Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  When I got inside the library, I walked past a huge oil painting of Thad Stem, who had died a few years earlier; he was now officially commemorated by a number of people who had refused to even speak to him in life. Behind the counter, I recognized the older white woman who’d long ago tried to prevent my mother from reading a novel by a black woman. But things had changed. The library now welcomed and even employed African Americans. And so I also saw the gracious face of Helen Amis, a lovely and kindly black woman who had been active in the freedom movement. I had called to let her know I was coming, and she smiled as I held out the manuscript. “Do give my best regards to your father,” she said quietly, taking the stack of paper from my hand.

  EPILOGUE

  BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME

  LIKE BLACK SOUTHERNERS in the segregated South where he had grown up, Daddy rode through Dixie in the back of the bus, but the mark of subordination had become a place of honor. In 2001, we took forty college students on a two-week bus trip through the South, visiting battlefields of the African American freedom struggle and meeting the local people who had overthrown old Jim Crow. Though I was supposed to be a teacher, the most eloquent thing I was able to share with the students was my daddy, whose massive frame filled the rear bench of the bus from Highlander Folk School in Tennessee to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

  At seventy-one, Daddy exuded wisdom, grace, and an openness to the things of the Spirit. In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Daddy went to the grave of Vernon Dahmer, murdered by Klan terrorists in 1966, with Dahmer’s widow and son and prayed with them. In Birmingham, he seemed to have hugged every single member of Body of Christ Deliverance Ministry, where we met Autherine Lucy, Colonel Stone Johnson, and many of the foot soldiers of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. From Beale Street in Memphis to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, he deeply touched the lives of those students. They laughingly took to calling his perch “the confessional,” because one by one most of them slipped to the back of the bus to talk to him about their aspirations and fears. I would hear the soft, rich timbre of his deep voice from time to time, and glance back to see him laying a gentle hand across the shoulder of a student weeping or laughing.

  Black and white together, we rolled through Dixie, singing the songs of the movement and challenging ourselves to confront the deeper truths of American history. We held classes on the bus, on city sidewalks, in hotel lobbies, and at crowded soul food restaurants. Day after day, we met local movement organizers, toured slave markets and sugar plantations, heard great gospel singers, and talked with people whose memories of the movement made history walk and talk. Night after night, we huddled in hotel rooms and explored our deepest feelings about the meaning of race in America. Although age tends to narrow some people’s focus, I could not help but notice my father’s broadened outlook and ease of manner. Daddy instructed all of us by the quiet grace with which he approached the people we met and the unblinking courage with which he confronted the painful history that we uncovered along the way.

  My mother, of course, had been the teacher in the family, and I liked to think of myself as following in her footsteps. She was the truth teller, too. Unlike my father, my mother was not a romantic liberal, looking for some kind of redemptive interpretation of a tragic past. With her, you knew you were getting the straight stuff; the blind didn’t see and the lame didn’t walk and what was dead stayed that way, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor. In some respects, my work as a historian drew upon the strengths I inherited straight from my mother—her ability to confront uncomfortable truths and her eye for the telling contradiction, for example. I ain’t no damn preacher, I had told myself, I am a historian. But as I’d learned my new trade at a deeper level, I’d discovered that I had not escaped the call to ministry as cleanly as I might have thought. I had not only followed my mother into the classroom but my father into the pulpit, never mind that I preached on weekdays instead of Sundays. There I was, pacing the lecture hall with chalk dust on my pants, day after day. Even if I’d had to move to a foreign country—and Wisconsin is a foreign country —I felt at peace with the heritage that had been both a blessing and a burden.

  This mixed blessing was never so clear as on that morning in New Orleans when our bus took us up the River Road to Destrehan Plantation in a driving rain. Those of us who had helped plan the trip knew this would be a hard visit. We had selected this place on purpose, knowing that our students would learn things here that were impossible to convey any other way.

  Thousands of Africans and their descendants had poured out their lifeblood at Destrehan to make the cane planters some of the wealthiest men of their day. In 1811, slaves from Destrehan and other nearby plantations rose up by the hundreds and marched down the River Road toward New Orleans, battle flags snapping in the breeze. Improvised drums banged out what one historian called their “suicidal quest for freedom that belied many white planters’ basic assumptions that their slaves were passive, docile laborers who would never challenge white authority.” United States Army troops confronted the slave army on the second day of their trek and slaughtered sixty-six of them. The clash was more butchery than battle; the white soldiers would turn captured black men loose one by one and shoot them for sport as they fled. The slaveholders tried the rest at Destrehan Plantation, where a handpicked jury of planters sentenced most of them to death. Roughly 150 were either killed on the River Road or hanged in front of their fellow slaves. “The heads of the executed shall be cut off and placed atop a pole,” the judge ruled. Months later, the levee along the River Road remained “ornamented with poles,” said one newspaper, “on which are placed numbers of the heads of these unfortunate wretches.”

  Though my students and I had studied the grisly history of this place, nothing could have prepared us for what we found as we stepped off the bus beneath the spreading live oaks with their canopy of Spanish moss. Private investors had turned the plantation house, with its enormous columns and three-foot-thick brick foundations, into a monument to what one tour company’s brochure called “the good old days” of the antebellum South. Young women in swirling skirts and sun bonnets greeted us at the door. The presence of a mixed-race group made them visibly uneasy. The tour included virtually no mention of slaves or slavery, let alone the 1811 revolt. A black handyman working outside told some of the students that the management had recently fired a young tour guide who’d insisted on talking about slavery. “Our guide’s presentation was about prayer schools, parlors, ladies’ portraits on the wall, tall ceilings, hand-carved banisters,” one of the students wrote in his journal. “It was surreal.”

  After a few minutes, I looked out a window and saw one of the black students on her knees in front of the levee, her forehead pressed against the ground, pounding the grass with her outstretched palms. Many of us, especially the African American students, could not hold back tears of frustration and sorrow. It was hard for me, too, but I had seen this kind of thing before. I made a couple of polite attempts to get our guide to talk about the lives of the people who had worked on the plantation, but she seemed to panic at the questions. Part of me wanted to protest. But as a Southerner myself, I knew that a busload of college students from Wisconsin would have a hard time saying anything without being dismissed as ignorant, meddlesome Yankees. Before the tour ended, about half of the students were sitting in groups of two or three under the trees, many of them crying. I tried to stop Rhea Lathan, an African American student, as she headed down the walkway toward the bus. She waved me off and stomped past me, muttering, “There are bodies hanging all over these trees.”

  By the time we filed slowly back onto the bus, the whole group was emotionally devastated. I saw Daddy in the back of the bus talking with a teary-eyed Rhea. And then the broad-shouldered preacher stood up in the aisle and said to the silent busload of students, “Let us pray.” Every head on the bus, atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jew, and Muslim bowed in unison. “Oh, Lord,” he intoned, “we pray your blessing
upon all those who lived and loved and labored in this place; for those who poured out their gifts on land that could never be their own; for women who birthed babies unattended; for children whose genius went unacknowledged; for all your children who cut cane and sweated in the hot sun, and knew in their bones there was a better place.” I could feel the balm of his words spreading through the rows of angry and emotional people. “And we ask your peace and your healing for those on this bus whose cheeks burn with tears and whose eyes have been seared by sights that hurt them deeply,” he continued. “We ask that these pains of love might bring a harder wisdom.”

  But Daddy was not going to leave us on the high horse of moral superiority. Before the tears could dry, he challenged us to find that harder wisdom. “And we ask your help, Lord,” Daddy continued, lifting his thick hands, “that we not become prejudiced against those who are prejudiced, or whose prejudices may not be our own.” Here it came. “For we acknowledge and confess to you that we, too, like the men who once owned Destrehan Plantation, have been tempted to love things and use people, when you have called us to love people and use things. We ask your forgiveness for our complicity in these evils, and in the evils of our own time, and pray your healing for our hearts. Thank you for the love that binds us one to another, and to our homes and families, and to you.” I could tell that the students on that bus, who rarely find such clarity in their college classes or campus coalitions, were astonished and grateful. But this harder wisdom was less surprising to me, having once read a letter of protest signed “A fellow sinner, Vernon Tyson.”

  Those words were not false humility; as my father well knew, Tyson blood was anything but a straight ticket to sainthood. After all, our family had literally grown up in the same soil that had produced Robert Teel, and the self-willed spirit of violence and the deeply ingrained white supremacy that drove Teel was not foreign to our family. The passionate intensity that the Tyson brothers carried into the pulpit on Sunday mornings was not entirely separate from the violent carnality that some of their kinfolks displayed on Saturday nights. My father, the most gentle and loving man I have ever known, could roar into a room like a grizzly bear and make his children wonder, at least for a moment, whether they would survive. All of his brothers were tenderhearted, comical, and expansive, and devoted to the love of Jesus. But one of the reasons I liked Muhammad Ali so much as a boy was probably because he reminded me of my uncles, bragging and strutting in a sweet way that was also faintly dangerous.

  More than one of the Tyson boys had been a high-style sinner in his day; a sexual history of the family would not be the stuff of Sunday school literature, though it might well involve Sunday school teachers. But the faith was there, even when they stumbled, and they worked hard to do better, even when they fell. The Tysons had broken some of the shackles of fundamentalism and white supremacy and they had all had gotten some education. More importantly, the family nurtured a tender and redemptive vision that would never quite let them forget that everyone, including Robert Teel, is a child of God. It cannot be denied, however, that the Tysons harbored a spirit that rebelled not only against an unjust social order but sometimes against their own best lights, too. Any one of the Tysons—not just the Gator—was capable of the kind of murderous rage that killed Henry Marrow.

  In that sense, like the story of the Gator, this book is really a story of the blues and a story of the gospel. Both the blues and the gospel started as Southern things but speak to the whole human dilemma. The blues are about looking a painful history straight in the eye; the gospel is about coming together as a community of faith in order to rise beyond that anguish. If anyone wonders why a white boy from eastern North Carolina teaches black history in Wisconsin, the timeless wisdom of the blues has one answer. Ralph Ellison expressed the central meaning of the blues better than anyone. “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness,” Ellison wrote, “to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” In that sense, this book is a kind of blues expression that urges us to confront our rage, contradictions, and failures and the painful history of race in America. As in that history, there is no clean place in this story where anyone can sit down and congratulate themselves. My family has sometimes tried, for reasons mixed and sometimes unclear, to help those who wanted a new world to be born. But beyond the bitter legacies of slavery and white supremacy, when we look into the mirror, no matter our color, none of us can forget that the Gator lurks in there somewhere, staring back at us. Like Thad Stem used to say, we not only have problems, we are problems.

  As a nation and as individual human beings, we would rather hear the gospel stories of Mrs. Roseanna Allen and Miss Amy Womble’s witness than the blues stories of murder, retribution, and injustice that mark our actual history. The story of how my daddy and Miss Amy and Dr. Proctor transformed our church is true, of course, and I consider myself fortunate to know it firsthand. All that the triumph of goodness required was a combination of the leading African American educator and preacher of his generation, a local white minister with deep roots in a place he knew in his bones, and the timely intervention of a prophetic hometown saint who happened to have been a first-grade teacher to most of the other people in the story. This makes for good narrative, but it is not a reliable recipe for social transformation. Unjust social orders do not fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process. Unfortunately, Miss Amy’s witness is a far less normal American story than that of Henry Marrow’s murder and the conflagration it caused in Oxford the summer I turned eleven.

  Even so, Miss Amy’s witness is a perfect match for the only history of the civil rights movement that most Americans willingly remember. In this story and in popular memory, a respectable and eloquent black preacher came to the pulpit to confront white America. A handful of us welcomed him, most of us feared him, and some of us hated him. But when this elegant man of the cloth arrived, he was not so threatening after all. Instead, his sonorous voice evoked our best selves and reminded us just how good we really were. Prodded by the simple sense of decency we learned as children, we listened nervously as the black minister promised to make the rough places smooth and the crooked places straight, and asked only our tolerance.

  Like Dr. Proctor, the black preacher then went away and bothered us no more, leaving us congratulating ourselves for a change of heart that need not change our ways or our world. And we cherish the conventional story of Dr. King and nonviolence, in fact, precisely because that narrative demands so little of us. The problem is not that we cherish the story, exactly, nor is the story itself entirely false. Miss Amy’s witness is true, and many of the things we admire about Dr. King are factual. The problem is why we cherish that kind of story: because we want to transcend our history without actually confronting it.

  We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation. In some instances, white people rose to the call of conscience, though only a handful followed their convictions into the streets. More often, what grabbed white America’s attention was the chaos in those streets and the threat of race war. The federal government intervened in domestic racial politics, in the end, because segregation had become a threat to American foreign policy and domestic stability. Most whites—and many middle-class blacks—recoiled in fear of these changes and huddled in the suburbs of their own indifference. The civil rights movement kno
cked down the formal and legal barriers to equal citizenship, but failed to give most African Americans real power in this society.

  In the intervening years, the nation has comforted itself by sanitizing the civil rights movement, commemorating it as a civic celebration that no one ever opposed. The enemies of the struggle ascended to national power and sought to diminish its memory, often by grinding off its rough edges and blunting its enduring critique of a dehumanizing economic and political system. The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.

  The work we face is to transcend our history and move toward higher ground. To find that higher ground, we must recognize, as Dr. King tried to teach us, that we are “caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Dr. King’s vision, like the gospel and the blues, came from the South but belongs to the ages. The chorus of the song that gave this book its name traces that connection of blues realism to gospel transcendence: Ain’t you glad, ain’t you glad, that the blood done sign my name?