Blood Done Sign My Name (31 page)

While it remains a matter of speculation, I am almost certain that Billy Watkins telephoned the Oxford Police Department that night and told them that he would bring the Teels in for questioning later. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to explain why the police did not take the thirty seconds necessary to get to the Teel house in a squad car and make an arrest. They had known about the killing, including the identity of most of those involved, since about nine o'clock. Such a telephone call reflects the day-to-day workings of power in the small-town South, which relied on personal authority and informal relationships among a certain class of white men. It is possible, as many local black folks believed, that the white police considered the killing justified and were slow to arrest a man whom they saw as having protected his family and property against the spirit of black insurrection that was sweeping the nation. But it seems more likely that Billy Watkins called and told them not to worry about it right away, that he would see to it that the Teels turned themselves in directly. Watkins was one of the few people whose authority was sufficient to ensure that the police would sit back and let Teel come in at his own convenience. Just when Robert and Larry Teel actually went to the police station remains a matter of dispute.

The
Oxford Public Ledger
claimed a few days later that Billy Watkins accompanied the Teels to the police station around ten o'clock Monday night. Mayor Currin and Chief of Police Nathan White both later claimed that the Teels surrendered sometime shortly after the shooting, that the magistrate draw up a warrant immediately, and that the two suspects went to jail at about six o'clock Tuesday morning. None of the black witnesses who went to the police station that night saw them there, however. Other reports indicated that the two men went to the police station sometime Tuesday morning. But the most reliable document—the official arrest warrant—indicates that Robert and Larry Teel were arrested at eight-thirty on Wednesday morning—almost thirty-six hours after the killing. “There was a hell of a mix-up in the Oxford police station,” W. H. S. Burgwyn acknowledged. “It was very confusing.” The young black people running through the streets did not feel confused.

If blacks interpreted this delay as a display of whites' determination to protect one of their own and preserve white power, Robert Teel certainly did not believe that he was the beneficiary of the white power structure. “My lawyer told me he'd have me out in twenty-four hours,” Teel said later. “He told me to go on over to Raleigh and let them book me and fingerprint me, and go through the regular processing, and he'd be over there with people to go my bond, and have me out in twenty-four hours. It took four months.”

After arresting Teel and Larry, state troopers took them to Central Prison in Raleigh. At first, they were in a large holding cell. In a few days, however, “it got to be common knowledge between the blacks who we were and what we were there for and the pressure was building up,” Teel remembered. “The sheriff had to put us in a private cell because they had the two of us whites locked up in a cell with thirteen blacks and this boy that was a trustee running up and down the hall telling everybody who we were.” Soon the police transferred the father and son to the jail in nearby Henderson for the duration of the trial; they were kept together at all times. “They tried to make me believe that [the incarceration] was for my own safety and my own protection,” Teel complained. “And I cannot say whether it was good or bad for my protection or somebody else's protection, but they seemed to be saying that I would have shot another black or else I would have been shot. Which very well could have been true, but my understanding of bond is that it is not what's good for the man but only whether you will appear in court or not.” In any case, the father and son remained in custody after their arrest in mid-May.

On July 27, the first day of jury selection, sheriff's deputies led Robert and Larry Teel into the old red brick courthouse, accompanied by a team of five attorneys. Billy Watkins and his law partners, Gene Edmundson and Charles W. Wilkinson, employed Frank Banzet, a lawyer from a prominent family in Warrenton, to join the defense team after it became clear that the pool of jurors would be drawn from Warren and Wake Counties. Warren, northeast of Oxford, was an old plantation county, with a heavy black majority and a firmly entrenched white aristocracy built on cotton, tobacco, and black slave labor; Banzet would handle the jury pool. Edmundson, a junior partner in Watkins's firm, didn't much like defending the Teels, but he was philosophical about his duties. “I had to look at it not as an individual but as an attorney,” he recalled. “We were there to do a job.”

At the prosecution's table, William Burgwyn was flanked by Charles White, an attorney from his office, and James E. Ferguson, a black attorney from Charlotte and one of the leading civil rights lawyers in the state. Burgwyn, though clearly an “establishment” figure in North Carolina, was regarded as extremely able and completely honest. And Ferguson was a very gifted attorney with a strong track record. “Ferguson had already played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement in North Carolina,” historian David Cecelski writes. “He had led or been involved in most of the civil rights law-suits arising in eastern North Carolina; he had been successful enough to have the Ku Klux Klan target him for assassination.” His new partner, Julius Chambers, narrowly escaped death in 1965 when his car was bombed in New Bern.”

The attorneys for both sides prepared to fight the case in front of Judge Robert Martin. Martin, who would preside over a series of racially charged trials in North Carolina in the 1970s, had campaigned for hard-core segregationist I. Beverly Lake a decade earlier. Judge Martin “hardbored no prejudice” against African Americans, he told one reporter. “I was raised in a mainly black county,” he was quoted as saying. “I ate with them and played with them. We had an instinctive love for the Negro race. Why, my secretary is black. That should show you how I feel about them.”

Whatever the judge may have felt in his heart, the atmosphere in the ancient courthouse grew exceedingly tense as jury selection began. Though the courtroom was no longer formally segregated, 250 local black folks crowded the left side of the aisle, while 150 white observers sat on the other side. “There was a lot of people there,” Carolyn Thorpe said later. “It was packed. There was a black side and a white side. There was a lot more blacks than whites—that place was full of black people.” State troopers searched everyone who entered the room. “Rumor had it that there were some Black Panthers that were recognized that were in the courtroom,” court reporter Rebecca Dickerson explained.

The prosecution initially moved to have the trial relocated outside Granville County, where white support for the murderers and white fears of black revolt ran high. Though Robert Teel had not been accepted among the leading white families of the county prior to the murder, many of them now rallied around him. “Teel was the white champion,” said a white woman born of an old and prestigious local family. “It was the fear of integration—it was not so much that you identified with Teel but that his skin was white. It was like you had to band together.” Anywhere would be an easier place to get a conviction, Burgwyn reasoned, and it certainly was not hard to establish that the local community was too turbulent for a trial. The charred wreckage of the warehouses still scarred downtown, carloads of armed men continued to cruise the streets, and headlines like “Oxford—A Quiet Town Becomes a Battleground” were a regular feature in the state's leading newspapers. Judge Martin ruled that the trial would stay in Granville County, but that a pool of jurors would be brought in from outside the community.

Lawyers for both sides questioned seventy prospective jurors from Wake County and thirty from Warren County. Frank Banzet, playing exactly the role for which Watkins had hired him, quickly moved to have all the jurors from Wake County rejected on the grounds that the juror selection cards had been stored in the basement of a hospital. They should have been kept in the office of the register of deeds, he argued. Only nine of the one hundred jurors chosen for examination were African Americans, despite the fact that Warren County was over two-thirds black and Wake County was more than one-third black. When James Ferguson of the prosecution complained that blacks had been systematically excluded from the pool of jurors, Banzet ridiculed the black attorney. Yes, there had indeed been discrimination, Banzet chuckled. The names listed all began with letters from L through W, he charged satirically, “thus obviously ‘systematically excluding' persons whose names begin with the letters A through K.” Moreover, all jurors from Wake County should be excluded, he persisted, because Wake's juror selection cards “are punched with numerous holes which are incomprehensible to a person of ordinary learning and understanding.” Wake County used then-novel and now-obsolete computer punch cards for its jury lists. These computing machines had made “more than 27 mistakes in the past three weeks,” he claimed, coming up with a remarkable statistic on the spot.

What truly bothered Banzet about Wake County was that it was home to several universities and the state capitol in Raleigh and therefore relatively liberal compared to Granville. Warren County, on the other hand, had always been tobacco country, much like Granville, with a black majority dominated by an agricultural and political elite descended from slaveholding planters. Even though the county was mostly black, the courthouse crowd in Warrenton had a long history of making sure that jury lists would be mostly white. Frank Banzet knew how things worked up there. The attorneys for Robert and Larry Teel wanted an all-white jury, and preferably an all-white jury drawn from a conservative, rural county.

The questions the Teel defense team posed to the prospective jurors clearly revealed their legal strategy. “Do you believe that a citizen has the right to self-defense?” they asked over and over again. “Do you believe that a man has the right to take the life of another man to protect himself or members of his family from harm?” The defense struck all nine of the black jurors and got their all-white jury, seven men and five women, half of them from Warren County. Every member of the jury had conceded that he or she did, in fact, support the right of citizens to defend themselves and their families by force. The prosecution was crestfallen, and the black people attending the trial were incensed, if not surprised. At the end of the day, Judge Martin ordered the jurors sequestered at a local motel for the duration of the trial.

The confusion among the police and the prosecutors—and the Oxford Police Department's failure to arrest Roger—became Billy Watkins's secret weapon. At the outset of the trial, Watkins made a successful motion to Judge Martin that all of the state's witnesses be sequestered. Therefore, the witnesses would be unable to hear one another's testimony or the testimony of the defense witnesses. This approach took maximum advantage of the confusion created because the prosecution had failed to indict everyone who had participated in the murder, which Watkins knew. Prosecutor Burgwyn countered by asking the judge to sequester all of the defense witnesses as well. “When we went to court,” Boo Chavis recounted, “they put us in different rooms.”

It is not clear how the defense attorneys managed to have most of their witnesses elude the judge's sequestration order. Roger Oakley was not listed as a witness and did not even come to the trial until the last day. In the end, Colleen Teel did not testify, and the court managed to compel only one of the five eventual witnesses for the defense to obey the sequestration order. This was true despite the fact that the defense team knew they would be calling those witnesses. Watkins even knew he would be calling Roger Oakley to the stand, but he kept silent. “We knew right after the arrest what had happened,” defense attorney Edmundson recalled. “[Roger Oakley] came in and we talked with him, took tapes, and put them in the safe, and no one else knew.”

At about three in the afternoon on Wednesday, July 29, the bailiff picked up the big courtroom Bible and Willie T. Harris, the seventeen-year-old African American who had driven the dying Henry Marrow to the hospital, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Harris, the first witness to take the stand, told the court that he had been sitting in his automobile under the shed at the Tidewater Seafood Market with three other young men on the evening of the murder. He heard Marrow and someone else—a white man, he thought—arguing loudly. Harris got out of his car to see what was going on and observed Larry Teel standing in front of the motorcycle shop with a big stick, swinging it at Henry Marrow. Almost immediately, Robert Teel dashed out of the barbershop with a shotgun, Harris said, “and I ran.” As his feet carried him down Highway 158 and up into Grab-all, he had heard two or three shots. Returning a few minutes later, Harris told the court, he saw Marrow lying on his back behind the Tidewater Seafood Market with Larry Teel standing over him.

The second witness for the prosecution was Boo Chavis. After all the violence in Oxford in May and June, the Chavis family had sent Boo to New Jersey to keep him safe and out of trouble, although the authorities had already apprehended him in several cases involving theft. Just as he got off a bus in Newark, sheriff's deputies handed the young man a subpoena and told him he had to testify at a trial in North Carolina. The diminutive young Chavis, who wore small spectacles, opened his testimony by recounting how he had been walking to the store after a game of bid whist at a friend's house down the street. His testimony was familiar to both sides because of the earlier hearings and the newspaper coverage. Chavis was probably the most damning witness for the prosecution, and the defense attorneys were determined to rattle him.

Chavis continued to testify that he had been on his way to the drink machine when four boys flew by him, running as fast as they could. The last one yelled, “Come on, Dickie,” recounted Chavis. He heard a shotgun blast and saw Dickie Marrow skidding onto his face in the gravel behind the Tidewater. Moments later, shotgun pellets burned his face, arms, neck, and hands, and the pain and blood blinded him for a second. Robert Teel accosted him in the doorway of the Tidewater Seafood Market and “put a shotgun barrel in my face and pulled the trigger,” Chavis said that he testified. When the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber, Teel and his sons ran over to the fallen Marrow and began kicking and beating him. “Okay, you got me,” Chavis reported that Marrow begged his attackers. “Let's forget it.” According to Chavis, Robert Teel then barked at his son, “Shoot the son of a bitch!” Another shot rang out “that sounded about like a cap pistol,” said Chavis—the .22-caliber rifle shot that ended Henry Marrow's life.