Blood Done Sign My Name (26 page)

And they began to have to stand that ground with him, in part because it was safer for the townspeople to assail his sons than to take on Jack face-to-face. “I became his defender,” my father recalled. “Down at Lonnie Hurley's taxicab and fuel oil station, I had to defend my papa. I said, I was there, I heard what he said, and this is what he meant by what he said. I explained it, but I didn't apologize for him. I was proud of him.” Terms like “nigger lover” were intended to hurt, but they became a badge of honor for the Tyson boys. “That was about the worse epithet you could get in those days, if you were white,” he remembered. “If people really wanted to smear you, if they really wanted to hurt you, that is what they would say, and sometimes they would say it about my daddy. But I would have rather been a poor boy at his table,” my father told me, “than to have been eating at the table of the rich, with somebody that compromised over something important.”

That spirit of rebellion was not merely a matter of ethics, religion, or kindness, though it might partake of all those things. My second cousin Elias Tyson, whom the family called “the Gator,” was not so much the wellspring of that rebel spirit as its most dramatic expression. The Gator was a two-bit drunkard, a shiftless Casanova, and a charming gambler who was cruel to everyone who cared about him. He was Jack Tyson's sister's youngest son. But where Jack, who had his own demons, nevertheless pursued the things of God, the Gator was a sensual, passionate, faithless man whose insatiable appetites for whiskey and sex ruled him and whose violent capacities brought his whole family to heartbreak.

Anywhere from ten to twenty years older than my uncles, the Gator came across as a striking example of untamed manhood. “Gator was an extremely handsome man when he was young,” said my uncle Dewey. “Movie-star handsome. About six foot four, weighed two twenty-five, black wavy hair and pretty brown eyes, good skin. The girls just hung around him in droves.” The strapping young rounder “was a sharp dresser, too,” Dewey observed. “He wore fine clothes, brown suits, and he looked good in them.” He may not have had a lot of clothes, my uncle Tommy added: “None of us had much money, but he had rather have two or three really nice shirts instead of a closet full of cheap stuff. He had good taste.” Decades later, when one of my uncles would swagger in front of the mirror, combing his hair a little too carefully, one of the others might playfully announce, “I believe that must be the Gator in there, don't y'all?” Or when a beloved nephew came in drunk or got somebody pregnant, his uncles might say, “I believe that boy has got a little more than his share of the Gator in him.”

The Gator was funny and full of himself, always ready with a smile and a song or a lewd joke, a pint of whiskey stashed somewhere in the car. “He was smooth,” said Dewey, who knew something about smooth himself. “Yes, hell, he was smooth, naturally smooth. He was not a sophisticated, Dean Martin kind of fellow, but he would have been if he'd had any education. And when he wasn't too drunk he was pleasant to be around.” The Gator would get a little liquor in him and ladle his charm over whoever was around to provide an audience. He'd entertain his younger cousins with snatches of lowdown blues that he picked up in the roadhouses of eastern North Carolina:

It takes a long, tall, dark-skinned gal,

To make a preacher lay that Bible down.

They would all laugh, and I heard bits of the songs and jokes years later, sitting at my uncles' feet while they played spades and told stories, but none of them failed to note that Elias's angels and his demons resided much too close for comfort. “When the Gator would get to drinking and carousing,” Dewey continued, “he was liable to do anything in this world. And hurt anybody who got in his way. He didn't care how much he loved them or didn't love them—that was beside the point. When he got to drinking and got mad, he was going to tear somebody up—he would flat out hurt you, and hurt you right quick.”

His rawboned style of masculinity made a mark on his cousins for good and ill. One day when the Gator was full of whiskey he went into a cafe in Snow Hill with my uncle Dewey, who was only a boy. The chief of police came in and exchanged words with the Gator, Dewey said, “and come over there to where Elias was to arrest him, and Elias hit him hard, knocked him cold as a cucumber. Just knocked him out flat on his back on the floor in the cafe. I think he plead guilty to assault or something like that, but he got off pretty light.” Young Robert Teel, growing up nearby, may even have been encouraged by the Gator's example. In any case, our illustrious kinsman spent most of his time running up and down the roads, bouncing back and forth between his wife, a string of girlfriends, and the hookers down at Sugar Hill. Along the way, if anyone crossed him, the Gator responded with his fists. “He loved a good fight,” Dewey recalled, “because he had a talent for it and was equipped to handle the situation. In fact, in all the fights he had, I never knew anybody to whip him.”

“He was a little sadistic with women, too,” Tommy added. Elias Tyson liked to go on fishing trips to the beach, his cousins all agreed, because they would always drive past Sugar Hill, the infamous brothel district in Kinston. Dewey recalled a “fishing trip” on which Elias carried him and DuLoyd Gay, another cousin, both of them teenaged boys. “We went down toward the beach,” recounted Dewey, “and long about Kinston we stopped up on the highway, and there was a motel, some little old cabin or something, and the Gator was drinking, and he picked him up a whore at Sugar Hill and took her to bed. Stayed with her most of the night, and in the same room where me and DuLoyd was sleeping, or trying to sleep, anyway.” His marriage to Margaret Fields, a passionate and well-intentioned young woman from Snow Hill, was predictably stormy because her plans to reform him did not put an end to these escapades. “I wouldn't be surprised if he cheated on her on the honeymoon,” speculated Dewey.

Whatever happened on their honeymoon, the Gator did behave himself for a short period of time after the wedding. In a few weeks, though, he was back to drinking and gambling and carrying on, and his young wife decided to confront him about it. “The first time he come in drunk, after the wedding,” Daddy told me, “she let him get in the bed, and then she slipped out of bed and got his belt out of his trousers, and ripped back the covers and lit into him.” Lashing the belt across his backside, she told him not to come home with whiskey on his breath and expect to sleep in her bed. “And he tolerated the whipping for a little while,” Daddy continued, “and then after a while he just reached up and grabbed her, slung her across his knee, and spanked her with the flat of his hand.” Their bitter passion could not sustain a family life, and their marriage never went long without unhappy incidents that packed Margaret and the children back home to her mother, and sent Elias careening off into the roadhouses and brothels, whiskey-bent and hell-bound.

“When the Gator's mother was sick and nigh unto death,” Daddy recounted, “laying up in her deathbed, Elias went off and got drunk.” Somehow, in his maudlin alcoholic fog, the Gator figured he was going to make up for all the pain he had caused his mother. “He went down to the bakery and bought six pies,” Daddy told me. “And he came lurching in the room with that armload of pies, all kinds of pies, and put them all up on the bed beside his mama, who was laying up there dying, and he announced, ‘Ain't nothing too good for my damn mama—if she wants pie she'll have pie, damn it.' Up there white with her last dying breath, and he was laying out pies, like that was going to make everything all right.”

The farce turned to tragedy on a hot summer evening when the Gator and his twenty-two-year-old nephew, Mack Gay, his sister's boy, were sitting on a woodpile playing poker and drinking corn liquor. They were alone at the house; the women had all gone to town, and the other men were working down at a tobacco barn. While it is hard to know exactly what happened, family lore has it that the two men got drunk and began to argue. The younger man came at the Gator. “Elias said he had a knife, but nobody ever found the knife,” my uncle Dewey related, “and anyway, Elias hit him with the axe. I don't think he hit him in the head. He hit him somewhere on his body, though, and the blood just gushed out everywhere, and Mack died right there by the porch.” It began to drizzle. The Gator couldn't stand to leave the boy in the rain, so he dragged him up under the porch a little. “And Elias ran off,” Dewey said, “but not far, just ran off down in the woods and that's where the sheriff found him, on the edge of the woods, huddled up like a dog, crying in the rain.”

Just after the murder, my father went to see the Gator, much deflated in spirit, as he awaited trial in the county jail. They talked through the bars for quite some time, the Gator pouring out his anguish. “And I said, ‘Elias, I know that's awful, what you done is terrible, but God's got a mercy,' I told him, ‘and if you ask for mercy, I believe God would give you mercy. I believe He would forgive you.' And the Gator said, ‘Hell,
Vernon, I don't want no mercy, all I want is justice and a fair trial.' And he got exactly what he wanted, because they sentenced him to thirty years.” Daddy would tell that as a funny story— not light comedy, of course, but a story of dark humor and absurd pride that is deeply connected to what is best and what is worst in our blood.

The humor in the Gator stories is collectively self-deprecating and, like many stories that human beings tell, it both defines the boundaries of our community and connects us to a larger humanity. It says to the family member: you are one of us forever, in your blood and bone. The fulcrum of this folk humor is a profound sense of the absurdity of our gall and arrogance. Its theological function is nothing more than a restatement of the concept of original sin, reminding us through our hilarity that the distance between our highest and our lowest capacities is not as far as we might like to think. But even as the story of the Gator admonishes us to yield to the good within us, it reflects a perverse pride: we might be saved by grace, but that doesn't make us “little tailor-made Jesus boys,” as my daddy might say. Redeemed sinners, yes, but there are things that can make a preacher lay that Bible down. Our laughter is communal and cathartic, binding us to one another while it expresses, and hence (we hope) disarms, the darker impulses we all share.

It is hard to say whether it was the Holy Spirit or the Gator, exactly, or maybe a little bit of both, that whispered into my uncle Earl's ear in 1957 and inspired his fateful collision with white supremacy. In the years after the United States Supreme Court had struck down segregation in the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, pressure on Southern racial dissidents grew far more intense. “The echo of shots and dynamite blasts,” the editors of the
Southern Patriot
wrote, “has been almost continuous throughout the South.” On September 25, 1957, mob violence in Little Rock, Arkansas, forced President Eisenhower to send the 101st Airborne to protect nine African American students as they entered Central High School. This smacked of Reconstruction-era federal intervention and fanned the segregationists to white-hot fury. The Arkansas legislature charged that the unrest in Little Rock had been “planned, schemed and calculated” in Moscow as part of “the international communist conspiracy of world domination,” despite President Eisenhower's rather dubious communist credentials. Thomas R. Waring Jr., the editor of the leading newspaper in South Carolina, called for a new secession movement. As one of the leading segregationist intellectuals, Waring envisioned that soon white Southerners would find themselves “fashioning homemade bombs to hurl at federal troops.”

Several months before what Waring denounced as “the invasion of Little Rock,” the bishop had appointed my uncle Earl to the Louisburg circuit, six rural Methodist churches fifteen miles outside Raleigh. In early October, about a week after the federal troops marched into Central High, Earl got a ticket for driving with an expired license. Earl arrived at the courthouse in Louisburg early and sat on the front row in the empty courtroom reading his Bible, oblivious to the shuffling of shoes and the scraping of chairs as people filed in behind him. But then came a hand on his shoulder, and Earl turned to meet the kind gaze of an elderly black man, who said, “Son, what are you doing here this morning?”

“Well,” Earl replied with a grin, “I believe I came to give the judge forty dollars.” Earl explained that he was planning to plead guilty, pay up, and get out as fast as he could. Unbeknownst to Earl, the small, dark-skinned man who had spoken to him was Judson King, director of the Franklinton Center at Bricks, North Carolina, a black educational institution with roots in the Reconstruction era that most people simply called “Bricks.” Though the school taught vocational training along the lines advocated by Booker T. Washington, Bricks also bred a kind of homegrown black nationalism, teaching young African Americans race pride, community uplift, and quiet defiance. Judson King, short and slight, almost bald, and “black as the ace of spades,” as my grandfather described him, spent much of his time teaching black sharecroppers to read and do arithmetic, and the rest of it encouraging them to find the courage to confront their landlords. “One of your boys pulled a pencil on me!” a white banker in Roanoke Rapids had once roared at King, a story that he retold with great pride, and an inflection that suggested that a pencil
was
a kind of weapon in this war. Though Judson King was a race man of the first order, one of the foundation stones of the freedom movement in eastern North Carolina, he was also a man of deep Christian conviction, and in Earl's soft eyes that morning he saw a brother in the faith.

“Don't you worry,” King assured him in his warm, resonant voice, “you give the man that forty dollars and the Lord will give it back to you. The Lord will take care of you if you'll let Him.” Earl looked into Judson King's eyes and he, too, recognized a brother in Christ, and they introduced themselves and began to share their Christian witness with each other. This had absolutely nothing to do with politics. Meanwhile, the courtroom had filled up behind them. When the bailiff told everybody to stand, Earl saw that he was the only white man on that side of the aisle. He instantly knew, too, that he could not repudiate his bond with Judson King by moving over to the side designated for whites. “As I was sitting back down,” Earl recounted, “I made up my mind that I was not going to move.” But then Earl felt another hand on his shoulder, and this time it was a burly sheriff's deputy.