Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  However we assess them, certainly the Tysons were not part of the South that U. B. Phillips, one of the leading historians of his day, described in 1928 as “a people with a common resolve, indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” Mistakenly, in my view, Phillips called this determination for white supremacy “the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.” But the Tyson family’s less common resolve, maintained as indomitably as any that Phillips could have described, reflected a vision of the love of Jesus that emphatically included everyone of whatever color. This did not mean that we were somehow untainted by white supremacy. We breathed it in with the tobacco smoke that wafted through every restaurant back in those days. But we were dissenters from the majority opinion among whites on the matter of race. Carl Degler, a historian of antislavery dissenters in the region, called people like us “the Other South.” The Tysons did not know there was an other South, and probably never heard the phrase. Like our ancestors, we took our stand in the only Dixieland we had ever known. If history had seen us defeated again and again, did that make the dissidents any less Southern than the slaveholders and segregationists? Lost causes ran in our blood.

  Not necessarily the Lost Cause, though; my great-great-grandfather William Tyson, who was born in 1835 in Pitt County, North Carolina, bitterly opposed secession in 1860 and never believed in slavery. Early that year, as hotheaded secessionists in the Carolinas worked to foment a revolution against the United States, William Tyson sired a son and named him George Washington, after the founder of American nationalism. In 1862, a year after secessionist troops had surrounded the state capital, shoved the state out of the Union at gunpoint, and hitched North Carolina to the caboose of the Confederacy, William Tyson fathered another son. This time my great-great-grandfather looked to the more recent past for a name that would signal his disapproval. As Union troops overran New Bern, only a few miles away, William Tyson named the boy Henry Clay Tyson, after the Great Compromiser, who had sought to hold the Union together and favored gradual emancipation of slaves. My father once claimed that this was a little like a white Southerner naming his son Muhammad Ali at the height of the Vietnam War, but that may have been an exaggeration. Henry Clay was not a black liberationist by any stretch, though his political creed—Whig nationalism—got drowned out in the crisis of the 1850s and 1860s, much as my father’s liberalism got drowned out in the wake of the Black Power era. In any case, like thousands of his neighbors, William Tyson remained a Unionist like Clay, even while the Civil War engulfed his home, and refused to support the Confederacy.

  In 1864, General George E. Pickett, who had led the famous Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, ordered twenty-two local boys in Kinston hanged in public for their loyalty to the United States. On a hastily constructed gallows at the Lenoir County courthouse, eastern North Carolina saw what the Confederacy was willing to do to its dissenters. After the mass hangings, Confederate soldiers went to the homes of the wives and children of the executed men, confiscated all their property, and forbade their friends and neighbors to help them. The Confederates would have hanged William Tyson, too, but he hid in people’s barns and in an underground passageway down by the Neuse River at Maple Cypress. From his secret sanctuary, William Tyson would slip out only at night to see his family, eluding the Confederate “recruiters” who roamed the roads. At the end of the war, he was forced into the Confederate “Home Guard” for a short time, then almost immediately captured by Union troops and sent to a prison camp up North. Things had been so hard for working people in eastern North Carolina under the Confederates, he liked to joke in later years, that he actually gained weight as a Union prisoner of war.

  My ancestor’s experience was quite typical in eastern North Carolina. Too little evidence of William Tyson survives to say for certain, but it would not surprise me if he had been a member of the Heroes of America, known informally as “the Red Strings,” a secret society of anti-Confederate guerrillas and saboteurs across the state. There were roughly ten thousand of them, although you would never know it to hear the Sons of Confederate veterans talk these days. Some were motivated by religious objections to slavery. Many others believed that this war was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” and that they themselves had no stake in the system of slavery. Still others objected to the tyranny of the Confederate government, which they had never consented to support. Poor whites resented Confederate impressment and taxation policies, but hated Confederate conscription laws that conveniently exempted wealthy slave-holders and their sons, one exemption for every twenty slaves owned. In 1861, one Rebel loyalist complained to the Confederate secretary of war that eastern North Carolina was “infested by Tories and disloyal persons.” When federal troops captured the northeastern North Carolina coast in 1862, almost a thousand white men volunteered for service in the Union armies. In 1864, Zebulon vance, the widely admired Confederate governor of North Carolina, conceded that “the great popular heart is not now and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians and not the people.”

  Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, white supremacists and neo-Confederates have made enthusiasm for the Confederacy posthumously unanimous. Some of them will even try to tell you that the slaves loyally supported the Confederacy, which is just a damn lie. In fact, as soon as federal troops under General Ambrose E. Burnside, guided by runaway slaves, invaded eastern North Carolina, thousands of those “loyal darkies” fled straight to the Union encampments. “It would be utterly impossible to keep them outside of our lines,” the perplexed General Burnside reported to the secretary of war, “as they find their way to us through woods and swamps from every side.”

  The actual history of the South too often rests in an unmarked grave, while the celebratory lies and politically convenient distortions march into immortality. In the 1990s, my father and I drove down to eastern North Carolina and plodded across a plowed field near Friendship Church to a small family graveyard that is William Tyson’s final resting place. The stone reads: WILLIAM TYSON, 1835–1916. IN HONEST MAN IS THE NOBLEST WORK OF GOD—illiterate stonemasons had turned “an” to “in.” Ironically, given his Unionist politics, which he never recanted, we found a brand-new Sons of Confederate veterans marker on his grave. My great-great-grandfather hid from the Confederates in life, but their descendants caught him after death, when he could no longer flee, and claimed him as a Confederate veteran, violating his memory in order to polish up the Lost Cause. Daddy pulled up the marker and gently tossed it into the weeds, shaking his head. When we went back ten years later, the marker had returned, and I yanked up the iron stob and pitched it a long, long way into the nearby tobacco field.

  That Southern dissenting tradition, however embattled, persisted in the life of my grandfather Marvin Earl Tyson, as well. He was a handsome string bean of a man with an insatiable intellect, born in 1901 near Friendship Free Will Baptist Church in Greene County, North Carolina. No one really knows exactly when or where Jack, as they called him, rejected white supremacy and began to preach a strange new gospel of equality; he came to it by degrees. Raised a fundamentalist, Jack was independent by nature, and as his mind grew he began more and more to live by his own reckoning. “My father was a kind of growing person,” Vernon recalled. “He didn’t come out of that root,” he said, referring to Jack’s evolving ideas about racial equality, “but those branches came out of his life, and he just let them flower as they would.” Even when nearly everyone around him felt differently, Jack kept his own counsel and trusted his own interpretations of the world. “He didn’t give a damn what other people thought about him,” my uncle Dewey said, “at least not about theological or philosophical questions, or how he was going to do things. If he did, anyway, we couldn’t tell.”

  Jack was the oldest of the seven children of Willie and Patty Mae Tyson, a farming family. They were poor as Job’s turkey. Willie broke his leg one spring when the boy
was in the eighth grade, and Jack quit school to plow and plant his daddy’s tobacco crop. He and his uncle Alonzo Tyson, who was a Free Will Baptist preacher, farmed side by side and never tired of talking about the things of the Spirit. Early one morning Jack went over to borrow a wrench to reset the sweep of his plow, and they got to talking about God, and when the dinner bell rang at noon, the two men were still standing out in the unplowed tobacco field, discussing the meaning of salvation and the doctrine of original sin. No wonder they stayed poor.

  Free Will Baptists had abandoned the old Calvinist belief in predestination and believed in “free will, free grace and free salvation.” A morally meaningful decision had to be taken freely, and humanity must choose its path to God. In those days, the generic term Baptist in eastern North Carolina generally meant Free Will Baptist. They did not get so far in the towns and cities, but out along the rural roads and up at the branch heads, country folk flocked in to hear the fiery sermons and sing the ancient hymns. Free Will Baptists displayed more emotion in church than Methodists and would have made an Episcopalian squirm, but they did not “speak in tongues” and cavort like the Pentecostal holy rollers. Some called them “foot-washing Baptists,” and Free Willers did hold quarterly meetings during which they washed one another’s feet. Jesus had washed feet, and that was good enough for them. At the end of the service, they would file up, row by row, and take turns kneeling before one another with tin basins and clean towels in a quiet drama of tender humility. This sacramental act underlined the fact that Jesus had called his followers to the way of humble service. Men washed the feet of men and women washed the feet of women; there was a clear understanding that young men and women washing one another’s bare feet were unlikely to keep their minds on the things of the Spirit.

  Jack attended these services a good deal, but his thoughts seem to have wandered from the things of the Spirit pretty regularly. When he was about eighteen, he was standing with some boys beneath the oaks at Friendship Free Will Baptist Church and saw a pretty girl walking across the yard. He asked who she was, and someone told him that she was one of the daughters of Reverend Willie Hart, the new preacher. “Well,” he announced to his companions, “I believe I am going to give that preacher a hard time.”

  Eighteen months later, when Willie Hart came home one Saturday afternoon, his five-year-old son met him at the road. “Daddy, Daddy, you better come quick,” the youngster yelled. “Irene has run off and married Jack Tyson, and Bessie thinks she is about grown!” Bessie was Willie’s fourteen-year-old girl and, according to family lore, she had rouged her cheeks with brick dust and steadfastly insisted that Irene, who was only two years older, was plenty old enough to get married.

  Jack had taken Irene to Greenville, the county seat of Pitt County, to get the marriage license, and then he’d driven to his uncle Alonzo’s house three miles outside Farmville, in Greene County, to get married. But Alonzo said that he couldn’t perform a wedding in Greene County; the ceremony wouldn’t be valid, since it was a Pitt County license. And so they all got in the Model T Ford and drove just across the county line at Middle Swamp in the rain, where Jack and Irene said their vows in the back seat of the car. Lots of folks back then got engaged in the back seat of a car, though sometimes they did not realize it right away, but Jack and Irene actually got married there. In later years, Irene liked to joke that only the front end of the car was in Pitt County, but that the back seat was still in Greene County and therefore she wasn’t legally obligated to honor or obey.

  In the early 1920s, Jack Tyson joined the Ku Klux Klan. My grandfather’s cousin Henry recruited him into the brotherhood of the bedsheet and sold him his first and only robe and hood. We should never forget that the Klan was about as mainstream as the Rotary club in the 1920s; membership nationally soared into the millions and included U.S. senators and, for example, the entire state legislature of Indiana. The mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, where I live now, openly endorsed the Klan. The Klan pumped its own muscular brand of Protestant morality; Cousin Henry had described it as a Christian men’s group devoted to providing cornmeal and sweet potatoes for widows and buying shoes and school books for orphans. If some sorry sumbitch was laying up drunk and his pregnant wife was out in the yard splitting wood, Cousin Henry told Jack, the Klan would drop by in their sheets and tell that man to sober up and that if there wasn’t a big pile of stove wood on the porch by the next evening, they would tan his hide but good. My grandfather joined the KKK out of both misguided piety and ignorant bigotry. I find it fascinating, and even hopeful, that Jack could go from klansman to race rebel. But it must have embarrassed my family because I learned about Jack’s later racial egalitarianism decades before I heard that he had been in the KKK. Most of us would rather claim to have always been perfect than admit how much we have grown. It occurs to me that my grandfather’s turn against white supremacy may have had something to do with his Klan experience, but apparently he never explained. Jack quickly discovered that the Klan was more committed to prejudice than piety, and he left after only a few weeks. Wearing the mask encouraged good people to do bad things, Jack told his children in later years, and the Klan’s obsession with white supremacy would not stand up to the injunctions of the New Testament.

  Growing up the daughter of a preacher, Irene was neither surprised nor dismayed when her young husband began to feel that the Lord was calling him to the ministry. In those days, Jack was an evangelical fundamentalist. He led the singing at camp meetings, held prayer meetings at their house, and began “exhorting” a little at Friendship Church. But his great shame was that he had no education beyond eighth grade, and he was sharp enough to know his own limitations. One day while he was teaching Sunday school, the principal of the local high school walked in and sat down. Jack was mortified that this man of learning was sitting before him, ignorant as he was, and later Jack told his children that he’d wished the floor would open up and let him through. But a few days later, John Holmes, the owner of the John Deere tractor dealership in Farmville, sent for Jack. “The school man told me he heard you at Friendship Church the other day,” Holmes told my young grandfather, “and he says you have great gifts for preaching but that you could use a little education.” Jack thanked him and conceded that he sorely lacked book learning. Mr. Holmes then offered to place fifty dollars a month in a bank account for Jack if he’d go to school. At the time, grown men cut timber all day long for a dollar, and fifty dollars a month was good money. And so Jack went first to Eureka College, the Free Will Baptist school in Ayden, and then moved down to Buies Creek and attended Campbell College, which also offered high school courses.

  Through this almost bizarre gesture of Christian fellowship from a near stranger, Jack Tyson got his high school diploma and acquired a little polish of learning when he was thirty and the father of seven children. He continued to take correspondence courses. Though he could only dream of graduating from college, he became a voracious reader and dedicated biblical scholar, and his mind ranged freely. His gifts made him a renowned Free Will Baptist preacher, and he conducted revivals all over eastern North Carolina. Jack Tyson had grown up in a world where preachers didn’t admit to preparing sermons; you just opened your mouth and God filled it. That kind of preacher would just “beat the Book and holler,” Jack liked to say derisively. But his reading and writing, combined with the evangelical style that he had learned growing up among fundamentalists, gave him a striking combination of preparation and passion. (“You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose,” he taught my daddy.) His inclination to study, undoubtedly a good thing, nevertheless encouraged his persistent temptation to regard his own views as divine writ; he did not think that he was God—that would have been blasphemy—but he sometimes seemed to think that God agreed with him on a pretty regular basis.

  Education also encouraged Jack Tyson to break the shackles of fundamentalism. The Bible is not a history text or a biology book, he said. It is the highest t
hat we know of God, but we do not know everything about God, nor are we likely to understand Him fully on this side of the river Jordan. He didn’t need a Divine blueprint; a God small enough for him to understand, Jack Tyson liked to say, would not have been big enough for him to worship. As he pondered the Scriptures and the world around him, his social views became increasingly liberal. He kept company with New Dealer sociologists and social prophets, and ran with radicals and renegades of various stripes. He became fast friends with a left-wing Methodist preacher named Key Taylor, a wild-eyed populist who supported cotton mill strikers and treated “colored people” exactly as if they were white. In 1943, when the Free Will Baptist convention voted down a proposal that the denomination move toward having a formally educated clergy, Jack Tyson left the Free Will Baptists and became a Methodist preacher.

  Our family’s religious journey seems to ratify the old joke that a Methodist was just a Baptist who had learned to read and write. The rumor among resentful Baptists was that Jack had sold out for filthy lucre, that the Methodists had bought him by promising to send his children to college. That was not true, in any literal way, but all six of his sons became Methodist ministers and most of them attended Duke Divinity School; unlike the Free Will Baptists, the Methodists required an educated clergy. That denominational switch changed the whole history of our family. The Methodists were a more middle-class denomination, and Methodist preachers had minimum salary protection and a retirement plan. If I grew up with a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall and books in the house, it was partly because we became Methodists.