Blood Done Sign My Name (13 page)

Tom Ragland, the city manager of Oxford and a lifelong resident, considered his hometown fairly typical. “Oxford was like most Southern towns in 1963 and 1964,” he said a few years later. “We had demonstrations and boycotts by the Negroes against segregation in stores, restaurants, theaters. We set up a Human Relations Commission to try and set up some communication between the races. And I think there was some communication.” The problem, of course, was that white Southerners may have needed “communication” as a way of congratulating themselves on their paternalistic generosity toward “the Negro,” but black Southerners needed what amounted to a whole new social structure, one that did not stigmatize and impoverish them. “We had changed it some,” Eddie McCoy reflected. “But then they messed it up and went back to how it was. They just went back to the old ways again.”

Whether or not there had been any real “communication,” the local Good Neighbor Council, the Bi-Racial Commission, and the Human Relations Council—it is hard to distinguish among these overlapping and evanescent committees—accomplished almost nothing. The Good Neighbor Council, with four black and four white members, focused on creating jobs for blacks, but managed to come up with less than a dozen. The Bi-Racial Commission, with five whites and five blacks, approached one hotel and three motels, asking them to drop the color bar; the establishments agreed to integrate, but withdrew their commitments when demonstrations failed to cease immediately. One drive-in restaurant undertook a thirty-day trial period of integration but discontinued the process after two days; three other drive-ins committed to thirty-day trials that never even began. None of the sit-down restaurants in Oxford would consider opening their doors to black customers. Segregation persisted not only at restaurants and hotels, but also in the local hospitals, the all-white chamber of commerce, and the all-white Merchants Association. So much for committees.

On our first Race Relations Sunday in Oxford, Daddy invited the head of the state Good Neighbor Council, Dr. David Coltrane, to speak at our church. Thad was not impressed. Coltrane was a distinguished gray-haired financier who worked for Governor Terry Sanford, the most progressive white liberal politician in the South. Coltrane traveled the state, putting out political fires and making pleasant noises about “good race relations” while trying not to rub anybody the wrong way. A moderate by temperament and inclination, Coltrane tended to stress the importance of “communication” between the races, as if slavery and segregation had been some terrible misunderstanding. The “race problem,” his calm words suggested, could be solved if the right people were on the committee. “Best damn sermon I ever heard in this church,” Thad whispered playfully as he walked past Daddy on his way.

In fact, according to Daddy, Coltrane's complacent pronouncements about racial “progress” troubled Thad deeply. That night, Coltrane spoke again at Methodist Men; Thad didn't show up. At about nine-thirty, my father cut out the lights in the fellowship hall and headed home. Driving down College Street toward the monument, Daddy saw Thad shuffling down the sidewalk. It was February and a little nippy, and Daddy stopped to offer him a ride home.

“Where you been this evening, Preacher?” Thad asked, getting into the Pontiac. Daddy could smell the whiskey.

“I've been down at Methodist Men,” Daddy replied, still delighted with the evening. “You should have come, Thad. Dave Coltrane had a good word for us, and the Methodist Women served pecan pie.”

“He ain't nothing but a damn fool,” Thad growled, shaking his head. “Terry Sanford, Dave Coltrane, and all them political do-gooders are off on another fool's errand. What he and all the rest of them need to understand is that we were wrong about the Negroes, and I don't mean mistaken. I mean we were wrong, as wrong as David was when he sent Uriah off to be killed so he could take Bathsheba for himself, and there ain't a committee or a commission in the world that is going to change that. We're about three hundred years late for the goddamn ‘Good Neighbor Council.' ” The two men rode home for three blocks of awkward silence, and my father dropped Thad off in front of his house.

Daddy went home, got out of his suit and tie, and read the newspaper at the kitchen table in his underwear by himself. Everyone else was already asleep. At around eleven o'clock he went upstairs and crawled into bed beside my mother. Just as he started to close his eyes, Daddy heard a knock on the front door. Putting on his old purple bathrobe, Daddy clambered back down the stairs and opened the front door. There stood Thad Stem. “Come in, Thad, come on in,” Daddy said.

“No, I won't come in, thanks,” Thad said.

“What is it, Thad?” my father asked. “What's wrong?”

“I'm the damn fool,” Thad muttered. “The truth is,
I'm
the damn fool. Good night, Preacher.” And then Oxford's illustrious man of letters turned and headed back out into the night.

Thad still lived on the street where he was born, and wrote his books in a dusty office above Hall's Drugstore. He was the prodigal son of the late Major Thaddeus Stem, a lawyer and then judge who had been an almost legendary figure in the state's Democratic Party. He taught me, with his unforgettable stories, that the poet and the preacher—if they're both doing their jobs—are only working different sides of the same street, even if Thad was pretty sure that his side was more fun.

Educated at Duke University, Thaddeus Garland Stem Jr. came home from postgraduate wanderings in Florida in the late 1930s and gave himself to the serious pursuit of whiskey and women and verse. Although he held a sinecure as the veterans Administration representative in Oxford, which occupied him for two or three hours a week, he spent the rest of his hours reading and writing. His regular “Rock Wall Editorial” for the Raleigh
News and Observer
was renowned for many years for its erudition and wit. He published two novels and a whole shelf of poetry.

The self-appointed singer of rainstorms and pretty girls on bicycles, Thad had taken Chesterton's advice to learn to love the world without trusting it. He detested sham and loved flowers; Thad would have plowed up his lovely yard and planted corn before he'd let the Junior League's “Yard of the Month” sign pop up on his property. Thad was proud of his position on the margins of small-town Southern life. Asked to join anything, Thad always gave the same reply. “I don't belong to but two things,” he'd say, “the Methodist Church and the Democratic Party, and I am thinking about quitting both of 'em.”

Thad inherited at least some of his racial progressivism from his father, Major Stem, an unlikely egalitarian, who died the year I was born. Back in the 1930s, when Thad was a teenager, Major Stem was leaving Hall's Drugstore with his son and they passed Mrs. G. C. Shaw, the wife of the principal at Mary Potter High, the local Negro high school. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Shaw,” the major said, tipping his hat.

A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. “Why'd you call that damned nigger woman ‘Mrs. Shaw'?” he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy titles for their black neighbors. While it was permissible to call a favored black man “Uncle” or “Professor”—a mixture of affection and mockery—he must never hear the words “mister” or “sir.” Black women were “girls” until they were old enough to be called “auntie,” but they could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as “Mrs.” or “Miss” or “Ma'am.” But Major Stem made his own rules.

“Well, Mrs. Shaw's older than I am,” he began softly. “She's better educated than I am, and she has more money.” Then, thrusting the bootlegger away from him, the major exploded: “But more to the point, what I call Mrs. Shaw is none of your goddamned business, you low-life taxidermist, you two-for-a-nickel jackal, you knee-crawling son of a bitch, net.” These were the days when people really knew how to cuss.

Back then, the appendage “net” meant a
real
son of a bitch, doubled and in spades. Thad knew that, and he understood what the rest of the words meant, but on the way home he asked his father why on earth he had called the bootlegger a “taxidermist.” The major said quietly that a taxidermist is a man who mounts animals. Thad told me it took him about five years to figure that one out, and he reckoned the bootlegger never did. In any case, whether it was nature or nurture, Thad clearly acquired some of his father's freethinking ways.

Raised on the concept of original sin, too, Thad knew that human beings not only
had
problems but
were
problems. What was different about Thad was that he did not permit his pessimism about human possibility to translate into an easy defense of the status quo. Things
could
be done, and ought to be done to make the world work better. But Thad could never be persuaded, however, that any amount of reform or education would ring in the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. One day he was strolling down Front Street and came to a group of sweaty workmen leaning on their picks and shovels under a shade tree, taking a break from their toil. They had removed several slabs of sidewalk and had dug a deep trench, which Thad was stepping around when he spoke.

“That is a right good-sized hole you're digging, brethren,” he said, smiling as he stepped past them.

“Yeah,” one of the workmen replied. “We're digging a hole big enough so we can bury every sorry sumbitch in Oxford.”

“Who's going to be left to cover us all up?” Thad responded.

Renegade though he was, Thad had a full set of keys to the library at Duke University, that great seat of learning forty miles south of Oxford, down the Jefferson Davis Highway. If he got curious about something, he would get in the car and ride down there, day or night, and roam the stacks. Thad would quote Cicero, Browning, Wilde, Housman, Frost, and Whitman as though he'd run into them at Hall's Drugstore that morning on his way to work. Listeners unfamiliar with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay might have adjudged by Thad's tone of voice that he was dating her. He could rattle off Lord Tennyson's “Ulysses” faster than a cat licks cream.

His own words ambled in the salty, succulent patois of Southern courthouses and roadside taverns of a distant day, before television had drained the life out of regional dialect, back when people told stories to pass their evenings. One local politician “wasn't worth hell room in August,” Thad would growl. “Anybody could take a Barlow knife and a wooden shingle and fashion a better specimen of humanity.” One of my father's fellow preachers in Oxford was a man of some vanity and bombast. “The sumbitch sends his mama a congratulatory telegram every year on his own birthday,” Thad would say whenever the good reverend's name came up. “He is the only man I ever saw who can strut sitting down.”

Thad had strong views about liquor—that is, he held a solemn conviction that there were only two occasions when drinking was appropriate: one, when a fellow was thirsty, obviously, and, two, when he wasn't, as a preventative measure. Thad loved Jack Daniel's sour mash whiskey and made no secret of it, though he certainly was not what people used to call “the town drunk,” as if it were an elected position and singular, too. It is true, however, that Thad's last will and testament stipulated that “good liquor” be served after his funeral. And he loved to quote a bit of doggerel that he attributed to Dean Samuel Fox Mordecai: “Not drunk is he who from the floor / Can rise again and drink once more. / But drunk is he who prostrate lies / Without the will to drink or rise.”

Most of Thad's intoxication stemmed from the English language. He was literally a man of letters, and the archives in North Carolina are jeweled with his hilarious and insightful correspondence. When a man from Bunnlevel wrote to Thad in the late 1950s to ask advice about his own “poetry career” and to find out “how one goes about getting the most from a poem financially,” the salty writer replied that “the Deity probably knows, but I am not aware that He has told any poet.” Stem's advice reveals both his joy in his work and his sense of isolation in Oxford. “I suppose,” he wrote, “that only a damn fool is a poet. God knows, he will be personally misjudged, socially mismatched, virtually unpaid, and worse than all of that misquoted.” Stem wondered whether his questioner had the “guts” to be “lonesome, out of step, often out of tune and soon out of time. Can you look the world in the teeth and tell it to go to hell and continue to stitch the dawn with gleaming words as if doing so is the only decent thing left in the world?”

Poetry did not pay, Thad regretted to tell his correspondent, and it was hard work, too. “If you subsequently improve upon the Psalms and upon
Leaves of Grass
you will still need a paying job,” Thad told him. “And if poetry isn't as thrilling as making love—that is, if it can be successfully replaced with anything else, give it up.” He realized that he had been discouraging, Thad added, but the rewards of the writing life for those crazy enough and disciplined enough to follow it were immense: “I have never been a Kipling adherent, but if you do what I have told you, you will be a MAN, and what Ike, or Billy Graham, or Mr. Du Pont think about it will not matter a two-penny damn.”

That self-willed style of manhood was one important thing that Daddy shared with Thad, although the preacher was inevitably more politic than the poet. In between his periodic assaults on their sense of racial superiority, Daddy took such good care of his flock's families and delivered such soul-soothing sermons that many of them were inclined to overlook his race-traitor tendencies. In response to the inevitable “n-lover” epithet, I recall hearing him telling a hostile caller, “Yes, I guess you've got a point there, because I do
try
to love everybody.” Thad probably would have added “even stupid sumbitches like you.” But Daddy was more patient, and rarely showed anger toward his adversaries, even though he had inherited a full measure of the Tyson temper. He held his ground like a sweet-gum stump, trying hard to live in a spirit of love and action, not anger and reaction. Oxford might be a little spiritually arid, but Daddy wasn't drawing his water from an empty well.