Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  My amusement, nostalgia, and the buzz of the clippers were sharply interrupted by the rhythmic popping of the strop as Teel whisked the blade of a straight razor across it. His cadence slapped out a familiar barbershop sound from the old days, one that I associated with the clean aroma of lather whipped up in a cup with a wooden-handled brush and the cloying smell of hair tonic. But now it took on a perilous aspect as I pondered the prospect of Robert Teel shaving my neck with a straight razor. I wished I hadn’t seen his criminal record that morning at the courthouse. If his voice hardened and his razor hand curled inward, pressing that blade across my throat, would it be first-degree murder? Manslaughter? Accidental self-defense? If somehow I managed to escape, would that make it assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury? Underneath the smock he had tied around me, my hand slipped to the ice pick in my jacket pocket. Somehow I managed to hold myself together as the razor slowly scraped my neck, then was replaced with a hot towel. Teel tenderly cleaned the leftover lather from my ears and my temples, which were pounding with unspilled blood.

  Just as he brushed the hair off my shoulders and pulled the tissue paper from around my neck, an orange four-by-four pickup with headlights mounted across the top of the cab pulled up in front of the barbershop. Even before I saw him, I somehow knew that it was my old friend Gerald stepping out of the truck. He walked into the shop wearing brogan boots like the ones we used to wear as boys, jeans, a flannel shirt, and a baseball cap. We had not seen each other in years, but he did not even pause. “Tim Tyson!” he said, grinning at me happily and extending a warm handshake. He hadn’t laid eyes on me, he said, since the old days when he and Jeff Daniels and I used to smoke Jeff ’s mama’s cigarettes in the woods. Seeing Gerald again was like seeing a ghost; a dozen years earlier, this young man had said something that had changed my whole life, and then we’d both moved away. Now somehow it appeared to have been no big deal.

  We chatted for a few minutes about our days as juvenile delinquents. Gerald was working at a local factory. I talked about working construction, cooking in restaurants, and how my girlfriend had persuaded me to try going to college. He wanted to get together and have a beer one of these nights, and I got directions to where he was living. While we were laughing and talking, his father wordlessly picked up my tape recorder off the Formica-topped coffee table and plopped into an armchair with the device on his lap, studying the buttons. He pushed “Record” with both thumbs and said, “I’ll talk to you. Is this thing on?” As I stepped toward him to make sure it was, Teel issued what he considered the summary assessment of what had happened back on May 11, 1970: “That nigger committed suicide, wanting to come in my store and four-letter-word my daughter-in-law.” That was the moment I became a historian.

  During my research trips to Granville County, which continued for years after Robert Teel uttered those fateful words, I always stayed with Ben and Joy Averett on their farm, which was on the outskirts of town in more ways than one. Though I had no way of knowing it when I’d met them as a little boy, I now came to understand that Ben and Joy operated their own little bohemian arts colony of a sort. Their annual Brunswick stew, made outdoors over a fire in a huge cast-iron cauldron, brought musicians and writers and friendly folks from across the country. Thad Stem was the only person allowed to smoke in their house, and he relished their company and their cooking. Their lovely cottage in the woods was filled with books of all kinds. Ben built Joy an elevated dance floor in the woods behind the house. When they had enjoyed that for a while, he turned it into the floor of a little cottage where she could pursue her weaving, painting, writing, and pottery. Though they had both grown up in Oxford and hardly seemed foreign to its folkways, Joy and Ben provided a well-rooted example of how to live an independent and artful life without “getting above your raising,” as the old saying goes. I was not only lucky to know them while I was growing up but lucky to have a place to stay while I searched for the story of what had happened to Henry Marrow, and to me, that summer in Oxford.

  Journalists have an old saying: “R.F.P.,” which means “Read the blankety-blank paper,” and that is where I began. After I had exhausted the coverage in the Raleigh News and Observer, which was available in the college library, I drove up to Oxford to see if I could find the Oxford Public Ledger. The local newspaper had been owned for decades by the Critcher family; their contributions to local political culture, as I have said earlier, included responding to the worst moment in Oxford’s racial crisis with an editorial calling for more attention to “the graves of the men who fell in the War Between the States.” The Critchers printed ads for Ku Klux Klan rallies but blamed blacks for all their troubles. Even so, the Ledger would provide an important gauge of local opinion. But when I went to the public library to look it up, the librarian came back to the desk with a puzzled look on his face. “It’s gone,” he said. “I know we had it once upon a time, but the microfilms of the Oxford Public Ledger from that entire period have just disappeared.”

  When I walked across the street to the Ledger office, I found an ancient Mrs. Critcher at the counter. When I asked about back issues of the Ledger, she seemed agreeable enough, but then said, “What are you researching?” I explained in a sentence or two. “Those papers are gone,” she said. “We must have thrown them away when we moved the newspaper office.” As I dithered in front of her, trying one way and another, her story changed a couple of times. There had been a fire, or perhaps it was a flood or hungry locusts, but in any case the Oxford Public Ledger for the entire post–World War II era was missing. That would not explain why it was missing from the library, of course. Nor would it enlighten us as to why the papers were also missing from the state archive in Raleigh when I checked there. Someone had gone to considerable lengths to destroy the paper trail. “I will tell you one goddamn thing,” Ben said at the farm later, proving that he had the instincts to write history as well as build houses. “They didn’t just walk off by themselves.”

  At the courthouse, I collided with a similar stonewall. The records for the Teel murder trial had disappeared, they told me. They did not really save court records. On my way toward the front door, however, I saw a staircase to the basement, where I would have expected to find the records. No one was watching, so I slipped down the stairs and found rows and rows of file cabinets. Since I had the case numbers, it was easy enough to look up the files. There was only a tiny partial transcript of the trial, but the arrest records were intact. In the bottom of the big folder, I found the yellow-handled knife that Henry Marrow allegedly carried when he was killed. I held it in my sweaty palm for a moment and wondered what he had been thinking when he’d realized that it was a pocketknife against two shotguns and that he was about to die. I stared into the angry eyes of Robert Teel and the bewildered face of Larry Teel in two police snapshots; the pictures themselves were period pieces, the thick Polaroid prints that roll out of a slot and develop before your eyes. I even found a few yellowed copies of the Oxford Public Ledger, presented as evidence by prosecutor Burgwyn in a plea for a change of venue. Nervous as a teenaged shoplifter, I stuffed the whole folder into my briefcase and headed for the public library, where I photocopied all the documents. Then I slipped back into the courthouse and replaced the folder. I was not going to steal the records, the way my adversaries had done. Two weeks later, when I came back to look at the photographs again, the folders were empty. It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.

  Given the trouble getting newspapers and documents from white sources, I decided to interview white people in Oxford first; if the whites heard that somebody was talking to the black folks, I reasoned, they would be likely to clam up. Local blacks would not be terribly concerned whether or not I was talking to white people; they would assume that a white boy was talking to white people. And when I got to them, I hoped, I would probably get
more cooperation. For a white boy, it seemed, it was easier to cross the color line than to penetrate the white veil of silence.

  The day after my unsettling interview with Teel, I called Representative Billy Watkins in Oxford, attorney for the Teel family in 1970, and I nearly dropped the telephone when he agreed to talk to me. Watkins was probably the second-most-powerful man in the state of North Carolina the day I called him. He was usually described as the “hatchet man” to Liston Ramsey, Speaker of the House, and was said to handle money matters for their powerful political machine. Some years earlier, Watkins had been considered a strong candidate for governor. My historian’s intuition, though I don’t have one bit of evidence to sustain it, says that Watkins’s supporters probably stole the Oxford Public Ledger from the library and the state archives. Though Watkins had come of age in a Democratic Party in which African Americans were irrelevant, by the mid-1970s, black voters exercised a near veto over the Democratic nomination. If opposition researchers or investigative reporters had been able to produce one well-timed news story of Watkins’s role in the Teel murder trial, Watkins’s larger ambitions could have been destroyed. Even though that did not happen, he remained chief bagman for the Ramsey machine. By the time I arrived at his office, he had changed his mind. “I am sorry,” the gray-haired, craggy-faced legislator said, squinting at me curiously. “The attorney-client privilege really keeps me from being able to talk to you the way I would like to do.”

  Regardless of why he had changed his mind and decided not to talk to me about the murder, Watkins could not stop himself from talking about race. Nobody these days understood the ways white and black people had gotten along in the South where he had grown up, Watkins insisted. It wasn’t as bad as I probably thought it was, he told me. Black people and white people had always gotten along in Granville County. “A black man was my hunting partner,” he said. “He kept the dogs and fed them, and I bought the feed. Relations were always good here. A black man keeps my horses now. I’ve got horses, and was raised on a farm, and we had some blacks out there who stayed on our farm for fifty years and more.”

  Watkins was an immensely powerful man whose sole study was the accumulation and exercise of political and economic leverage. No dreamer or scholar, he was instead a student of appropriations bills, paving contracts, and campaign contributions. Even his acute understanding of power, however, could not penetrate the wishful thinking and guilty apologetics that kept him from understanding the power dynamics behind the paternalistic relationships he described. Like many white people, most of what he thought he knew about race he’d learned from African Americans who had worked for his family, and most of it was ludicrous. Sensing that he had failed to persuade me somehow, he seemed reluctant to part company, offering one example and another of his beneficence to black people in a strange plea for an irrelevant absolution that it was not my place to offer. “You know,” he said as I turned to leave, “a black girl worked in my office during that whole trial.”

  When I walked into the police department across the street from his law office, I knew immediately that Watkins had warned someone there. Nathan White, who had been chief of police back in 1970, and Doug White, his brother and former assistant chief of police, met me at the door. They were both part-time detectives now, on their way toward retirement. “Your father was a good man,” Doug White said, inquiring about my daddy’s health. “Everyone in Oxford remembers him very warmly. A lovely man.” Picking up two strapping police officers as they walked me down the stairs, the two elderly gumshoes escorted me into a windowless concrete-block room in the basement of the police station and seated me at a Formica table. Doug White did all the talking. “Tell us about this paper you’re writing,” he said. I told him I was interested in the murder of Henry Marrow in 1970 and the riots and all of that. He nodded warmly, waiting impatiently for his chance to speak.

  “Your father was a good man,” he repeated unctuously. “We all just thought the world of him, didn’t we?” Four heads nodded. “And we’re so proud and pleased that you’re in school—that is just wonderful, isn’t it?” Nods all around. Then he lowered the boom. “But the thing is, you can’t write about this. All it will do is stir up bad feelings and cause trouble. Before all that trouble, things were good around here. And things have been good around here for a long time now.” He cleared his throat, and the three other men all nodded as if their throats, too, had been cleared. “You can’t write about this. No good can come of it.” It was clear that White had been working on his speech. “We are glad you’re back in Oxford, Tim, we really are. There are a lot of good things to write about around here, and we would be glad to help you with anything else. But the thing is, you can’t write about that. All it is going to do is stir up trouble.”

  I was only twenty-three, and so green that it did not even occur to me at first that they had brought me down into the basement to intimidate me. Despite my bumbling, cherubic appearance, I played a tough hand of poker. “Well, this is what I came to research and write about,” I said. “And this is what I am going to research and write about.” For good or ill, I aimed to finish my project, I insisted. “Some of the stuff people are telling me makes the police department look pretty bad,” I added. “I would hate to have to write my account without the department getting the chance to present its own point of view. I really don’t think it would be fair.” This is the hard-boiled, veteran journalist’s response—fine, don’t tell me your side, and let’s just see what you look like in the newspaper after your enemies tell it. How I came up with it is a mystery to me, since I was anything but hard-boiled, and until the day before I had not been a veteran of anything more harrowing than late-night skinny-dipping with waitresses. The policemen did not like my answer one damn bit, either. The men stood up, and White said in a menacing tone, glowering at me, “Tim, I said you can’t write about this. And I mean that thing.” Suddenly I was truly frightened, but I also knew that I was a middle-class white boy, with all the privileges that implied. My daddy was a preacher and my mama was a teacher, as Mrs. Roseanna Allen used to say, and they weren’t going to beat me up in the basement of the police station. I picked up my daddy’s old briefcase and walked right out the door without saying a word.

  Rattled, I went to the old gray-blue Falcon I had borrowed from a friend and scribbled furiously, hands trembling, on a legal pad. I wrote down every word that had been uttered in that basement that I could remember. And then I pulled into the street and began heading for Ben and Joy’s farm.

  Quickly an imposing blue police van appeared in my rearview mirror. A short-haired, blank-faced white man in an institutional blue shirt hunched over the steering wheel. He roared up to within a couple of inches of my back bumper. I checked my speed, thinking he might pull me over for speeding. I was going twenty-five miles an hour on a side street. Passing the liquor store and the doctor’s office, heading into a residential area, I accelerated a little, and he stayed literally almost right on my bumper, glaring at me. It began to occur to me that he had been sent to frighten me, but I brushed the thought aside as paranoia. Just to prove to myself that this was my lurid imagination, I turned directly into a residential neighborhood and took a right, then a left, then a right, thinking that he would disappear. But the van stayed inches from my bumper. He was playing some kind of game, and if it was supposed to scare me, it was damn sure working.

  I took the next left onto College Street, the boulevard of old homes where many of the wealthiest white families lived in victorian splendor. He wouldn’t do anything to me here, I reasoned. But suddenly it looked as if this police van had been welded to my bumper. When I slowed down, the van actually bumped the Falcon hard. I floored it. Heading down College Street, I went faster and faster: forty, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone. I thought he would probably flash the blue lights and sound the siren, but instead the blue van stayed right against my back bumper. Racing past the orphanage, I wanted to turn left on
Highway 158 at the Three-Way Diner, heading for the farm. But a continuous line of oncoming cars was approaching the intersection, and I was not going to slow down. At the last possible second, an opening in the traffic let me take a hard left turn on two wheels, gas pedal pressed to the floor. Surely I had shaken him, I thought. But when I looked into the rearview mirror, I saw the van careening across traffic and racing up 158. In seconds he was on my tail again.

  When we got to Four Corners, up at the old Tidewater Seafood Market, where Henry Marrow had lost his life, I cut the wheel to the right and gunned the Falcon’s pathetic little engine as hard as I could. On the one hand, it frightened me that we were heading out of town. On the other hand, I knew Ben Averett was working in his shop, and that he had plenty of firepower to handle one crazed police officer if it came to that. Ben’s driveway was less than a mile away, and if this maniac followed me up there, he was likely to be sorry. The van stayed literally inches from my back bumper, and I was going about eighty; the Falcon wouldn’t go any faster. I kept wondering—and I still wonder—what I might have discovered about this case that would make this police officer willing to risk his life to scare me away.

  The driveway to Ben’s farm empties into the paved road in a kind of wide, funnel-shaped gravel turnaround. It was coming up soon on my right, which I knew and the policeman, presumably, did not know. For all he knew I was headed for the Virginia state line, which was not far away, either. He was still welded to my bumper when I suddenly peeled off to the right, running the Falcon headlong into the driveway and pulling the wheel sharply to the right and then back. The car skidded sideways across the gravel, spraying up a cloud of rocks and dust and making a hideous noise, then finally slowing enough that I could gun it across the wooden bridge and up the driveway at axle-cracking speed. Relieved to have made the sliding turn in one piece, I glanced into the rearview mirror. The van was gone. I had lost him. When I drove into the yard, Ben was splitting sweet-gum stumps with a maul axe. I told him what had happened. “You’d better watch your ass,” he said quietly.