Blood Done Sign My Name

by Timothy B. Tyson

  “The Blood Done Sign My Name,” which I first heard sung as a blues song, started out as a slave spiritual. After the fall of the Confederacy, it emerged as a paradoxical blues lament, sung by Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) from a Mississippi prison cell and by his counterparts across the black South. In the 1930s, as black hopes for a new America began to rise, “The Blood Done Sign My Name” evolved into a gospel song. My favorite version of it, recorded in the late 1940s by the Radio Four, echoes the sorrowful roots of the blues and elevates the transcendent spirit of gospel, but listen closely and you can hear Chuck Berry rocking down the line. My own hopes for this country have taken a similar trajectory, moving from deep blues through gospel reconciliation and on into the full-throttle ebullience of rock and roll. And yet my ascendant spirits, like the future of our country, depend upon an honest confrontation with our own history.

  That history reveals the blood that has signed every one of our names. The sacrifice has already been made, in the bottoms of slave ships, in the portals of Ellis Island, in the tobacco fields of North Carolina and the sweatshops of New York City. The question remains whether or not we can transfigure our broken pasts into a future filled with common possibility.

  And so we turn to history not to wallow in a fruitless nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise that is rooted in the living ingredients of our own lives. America owes a debt that no one can pay, and yet it probably remains what Lincoln called “the last, best hope” of human freedom. As the spirit of empire stalks the land, the bitter irony of that possibility should not be lost on anyone. While it remains possible that our unacknowledged pasts will rise up and put an end to us, I believe that we can lay these ghosts to rest someday, provided that we turn and face them. I continue to believe, with James Baldwin, that if we do not falter, we “may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

  I believe in this possibility because as I have continued to sift the evidence and search for the meaning of a senseless death in my hometown, I found something much larger. It may not be an easy, add-water-and-stir redemption, but it opens a history in which we can all recognize the faces of flawed, well-meaning people like ourselves. Black Southerners, rooted in long-standing traditions that spoke to the best and confronted the worst in our common humanity, toppled the American racial caste system. The struggle in the South, like the struggles in Milwaukee, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, New York, and your own hometown, did not take place in some ethereal realm, removed from the sins of the past, but in the fallen world, among the imperfect people who had inherited a deeply flawed history. Everyone in this struggle, adversaries and advocates alike, grew up steeped in a poisonous white supremacy that distorted their understandings of history and one another. That history is not distant. Many of those who marched with Dr. King in Alabama and started the movement in Oxford were the grandchildren of slaves. The boy who told me “Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger” is barely middle-aged. And the enduring chasm of race is still with us, in some ways wider than ever.

  “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner reminds us; “it isn’t even past.” White supremacy remains lethal, though most of its victims die more quietly than Henry Marrow. It shoots down black youngsters who learn from the images of themselves on BET, CBS, and FOX that their lives are worthless enough to be poured out in the crack wars. Almost half of all African American children grow up in poverty in a deindustrialized urban wasteland. Blacks fall behind whites, sociologist Glenn Loury observes, in almost every observable measure of well-being: “wages, unemployment rates, income and wealth levels, ability test scores, prison enrollment and crime victimization rates, health and mortality statistics.” The majority of Americans reject social programs that could help close the enduring chasm of race, believing it is not our history, but their genes. The ancient lie of white supremacy lurks in the unconscious assumptions of most whites and many blacks, who believe, deep down, that something is wrong with black people. Many people who care are mired in guilt, as if the agonies of history could be undone by angst. The kinds of employment, education, and infrastructure initiatives that it would take to heal the enduring scars of slavery’s legacy are off today’s political chart. It remains easier for our leaders to apologize for the past than to address its lingering impact in our society. We can wring our hands over the horrors of slavery but cannot imagine an employment program for our cities.

  And yet the freedom struggle persists, even though it has not prevailed, in its battle against what Dr. King called the “thingification” of human beings. The traditions that gave us the movement will always be there for us to call upon, but we cannot wait until the saints come marching in; they never have, and they never will, at least not on this side of the river Jordan. But we must not forget, and I cannot forget. “The struggle of humanity against power,” Milan Kundera once wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The tragic murder of Henry Marrow—and the assassination of Dr. King and the loss of all those whom the slave poets called “the many thousands gone”—cannot be erased. But that blood, too, has the power to redeem our history. We only have to name it, and heed the call of justice that still waits for an answer. Like the nameless slave poets who wrote the spirituals, we must look our brutal history in the eye and still find a way to transcend that history together. I am standing here until the Lord takes me somewhere else, because the blood done sign my name.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  STORIES CAN HAVE SHARP EDGES. If you don’t believe it, read the Bible. Cain’s people wish someone had told his side of the story: Abel had it coming. The Chamber of Commerce in the Sodom-Gomorrah Greater Metropolitan Area would like to point out that much has changed since the old days, when a handful of misfits and outsiders marred the reputation of their fine community. Several persons in the Scriptural list of who-begat-whom still don’t see why the New Testament historian found it necessary to use their real names.

  Though tempted to change a few names to protect the guilty, principally, the wholly innocent in this story being hard to find, I have used real names in this book. The sole exception is one childhood friend, whom I no longer know but remember fondly, and do not wish to embarrass here without cause. I also have altered the identity of one distant relative, whose daughter pleaded that his grandchildren needn’t know the historically unimportant details of his misdeeds, which are sufficiently distinctive that most of the family will recognize him anyway. Several informants wished to remain anonymous, an understandable preference, given the various felonies involved, and I have respected their requests.

  This book is both memoir and history. I have hewn to the rules of evidence and argument that I learned in the doctoral program in the Department of History at Duke University. I first told the story in a master’s thesis submitted at Duke in 1990, Burning for Freedom: White Terror and Black Power in Oxford, North Carolina, and available at the Richard H. Thornton Library in Oxford, North Carolina. Historians may wish to consult the thesis for an exhaustive, if not exhausting, degree of documentation.

  There are at least two crucial things missing from that novice’s work of scholarship, however. First, someone in Oxford went to the library and tore out the pages where I narrate the killing of Henry Marrow, presumably to prevent other people from reading them. I could have replaced them, of course, but I have chosen not to do so. Those missing pages make my central point more clearly, in some respects, than their contents ever could have. Our hidden history of race has yet to be fully told, and we persist in hiding from much of what we know.

  The second critical gap in the master’s thesis reflects my own limitations; in the entire thesis, all two hundred pages and more, the reader never learns that I lived in Oxford, that I knew many of the people in the story when I was a boy, or that my family was marginally, though intensely, involved in these events. I was trying to write an objective history, grounded in scholarly researc
h, and did not wish to undermine my empirical plodding in favor of anything more personally revealing. That approach has its place. In the years since then, I have published a number of scholarly works of history, and read many others. As I have pondered the past more deeply, however, I have come to see that my master’s thesis, despite its research and documentation, constitutes a species of lie; that is, I failed to share my heart and my experiences with the reader, and hid behind my footnotes.

  This account bares not only my labors as a scholar but also my life as a human being. It explores what happened in Oxford, North Carolina, and what happened in my own soul. I am under no impression that my memories reflect the indisputable facts of the matter, though I believe them to be true; still, I have treated them with the same scrutiny as other historical sources, and perhaps more. I have attempted to verify them carefully, as I do with other sources, by checking against other documentary accounts and other people’s recollections.

  Generally speaking, I have used quotation marks only when I could verify a quote, in the manner of historians. But I have sometimes accepted a trusted source’s account of a conversation to which I have no other source. This has two or three times led me to use a quote that I would have considered hearsay in my role as an academic historian.

  I have done my best to write a book that honors both my historical training and the Southern storytelling tradition of wayward preachers and saintly teachers from whom I have sprung and to whom I remain accountable. In my heart, I believe that these things work together, each strengthening the other, and that in the end I have come much closer to the truth than I did when I was merely piling up scholarly citations. Historians who wish to follow my trail will find it easy to trace my sources in the bibliographical notes at the end of the book. I have also used these appendices as a way of acknowledging my extensive debts to other scholars.

  Love and work have taught me that Eudora Welty was right that “people are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.” If some of the people in these pages have left a bitter taste in my mouth, others have brought fragrant blossoms season after season. And who wants to live without onions? Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States. Indeed, they might wish to find another planet. But if, as Robert Frost said, earth’s the right place for love, those of us who believe in love and freedom cannot look away.

  The bloody, tangled history that taints and confounds all of us could have been much better if human beings had acted differently, and it could have been far worse, too. It may yet be unspeakably worse; no one should underestimate the venom of ancient wrongs. But I remain stitched to the labors of redemption and to what Charles Chesnutt, another storyteller from North Carolina, called “the shining thread of hope” that permitted him, over a century ago, to close his own story of white supremacy, racial murder, and unresolved injustice: “There’s time enough, but none to spare.”

  Timothy B. Tyson

  Madison, Wisconsin

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WHEN MY DAUGHTER, Martha Hope Tyson, was eleven, she accompanied her brother and me to the Harmony Bar in Madison, Wisconsin, to watch the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament. Royally indifferent to the clash between good and evil, Hope came only for the french fries. While Sam and I watched the (good) Blue Devils battle the (evil) Tar Heels, she read the first draft of this manuscript, devoured every word without even looking up. The memory of her happy absorption sustained me for the two years of labor that came afterward, and I am grateful to her. I hope she likes the final product nearly as well.

  No fundamentalist zealot of any of the world’s religions is more devoted to his or her faith than I am to the rituals of the Harmony Bar Writers Collective. (Hat’s off to Keith and Alison, et al.) Our resident shaman, Craig Werner, combines genius and generosity in equal measure, and has been a brilliant head coach. He sat through my endless stories, and then gave them back to me configured as an outline, which I followed dutifully, seventeen different times. (Hat’s off to Keith and Alison, et al.) Our “editorial meetings” were the spark plugs and map of this book’s long road home. Steve Kantrowitz has leavened every page of the manuscript with his matchless analytical and aesthetic sense, and thankfully not his hideous puns, which history will never forgive. He always set aside whatever he was doing to help me with literary chores frequently more ridiculous than sublime. And then there was the whiskey to finish. David S. Cecelski remains my brother until the last shred of real pork barbecue has been flushed from eastern North Carolina by fast-food conglomerates and health inspectors. He sometimes labored over this manuscript for fourteen or fifteen hours at a sitting with nothing but steaks, ribs, chopped barbecue, crab cakes, smoked chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, butterbeans, sweet potato biscuits, bourbon, and seven-dollar cigars to sustain him. Any lingering flaws in this book are entirely his fault, every single one of them.

  I wish to thank the people of Granville County, North Carolina, some of whom will find fault with this book, and rightly so, since we have not only a flawed history but a flawed historian. Many granted me interviews or otherwise helped with this book, including the late Goldie Averett, Linda Ball, Helen Canady, Rev. Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, Dr. Francine Chavis, James Chavis, Mary Catherine Chavis, William A. Chavis, Sam Cox, Herman Cozart, Hugh Currin, Rebecca Dickerson, Roberta Gabbard, Lettie McCoy, Robert G. Teel, Carolyn Thorpe, the late Billy Watkins, Nelda Webb, Doug White, Dr. Doris Terry Williams, and many others, some of whom preferred to remain nameless. A special thanks to Tom and Grey Currin, for singing so beautifully and for catching some important spelling and factual errors. All of these folks taught me something and some of them taught me everything.

  James Edward McCoy, a brilliant historian of Granville County, taught me at least as much history as I learned down the road at Duke University. I am obligated to him literally more than I can say. And the people of Granville County owe him even more. Thanks to his diligent efforts to document the past, their struggles over the legacy of slavery will illuminate the pathway for those who come afterward. I hope that folks black and white in Oxford, especially the young people, will go up to the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill and read through his dozens of interviews with their elders, many of whom are no longer with us. If this book offers McCoy some token of appreciation and respect, that will please me, but I can never really repay what I owe him.

  The day my family came to Oxford United Methodist Church, I met Ben and Joy Averett, who over the years taught me to work hard, love words, and live free. I wrote much of the master’s thesis that became this book (twenty years later) in Joy’s tree house in a dark time. Joy, my first real teacher and my first real sweetheart, too, did not live to read any of my books. Without the unearned grace of her love, I never would have written a book and might not even have survived my own stupidity. As I sat by her bedside in the oncology ward at Johns Hopkins, she gave me love’s last lessons. And when Ben scattered her ashes in the orchard, he showed me how to accept those lessons. Thanks also to Amy Averett, Ed Averett, and the Burwell and Averett families for their many kindnesses.

  To paraphrase Professor Kantrowitz, some of my best teachers have actually been, well, teachers. As noted in the text, this book began as a freshman history paper in 1982. In high school, Helen Mask and Betty Grady taught me to write essays and gave me dozens of good books, and many hours of detention hall in which to read them. My undergraduate mentors—John Bellios, Dan T. Carter, Fred Chappell, James Clotfelter, Janet varner Gunn, Fraser Harbutt, James Thompson, and Allen Tullos—recognized talents that I did not quite see and pressed me to cultivate them. The seeds they planted at night school in Chapel Hill and at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and at Emory University sprouted in due season. That same freshman year, William H. Chafe spoke at UNC-G and inspire
d a shy undergraduate in the crowd to pursue oral history on his own.

  Five years later, I joined Chafe’s graduate students in the Department of History at Duke University, where his scholarly energy, personal integrity, and irrepressible spirit taught us not only how to write and teach history but how to live. Bill continues to guide me with his friendship and counsel, and he read every page of this book more than once. I also owe much to Lawrence Goodwyn, whose devotion to clarity and democracy sustained me, and to John Herd Thompson, who mentored me as a writer and sustained me as a friend, sharing a cold brown one from time to time and just the wee sidecar, too. James Applewhite gave me All the King’s Men and, Thomas Wolfe’s admonitions aside, showed me the way to go home again. Julius Scott, Syd Nathans, and Raymond Gavins drilled me in African American history. John Hope Franklin was an inspiration. And Vivian Jackson kept me from losing my mind as I gained my doctorate.

  After I left graduate school, I found other strong mentors among historians. Dan T. Carter, who helped me with the research for this book when I was an undergraduate, has continued to be my teacher and friend for twenty years. John Dittmer has been a constant fountain of encouragement and assistance, and remains a hero of mine. Charles Payne and Kalamu ya Salaam taught me some hard things. Robin D. G. Kelley read part of the manuscript and urged me onward, not to mention inspired me by his example.

  The first historian I ever met was Frank Adams, who taught me about people like Myles Horton and Septima Clark, introducing me to the best Southern dreams of freedom when I was only a teenager and no doubt tiresome. And more recently, he read a draft of the manuscript and gave me both his blessing and his thoughts. Like the old song says about Jesus, Frank, Margaret, Sam, and Mary Thom gave me water, and not only from their well.