Blood Done Sign My Name (30 page)

While the other marchers worried about getting the governor's attention, Eddie McCoy had what he considered a far more serious problem: he and two of his friends had borrowed the mule for the march from Lonnie Fields, a black farmer in Granville County, and now they had to get it back to him—two days late. “Lonnie Fields was the meanest man in Granville County, and he would kill you,” McCoy laughed. “I don't mean he might kill you, I mean he
would
kill you.” On top of that, to borrow the mule they had found it necessary to tell Fields a deliberate lie. “We told him we was just gon' take the mule out to the edge of town,” McCoy recalled, “and be back that afternoon. And that evening we still won't back with the mule, and Lonnie Fields went in the house, turned on the news, and saw his mule on television, and he sent some people to tell us he was gon' kill us, and he won't kidding. He said to tell us he was gon' kill every damn one of us.” Two days later, they were in Raleigh with Lonnie Fields's mule, and trying to figure out how to get the mule back without walking him the whole fifty miles.

The young men got the U-Haul truck they had used to carry provisions for the marchers and decided to load up the mule to return it to the furious farmer. But when they tried to walk the animal up the gangplank into the back of the truck, the mule planted his front feet, brayed and snorted, and refused to move. They tugged on the lead rope and even tried beating the mule with a stick, but the stubborn beast would not budge. “I told them we ought to just leave the mule in Raleigh,” McCoy chuckled, “because if we didn't take the mule back Lonnie Fields was gon' kill us, and if we took the mule back Lonnie Fields was gon' kill us anyway, so I told 'em, said to hell with the damn mule.” But they struggled on. Their fathers and grandfathers had loved mules, studied mules, sat around the store and bragged about mules, but the Black Power generation didn't know much about mules beyond their political symbolism. Finally one of them went to a pay telephone and called his grandfather, who advised them to blindfold the beast. “We took a sack and covered that mule's head,” McCoy said, “and walked him around until he didn't know where he was, and then just led him right on up into the truck. But when we got back to Oxford, didn't nobody want to return the mule. Finally we found one of Lonnie Fields's children and got him to take the mule back. And Lonnie Fields said he was gonna kill
him
for helping us.”

The leaders of the march had even worse luck with the governor than McCoy and his friends had with the mule. Governor Scott was not blindfolded, and his decision not to meet with the black protestors made crystal clear electoral sense. A “law and order” Democrat, Scott was resisting a Republican tide strengthened by the cresting waves of white backlash against civil rights gains. Two years earlier, during the presidential election of 1968, the Democratic tally in the state had dropped 42 percent; George Wallace, the slick-haired racebaiter from Alabama running on the American Independent Party ticket, had outpolled the Democrats in North Carolina. Jim Gardner, the Republican Party candidate for governor in 1968, actually endorsed Wallace for president of the United States, though he nonetheless narrowly lost to Scott, whose father had been one of the state's most notable governors. “I've never heard Wallace say anything that I disagreed with,” Gardner explained. Presumably this included Wallace's most famous declaration: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

As the 1960s ended, both Democrats and Republicans knew full well that the whole electoral process was cascading into a one-issue waterwheel, with race at the hub. In 1972, North Carolina would elect James Holshouser, its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. White voters would also elevate the state's most prominent opponent of racial equality, Jesse Helms, to a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he would never lose. So in 1970 the incumbent Democrat, Governor Scott, ignored black concerns, apparently having forgotten that the majority of whites backed Gardner, and that only black voters had saved him from defeat in 1968. Black voters were hardly likely to swing over to the party of Jesse Helms, but white voters were pouring out of the Democratic Party in a racially driven realignment of political loyalties. Maybe Scott was right, at least in electoral terms, to keep his distance. But it made the demonstrators who had walked fifty miles from Oxford bitterly angry.

The governor's refusal to acknowledge the protest reignited the anger of black incendiaries in Oxford who felt that his political posture showed that he and the white-dominated state apparatus stood with the murderers of Henry Marrow. “Everything was going fine,” Mayor Currin told a reporter. “Then, wham, Sunday it started happening again. We thought the black community was satisfied.” Around midnight, after most of the marchers got home from Raleigh, someone threw firebombs into a small antique store in a downtown alley called Bank Street. James Currin Antiques was an easy target, white-owned property hidden from view and readily accessible, through back streets and alleyways, to the black neighborhood around Granville Street. This was only the diversionary attack, however; a few minutes later, flames roared through the Chapman Lumber Company on McClanahan Street, within sight of my father's church. The vast, two-story lumber company building held large quantities of paint and turpentine, as well as sizable stores of lumber. In a matter of minutes, the blaze completely engulfed the building. This was the first truly serious calculated blow to white economic power in Oxford, and the most costly fire in Oxford during the twentieth century—until the following night.

CHAPTER 10

PERRY MASON IN THE SHOESHINE PARLOR

ON MONDAY, MAY 25, a week after the murder, half a dozen black veterans huddled in the back room at McCoy's Pool Hall, mixed several gallons of gasoline with half a box of Tide washing powder, and made firebombs. The soap “thickens it up good,” one of them observed. “Makes it stick to things long enough so it doesn't just flame out but catches everything on fire. The military taught us how to make 'em.” Downing several quarts of Miller High Life beer while they worked, the men used a homemade funnel to pour the mixture into the empty bottles, which they stoppered with rags. Big enough to ignite a good-sized blaze, the Miller quarts flew like small footballs and were made of thin glass that would always break. “Shit, man,” one of them said, “a Coke bottle is so thick the damn thing won't even break. The big quart was the thing.”

They devised a careful plan for their fiery announcement to the white-controlled legal system. “They could get an all-white jury and let 'em off, they could sure enough do that if they wanted to,” one of the black men said years later, “but we were going to sure enough let 'em know that we won't gonna take that shit.” The black veterans synchronized their watches, took careful note of police patterns of surveillance, and rarely attacked without a coordinated diversionary operation. “We'd light up some tool shed or something easy like that on the other side of town,” one explained, “and then Andy and Barney would haul ass over there and then, bam, we'd burn the damn warehouse. It was a military operation.”

Two of the younger black men agreed to torch a white-owned house on New College Street that had been standing empty for months. “We burned that one house, trying to get a diversion up,” one of them recalled. “See, once you hit the railroad tracks,” another arsonist explained, “we could split up—they couldn't catch you. All we had to do was make it to the railroad tracks. If you couldn't run that fast, you didn't have no business doing it.” The older black veterans would then take out the real targets. That night, they set their sights high, planning to torch two large tobacco warehouses, Planter's Warehouse and the Owen Warehouse Number Two. Inside these warehouses were eight hundred thousand pounds of golden cured tobacco, a known flammable substance, with a total value of more than a million dollars.

Just before midnight, as police and firefighters rushed to the flaming house on New College Street, two squads of veterans crept through darkened alleyways to the enormous warehouses downtown. Lookouts posted earlier gave the all-clear sign. Quickly stretching duct tape across the large windowpanes—“that shit muffles the sound”—the men shattered the windows with bricks, lit the rag stoppers on the bottle bombs, and “just threw our shit in there and ran down to the corner where we could just watch it go,” according to their leader.

The magnitude of the fires surprised even the arsonists. At first they stared wide-eyed at the huge blazes, and then they hurried to a row of homes behind the warehouses to help the families hustle their furniture out. They used garden hoses to soak the rooftops with water to prevent fiery debris from igniting the whole neighborhood. Soon more than a hundred firefighters were battling the blaze, six fire departments from nearby towns having sent men and trucks. The old pine-and-brick structures stacked high with the cured leaf roared like piles of tinder. By the time the first fire truck reached Planter's Warehouse, it was already engulfed in flames. Moments later, the front wall of the enormous building blew out in a great explosion, scattering bricks and flaming debris into the street, pulling down telephone and power lines as the side of the building fell. Glowing debris landed on residential lawns miles away.

The screaming sirens woke up my family, and we children followed Daddy and Mama onto the brick walkway in front of the house on Hancock Street, huddling together in our pajamas. Like a hundred-foot torch held skyward, the flames from the warehouses licked into the night sky. Farmers twenty miles away smelled the smoke and saw the horizon lit up with a bright red glow, as though the sun were setting in the middle of the night. From four blocks away it looked to me like the whole world was on fire. I wasn't quite eleven years old, of course, and I had clean sheets waiting inside and nothing could harm me, as the old song says, with my mama and daddy standing by. What would come of all of this destruction and anger and fear? I did not know enough history to understand what was happening, and it would be many years before I did, but Oxford would burn in my memory for the rest of my life.

The pool hall conspirators had wanted their attack to hit the white community where it mattered most, in the economic engines of the town. To that end, several African American men employed at Burlington Mills on the third shift ran through the plant at the prearranged hour shouting that Oxford was burning. These in-plant co-conspirators, who had synchronized their watches with those of the arsonists, urged their coworkers to rush home and make sure their families were all right and their houses did not burn. When the employees ran outside and saw the raging red skyline and the town shrouded in smoke, most of them left their jobs and hurried home. Although the
Oxford Public Ledger
stressed that this only caused workers to lose wages, the black insurgents working the “cash register at the pool hall” calculated that the biggest losers would be mill management. The
Ledger
's lead editorial on the day after the fires, “Lessons To Be Learned from Memorial Day,” highlighted the Confederate origins of this “day for decorating the graves of the men who fell in the War Between the States” and did little to suggest that the editors understood what was happening in their hometown.

Whatever the
Oxford Public Ledger
might report, Oxford's all-white economic elite had been hit and hit hard. The next day, Mayor Currin estimated the damages at “well over a million dollars, though it is hard to say at this point.” (In 2003 dollars, the total damage would amount to something approaching $5 million.) Not only the warehouses and the empty house on New College Street had gone up, but also three smaller buildings downtown. Coordinated attacks had occurred all over town, although further investigation revealed that not all the squads of arsonists had been successful. Law enforcement officers found failed firebombing attempts at six other buildings: the Southern Railway Station, the clubhouse of the all-white veterans of Foreign Wars, the Fleming Warehouse Number One, and three smaller structures. The charred landscape in the business district awed the teams of journalists and officials who came to survey the damages. A large section of downtown Oxford, the Raleigh
News
and Observer
reported, “look[ed] like Berlin following the Allied bombing raids of World War II.”

On the night of the bombings, the Oxford Police Department arrested six young black males, ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen, who were running the streets in defiance of the curfew. One or two of them carried Coke bottles full of gasoline. White Oxford breathed a deep sigh of relief, reassuring itself that the culprits responsible for the devastation had been swiftly apprehended. Unfortunately for those who relied on this line of reassurance, the police had taken the young men into custody in the hours
before
the fires. It is possible, though not likely, that the boys may have been responsible for one or two of the failed arson attempts around town that night or the previous night. But the arrests and investigations never threatened to disrupt the “military operation” raging in the shadows of Granville County. No one could have been more pleased at the arrests than the pool hall enclave of black veterans. The police were happy to pat themselves on the back without actually catching any of the conspirators. The youngest three teenagers, all of them fourteen or fifteen years old, were released on bond and confined by the court to their homes pending trial. Authorities held the three older boys, all seventeen-year-olds, for ten days and then released them under large bonds. None of the boys could be linked to any of the firebombings, and the court eventually dropped all of the charges to misdemeanor curfew violations. “[City officials] probably knew better, but they let people believe it was just a bunch of shirttail boys burning up stuff,” one of the older veterans recounted.

The black veterans who actually burned down the warehouses in Oxford and the activists who applauded their efforts had no illusions about the prospect of colorblind justice in Granville County. “We knew damn well they won't gonna convict Teel and them,” one of their ringleaders commented. This makes the arson smack of preemptive vigilantism but, given the experiences of these men in
Vietnam and in Oxford, they could hardly place their faith in the white-dominated legal system. In their minds, the courts were owned and operated by their enemies, who considered them unfit for full citizenship. “There wasn't no need to wait around and see what might happen,” the bomb thrower continued. “They won't gonna convict 'em noway.”

The white prosecutor, W. H. S. Burgwyn, a gray-haired, steely-eyed veteran of the courts and the scion of North Carolina political aristocracy, felt more hopeful. Burgwyn's father had been a judge, planter, and politician, and the direct ancestor of illustrious heroes of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Something of a courtroom legend himself, Burgwyn knew that the murder case confronting him posed the most serious challenge he had ever faced as a prosecutor. “The whole community was in an uproar,” Burgwyn recalled. Support for the murderers had taken on the air of a cause célèbre among some whites, he acknowledged. “The Klan was kicking up a fuss,” he said, “and some of the country club crowd had raised a big defense fund,” but he still thought he had a strong case. “We felt that this boy had been cold-bloodedly murdered, in a helpless state, shot on the ground,” he said.

He conceded some confusion, however, about exactly what had happened in the shadows beyond Teel's store. “We had a dead man,” Burgwyn explained, “with three or four white men standing over him with a gun. We knew which gun had killed him, but we couldn't place the gun in the hands of any one individual at the time of the shooting.” It was getting dark, he explained, and most of the witnesses had run away from the scene. Boo Chavis had had the best view, but he may have seemed an unreliable witness because of his criminal record. Still, the prosecutor insisted, he had a strong case. Neither the black veterans, who had no faith in the legal system, nor prosecutor Burgwyn, who had spent his life in it, could have predicted what would actually happen in the Granville County courthouse that summer. Years later, referring to the popular television attorney of the time, whose cases always ended with a dramatic courtroom twist, Burgwyn said, “It was just a Perry Mason kind of thing.”

In a sense, the legal proceedings had begun shortly after the murder. “Go call the ambulance,” Robert Teel told me he had snapped at twenty-one-year-old Roger just after Marrow was shot. Teel walked quickly down the front of the cement-block building with his large ring of keys, shooing out a handful of customers, gathering up all the money, and locking the grocery store, the barbershop, the laundry, and the motorcycle shop, and stacking the guns in the trunk of his car. After he closed down all the businesses, the Teel family drove to their home on Main Street, only a few hundred yards from the courthouse and the police station.

At the house, as unattestable rumor echoed it down the years, the family had a discussion in which Robert Teel decided that Roger, who certainly had helped kill Henry Marrow, would have no part in whatever consequences were to follow. Roger's wife, Betsey Woodlief Oakley, was six months pregnant. She had already suffered two miscarriages. Roger was to stay home with her, no matter what. At around ten o'clock, an hour after the murder, Teel called his attorney, William T. Watkins, who reportedly told him to gather up as much cash money as he could and put it in a pillowcase, then wait for him at the house. Teel was not to talk to anyone, the lawyer insisted.

Whether Billy Watkins, a ruthless lawyer and cagey politician with a dry, cottonmouth smile, advised Teel on how to confuse the police we may never know. The local courthouse legend in Oxford says that Watkins suggested that Roger Oakley and Larry Teel exchange clothing and that Larry wear Roger's eyeglasses to the police station. Roger and Larry were both slender young men of medium height. The smearing of their appearances might have bewildered witnesses and investigators and thereby permitted Roger to avoid prosecution, at least for the moment. The reputation of Billy Watkins as a wily and unscrupulous attorney may explain the persistence of this rumor. Or the story may simply be a fiction that local people used to explain the inexplicable. Teel himself credited Watkins but did not mention the alleged subterfuge. “Billy told me not to say a word to anybody,” recounted Teel, “and let them accuse whoever they wanted. And we did not tell them who or whatever,” he continued, “but just let them build their own case. We listened to Billy Watkins.”

“The name Watkins,” said a member of one of Granville County's leading families, “just stood for and stands for a lot in Oxford.” Billy Watkins was already Oxford's leading attorney in 1970, the fifty-one-year-old scion of political power and the avatar of ruthless ambition. The year before, he had been elected to the state legislature. The son of a local planter who had been “one of the most reputable politicians this area ever had,” Watkins was fast becoming a leading figure in the Democratic Party. He was on his way to the chair of the legislature's powerful appropriations committee, from which he and his chief political ally, Speaker Liston B. Ramsey, would come to exercise almost invincible sway in the General Assembly. Watkins would never face serious political challenge in his district and would become one of the two or three most powerful men in the state. As soon as he arrived at the Teel house on Main Street, Watkins took complete control of the case. “I was aiming to tell what I had shot, and what Roger had done,” Teel recalled, “but Billy listened to the whole story, and we told him, and so he handled it from there on and we went by his advice.”