Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  Jack served small-town and country churches, and he never made any money. But life was a little easier. “When my daddy was driving the car and he was dressed up,” my own father remembered, “I thought he was so handsome. He had store-bought clothes on, nice suits, and his shoes were shined. He had Palmolive shaving lotion on and vitalis hair stuff, and I thought his hat smelled good. I thought that any wind that went by him and came in my nostril was a sweet wind.”

  Life in eastern North Carolina did not always smell so sweet. Though people tend to think of poor, rural white Southerners as the worst racists in the country, these were not the people who redlined black folks out of their neighborhoods, the way northern bankers and real estate agents did. They were hardly in a position to keep blacks out of America’s most elite schools, the way northeastern academics did. And white country people in the South often lived right alongside blacks, in similar material conditions, which both softened and sharpened racial clashes. Karl Marx exaggerated only slightly in pointing out that poor whites had nothing to lose but their chains. But Marx couldn’t have known that the links that white supremacy and the Civil War had hammered into those chains gave white working people in Dixie a bone-deep sense of themselves as white Southerners, tied to a bloody history that usually pitted them against African Americans, even in opposition to their own interests.

  The landscape poor whites shared with blacks, in rough and unequal fashion, was a hardhanded world of hog killing, hookworm, and backbreaking labor, where the Great Depression came early and stayed late. Indoor plumbing was practically unknown; the outhouse, with its Sears Roebuck catalog, and the slop jar under the bed were standard equipment. Kerosene lamps provided what little light was needed, since men and women who had worked from dawn until dusk rarely sat up late reading. The Tyson boys shared shoes when one of them needed to look nice, and cardboard patches made shoe leather walk a little farther. Irene Hart Tyson stitched pajamas and underwear for the children out of flour sacks. Her boys bickered over socks; after my father grew up, his sock drawer was always brimming with new socks, neatly rolled in homage to the painful memory of having had so few to wear when he was a boy.

  When there was no meat and not enough eggs in Irene’s larder, she would make egg gravy and biscuits. Or else she would fry out a little fatback pork, add flour, and make thin gravy with black pepper, Tabasco sauce, salt, and water. She would slice leftover biscuits into the gravy and simmer them, a dish she called “stewed biscuits.” On cold winter mornings, she would break up kindling and light a fire in the stove, and serve fried dough with homemade jam as a treat for her brood. Irene worked hard and loved harder, and managed well through every hardship except losing her children; she had ten children in all, but three of them died as infants or toddlers.

  The first one, Thelma, was a curly-headed three-year-old angel and Irene’s only girl when she died of pneumonia in 1929. For the rest of her life, Irene would pass girls on the street and say, “Jack, look, she’s about the age Thelma would be if she had lived.” Thelma’s picture occupied a permanent place of reverence on the mantel-piece. “I know that when my mama died,” Daddy said, “and she met God, she didn’t say, ‘Tell me about the Trinity, I’ve always wondered how God could be three in one.’ What she said was, ‘Have you taken good care of my Thelma? And when can I see her?’ ” A second girl, velma, died of diphtheria in 1938, when she was ten months old.

  Soon after velma died, Irene entered her eleventh pregnancy. The family doctor thought that having another baby would be a threat to her health, and her husband sided with the physician. After much persuasion, Irene checked into the little country hospital in Wilson to undergo a hysterectomy, which would abort this pregnancy and prevent any more. When Jack left the house to see her, he sternly instructed the seven older children to take good care of little Eugene, who was three, and to scrub out the entire house. The boys boiled water on the stove and dumped each full pot into the galvanized tin tub set on the wide boards of the kitchen floor. But before they had filled the washtub, little Eugene teetered backward, plopped down into the scalding hot water, and screamed.

  Lying on her bed in the tiny hospital, Irene heard the crying infant being hustled into the emergency room. “That’s my baby,” she yelled, and the nurses had to restrain her to keep her from running to see him. Badly burned from the waist down, little Eugene died during the night. His father carefully dressed the boy, combing his hair and carefully cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife, before they went to the cemetery to sing “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and lower Irene’s precious boy into the sandy loam of Greene County. Irene felt terribly guilty about the abortion and blamed herself for the tragedy. My great-aunt Pauline, about sixteen at the time, came to live with Jack and Irene’s family for several months afterward to help out with the housework. “Rene-rene was just devastated,” Pauline recalled. “As far as she was concerned, this was God’s way of saying, ‘I decide who lives and who dies, not you.’ She just sort of broke down after that.”

  Robert G. Teel, Gerald’s father, grew up in this same brutal world of tenant farming and hardscrabble survival. He was born in Pitt County the year after my father, in 1930, the son of Lucy Barrow and Moses Teel, only a few miles down the same lonesome stretch of blacktop where the Tysons lived. Young Robert’s mother and father separated early in their marriage; there were rumors that a drunken father had physically abused Robert. Lucy took her son and went home to her parents’ farm near La Grange. “We was staying with my grandparents until Ma and my stepdaddy married,” Teel told me later. “We were farmers, worked hard, got along pretty good.” The Teel family could not have had much more money than the Tysons and, like my father, Gerald’s daddy had sometimes worn underwear stitched from flour sacks. Collard greens, fried fatback, field peas, and fried cornbread were standard table fare. Young Teel did not always get that much. “I came from a real poor family,” Teel explained. “Real, real poor.”

  After a time, apparently against the will of her parents, Lucy remarried to a man named Jesse Smith. Robert Teel kept his first father’s last name but idolized his new stepfather. Years later, Teel still called him “one of the greatest men I have ever known.” The Barrows, however, never accepted Jesse Smith. “They told me you’re not supposed to listen to your stepdaddy,” Teel said. Teel and Smith shared an aversion to formal schooling. “I was kind of hardheaded, didn’t much want to go to school,” Teel recounted, “and I thought I shouldn’t have minded listening to my stepdaddy.” Teel dropped out of high school at sixteen, lied about his age, and joined the army.

  I have often contemplated the differences between my father and Gerald’s father, and how they shaped our lives. Daddy and Teel were within a year of each other in school and grew up only a few miles apart. Neither of them liked school worth a damn. They wore overalls, ate cornbread and beans, drank their iced tea heavily sweetened, and knew what it was to work hard in the tobacco fields from sunup to sun-down. Each of them left eastern North Carolina wanting something better, something more. The difference between them couldn’t be boiled down to socioeconomic class; neither of their families had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, as the saying went. In fact, while Teel had his G.I. Bill educational benefits to pay his way through any school, my father had to borrow and scrounge. But Daddy went to a liberal arts college founded by the Quakers, where he met pacifists, liberals, radicals of various descriptions, and black people far more educated than himself. More important, he had Reverend Jack Tyson for a father. At the heart of our differences, I think, stand the many-sided visions of Jesus that haunt the South. Although eastern North Carolina was awash in Baptist fundamentalism, the Teel clan did not seem to have had the softening influence of the gospel in their lives, at least not the same gospel that Jack Tyson preached.

  During World War II, for example, my grandfather resigned one of his pastorates rather than permit the church to buy war bonds. When the radio played the popular song “Praise the
Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” Jack said to turn that mess off; he was not going to have it in his house. One night, driving from Pikeville to Stantonsburg, according to my father, Jack let them listen to the whole song. “I want you to know why I object to it so much,” Vernon remembered him explaining. He understood people passing the ammunition, but didn’t hold with them praising God while they were doing it. Jack was not a pacifist, certainly not in the face of Adolf Hitler, but in his mind it was not the place of the church to make war, nor was it appropriate for Christians to celebrate slaughter. Not surprisingly, since race stood at the center of Southern life, race was the issue where Jack clashed with his fellow Christians most sharply.

  The racial views of the Almighty were well known to the white citizens of eastern North Carolina. Most white Christians believed that white supremacy was the will of God; the Lord Himself had placed them above the “sons of Ham,” whose appointed purpose was to be hewers of white people’s wood and drawers of white people’s water. The segregationists’ favorite biblical citation was Genesis 9:18–26. In the ninth chapter of Genesis, Noah got drunk, and his own son, Ham, saw him naked. This embarrassed Noah, evidently, and he cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, his own grandson, who had nothing to do with it. “Cursed be Canaan,” Noah declared, “and let him be a bondman of bondmen to his brethren.”

  Right-wing fundamentalists invoked Noah’s little domestic incident as God’s blessing upon slavery, segregation, and white supremacy; children’s literature from the White Citizens Councils in the 1950s confidently assured white youngsters that heaven, too, would be segregated. Jack himself accepted these distortions of Scripture early in his life, back in the 1920s. Once he began to read and ponder the Book for himself in the 1930s, however, it became clear to Jack that the Bible said no such thing. For one thing, the author of Genesis did not utter one damn word about the pigmentation of Ham or his sons. In fact, it stands to reason that Ham looked right much like Noah’s other sons. And Jack observed that it was not God who had cursed Ham, but Noah when he was drunk as a busted bicycle, not to mention butt naked. In this undignified condition, Noah hardly seemed to Jack the most likely vehicle for eternal proclamations about the social order.

  White Southerners, with their abiding sense of place, also saw God’s blessing for the social order in the natural world around them. “Segregation is a fundamental law of nature,” one of Jack’s contemporaries wrote to the editor of his hometown paper, “and the mockingbirds and robins lead separate and peaceful lives.” Any challenge to white supremacy would represent “a violation of God’s eternal laws as fixed as the stars,” the North Carolina superintendent of schools told an auditorium filled with African American college students when my father was a boy. If God had intended black and white people to mix as equals, most white folks figured, He would not have made them different colors. Of course, looking around the barnyards and fields where he lived, Jack could see that the segregationists drew their examples from the natural world as selectively as they read the Bible. They never argued that black horses wouldn’t mate with white horses, since they clearly did. Mockingbirds and robins were not just different colors, like people, but separate species. And the ubiquitous mules that plowed the tobacco fields and hauled the cured leaf to market brayed every day in witness to the failure of donkeys and horses to discern the Divine plan.

  Like the mule, Jack enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and I think it is important to concede that his contrarian views about race partook in some measure of his arrogance and cussedness. On race, and on several other topics, Jack’s brilliant mind and his powerful ego sometimes set him at odds with other folks. His ministry was important to him, and he did not offend the folks in the pew lightly. But at some point, he simply stopped obeying many of the racial folkways that both reflected and created the architecture of social power in the South. Black Southerners worked alongside white people, for example, “but they didn’t drink out of your dipper,” my father recalled. “And when they cooked for white people, they didn’t eat at the main table. But in the 1940s, the blacks who helped us on the farm began to eat at our table.” It was not easy for blacks to cross the line, Vernon remembered. “They weren’t really sure they were welcome. But my daddy taught us to just say, ‘Oh, yeah, come on in here and eat with us.’ It was not something we talked about so much but just something we did.”

  For all of his iconoclastic radicalism on race, even my grandfather never entirely shook the presumptions of his white supremacist culture. Nor were his white supremacy and his racial egalitarianism always easily separated. When Jack’s friend “Uncle Rudy” Clegg, the black janitor of the local high school, asked Jack to officiate at the wedding of his granddaughter, Jack did not hesitate to agree. He came home and told the family that Rudy had assured him that these nuptials would be “the biggest thing that Biscoe ever pulled off,” and they all got a laugh out of what seemed a poor black man’s presumption. The Tysons quoted Rudy laughingly as sort of a playful “coon” story, as if Rudy were the blustery “Kingfish” in Amos ’n’ Andy. But Mr. Clegg was a man of substance on the other side of the color line, and he knew what he was talking about. The crowd at Big Bethel was so large that Jack literally had to crawl in the rear window of the church. He loved every minute of the service and attended the reception afterward. When the congregations at his white churches heard the outlandish news—that Preacher Tyson had married a black couple—there were angry words and cold stares, but he won them back. Jack generally kept his white congregations for the same reason that he welcomed black folks at his front door and sat them down at his dinner table; he was openhanded and warmhearted, a deeply religious man who earnestly believed in what he would have called “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” If he sometimes offended his congregations, they always knew where he stood. Of course, it did not hurt any, a friend of his assured me, that when Jack Tyson “stood like a ramrod up there in the pulpit, he was the damnedest preacher I ever heard. I mean the best, and by a long shot, too.”

  Jack’s heyday in the pulpit came during the 1930s and 1940s, when the challenge to segregation and white supremacy was beyond the vision of most Americans. And Jack didn’t preach about race very often. Like my daddy always said, if you asked him about his sermon ahead of time, Jack preached “about God, and about twenty minutes.” But when the Spirit spoke to him about race, he heeded the call. One Sunday afternoon in 1945 while Jack was serving the Biscoe-Star-Candor circuit in Montgomery County, C. v. Richardson, the big textile mill owner up at Star, came by the parsonage in a huff and told him to stay away from the subject of race.

  By the 1930s, the Carolinas had surpassed New England as the world’s leading producer of yarn and cloth. Despite the long hours at low pay, hard-pressed farm families poured into cotton mills like the one Richardson owned. These jobs “furnished almost the only refuge for the white laboring people of the South from the strong competition of cheap negro labor,” as the Southern Textile Bulletin, the mouthpiece of the mill owners, warned. It would be wrong, the Bulletin argued, “to work negroes in association with white women and children.” Except for a handful of janitorial jobs, the cotton mills stayed lily-white. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the mill owners constantly warned that “communist” labor unions had targeted the mills with their radical agenda of “race mixing” and social overthrow. “The Communists may harangue until judgement day,” the Southern Textile Bulletin vowed, “but they can never convince the cotton mill operators of the South that negroes are their equals.” Mill owners like Richardson took care to hold preachers under their thumbs; the money men depended on the ministers to help keep black and white working people at each other’s throats, labor unions at bay, and wages in the cellar. Richardson, who donated a large portion of the church budget, warned Jack that he’d already “heard just about enough of those ‘nigger sermons.’ ”

  Soon after Richardson issued the warning, Jack mounted his pulpit and told the con
gregation about a dream. It wasn’t like the dream Martin Luther King Jr. would lift up for the ages at the March on Washington almost twenty years later—in fact, it was a white man’s strange nightmare—but it worked toward the same ends. Jack told the people that in his dream, he woke up one morning and his skin had turned black. He was the very same person inside, he said, with all the same hopes, needs, and aspirations, but no one knew him anymore. His wife would not let him in the house, and his children turned away from their daddy. In his dream, Jack told the congregation, he walked the streets alone and could not find a job or a place to sit down and have a cold drink. He was a man without a country and a wanderer in a world that walled him away. At the end of his sermon, Jack broke the spell of his tale and confessed to his parishioners that it hadn’t been a dream at all, just something he’d been thinking about one day—that God Almighty was not a respecter of persons, and He did not care about the color line. “And I think all of you ought to think about it, too,” he added, motioning the piano player to start the last hymn.

  On the way down the aisle, Jack saw the textile mill owner glowering at him and knew fully the price he might pay. Although it was only his third year in Biscoe and the standard hitch for Methodist preachers in those days was four years, the church’s administrative board voted not to renew his contract, and the bishop moved Jack to Carrboro, North Carolina, on the edge of Chapel Hill. He died there in 1953; but his family always remembered his defiance with unmasked pride. Jack’s children grew up knowing that you stood your ground on some things.