Blood Done Sign My Name (6 page)

The new statute meant that white men who fathered children by their slave women increased their own material worth. violating their own deeply held beliefs, they sired offspring that would work in their houses and fields without fee and care for them in their old age without fail. Children born of white fathers and black mothers became black, not white, and remained slave, not free. Without that provision, growing numbers of apparently “black” people who were legally “white” would have populated the American colonies. The whole system of racial bondage rested upon the fact that free white men could father “black” slave children, while black men could never father “white” children. The children of slave mothers or fathers must always inherit that status. If large numbers of white women had birthed mulatto children by black fathers, the system of slavery based on racial caste would have been undermined and might have been rendered unworkable. Some form of unfree labor would have persisted for a time, but racialized slavery, justified in the name of white supremacy, might well have never evolved the way that it did. “Race” itself could have meant something entirely different without these rules about sex.

It was a different thing, of course, for a white man to father “black” children. Annie Bell Cheatham remembered her grandfather, born a slave in Granville County, telling her that white men would often have sexual relations with the slave women who worked in their houses, even if the woman had a black husband. “They would keep the woman in the house,” Cheatham said, “and she would do the cooking, and the white men would go with the black women. They didn't have no choice.” The slave husband, her grandfather explained, “better not say anything about it—they will hang him.” Some white men who had black families on the side chose to free their black children, who were often called “free-issue Negroes.” “ ‘Free-issue' people was white men taking black women and them having children,” Rachel Blackwell, born in Oxford in 1891, remembered. “And they would call them ‘issued free.' The white man would help support that old colored woman and them children, and they would be real light-skinned but the other children would be black. My mother told me about this,” Blackwell continued, “but she couldn't say or do anything about it.”

The sex and race taboo that grew from these roots in slavery remained a mighty oak in my boyhood. The challenge to segregation that arose in those years shook that tree like a hurricane, and the white supremacists clung to its trunk for dear life. “What the white man fears and what the white man is fighting to prevent at any cost,” the editor of the
Warren Record
wrote in 1955, “is the destruction of the purity of his race. He believes that integration would lead to miscegenation, and there is some basis for his fears.” Of course, “miscegenation” was not the real concern; a system that gave all the power to the men in one group and virtually no power to the women in another group made “race mixing” in one direction almost inevitable, as many African Americans in Granville County could attest. The social order permitted white men in the South, by virtue of their position atop the race and gender hierarchy, to take their liberties with black women, while white women and black men remained strictly off-limits to each other. The much traveled sexual back road between the races was clearly marked “one way.”

When I was growing up, many whites assumed that “race mixing” in schools would lead to rampant interracial sexual activity and that the “death of the white race” would inevitably follow. White purity and white power were imperative, all things good and decent hung in the balance, and sex was the critical battleground. Mainstream white conservative James J. Kilpatrick, whose national influence would persist well into the Reagan era, declared that white Southerners had every right “to preserve the predominately racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two hundred years.” William F. Buckley's
National Review
agreed, and justified not merely segregation but disfranchisement for blacks, arguing that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in those areas where it does not predominate numerically.” The race-sex complex, with all its hypocrisies and contradictions, underlay the entire struggle. James Baldwin's was one of the few public voices that could pierce the fog of “miscegenation” rhetoric, and he offered a timeless retort to the question “Would you want your daughter to marry one?” In a television debate with Kilpatrick, he explained, “You're not worried about me marrying
your
daughter—you're worried about me marrying
your wife's
daughter. I've been marrying
your
daughter since the days of slavery.”

The fall of Jim Crow tested these deeply rooted taboos. In 1970, for example, when I was eleven years old, the county fair just up the road in Yanceyville began to admit black people on the same day as whites; in the old days, the fair in Oxford and other towns nearby had set aside a day or two for “Negroes,” and whites otherwise had their run of the place. The new arrangements may have seemed unthreatening; black and white Southerners, after all, lived and worked in close proximity to one another, and it was only the county fair, for goodness sake. Why couldn't black and white shuffle through the turnstiles together, munch cotton candy, and throw up on the Tilt-A-WHIRL? What the authorities had failed to consider were the “girlie shows,” carnival burlesque performances in which pale white girls from somewhere else danced out of their skimpy clothing and bumped and grinded for a hooting tent full of men. When the ticket taker admitted a group of young African Americans to the show, things inside the tent got tense. After one of the black men yelled out his appreciation for the white dancers, a white man behind him smashed a wooden folding chair across the black man's head. Fists flew, knives flashed, and blood flowed both ways across the color line. The fighting spread from the fairgrounds to the streets of Yanceyville, and the mayor had to call a curfew and bring in state troopers for several days to stop the violence.

The central political fact that hung over the spring and summer of 1970 in Oxford, rooted in four hundred years of history, was that the Granville County schools were scheduled to undergo full-blown racial integration that fall. Three years earlier, Oxford had taken the first ineffectual and involuntary steps toward desegregation. Two African American children had left Orange Street School, the segregated all-black elementary school, to enroll at previously all-white C. G. Credle Elementary. The school board had carefully selected two middle-class black boys and assigned them, just like me, to Mrs. Emily Montague's third-grade class at Credle, where they said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning like the rest of us.

Thirty years later, when my own children were learning the Pledge of Allegiance, I suddenly remembered another set of words that schoolkids had chanted in unison at my elementary school: “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street.” It just came to me in the shower, a singsong echo in my mind, like a forgotten football cheer or an unwelcome snatch of music that would neither finish nor stop: “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street.” At first I had no idea where it came from—my first theory was that it was from “Goin' Back to Indiana,” an old pop tune by the Jackson Five. I called my sister Boo, who reminded me that Orange Street was the black school in Oxford, the school that those black children at Credle would have attended had the Supreme Court held its tongue. And then, of course, I knew very well where I had learned the words. I have no clear recollection of any protests against integration at Credle Elementary. But standing in the shower, thirty years later and a thousand miles away, I could still hear a chorus of schoolchildren chanting, “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street,” and I cannot help but ponder how those two brave and unfortunate black children must have felt as they made their way up the sidewalk to a school where they were not wanted.

My first memory of being in school with black children was standing behind one of the two black boys at the water fountain on the playground at Credle. It was an old cast-iron fountain with a foot pedal, and a couple of seconds after you stepped hard on the pedal, bitter-smelling water gurgled up from the primordial depths of the earth, tasting like iron. I hadn't noticed the black boy in the line, and suddenly there he was in front of me, bent over the old iron spout. Deep down, I did not want to drink after him. Without really understanding why, and even though I knew better, somewhere inside I had accepted white supremacy. The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain, at the core of the lie a crucial silence, since there was no
why.
Black was filthy, black was bad, I had somehow managed to learn. Many of my white classmates turned away from the fountain in disgust rather than drink after a black child. And even at that moment, because I had been taught to know better, I knew that my revulsion was a lie, someone else's lie, and an evil thing. This time, I decided not to give the lie the power it demanded. I suppose I was both resistant and complicit, in the same moment. I could not turn away—I lowered my head and drank after him. But I succumbed slightly; when he moved, I took my turn and pressed the pedal down, and let the water run for a few seconds before I drank, bending over the arc of cool water but pausing for a moment to let the water rinse the spout before I touched my lips to the acrid stream. I guess that made me a “moderate.”

It was the logic of moderation that permitted schools across the nation to evade the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling for almost twenty years, but when defiance and evasion finally became untenable, “seg academies” sprouted across the landscape. Fearful white parents flocked to the all-white Christian academies, abandoning the public schools in the hour of their deepest need so that their children would not have to attend school with black children. This set a terrible and enduring example and undid any possibility that integration might work. At the molten core in the very center of white fears of school integration was the specter of sex between black males and white females. That simmering sexual subtext overwhelmed the feeble official efforts to ease racial tensions in Oxford after the killing.

“We had tried to do everything we could to get things quieted down after the riot,” said Mayor Currin, “and finally we decided, ‘Let's get the ministers together.' ” Reverend Don Price, a white Baptist minister, recalled that the mayor “was trying to say, ‘Hey, we've had enough violence in this community, let's talk to our congregations and try to be peacemakers.' ” Currin contacted most of the ministers in the county, black and white, and invited them all to meet at my father's church. “We were talking about the situation,” the mayor remembered, “and we got back to what had brought on the trouble at Teel's place, and somebody said something about the black man saying something to a white woman, and that was all she wrote.”

The visceral reaction among some of the white ministers was so strong, Currin recounted, that “I will never forget this as long as I live. I will never forget this. This white preacher rears up in his chair and yells, ‘
What
did you say, brother?
What
did you say?' And then he made his little speech about race mixing.” According to the mayor, his official efforts to turn preachers into peacemakers “ended right then and there, as soon as he made that statement.” For many whites, the allegation that Henry Marrow had made a lewd remark to a white woman turned public murder into justifiable homicide, transforming a crime of passion into a late-model lynching that fateful May.

CHAPTER 3

“TOO CLOSE NOT TO TOUCH”

THE FORCE THAT drove the bullet through Henry Marrow's brain, if you were searching for something more explosive than gunpowder and more specific than that Cain slew Abel, was white people's deep, irrational fear of sex between black men and white women, any single instance of which was supposed to abolish the republic, desecrate the Bible, and ring in the Planet of the Apes. But we should also consider the strange and nearly inexplicable fact that a man like Robert Teel had decided to open a store in Grab-all, a black neighborhood nestled on the northwest edge of town.

My boyhood image of Teel is of how he walked into his house: eyes locked ahead, his gait more like that of a man the power company had sent to disconnect the electricity than a man coming home for dinner, his shoulders braced as if he were going to walk through the side of the house instead of the door. In four years of playing with his son nearly every day, I never heard his voice. And now I realize that the white supremacy that clouded all of our minds back then must have raged like a tornado in his. Looking back, I cannot imagine what he might have thought it would be like to run a store on the busiest corner of a black shantytown.

There were some tidy middle-class homes in Grab-all—the neighborhood was mixed. Both segregation and strong community ties kept the black middle class rooted there. “We were all like family in Grab-all,” Nelda Webb recalled. But some parts, like the area behind Teel's store, called Around the Bend, were hard scrabble and hand-to-mouth. “Those were some of the poorest people in the world,” a local black man explained. And everybody knew “Lynching Hill” near the Browntown section of Grab-all, a hill whose bloody history haunted the area.

Some of the roads were unpaved, and car wheels churned clouds of dust in the summer and muddy ruts in the winter. Streetlights and sidewalks were few. Some of the houses in Grab-all were ramshackle wooden frame structures with swaybacked porches, most of them dilapidated and many of them painted the same rusty shade of red. “Those rental houses all belonged to one person, Mr. Bennie Watkins,” Mayor Currin explained to me, “and he got hold of a lot of red paint one year, I reckon, and just painted them all red.” It was a rough territory in spots. “It was hard even for a black to walk in Grab-all that didn't live there,” William A. “Boo” Chavis told me years later, “much less white folks. The cops didn't want to go out there no way.”

When Robert Teel opened his store at Four Corners, the main intersection in the neighborhood, it is fair to say that Grab-all did not welcome him. “When he first come out there,” said Chavis, “didn't nobody like the idea.” When I asked Teel about it years later, he freely admitted that “sometimes there was a little violence, sometimes there was some ugly words said,” but he maintained that accounts of the clashes were always exaggerated. “Sure, I had some trouble with a few blacks come up,” he conceded, “but when you're running four or five businesses, you're gonna have a percentage. If you have one place of business, and you have trouble with one person a year,” Teel argued, “then if you have five businesses, and you have trouble with one person per business per year, then that's five per year. And it looks like you're getting a black eye, when you're not having trouble but with one person per business per year.”

If anyone was getting a black eye at the Teel place, it certainly was not Teel. The establishment became known as a place where conflict was common and where Teel settled disputes in a brisk and direct fashion. “I have never been used to taking foolishness from people,” Teel told me a dozen years later. A local black political leader put it differently, though how accurately I do not know: “Didn't nobody want to mess with him because the Klan was backing him.”

Herman Cozart, a dark-skinned black man who hauled pulpwood for a living, often stopped by the store at Four Corners in the early days, and he developed a low opinion of Robert Teel. Cozart recalled that Teel denied him change for a dollar on two separate occasions and cussed him for asking the second time—an odd posture for a man who owned a coin-operated laundry. Cozart, though he was an affable, easygoing fellow, could have passed for an NFL lineman. A massive, thick-chested hombre who spent his days handling huge timbers, Cozart was known to carry at least one gun almost everywhere he went. He was not afraid of Teel, but he watched him carefully.

Cozart's account of one encounter he had with Teel in the barbershop revealed the degree of racial tension down on the corner. “One Saturday evening we were coming through there after I had got off work,” Cozart recounted, “and I figured, you know, I got to go to church tomorrow, and the boy in there was shining shoes.” Taking his dress shoes off the seat of his truck, Cozart walked into the barbershop. “I said, ‘I need a shoe shine here,' and the head man looked at me and said, ‘We don't shine y'all's shoes in here.' ” Miffed, Cozart pushed Teel a little. “Well, how about a haircut? You got a barbershop.” The black man flashed a roll of bills.

And Teel glared at him, saying, “We don't cut
y'all's
hair.” Cozart was slow to anger, but he wasn't afraid, and he made his point before leaving.

“No problem,” he said, slipping the bankroll back into his pocket. “I got plenty of money and I can take it someplace else. Cutting hair ain't nothing noways. I cut hair myself, and I've cut black hair and white hair. What's the difference? Clippers ain't gonna catch no germs, is they?”

Teel bristled. “He turned all red,” Cozart recalled, “and said, ‘I DON'T cut y'all's hair!' And I said, ‘All right, then,' and I looked at him and I thought, ‘This booger-bear ain't gon' be up at
this
corner very long.' ” Cozart strolled calmly out of the barbershop, feeling no need to prove himself in a fight with a little bantam rooster of a white man whom he regarded as a dangerous idiot. “I knowed Teel was a tough hog,” Cozart said, “and I knowed somebody was gon' have to hurt him one day, or he was gon' hurt somebody, one.”

It had taken Teel more than fifteen years to open the place at Four Corners. Arriving in town on a rainy Wednesday morning in 1953, Teel remembered, he had not known “one soul in Granville County.” In a town organically suspicious of outsiders, Teel had been determined to make good as a barber. He had not had much luck before he came to Oxford. He'd enlisted in the army just after World War II, but had left the service after a fellow soldier had knocked out all his front teeth with a rifle butt. Returning to eastern North Carolina in 1946 with a medical discharge and disability benefits, Teel got married and worked hard, first in a lumberyard at Mount Olive and then in a textile mill in Carrboro. These jobs paid little and did not satisfy Teel in any case. His first marriage fell apart quickly, and in an arrangement most unusual at the time, Teel retained custody of his toddler son, Larry Teel. After a few years, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend the Durham Institute of Barbering. Upon his graduation in 1953, an elderly bachelor from Oxford named C. R. Wells offered him a job cutting hair. “I had never heard tell of Oxford before,” Teel recalled. (Everyone called him Teel, even his wife and children.) “But my instructor and the state examiner both told me it was one of the best jobs in the state, and that Mr. Wells would do right by me.” Teel and his little boy moved to Oxford on March 11, 1953.

Wells, an elderly, effeminate bachelor, apparently fell in love with Teel and did everything he could to help the young man establish himself in Oxford. “Teel had a power over Mr. Wells,” recalled the gracious older woman in whose home Wells boarded. “It was like he wanted so badly for Teel to love him.”

The relationship paid off handsomely for the ambitious new-comer. Teel performed his duties well, attracted considerable business and eventually, with a coworker, bought the older man's business. “We sort of more or less pressured him,” Teel said. The pair informed Mr. Wells that they were planning to open a barbershop down the street. “He said, ‘I won't be no good without you at my age, and I'd rather sell to you than have you competitive against me.' That's how we done it.” Whatever Teel lacked in polish of education, he made up for in crude charm and raw cunning. He built up a reputation as a talented barber and began to cut the hair of Granville County's economic and political elite at his shop downtown. “He cut my hair many times,” Mayor Hugh Currin recalled. “Good barber, and a right good fellow, too, though I would not advise you to cross him.”

Others saw Teel as “a man very much out for his own personal gain,” which rubbed some of the more traditional Southerners the wrong way. If grasping ambition ran against the grain of Granville County's rickety agricultural elite, however, it was perfectly acceptable to the rising class of merchants and lawyers who had begun to lure industry into the county. The 1960s were boom years for Oxford. Despite some resistance from old planter families, who feared wages going up and Yankees coming down, Granville Developers Inc. recruited roughly 4,000 new manufacturing jobs to the county during the decade. Not quite all of the new jobs were reserved for whites. Teel fit into the new spirit well, his conversation ambling in the old tobacco-farming style but his aspirations honed to “New South” boosterism. “I've always had the ambition to want a nice home,” said Teel, “a ten-thousand-dollar brick home, a nice, big Cadillac, at least one boy, things like that.”

Having gotten a good start financially, Teel met and married Colleen Oakley, a high-strung widow from the nearby township of Berea. Oakley's first husband had died in an industrial accident, leaving her with three children—Elbert, Jerry, and Roger Oakley. The first children Colleen and Teel had together were twins born prematurely; one of them, Alton, died almost immediately. The other twin, Alvin, Teel explained, “always had some hearing problems, and eye problems, and an allergy-type thing.” Two healthy boys followed the twins: Jesse and then Gerald, the last one born, like me, in 1959. Half of them were Teels and half of them were Oakleys, but they all seemed to be young men with dark hair, olive skin, and a reputation, deserved or not, for a bad temper.

It wasn't just the men. Colleen Oakley Teel could cut quite a shine herself. When I was in the fourth grade at Credle Elementary, one of my mother's fellow teachers gave one of the children a bad grade, and his mama reportedly came to school and beat the teacher over the head with a pocketbook. Black children who grew up in Oxford remembered Mrs. Teel chasing them after a disagreement over a tricycle. “Y'all black niggers!” they said she yelled. “I'm gonna kill every last one of you!” One of Teel's lawyers, thinking back on the family twenty years later, considered the problem to be congenital. “I guess it just runs in the family,” the attorney told me. “He was hotheaded, his wife was hotheaded, and the children were hotheaded. I think it was just in their blood to be hotheaded. I mean, you just didn't need to be messing with the Teels.”

As the Teel family grew, they also became quite prosperous. Teel bought a big, gracious home on the corner of Front and Main. It was a white two-story house with ample porches held up by carved pillars. Magnolias and crape myrtles perfumed Front Street in the summer, and the victorian-era homes on the broad, tree-lined avenue—one or two of them literally mansions—belonged to some of the county's wealthiest families. Front Street was only one block over from Hancock, where we lived, but I realize now that it was a long way socially; houses on Hancock were far more humble, though I'd never even noticed when I was growing up. But while the Teels had the money to live on Front Street, they lacked what their more aristocratic neighbors would have thought of as “background.” They were still uneducated and, like my family, they were still from somewhere else. And so perhaps it is not surprising that, apart from the youngest children, they kept to themselves. Besides, Robert Teel was too busy for social climbing, even if he had entertained such aspirations. He made his money not from an inherited plantation or a position at the bank, but with his own hands.

In fifteen years cutting hair downtown near the courthouse, Teel won the trust of a number of Oxford's bankers and landowners. In 1969, these connections helped him buy the large lot at Four Corners, literally across the tracks from the rest of Oxford, in the heart of Grab-all. Beside the roughest part of Grab-all, “around the bend,” where many houses did not even have indoor plumbing, let alone washing machines, Teel erected four cinder-block storefronts. Before he knew it, Teel had managed to install what amounted to a little shopping center without investing a nickel of his own money.

The coin laundry was the most lucrative of Teel's businesses. His convenience store offered his African American customers basic groceries at high prices, but within walking distance. Besides these, gas pumps, a car wash, a Yamaha motorcycle dealership, and a barbershop kept the Teel and Oakley boys busy and the money rolling in. “Out there it was a percentage black and a percentage white, it was near about a fifty-fifty deal, and people could decide whether they wanted to go all-black or all-white,” Teel recalled. The neighborhood was all black, of course, and so the walk-in customers were black, but the store's location at the intersection meant that perhaps half his customers were white.

The grocery store and the coin laundry were open to anybody, but the barbershop was whites only. “And the races were mixing some out there,” Teel said, “and I figured I could just stand there and take up the money.” Before the killing occurred, Teel said, “Mr. Roger Page had told me he'd help me put in volkswagens to sell on that lot next door, and that would have been another business over there.” Even without the car dealership, Teel claimed, his road to becoming a millionaire was clear to him within the first year. Richard Shepard, the owner of a funeral home in the black community, felt that Teel was not exaggerating: “He would have been rich if he had stayed out of trouble.” But trouble always found its way to Teel's door.