Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  There remains no place in American memory for the economic vision of King, who said in 1957, “I never intend to accommodate myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the many in order to give luxuries to the few.” Not many people today recall the King who died in an attempt to organize the downtrodden of America into a nonviolent revolution to take political and economic power from the rich. “We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society,” King declared just before his assassination. “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” The radicalism of Dr. King’s thought, the militancy of his methods, and the rebuke that he offered to American capitalism have given way to depictions of a man who never existed, caricatures invented after his death. The real Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis in 1968 calling for “the dispossessed of our nation” to “organize a revolution.” There he told the nation that “the whole structure of American life must be changed”—just before somebody killed him.

  The assassination of Dr. King set off a racial crisis across the nation that spread into our church. “You can’t have it here,” the man snapped at my father as we walked toward his study at the church on Sunday morning. “This is our church, and you cannot have it here. This ain’t your church, Vernon, this is our church. And I am telling you right now, you ain’t having no Martin Luther King service in our church.” As the door to the small room swung open, I could see that Daddy’s office was literally full of angry men. The pastor’s study couldn’t have been much more than fifteen feet square, and there were about twenty-five men packed in there. We could hardly get in the door for all the red-faced men in their Sunday suits. And I had never heard anyone address my father in that tone of voice.

  “Little Buck,” my father said, turning the broad barrel of his body to face me, “you run on up to Sunday school now. Your mother will be along to get you before church.” I turned and scampered down the hall into the education building and then upstairs to my class. I don’t remember being worried in the least about the men in Daddy’s study. I knew that something odd was going on, but I figured it had to be some kind of misunderstanding among grown-ups. Everybody loved my father, for one thing, besides which nobody in their right mind would attack my daddy in a small room with only two dozen men.

  Daddy hadn’t been expecting anyone to find out about the memorial service until he announced it at church that morning. Dr. King had been killed on Thursday in Memphis. More than a hundred cities had exploded overnight into the flames King had worked so hard to forestall. Rioters and revolutionaries set more than seven hundred fires in the nation’s capital alone. Army units in full combat gear took battle positions around the White House and ringed the Capitol building with machine-gun nests. Into the weekend, violent clashes occurred in cities and towns across the country, including rock throwing and street fights in our own little town. Saturday, as the smoke from the riots lingered from sea to shining sea, black and white ministers from Oxford convened an emergency meeting in my father’s small study.

  The preachers quickly agreed that there should be an interracial memorial service for Dr. King the following day, Sunday afternoon, at five o’clock. White people weren’t going to attend a black church, it seemed pretty clear, and it appeared pointless to have an all-black service, given that their purpose was to nurture some sense of community across racial lines. But any white preacher who sponsored a memorial service for Dr. King was putting his job on the line. “The Baptist minister said, ‘Well, we sure can’t have it at my place. I have a Board of Deacons, and they’d have to approve it, and I don’t think I’d get a single vote,’ ” Daddy recalled.

  “And finally I pulled the Book of Discipline down, and looked it up. So I said, ‘The book says I have the authority to do this, and I want to invite you all to come and meet here.’ ” The ministers agreed to meet there at Oxford United Methodist Church the next afternoon at five, and to say nothing about it until the following morning at church. They would announce the five o’clock memorial service for Dr. King simultaneously, at the eleven o’clock morning worship service. That way the opposition would have little time to mobilize.

  The roomful of indignant men that met us the next morning clearly revealed that someone had failed to keep the agreement. “This ain’t your church, Vernon, it’s our church,” the spokesman repeated. “You can’t have a church full of niggers in here. This is our church.” An angry clamor of assent echoed around the cool, white plaster of the walls lined with books, and now also lined with church-men young and old. Eli Regan stood silently near the back, letting this younger fellow do the talking.

  “The last time I checked, it was God’s church,” my father replied. “I think it probably still is.” He made his way around the desk and took the robe that his daddy had given him off the coat rack. Nestling it around his shoulders, he straightened his tie in the small mirror in the corner and ran a comb through his hair.

  “Well, you can say whatever you want, Vernon, but you can’t do it,” the man replied. “You are not having any damn Martin Luther King service in our church, and that’s a fact. You can’t do it. We’re not going to let you do it. So you may as well get on the telephone right now and tell them it is not happening in our church.”

  My father again plucked his copy of the Methodist Book of Discipline from the shelf behind his desk, opening it to the page he had marked the day before. “I don’t mean to be arrogant, you understand,” Daddy said, “and I understand that you’re not happy about it, I hear that, and I am not saying that you have to come to the service. But we’re all Methodists here, and part of that is having methods, you might say, for doing certain things. This book lists them, and it says right here”—he opened to the page, holding the book out toward his interrogator—“that the pastor of this church can determine the number and nature of services held in the sanctuary. And for the moment, at least, I believe I am still the pastor of this church.” He scribbled a number on the back of his business card and handed it to the speechless spokesman. “And here’s the bishop’s phone number. If he says I am not the pastor of this church, I can’t do it. Otherwise, I plan to proceed.”

  Daddy started rummaging through his satchel for his sermon notes. There was a stunned silence. Nobody knew quite what to do or say. The study was so packed that it was literally hard for the men to leave. But Eli Regan shuffled around to the front of Daddy’s desk, stepping in front of the man who had been speaking. Regan was probably as conservative a man as you could have found in the state of North Carolina, and he spoke with great authority in this group as the lay leader and as one of the senior men in the church. “Well, Preacher,” he said, “I have two things to say about all this. The first thing is that I believe in my heart that Martin Luther King is the worst enemy that America has had in my lifetime—the very worst. You don’t think so, but that’s what I think, and I think most of these men agree with me.” There were nods of assent all around the small room. “And the second thing I want to tell you,” Regan continued, “is that if anybody in this room knocks you down, Preacher, I’m gonna pick you back up again. You’re still my preacher.”

  “That’s all it took,” my father recalled. “They all left, and nothing else was said about it.” Half an hour later, Daddy announced from his pulpit that there would be a community-wide memorial service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the church at five o’clock that evening. When the hour came, people attended from all over the county. “The people came interracially, more folks from the black churches than from our church, maybe, but some of our folks, too, and they filled up that sanctuary that afternoon,” he recalled. “We had everyone sign a registry that we mailed to Mrs. Coretta Scott King, along with a program from the service.”

  Despite the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations we now hold nationally every January, many white people at the time celebrated the murder
of Dr. King. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, blamed Dr. King’s assassination on King himself and the politics of nonviolent direct action, calling it “a great tragedy that began when we started compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Reagan also suggested that the murder was probably committed by antiwar protestors, who “will do anything to further their own ends.” But hundreds of churches across the nation held services similar to the one at our church, mourning a loss so deep as to defy easy assessment, even at a distance of decades. And I would wager that Eli Regan was one of the very few ushers at any of those services in the spring of 1968 who had favored Strom Thurmond for president in 1948 and was fixing to vote for George Wallace that coming fall. Richard Wright wrote of black Southerners in the Jim Crow era that other Americans “think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.” He could have just as easily been talking about all of us.

  THE KING ASSASSINATION also marked my experiences of race in an indelible way. In the year or so leading up to his killing, with direct exposure to black children at school—even if there were only two of them—I began to notice and confront my own received assumptions that white people were somehow better than black people. It wasn’t that I had been taught that explicitly, mind you—my parents told me quite the opposite—and yet white supremacy was like the water and we were like the fish, and of course we were all drenched to the skin. All the social signposts of American life taught me that white people were superior in some vague and undefined way, but my particular world instructed me that nice white people must try to help blacks become more like white people. The astonishing arrogance and ignorance of these assumptions would be funny if those attitudes were not still fairly prevalent. The truth is, I was probably more fortunate than most. When I study old photographs of Klan rallies now, I find my eyes turning to the children in the pictures, and wondering what they think about all that stuff today.

  When I ponder the origins of that ingrained sense of white supremacy that I found inside myself, I have to consider the fact that nearly all of the African Americans with whom I had intimate contact were servants. I never once saw a white grown-up who did housework or yard work for a living; black adults who performed those labors worked at houses all around me. I knew, of course, that there were other black people—college presidents, funeral directors, educators, and so on. I saw such people from time to time, carrying out their warm but somewhat formal dealings with my father, whom they seemed to regard with great affection. Dr. Proctor had dined with us, and Reverend James Hampton, an easygoing black preacher in Sanford, sometimes enjoyed a sandwich with Daddy at the house while they talked about local civil rights politics. But I never saw any real degree of ease with any of the other black people in our lives— except the African American women who worked in our house.

  For readers born later or elsewhere, it may come as a surprise to know that even white people of modest means employed black household help in the South where I grew up. In large measure, this reflected a racial and gender caste system that denied most other opportunities to African American women. That system was designed to ensure a ready supply of cheap black labor, especially for the Southern ruling classes that emerged out of slavery’s old planter class. But the privilege of exploiting black labor extended even to fairly lowly whites; textile mill hands and poor farmers, for example, frequently employed their black neighbors to do laundry.

  Middle-class white liberals like my parents understood all of this to be part of a misbegotten and unjust system. But they needed the labor, they could easily afford it, and many of them assuaged their consciences by treating “their” help better than the market dictated. “Why, she’s just like family to us” was the paternalist explanation. In truth, to refuse to employ black household help would not have liberated anyone, and having a maid, ironically, freed up my mother to teach school. The federal government was entirely complicit. When President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern conservatives and their Northern Republican allies forced the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded people like us from having to pay retirement or unemployment insurance for the people who scrubbed the toilets and tended the tobacco. There was nothing clean about the way white people’s houses got cleaned in Oxford, North Carolina, including our own house.

  I don’t know how my first black friend, Mrs. Roseanna Allen, would have felt about all this. We certainly did not discuss it. Mrs. Allen was a tall woman with chocolate brown skin and moist, beautiful eyes. Like Mrs. Fanny Mae McIver in Sanford, she kept house for our family so that my mother could teach school. In her starched white work dresses and rubber-soled canvas shoes, Mrs. Allen was quite imposing. By 1966, I had two little sisters, Boo and Julie, and Julie was only two. Mrs. Allen cleaned the house and washed the clothes and cooked our supper, while she took care of Julie and waited for the rest of us to get home from school.

  Mrs. Allen respected my father for his well-known positions on racial issues. Reverend Tyson was somebody in her world, and she was intent on making certain that we understood why. “Your father believes in what is right,” she told us over and over again. I did not fully understand what she meant, and she did not go into the details, but I knew even then that what was right was connected to the race issue. Mrs. Allen had full adult authority in our household; I remember her chasing me down the brick walkway one morning when she saw that I was wearing jeans with both knees kicked out. “Your mama is a teacher and your daddy is a preacher,” she huffed, turning me around forcefully, “and you ain’t going to school dressed like that.” In spite of her firm hand, I loved Mrs. Allen truly. Her skill, her grace, and her good spirits fascinated me. It was also obvious from my mother’s warnings and inflections that Mama greatly respected her abilities and her character.

  Mrs. Allen had what seemed to the Tyson children an exotic secret life. Her husband, Fred Allen, ran a taxicab service. If he got more than one call at a time, he might telephone his wife at our house and ask her to pick up someone on the far side of town. She would herd whatever children were in her care into my mother’s station wagon, and off we would go. Since white people did not ride in “black” taxi-cabs, we were always off to pick up an African American who needed a ride from someplace we might never have seen otherwise to the hospital to visit a relative or to the post office to pick up a package. We literally saw the color line between our neighborhood and the black side of town—neighborhoods without sidewalks, pavement, or streetlights, poor people living in run-down houses.

  But until the day Gerald told me about the murder of Dickie Marrow, the sharpest sense of the color line I had was from a spring day in 1968, when I was almost nine. Mrs. Allen stood at the ironing board in between the twin beds where my brother and I slept, which she used as laundry tables on washday. I remember the smell of starch and the hissing of steam, and then the sudden realization that Mrs. Allen was crying. Silent streams of tears trickled onto my father’s white shirts. When I asked her what was wrong, she almost bellowed: “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” She seemed desperate and almost out of control. “They gone and killed Martin Luther King, that’s what’s wrong!” She choked hard on her sobs and buried her face in the laundry.

  I knew vaguely who Dr. King was, and I knew that my father admired him greatly, but I was too young to understand even a little of the magnitude of that murder in Memphis. All I knew was that I wanted to comfort my beloved Roseanna. I don’t think I had ever seen a grown-up crying like that. And so I said the only thing I could think of to say: “Maybe it will be all right, Roseanna, maybe somehow it will work out for the best.”

  She lifted her head and almost roared at the obscenity of the thought. “Work out for the best? How could it possibly work out for the best?” Mrs. Allen’s face, contorted with tears and anger, looked at me with a stunned expression of rage. “
How could it work out for the best that the man that God lifted up to save my people has been shot down like a dog in the streets? Did it work out for the best that Hitler killed six million Jews? Would it work out for the best if somebody burned your house down to the ground? Did it work out for the best that they took King Jesus out and nailed him to the cross?” She sobbed into the laundry.

  Somehow I managed to whisper, “We think it did, don’t we?”

  “What?” she said, raising her red-rimmed eyes toward me.

  “We think it worked out for the best that they hung Jesus on the cross, don’t we, Roseanna? Jesus died on the cross to save us all from sin, didn’t he?” I asked her.

  “Oh, child,” she cried, moving toward me on her knees. “Oh, baby.” Reduced to roughly my height by her kneeling, she squeezed me tight, rocking me back and forth in a muttered mixture of tears and prayers, and she held on to me for what seemed a long, long time. Afterward, she rounded up my brother and my sisters and gave everybody their own little bottle of Coca-Cola, and we took the thick green bottles out to the back steps, where we sat together for what seemed like the rest of that terrible day. Just how terrible it was I simply had no way to know at nine years old.