Blood Done Sign My Name (33 page)

The trial resumed at three, at which time attorneys for both sides prepared to make their final addresses to the jury. James Ferguson gave a striking and memorable summation for the prosecution that Friday afternoon. “From the first day of this trial,” Ferguson told the jury, “we have heard ‘self-defense, self-defense, self-defense.' When every one of you and the other prospective jurors was questioned from this side of the table,” the seasoned civil rights lawyer said, gesturing toward Billy Watkins and Frank Banzet, “you were asked again and again whether you believed in the right of a man to defend himself. This was the central issue, the defense told us. It was a question of ‘self-defense.' ” His eyes swept up and down the row of five white women and seven white men who sat impassively in the jury box before him. “Henry Marrow was running away just as fast as his legs would carry him when they shot him the first time,” Ferguson said. “They had to shoot him to stop him from leaving. And then he was flat on his back, bleeding, begging for his life, and then unconscious, after they beat him half to death, more than a hundred feet off the Teel property, when they shot him in the head. And yet Mr. Watkins and his colleagues tried their best to persuade you that it was a question of ‘self-defense.'

“And now, after the state has proven beyond any doubt that this killing was by no stretch of the imagination an act of self-defense,” continued James Ferguson, “they have come up with this story of an ‘accidental shooting.' It was an accident, they tell you now.” He looked up and down the jury once more, and then delivered the hook. “I guess we might say this is what you'd call
accidental self-defense.
I don't know about y'all, but I have never heard of ‘accidental self-defense,' myself. This may be the first instance of ‘accidental self-defense' in recorded history.”

Of course, Ferguson told the jurors, most of whom stared at the floor, there was no such category as “accidental self-defense,” and nothing remotely like that had happened. They all knew what had happened, and five witnesses for the state had made it clear what had happened. All of the witnesses for the defense, Ferguson reminded them, were members of the Teel family. No one could blame them for trying to keep their family together, but a man had been killed and justice must be done. “If you turn these men loose,” Ferguson told the jury, “you may as well hang a wreath on the courthouse door on your way out, because justice is dead in Granville County.” At that, Judge Martin ended court for the day, and announced that court would continue to meet through the weekend.

Saturday morning, Watkins and Burgwyn presented a dramatic clashing of styles. Watkins made a professional presentation that all the observers agreed was long and dry. “Watkins spoke to the jury for an hour and 30 minutes,” the Raleigh
News and Observer
noted. He explained that the prosecution had decided to charge Larry Teel with firing the fatal shot but actually had not known whether or not that was true; the prosecution's case was “a shot in the dark,” he said.

The other point that Watkins made again and again was that the jury could not rely upon the word of the prosecution's witnesses, especially Boo Chavis, who not only had a significant criminal record but had practically grown up in the same house with the deceased. “Most of [Watkins's] time was spent in an attempt to discredit the testimony of the state's witnesses,” the newspaper reported, “particularly William Augustus Chavis, [the] young Oxford Negro who testified he had seen Larry Teel place a rifle muzzle against Marrow's forehead and pull the trigger.”

“This is one of the most serious cases ever to be tried in this state,” Burgwyn noted, opening his brief summation. “The outcome will affect events in this community, the entire state of North Carolina, and across the nation.” The murder of Henry Marrow was “a useless, senseless death,” he said, but it occurred “at a moment of great upheaval on the subject of race. We cannot tell the world that we have one system of justice for Negroes and another for whites,” Burgwyn advised the jury. The grizzled prosecutor, weary from lack of sleep, rubbed his eyes and squinted as he reminded jurors of the brief testimony of Page Hudson, the state's chief medical examiner, on the first day of the trial. “As Dr. Hudson told you, Henry Marrow had two serious fractures of the skull, one on the top of his head and another on the back of his head,” Burgwyn stated. “He might well have died even if that last bullet had never blasted through his brain, but it did.” Who fired the shot really didn't matter, he said, since they had all intended to kill him. Burgwyn asked the jury to recall the bruises and abrasions all over Marrow's body, including the shotgun wounds on his buttocks and the back of his legs, “wounds that immobilized him,” said Burgwyn.

“After they shot him down, and while he was laying there, flat on his back, unable to get up,” the prosecutor continued, “they kicked him and stomped him and hit him in the head with a shotgun butt over and over again. They beat him while he begged for his life, beat him until he was probably unconscious. And then they shot him in the head like you or I would kill a snake.” Burgwyn turned and walked slowly toward the prosecution table, apparently overcome with emotion.

“Right at that moment,” recalled the court reporter who had been taking notes during the trial, “when it was quiet, we all heard a baby crying outside the courtroom. The window was open, and you could hear it all through the room. We could all hear it. And I just started crying.” Two decades after the trial, as I interviewed her, her eyes filled with tears again. “I was thinking about that little baby, the one whose father had been killed, and the little baby that had just been born in the Teel family, Roger's little girl. And how none of this was their fault, none of it. All of this was our fault, not theirs. It was all our fault.”

Seizing the moment, Burgwyn turned around to face the jury once more. “When I hear that little baby cry,” he said, “I think about a little girl that is going to grow up without knowing her father. And I can't help but hear that cry as a cry from the deceased from his grave, saying, ‘vindicate my death. vindicate my death. Don't let them kill me and just tell the world, “It was an accident.” Don't let them do that to me. Please don't let them do that to me.' ” And then he went back to the table.

After Burgwyn sat down, Judge Martin gave instructions to the jury. They could bring in one of five verdicts, he explained. They could find the defendants guilty of murder in the first degree. They could rule the defendants guilty of murder in the first degree with a recommendation of life. They were also free to decide that the defendants were guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter. If they believed that the defendants were not guilty of anything, Martin told the jurors, they could find the defendants not guilty. In North Carolina, he added, a verdict of first-degree murder without a recommendation of life imprisonment meant an automatic death sentence. If they found the defendants guilty of first-degree murder, they would need to decide whether they felt the death penalty was appropriate. With that, he sent them out to determine the fate of Robert and Larry Teel and left the court in session but “at ease” until six-thirty that evening.

All afternoon the town waited on the jury. “We were scared to death,” Gene Edmundson, one of the defense lawyers, remembered. “You just don't know.” Forty or fifty young black men and women stood around outside the courthouse, doing their best to look militant and disdainful of it all, as if they knew that the white men would be acquitted. Many of them, however, still managed to hope for a conviction. Klansmen stood around brooding. Two dozen armed white men, the “auxillary police,” some of whom reportedly belonged to the Klan, too, stood at ten-foot intervals up and down the sidewalk outside the courthouse, helmets on and riot clubs at the ready. Highway patrol units with tear gas and shotguns were on full alert nearby. When the judge called the trial back into session at six-thirty, hundreds of people filed quietly back into the courthouse, state troopers patting everyone down for weapons at the door. Judge Martin brought the twelve white jurors back in after six long hours of deliberation and asked the foreman if a verdict had been reached. Charles M. Shaw, an elevator inspector from Raleigh and the foreman of the jury, said that they had not come to a verdict yet. The judge then ordered the jury sequestered for the night, and the spectators filed out again.

The next morning, many people went to the courthouse instead of church. A courtroom packed with more than four hundred people, about three hundred of them African Americans, waited for the verdict. Deliberations had begun in a locked chamber adjacent to the courtroom at nine-thirty, and it was just an hour and a half later when foreman Shaw notified the judge that they were ready to report. As it happened, churches all over town were starting their eleven o'clock services. “The jury came out at eleven o'clock in the morning,” defense attorney Edmundson recalled, “and when they knocked on the door to the courtroom, the church bells all over town started ringing.” The twelve jurors filed out and took their seats. Judge Martin asked the foreman, Shaw, to stand. “Have you reached a unanimous verdict?” he entoned.

“We have, Your Honor,” Shaw replied, handing the signed verdict to the bailiff, who passed it to the judge. After Judge Martin silently scanned the verdict, he handed it to the clerk to announce: “We, the members of the jury, unanimously find Robert Larry Teel not guilty of murder in the first degree.” The room erupted into wailing and yelling. “Everybody jumped up yelling and crying,” recalled Carolyn Thorpe, one of the young black women in the courtroom that morning. “Everybody was totally shocked, furious. It was something like reading a fiction book. I just couldn't believe it was happening like this. It was like a cartoon.”

“Order in this court! There will be order in this courtroom!” Judge Martin exclaimed, pounding his gavel. “This court will tolerate no further outbursts.” The judge ordered the bailiff to arrest anyone else who said anything out of order on charges of contempt of court. The second and third verdicts found Robert Teel not guilty of first-degree murder and not guilty of aiding and abetting first-degree murder, and the announcements were greeted with silence and tears. Larry Teel threw his head into his hands and wept. Prosecutor Burgwyn insisted on polling the jury, forcing each juror, one by one, to pronounce the words “not guilty.” After the jury left the room, Judge Martin ordered the spectators to depart one row at a time, in orderly fashion, alternating between the black and white sides of the courtroom. Deputies enforced the edict. As the young blacks filed out, most of them crying or fuming, they spread the word that everyone should go to a mass meeting at the First Baptist Church to decide what would happen next.

The Raleigh
News and Observer
's lead editorial the next morning was entitled “Sham and Mockery.” The jury was “doubly conned,” the editors wrote, if it believed “the incredible testimony of a surprise witness who surfaced on the last day of the trial and said
he
had fired the fatal shot into Marrow's brain
accidentally.
” The newspaper's editors noted all the irregularities in the case and pointed out the obvious: that even the testimony of the defense witnesses themselves would have supported a conviction of manslaughter. It was as though the jurors had decided to give Robert and Larry Teel a medal. The whole affair, the
News and Observer
said, “has been a sham and a mockery of justice.”

Decades later, prosecutor Burgwyn remained philosophical about losing the case, but shook his head in disgust. “I thought it was absolutely the worst miscarriage of justice I had ever seen,” he said, “and I still do. They should have convicted, but they didn't.” Billy Watkins and Gene Edmundson of the defense team both denied that politics outside the courtroom had affected the trial's outcome. They simply thought they had done a better job than the prosecution, although Edmundson was not sure that the verdict would have been the same with what he called “modern methods of investigation.” Teel himself agreed that Billy Watkins's legal representation was decisive. “I'm pretty sure if he hadn't been a smart attorney they would have gotten me,” Teel told me. “I think he was a very, very smart man by keeping our mouths shut and letting the prosecution go on and hang themselves.” But the most eloquent analysis came from one of the young black men who had been sitting under the shed at the Tidewater Seafood Market that night. Jimmy Chavis had held Henry Marrow's head in his lap on the way to the hospital. “That court,” Chavis told me years later, “that court won't nothing but a shoeshine parlor.”

CHAPTER 11

WE ALL HAvE OUR OWN STORIES

IN THE ONLY published local history of Granville County, sponsored by the chamber of commerce, the authors offer the story that my hometown of Oxford undertook a “voluntary desegregation” program in 1964. That is one big white lie, and anybody who actually believes that mess, my grandmama Rene-Rene might say, don't even have a bucket to carry it in, bless their heart. Even if Oxford had abandoned racial segregation that year, which it certainly did not, a decision to
obey federal law
stretches the meaning of the word “voluntary.”

But truth and falsehood keep house on both sides of the color line, and we all have our own stories to tell. In the 1980s, when Eddie McCoy would talk about how murder, marches, and mayhem had— and had not—changed everything back in 1970, local black folks would sometimes dismiss the movement with a wave of the hand. “Y'all didn't do nothing,” they would say. “Y'all didn't even have to do that stuff. President Kennedy and them done all that. They had all that stuff planned out up in Washington. Y'all didn't do nothing.” The people who dismissed local organizing, of course, had not participated in the movement. The majority of African Americans in Oxford and elsewhere had stayed on the sidelines, paralyzed by fear, indifference, or their inability to imagine a better world. The black middle class— hardly a middle class at all, since many of them were only a few pay-checks away from poverty—was especially reluctant. Having missed the freedom train in the 1960s and 1970s, the bystanders now told the story that the train had never come, that freedom had been an easy walk, or that the tracks had been laid by a federal grant.

That last narrative had a grain of truth in it—the role of the federal government in the black freedom struggle
was
considerable— and yet added up to less than a half truth, offered at least in part to defend the storytellers against the fact that many of them were freed by a movement they had been afraid to support. Years later, McCoy would try to tell his stories to young black men who'd grown up on hip-hop and Ronald Reagan, taking both the gains of the movement and the contempt of their fellow Americans for granted, and they would scowl and mutter, “Ain't nothing changed.” Sometimes McCoy was tempted to agree with the young bloods of the hip-hop nation, who disdained what they had been told about the civil rights movement; their stories resonated with some bitter realities about black America in the late twentieth century. But their dismissal of the movement was not the whole story, either.

Those who tell us that nothing has changed have simply forgotten, if they ever knew, how bad things were for black people in this country only a few decades ago. From the day the first Africans accompanied European explorers into the Carolinas in the mid-1500s until sometime after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—for the first four hundred years of the African American experience— almost every white vision of the commonwealth excluded African Americans, even though they were inseparable from its destiny.

Black Southerners forcibly altered that narrative in the 1950s and 1960s by stepping outside their assigned roles—and compelling a reluctant federal government to intercede on their behalf. As often as not, they had to be prepared to defend themselves physically from terrorism by white reactionaries. White liberals, with their hesitancy and quibbling, were sometimes very little help. In North Carolina, white liberal paternalists did not stand in the schoolhouse door as George Wallace had in Alabama. Instead, journalist Osha Gray Davidson observes, they “would quietly appoint a committee to deliberate for eternity over exactly which door, and of what dimensions, would best facilitate the ingress and egress of all students. The style of a Wallace was different, but the result was the same.” And so sometimes it was necessary to escape from an endless and pointless conversation with white paternalism by striking hard and sometimes violently against the architecture of their oppression—Oxford's tobacco warehouses being only the local example.

The struggle was far more violent, perilous, and critical than America is willing to remember. Those who tell themselves that white people of goodwill voluntarily handed over first-class citizenship to their fellow citizens of color find comfort in selective memory and wishful thinking. And those who believe that the federal government rode over the hill like the cavalry and rescued the poor black folks from white “rednecks” have forgotten or never knew what happened in the civil rights–era South. On the way to learning some truths, if not
the
truth, about these histories of all our hometowns, I managed to reexamine some of my own precious but partial narratives about race, politics, freedom, and morality.

The freedom movement in Oxford did not end with the trial of Robert and Larry Teel. The acquittals shocked most black people in Oxford—even those who said they'd expected nothing different— and shamed many white people; the street battles and warehouse fires terrified even the shameless. But though it may have taken violence or the credible threat of violence to budge the racial caste system, it also required a coordinated, economically targeted, community-wide effort from the black community. Before the embers of arson had cooled, the newly founded Granville County Steering Committee for Black Progress met at the First Baptist Church and planned an economic boycott. “The economy of Oxford depended on black consumerism,” Ben Chavis said later, “and we decided we were not going to spend our money with businesses that were supporting injustice.” With African Americans making up more than 40 percent of the population, Oxford's white-owned businesses could not afford to have the black community unified against them. The acquittal of Henry Marrow's accused killers, terrible as it was, brought a new degree of unity to the black community, and Oxford business leaders were forced to take note.

Presenting himself as the voice of that consensus, Chavis went before the all-white chamber of commerce and explained the threatened boycott: the problem went beyond just the killing, beyond even the lack of justice in court, he said. Whites still excluded blacks from jobs at the stores downtown. Banks refused to hire blacks except as janitors and were reluctant to give them loans for anything except automobiles. The movie theater remained segregated. Blacks were welcome downtown only as retail customers or night-shift janitors. Some of the people in this very room had donated money to defend Robert Teel, Chavis reminded the white men, even though their establishments depended upon black patrons. A black boycott, he warned, could bring the town's economy to its knees. Though Chavis apparently was not himself a man of violence, he was not above using the fear of violence as a negotiating tool, and he hinted to the white businessmen that he could not be responsible for what might happen if they failed to respond. “They said they thought something could be worked out,” Chavis recalled, “but nothing was worked out, so we boycotted. The next week, Oxford looked literally like a ghost town.”

As whites had rallied along caste lines after the murder, some wearing sheets, some writing checks, now blacks, too, seized the moment for solidarity. “Black people stuck together here,” recalled Linda Ball, one of the energetic organizers. “At least for that particular time. The murder and them letting the murderers go brought us together.” Black women were at the center of the boycott, partly because they did most of the shopping. “The women always be the first to come out anyway,” Ball explained. “The First Baptist Church would be filled with women.” The Steering Committee organized picketing at the department stores and the grocery stores. Women handed out flyers explaining the boycott to prospective shoppers. The committee arranged for a small fleet of private automobiles and volunteer drivers to take black shoppers to nearby towns. “How we had it networked,” said Eddie McCoy, “is we were carrying people to Henderson. People would call us and we'd take you to Henderson to buy your food, to buy your clothes.”

In the early days, right after the murder and the acquittals, the anger in the black community made it easy to sustain the boycott. But when outrage began to fade toward apathy, the black women running the boycott were not above intimidation, either. Along with their signs and leaflets, they carried cameras. “We would take your picture when you'd come out the store,” one of them told me. “That way we would check and see who was going into the stores.” Someone might contact these people by telephone and explain the purposes of the boycott or make veiled threats; more often, the cameras furnished coercion enough. At the grocery stores, young black men and women would occasionally knock groceries out of black customers' hands in the parking lots. This may seem appalling to those who grew up with the story of Rosa Parks and her tired feet, but the same story could be told from Montgomery to Memphis, from the earliest years of the movement; there were always black people too fearful, too attached to “their” white folks, too pessimistic or too beaten down by white supremacy to stand up for themselves. And black activists dealt with their dissenters emphatically, because freedom itself was on the line. “We'd bust a bag of sugar, break a couple of jars of jelly,” McCoy recounted. “Didn't nobody try to hurt nobody. They just needed to know we weren't playing that shit. Black people had to work together.”

The picketing persisted into autumn. When virtually no blacks attended the county fair that fall, the white men of the chamber of commerce decided it was time to negotiate. The merchants agreed to hire blacks in retail positions. The movie theater quietly desegregated. The town's one black police officer got a promotion, and the police department moved toward hiring others. The public schools underwent full-blown integration that autumn, though many white parents pulled their children out of the public schools and enrolled them at vance-Granville Academy, a “Christian” school that did not admit black children. And in an act that revealed the immensity of the shift in relative political power, the city of Oxford eventually moved the Confederate monument out of the main intersection in front of the courthouse and tucked it away among the cedars and magnolias behind the public library.

In a real sense, the local black freedom movement had won. But it had taken the physical threat of “Black Power” to make the moral argument of civil rights mean anything on a local level. It had taken widespread violence to bring about an uneasy racial truce, let alone “voluntary” acceptance of the Supreme Court's
Brown v. Board of
Education
decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under the terms of that truce, the courts in Granville County became much less a mechanism of white domination, though thirty years later African Americans still regard the judicial system with great suspicion. Nevertheless, most who remember the past with any clarity concede that in some respects it is truly a new day. Eddie McCoy, once a dedicated Black Power revolutionary, eventually became the first African American elected to the Granville County commission, in small part because of a significant number of white allies; this was not the usual legacy of Black Power, of course, but owed much to McCoy's remarkable combination of street credibility among blacks and easygoing business reputation among whites. As in many other towns, in Oxford it took a murderous and avoidable tragedy, and some luck, to summon the political will to change things a little.

The social changes wrought by the black freedom movement came about by a complex mixture of violence and nonviolence, economic coercion and moral appeal. “A lot of what we did was wrong,” McCoy told a class of college students thirty years later, “but it worked. What one of those fellows that burned the warehouses might say to you if he was here is ‘I know it was not my property, but you wouldn't hear me, and it did make a difference.' ” That those hard-won and morally ambiguous victories generated a great deal of fear and resentment should surprise no one. “The black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar,” James Baldwin explains, “and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” And so one of the major by-products of the freedom struggle, in Oxford and across the country, was a white political backlash of sustained ferocity.

In the end, that white backlash pushed my family to leave Oxford. The summer I turned eleven, that perilous summer of blood and fire, my father accepted a position at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, and we moved away. I hated to leave, and I had no idea of the logic behind my father's decision to take a job far away. And so I clung to my old hometown. For several weeks that summer, and many weeks in a dozen summers to come, I worked and played on a farm in Granville County owned by Ben and Joy Averett, members of our church and the parents of my friend Ed.

Ben was a brawny, forthright man whom I liked to call “Pharoah,” because he kept me and Ed busy picking up rocks, weeding the garden, and carrying wood for the fires. Ben worked us hard, but he also showed us how to ride horses, shoot guns, catch fish, and think for ourselves. Though he had a gruff manner and a quick temper, he was also gentle and kind, quick to forgive, and defied all stereotypes. Ben kept rifles, shotguns, and pistols of all descriptions, drove a pickup truck, and liked country music. He made the best barbecued chicken the South has ever seen. Possibility was his playground. “Anything that you ever want to do, there is a book about it at the library,” Ben liked to say. And his life bore testimony to his philosophy: he could build houses, do plumbing and electrical work, grow peaches, lay tile, and dance like nobody's business. Growing up, I considered Ben a model for what a man ought to be and do, and I was not far wrong. One day Ben decided that writing a sonnet couldn't be any harder than building a house, checked out a bunch of books about sonnets, and wrote a masterful sonnet—about building a house.