Blood Done Sign My Name (5 page)

Despite the bitter memory of slavery, some black people in Oxford always enjoyed fairly good relationships with whites. Mary Catherine Chavis, who took Henry Marrow into her house when he was a teenager and acted as a mother to him, grew up around white people in the 1930s and 1940s and had very little trouble from them. Her maternal ancestors had been free blacks and well educated. Her mother attended North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham and then came back to Oxford to teach school, and Mary Catherine followed in her footsteps, graduating from Shaw University and then coming home to teach at Mary Potter High School. “We really didn't have a lot of problems with white people when I was growing up,” she recalled. William Baskerville, born at the turn of the century in a small, racially mixed neighborhood near the railroad tracks, had close attachments to his white neighbors. “I would go over there and they would say, ‘Come on in here, William, and get you some dinner.' They would invite us in and we would sit down and eat together.”

While very few whites during the Jim Crow era invited black people to sit at their dinner tables, leading whites in Oxford invoked warm memories of their paternalistic relationships with African Americans in defense of the “good race relations” that they insisted had forever prevailed. “A black man was my hunting partner,” explained Billy Watkins, Oxford's leading attorney and a representative to the General Assembly. “He kept the dogs and fed them, and I bought the feed.” In his mind, this proved that “relations were always good here,” he told me. “A black man keeps my horses now. I've got horses, and was raised on a farm, and we had some blacks out there who stayed on our farm for fifty years and more.” This was undoubtedly a sincere description of Watkins's vision of his relationships with the loyal family retainers who worked on his family's plantation. But these ties, even when the affection was genuine on both sides, were like a clay pot that had to be shattered for the tree inside to grow. What kind of fruit that tree would yield, in the long run, remained an open question.

My mother grew up in the shade of that spreading paternalist oak of “good race relations,” but she herself broke free of it. By the time I had children of my own, I saw what a fearlessly self-reliant person she was. And if Mama sometimes seemed a little starchy to me when I was growing up, this was not the case with my father, partly because she married so far beneath herself. Jack Tyson, my father's father, was a fiery New Dealer with unconventional views on race, and had only recently left tenant farming when he moved his family to Biscoe. “I don't have but three cents,” Granddaddy Tyson would laugh, “and I got to mail a letter with that.” In 1946, Mama was fourteen when she saw Daddy, a sixteen-year-old, ride into town sitting in a chair in the back of the truck. “I thought he was the best-looking thing I had ever seen,” she laughed later.

Her diary from the late 1940s confirms her opinion. “Vernon sat with me in the picture show,” she wrote a few months later, “winked at me, held my hand, and wore my hat. I LOVE him!” At fourteen and fifteen, she wrote about him in her diary nearly every day, even when there was not much to say: “Saw
Vernon today,” or “Vernon wasn't there,” or less persuasively, “Vernon is dating Betty Charles but I don't care!” When she turned fifteen, her parents reluctantly permitted her to begin dating, and she never dated anyone else, at least not seriously. On the flyleaf of her diary, “Vernon Tyson” is scribbled over and over, in different versions of the same hand, and then the words “I do,” and then in the same handwriting but much older, “You bet I do.”

In the spring of 1948, when it became clear that the young couple was pointed toward the altar, the Buies tried to send Martha to Europe for the summer, hoping to derail their romance. “Mother said she wished I would get over my ‘Vernon' crush,” Mama confided to her diary that year. “That hurt me so much.” Several weeks later, on May 17, it looked like Jessie Buie was out of luck with respect to her love-smitten teenaged daughter. “Dear Diary,” Martha wrote, “Vernon said he was gonna hit a home run for me in the baseball game, and sure enough he did. I love him! I love him!” On May 28, however, things were looking up for Jessie's campaign. “Vernon makes me sick,” Martha wrote. “He can't be decent.”

But opposites attract, so they say, and my mother's cleaned and pressed upbringing may have made my father seem all the more appealing to her. “I just can't help liking
Vernon,” she wrote soon afterward. “Sometimes I wonder if it is right to feel this way or not. We're so very different. But I love him so much I just don't think anyone else will do. I love every inch of that fine boy.” And so it was that when I was growing up, my mother loomed as the guardian of manners, while my father's eyes laughed as he drank out of the milk jug—when she wasn't looking.

When my father walked through the door in the evening, his children jumped on him and held on tight, laughing and squealing. No one was more fun than Daddy, and when he turned his charm on a child, the effect was as powerful as a narcotic. If you stayed home sick from school, Daddy was likely to show up and take you out to lunch, a gesture that all of the children interpreted as a sign of his special pleasure in our delightful company. His presence in the house was raucous, rollicking, warm, and attentive, except on those frequent occasions when it was cloudy, oblivious, foreboding, or even threatening.

That fact, in itself, was not strange. In the small-town South where I grew up, we children were afraid of
everybody's
daddy.
Vernon Tyson's rich baritone was the voice of God. The only problem was that you never knew if you were going to get the Old or the New Testament. Six feet tall with shoulders seemingly half that wide, Daddy could be tender and impish, and he plainly loved my mother like a hound dog loves a bone. I remember lying beside him in their bed, his massive arm under my neck. My brother,
Vern, lay on the other side of Daddy, but with my father's chest between us, heaving up and down as he snored softly,
Vern might as well have been on the yonder side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Daddy's hands seemed roughly the size of chuck roasts. Those meaty paws tenderly stroked our faces and patted our backs and tousled our hair whenever we went near him. But on those rare occasions when he roared into a room in anger, we froze in terror. “Child abuse” had not yet been invented, and every father I knew obeyed the biblical injunction not to “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Not all of them, however, were built like a freight car and wired like a bomb.

Though he seemed to us an iron-fisted disciplinarian, he was also remarkably gentle and intuitive for a man of the John Wayne generation. One Saturday morning when I was seven,
Vern, Gerald, Jeff Daniels, Burton Gibbs, and I were secretly smoking cigarettes down by the creek. We perched on the muddy bank, cupping our palms and fumbling with the matches. Jeff had stolen a pack of Tareytons from his mother and on that authority, presumably, commanded everyone not to “nigger-lip,” an admonition that meant we must not suck the cigarette too far into our mouths and get the filter soggy. My brother was twelve years old and took charge in his capacity as the senior member of the expedition. Certain rules were necessary, even here in the wilderness. It was permissible to cuss and talk “dirty,”
Vern said, since we were smoking cigarettes anyway. When men were smoking cigarettes and cussing, we reckoned, they could talk about anything they damn well pleased. After all, since the penalty for smoking cigarettes was undoubtedly death and then hell, talking about “you-know-what” couldn't make things much worse.

We had been down by the creek smoking when Gerald had first told me about sexual intercourse, though he'd used another word.
That
was when a man “puts his you-know-what between a woman's you-know-whats,” he'd said in a tone of grave authority. Gerald's account of coitus, which had seemed to draw on direct observation, explains how I'd come to think that a woman's private parts resided between her breasts. This tantalizing misunderstanding had prevailed for several weeks, fascinating my seven-year-old mind until the fateful day that we got caught smoking cigarettes.

One of the neighbors saw us down by the creek and called each of our parents. When we came home for supper, Daddy solemnly ushered us into the living room and left us there on the couch for what seemed like several months. No one ever used the living room at our house. We'd always thought it had been reserved for Sunday afternoon company, but now it appeared that it had actually been set aside for executions. Death Row at Central Prison would have been more cheerful.
Vern whispered something to me along the lines of “We're dead,” but otherwise we sat silently, huddled under a cloud of iniquity darker than the grave, pondering our demise.

We could hear Mama and Daddy talking in hushed tones in the kitchen. And then suddenly that huge bear of a man lumbered into the room, sat down in front of us, and so began the sermon. The voice was calm but the content was indecipherable. They knew, of course, exactly what boys talk about while smoking cigarettes down by the creek. Rather than punishing us, Daddy and Mama had decided that it was time for him to tell us about the birds and the bees. Daddy's lips continued to move, but I had no idea what he was saying. He never even mentioned cigarettes. It seemed cruel, in a way, to burden condemned men with this prattle about God's plan for Creation.

Our one comfort was that as long as Daddy kept talking, he was not whipping us to death. Maybe our reprieve would last for only a few minutes, but why not make the most of it? So I nodded at what seemed appropriate times, and tried to appear alert and attentive, even as I peered into the abyss. The whole idea was to keep him talking. Daddy still hadn't said one word about cigarettes. And then suddenly, without my having apprehended a single sentence, Daddy's momentous speech ended. Did we have any questions? he asked us. Any questions at all? Was there anything we wanted to know about anything?

The moment of death drew nigh. I tried to telepathically urge my brother to ask Daddy
something, anything
to save our lives for another few minutes. Perilous silence gripped the room. Seconds ticked by. If I'd only had the remotest idea what Daddy had been talking about, I would have asked him a hundred questions, as slowly as possible, like that woman in my “Arabian Nights” book who told the sultan long, interwoven stories to keep him from chopping off her head. But I couldn't even identify the topic, let alone ask a pertinent question. Why didn't my stupid older brother think of
something,
anything,
to ask Daddy? Finally, positive that further delay would move us straight to the End, I blurted out, “What is my front tooth made of?”

Daddy laughed out loud and long, shook his head, and handed each of us a Christian book about where babies come from. Late that night, with a flashlight under the covers, I read both my book, which was called
Wonderfully Made,
and then
Vern's book, which I was not supposed to see until I got older, read them cover to cover and still never found out that a woman's vagina was between her legs. Apparently, while a man and wife lay sleeping, something horrible crawled out of him and into her—into her ear, for all I knew. Anyway, right after he gave us our books, Daddy took the whole family out for dinner at the new Hardee's drive-in. Sucking on a chocolate milk-shake, I contemplated the mysterious grace of God.

Neither Divine mercy nor threat of punishment actually made us stop smoking cigarettes, in part because this taboo was inextricably linked with our haunting prepubescent sense of ourselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God. If we couldn't smoke the whole pack in one sitting, we'd hide them under a fallen tree, just like the dirty magazines we sometimes found there. We would repent predictably and promise God never to do it again, though we knew we would be back. But you couldn't be taking that kind of stuff home with you, and it was hard to escape the deep uneasiness that it might somehow follow you and disrupt the warm goodness of family dinners, saying grace and singing hymns and hugging Mama good night. It was no accident that our father had made the leap from cigarettes to sex. This seemed appropriate—sin was sin, whether you smoked it or just peered at it with the fearful awe that gives way to the dry tightness in your throat and the strange stiffening in your pants.

Sex was sinful. And sin was sexual. Both of them were inextricably bound up with race, which was something we all knew, the way we knew that Robert E. Lee was a hero and North Carolina was the basketball capital of the world. I could not help but notice that grown-ups always talked about both race and sex in exactly the same whispered tones. Hymns we sang in church promised that the blood of Jesus would wash our sins “as white as snow,” cleanse our souls of “one dark blot,” or help our “dark passions to subdue.” And I knew, without knowing how I knew, without ever being told, that the color line throbbed with sexual taboo.

Segregation, I understood without ever having been told, existed to protect white womanhood from the abomination of contact with uncontrollable black men. Whites who questioned segregation confronted the inevitable and, for most people, conclusive cross-examination: Would you want your daughter to marry one? The answer never came, and it never had to come. Everybody knew that would be the most horrible thing imaginable, because interracial sex was inherently pornographic, unnatural, and perverted. If sex was sinful, interracial sex was the most sinful—and therefore the most sexual—that sex could get. And the worst abomination of all, of course, was sex between a black man and a white woman. It was that sin—or the faint hint of it—that got Dickie Marrow murdered.

It took me many years and a Ph.D. in American history to find my way toward the roots of this strange folkway. The sexual obsessions of white supremacy, which were so evident to the children of Jim Crow, had their origins in the fundamental structure of the colonial economy three hundred years earlier. In 1662, the
Virginia legislature passed a statute that read, “Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother.” This reversed English common law, under which the status of a child followed that of the father.