when the enemy was the author himself. I can never repay her many kindnesses and her sage counsel. And I would not play poker with her if I were you—don't say I didn't warn you.

As ever, I drew my deepest strength from family. My grandmother, Jessie Buie, died before any of my books were published, and she is probably too busy managing her proper portion of the Hereafter to read them now, but I will always love her. My uncle, Charles Buie, told me important stories. All of the Buies loved me long and hard, for which I am grateful, and listened to my stories, which was above and beyond the call of duty. Likewise all the Tysons have blessed me with love and support. Special thanks to the late Pauline Pearce, the late Dewey Tyson, the late Tommy Tyson, Earl Tyson, and Bobby Tyson for sharing family stories and being supportive over the years. I am also particularly grateful to Cheryl Tyson and Thomas Earl Tyson for their tenderness.

And the Morgans of Corapeake, all twenty-two of them, redefine the traditional connotations of the phrase “in-laws.” Our bountiful matriarch, D. Morgan, has nurtured me like her own. Sam Morgan has been a steady rock. Susan Evans won a special place in my heart years ago, which only grew larger when she spent endless hours taking photographs for this book; I am obliged to write another one, if only to furnish a home for the cover shot she
will
get one day. Jason Morgan Ward sets a sterling example as a scholar, and I am grateful to his parents, Mike and Hope, for their assistance and support. As for Brooke, we'll always have Barcelona. Phil, Tom, and Leigh Morgan read parts of this manuscript, and I did find that list of typographical errors, thanks, Leigh.

My brother Vern, whom I shared a room with for many years, is a lovely man, aside from his personal habits. I want to thank him for his friendship and support, and for taking the blame for that beer Daddy found in the downstairs freezer in 1975. My deep thanks to Jessie Katherine and Thomas Tyson, two of the most important people for whom I wrote this book. Thanks to Terri, too, for greatly increasing the median IQ and personal appearance of our family. Boo, the latest Tyson to graduate from divinity school, fights for justice and mercy in Alabama, and has her own story to tell, which makes me proud. She and Lori Messinger, sister-outlaw #1, have stood by me for many years, enduring my incessant stories, and I am forever grateful. Julie Tyson, my brown-eyed soul sister, has been an angel to me and a light to the world, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart. Long live the sisteren.

My children have been perhaps the biggest blessing of my life. Samuel Hart Tyson, who has already won several games in Cameron Indoor Stadium, played hoop with me, comforted me whether Duke lost or won, made me laugh a thousand times, jumped off cliffs into cold water with me, and inspired me with his zesty embrace of the world. Hope Tyson, as noted earlier, read the manuscript in its first incarnation, and has furnished a fine example for her father by her laughter, love, and the way she makes something beautiful and useful every day. And she's brave, too, not to mention an accomplished writer herself. I love them both always.

The mother of these angels, Perri Anne Morgan, is a brilliant woman whose one large blind spot it has been my privilege to occupy for twenty years. I am sorry for all that this book has cost her, and I will try to make it up to her. I am grateful for her patient help, luminous editing, and all the years of love and friendship. Perri stitched my life together by turning our house into a juke joint—no need to choose between gospel and blues when sweet mama is at the old upright. The thrill is definitely not gone.

When I was only three years old, Mama found me on the floor with a book pulled tightly against my face, sobbing hard. When she asked me why on earth I was crying, I told her, “Because I can't get
in
the book.” Now, I could not read at that age. What had happened, really, is that my mother had read so many books to me, so vividly, so beautifully, that I expected to be able to pick up the book and plunge instantly into beautiful depths of the imagination, and was disappointed that I could not. In later years, of course, I found exactly that kind of satisfaction in books, and I owe all that to Mama. Martha Buie Tyson stands like a tree beside the river of our lives, giving shade and sustenance, and teaching all of us by example. I am also grateful to her for sharing her diary, answering my endless questions, and letting me write about her family.

My father, who remains the best damn preacher who ever beat on the Book, graced my life with his passion for the word and his vision of redeeming love. Like Jacob, he has wrestled with the angels and come away walking with a limp, but he carries that vision without which the people perish. And even if he didn't, he has been the best father anyone ever had. And even if he hadn't, he has become a friend like no other, reading every draft of every sentence I ever wrote, serving as a library of eastern North Carolina lore, going with me to archives and interviews, offering excellent editorial suggestions, giving me his love and my liberty, to say nothing of lunch. This book is dedicated to Martha and
Vernon, my mama and daddy, with undying gratitude for their courage and their vision and their love.

NOTES ON SOURCES

My most important sources, aside from our family's memories and diaries, are the criminal court records from the Granville County courthouse and the Francis B. Hays Collection at the Richard H. Thornton Library, both in Oxford, North Carolina; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington; the Governor J. Melville Broughton Papers, the Governor R. Gregg Cherry Papers, the Governor Kerr Scott Papers, the Governor Terry Sanford Papers, and the Governor Robert Scott Papers, all at the North Carolina Division of Archives and History in Raleigh; the James Edward McCoy Papers and the Jonathan Daniels Papers at the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the James William Cole Papers at the East Carolina Manuscript Collection at the J. Y. Joyner Library at East Carolina University in Greenville; the Raleigh
News and Observer
and the
Oxford Public Ledger,
although I also used a number of other newspapers as listed below; and my own interviews with participants and observers of the events in this book. As noted in chapter 12, the
Oxford Public Ledger
is missing for this entire historical period, but I was able to retrieve several key issues from criminal records 70-CR-1847 and 70-CR-1849 at the Granville County courthouse. Below, scholars and readers can trace specific sources by chapter. Eventually, all of my research materials, including transcripts of the interviews, will be housed in the James Edward McCoy Papers.

CHAPTER ONE: BAPTISM

My sources for the riot in Oxford the night I heard about Henry Marrow's death are State Highway Patrol Civil Intelligence Bulletin, May 13, 1970; North Carolina Good Neighbor Council report, May 12, 1970; State Bureau of Investigation Civil Intelligence Bulletin, May 13, 1970; and Western Union telegram from Mayor Hugh Currin to Governor Robert Scott, May 13, 1970, 11:41 A.M., all in Governor Robert Scott Papers. See also Raleigh
News and
Observer,
May 14, 1970, and
Oxford Public Ledger,
May 15, 1970. I also relied heavily on my interviews with former assistant chief of police Doug White, Mayor Hugh Currin, Carolyn Thorpe, Linda Ball, Eddie McCoy, Herman Cozart, and several others who prefer to remain anonymous. Sources for the nationwide violence in May 1970 are cited below in my notes for chapter 6. The quote about the threat to “the whole economic and social structure of the nation” comes from
Business Week,
May 16, 1970.

CHAPTER TWO: ORIGINAL SINS

Population figures for Granville County are drawn from the United States Census of 1970. For the economic development of Granville County after World War II, see
Statistical Profile of the Henderson-Oxford, North Carolina
Redevelopment Area
(Washington: United States Department of Commerce, 1962). See also
Oxford, North Carolina Population and Economy
(Oxford: Granville County–Oxford Planning Commission, 1965) and
North Carolina
Profile on Granville County,
n.d. Another very useful source is Dennis McAuliffe, “The Transformation of Rural and Industrial Workers in Granville County” (Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1984), especially the tables on pages 71–72. All of these studies are available in the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For information on tobacco production in Granville County, see
Heritage and
Homesteads: The History and Architecture of Granville County, North Carolina
(Oxford: Granville County Historical Society, 1988), 27, 34, and 61. For the 1887 fire, see Laura Edwards,
Gendered Strife and Confusion
:
The Political Culture of
Reconstruction
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 218, 244–46.

Much of the narrative here relies on my father's diary, which he was gracious enough to let me use, and on my interviews with him and my mother. I have verified the reaction inside the Oxford United Methodist Church in my conversations with Ben and Joy Averett. The descriptions of race relations in Oxford rest on interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, William A. Chavis, James Edward McCoy, James Chavis, and Mary Catherine Chavis. For the evolution of the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings with respect to racial covenants, see Donald Nieman,
Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the
Present
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 122, 129, and 144. For interracial contacts in Greensboro in the late 1940s and early 1950s, see William H. Chafe,
Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black
Struggle for Equality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 29–34.

In fact, all scholars of racial politics in North Carolina and in the United States owe a great debt to the insights in Chafe's landmark work on Greensboro. For racial paternalism in North Carolina, see Chafe,
Civilities and Civil Rights,
7–10, 38–41, 48, 67–70, 204, 236. See also Stephen Kantrowitz, “The Two Faces of Domination,” in David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, Democracy
Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 95–111. For race relations in Granville County before and shortly after World War II, see F. E. Hunt Jr., “Oxford, N.C.,” 1947, and untitled paper by Francis B. Hays, July 5, 1948, in the Francis B. Hays Collection, vol. 22, 254–61. Dr. King's reference to the “thingification” of human beings comes from Martin Luther King Jr.,
Where Do We Go
from Here? Chaos or Community
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 123.

The colonial origins of the race and sex taboo that has marked racial politics in the United States, particularly in North Carolina, are explored in Kirsten Fischer's brilliant
Suspect Relations: Sex, Race and Resistance in Colonial North
Carolina
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). My early thoughts about the subject responded to insights found in Winthrop Jordan,
White over Black:
American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Peter Wood,
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial
South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); James Merrell,
The Indians' New World: The Catawbas
and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), and “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,”
Journal of Southern History,
vol. 50, no. 3 (August 1984): 363–84; and Leon Higginbotham Jr., “The Ancestry of Inferiority, 1619–1662,” in Edward Countryman, ed.,
How Did American Slavery Begin?
(New York: Bedford–St. Martin's, 1999), 85–98. See also Timothy B. Tyson, “Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1994, 1–12. For the insight that our ideas about “race” are not simply handed down but constantly retranslated, see Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,”
New Left Review
181 (May-June 1990): 95–118. For a contrasting view, see Alden vaughan,
The
Roots of American Racism: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth Century Virginia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 136–74. I am also grateful to colonial historians Peter Wood, Elizabeth Fenn, Kirsten Fischer, and Jennifer Lyle Morgan for their advice on conceptions of race, freedom, and sexuality and the relationship of those concepts to the social structure of colonial America.

All of the material about slavery in Granville County, North Carolina, comes from interviews housed in the James Edward McCoy Papers in the Southern Oral History Project in the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These include McCoy's transcribed interviews with Lonie Allen, Helen Currin Amis, Novella Allen, William Baskerville, Rachel Blackwell, Lucille Peace Blalock, Lois Braswell, Judge Chavis, Mary Catherine Chavis, Thomas Chavis, Annie Bell Cheatham, Ethel Carrington Clark, Frank Clark, Johnny Crews, R. F. Cousin, and Mary Thomas Hobgood. The sources of specific quotations are indicated in the text. My views of the distinctive Afro-Christianity in the South have been shaped most strongly by Albert Raboteau,
Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in
the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), Charles Joyner,
Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 141–71, and Howard Thurman,
Jesus and the
Disinherited (1949; Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). The quote from W. E. B. Du Bois is from his timeless work
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880
(1935; New York: Touchstone, 1995), 124.

The material here on sex and race in the Jim Crow and civil rights–era South derives from work by a number of scholars, principally John Dollard,
Sex
and Caste in a Southern Town
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 134–72; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Mind That Burns in Each Body,”
Southern Exposure
(November-December 1984): 64–69; and
Revolt Against
Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching
(1979; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). One of the most lucid explorations of the racial politics of sex, the sexual politics of race, and what W. J. Cash called “the rape complex,” is Glenda Gilmore's brilliant essay “Murder, Memory and the Flight of the Incubus,” in Cecelski and Tyson, eds.,
Democracy Betrayed,
73–93. See also Gilmore's classic work of Southern history,
Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in
North Carolina, 1896–1920,
especially pages 91–118. See also Danielle McGuire's pioneering essay “ ‘It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped': Black Womanhood, White violence, and the Civil Rights Movement,” Rutgers University, forthcoming.

The quote about “the destruction of the purity of his race” by the North Carolina editor is from Bignall Jones, “Only One Way to Maintain Schools,” Warren Record, April 2, 1955. For William F. Buckley's opposition to voting rights for Southern blacks, see
National Review
4 (August 24, 1957): 149. For James J. Kilpatrick's advocacy of white electoral supremacy, see “Down the Memory Hole,”
New Republic
193 (July 1, 1985): 9. The exchange between Kilpatrick and James Baldwin about blacks and whites marrying each other's daughters is quoted in Paul Spickard,
Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic
Identity in Twentieth-Century America
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 268. The story about racial clashes over the “girlie show” at the county fair in Yanceyville comes from Good Neighbor Council report, September 21, 1970, Governor Robert Scott Papers. Reactions to these dynamics of race and sex with regard to the integration of the Granville County schools come from interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, Reverend Don Price, and several others who preferred not to be cited.

CHAPTER THREE: “TOO CLOSE NOT TO TOUCH”

My description of Grab-all rests upon my own memories and observations, but also on McAuliffe, “Transformation,” 122, and my interviews with Mayor Hugh Currin, James Edward McCoy, Mary Catherine Chavis, William A. Chavis, James Chavis, Roberta Chavis, Fannie Chavis, and Benjamin Chavis. For relations between the Teels and the African American community, I relied on my interviews with Robert G. Teel, William A. Chavis, James Chavis, Herman Cozart, Billy Watkins, Richard Shepard, and Goldie Averett. On economic development in Granville County during the decades after World War II, see my sources for chapter 2.

For an excellent account of the material and cultural life of tenant farm families in eastern North Carolina during this period, see Lu Ann Jones,
Mama
Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Roy G. Taylor,
Sharecroppers: The Way We
Really Were (Wilson, N.C.: J-Mark Press, 1984) is also useful. For a scholarly examination of the economic realities beneath the crop lien system, see Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch,
One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences
of Emancipation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For readers who seek an engaging tour of the rapidly changing American South from the 1930s through the 1950s, I recommend three excellent recent books that have shaped my thinking in different ways: John Egerton,
Speak Now Against
the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
(New York: Knopf, 1994); Patricia Sullivan,
Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in
the New Deal Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Pete Daniel,
Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Numan Bartley,
The Rise of Massive
Resistance: Race Relations in the South During the 1950s
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), sets a standard for all other scholars of that subject.

For the mid-1960s Ku Klux Klan revivals in North Carolina, see especially David S. Cecelski, “Ordinary Sin,” Independent Weekly, March 19, 1997. See also David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina,
and the Fate of Black Schools in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 36–39, 183. Almost all of the specific information in my account of the Klan revivals comes from coverage in the Raleigh
News and
Observer in 1965: the U.S. congressional investigation that named North Carolina the number one Klan state was covered on October 20, October 23, and October 24; for the Methodist church in Smithfield that invited the local Klan leader to speak, see November 13; for the Fayetteville KKK rally with fifteen thousand in attendance, see November 10; Jim Gardner's comments are from the October 24 issue; the story of the bombing of the black migrant labor camp is from October 1; the New Bern funeral home bombing, the arson attack on Mayor Royce Jordan's barns, and the attack on the college students were covered on October 3; the torture of the interracial drinking buddies can be found in the October 9 issue; the arson of the black schools in Mars Hill and Johnston County can be located on October 12 and 26, respectively; the statewide KKK campaign of burning crosses on courthouse lawns is from October 22; and the story of Judge Pretlow Winborne and the wiener roast was reported on November 3. The
New York Times,
October 30, 1966, reported the story of the Ku Klux Klan booth at the North Carolina State Fair.