Blood Done Sign My Name (23 page)

In the years since the freedom movement ended, the memory of what had been required of people faded, McCoy explained to me, and people no longer appreciated the sacrifices that had been made regardless of methods. “I was doing that stuff back then, sit-ins and marches and all the rest and nowdays nobody even knows what it was like. People right now think that the white man opened up his drugstore and said, ‘Y'all come on in now, integration done come.' But every time a door opened, somebody was kicked in the butt; somebody was knocked down and refused and spit on before you went in them places. It wasn't no nonviolence in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around—you better believe it. You didn't get it for free.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a good thing, McCoy conceded, but it was the determination of local citizens, not the legislation itself, that made the new law meaningful. “Law or no law,” McCoy spat, “somebody still had to go in there and get kicked in the ass. And by the time they killed Dickie Marrow nobody was having that shit anymore. We was about ready to kick some ass our own selves.”

CHAPTER 8

OUR “OTHER SOUTH”

NOTHING IN MY family's history—nothing in American history, for that matter—prepared my father for Black Power in the manner of Eddie McCoy. In that regard, Daddy was like most white liberals of his generation. His family background did, in fact, make him unusually receptive to certain aspects of the African American freedom struggle; to the redemptive rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., for example. His independent cast of mind allowed him to defy conventional wisdoms of various kinds, and he admired, if he did not always emulate, iconoclastic Southerners like Thad Stem and Charlotte Hawkins Brown who chopped with a big ax and cut their own path. He probably had enough Christian millennialism in him to imagine a whole new social order, though his theologically conservative view of human nature made him doubt that one was on the way. Daddy was a Methodist preacher first and foremost, tending to the living and burying the dead, and he saw his civil rights duties as a matter of persuading the fearful folks in the pew to accept all human beings as children of God and equal in His eyes. But even if Daddy had not been a preacher above all else, he was not hard-edged enough to make sense to someone like Eddie McCoy.

Where Eddie McCoy simply demanded respect—and back in 1970, at least, really saw little reason to talk to white people at all—Daddy wanted a new heaven and a new earth, where the lion would lie down with the lamb. Daddy liked to joke that the lion had always been willing, especially around lunchtime, but the lamb needed more assurance that the Kingdom was at hand. The Black Power generation's vision of social change, though it was often portrayed as radical, and thought of itself as radical, was actually in some ways a deeply traditional and even conservative assessment: you could have whatever you could take, and you could keep whatever you could hold. Power conceded nothing without a demand, as Frederick Douglass had pointed out a century earlier; it never had and it never would. But my daddy longed for justice to roll down like waters, for the crooked places to be made straight and the rough places to be made smooth, and for all flesh to see it together. Neither his view nor McCoy's involved a pragmatic understanding of coalition politics—how we would get there from here. But both Daddy's committed Christian faith and his Eleanor Roosevelt liberalism led him to yearn that white people would concede power rather than black people merely seize it.

There were other white Southerners with broader visions, I realize now, but few of them had the ear of any appreciable white congregation. I now know that there was a Southern left populated by radicals and prophets, people like Myles Horton, who founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932, where a generation later Rosa Parks became acquainted with other people like herself from across the South, whose defiant stories inspired her famous one-woman sit-in on the bus in Montgomery; Anne and Carl Braden, called “dedicated Communists” by Kentucky's attorney general, whose
Southern Patriot
kept dissidents in Dixie informed of one another's existence in the 1950s and 1960s;
Virginia Durr, an Alabama belle whose antiracist activism over the decades placed her
Outside the Magic Circle,
as she titled her autobiography; and Lillian Smith, the Georgia-born lesbian writer whose
Killers of the Dream
inspired generations of Southern dissidents, including my father. But while Daddy had stumbled upon Smith's classic in a course that he took at Guilford College, most of the Tysons had never heard of her or these other radical folks. I came to know their stories much later, as a historian, and wished that I had grown up knowing them. Southerners like the Tysons did not write for radical magazines or get investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, though we sometimes got run out of town all by ourselves. The truth is that neither ideology nor sociology moved my family; instead, we found our footing in the Scriptures we were raised on and in the church that sometimes broke our hearts.

Some people criticized my father and some of his brothers for being “fanatics,” and it would be soothing and self-congratulatory now, after the fact, to accept that critique and portray my kinfolks as the kind of saints and heroes that populate many conventional narratives about the civil rights movement. But the truth is that the Tysons got embroiled in this mess out of decidedly mixed motives. It was not that they were crusading heroes or political leaders so much as that they were passionate, willful, stubborn Christians responding to the world around them. They heard the Spirit of God within them and tried to obey—that was
part
of it. But they also drank deeply from that uncompromising and rebellious pride that moves in the hearts of both ruthless tyrants and saintly visionaries.

As the Lord had revealed it to the Tyson boys, they were smarter than you were and better looking than you were, and they could preach rings around anybody you knew, and could not only stomp a mudhole in you and kick it dry, if it came to that, but had their finger on the pulse of the Holy Spirit besides. They took their orders directly from the Lord, and lesser authorities could kiss their asses. Consequently, nobody had any business telling them what to do or say, nor did any of the principalities and powers of this world. In fact, the more power you had, the less likely the Tysons were to take dictation from you. That isn't a saintly orientation toward the world, exactly, but saints who share it probably swim farther upstream than the timorous angels my daddy derided as “little tailor-made Jesus boys.” If, as one of the better-known humorists of my granddaddy's day speculated, a fanatic is a person who does just what the Lord would do if He knew the actual facts of the case, then the Tysons probably were fanatics. But before we give them credit as social prophets, we do well to remember that they rebelled not only against an unjust social order but sometimes against their own best lights, too.

However we assess them, certainly the Tysons were not part of the South that U. B. Phillips, one of the leading historians of his day, described in 1928 as “a people with a common resolve, indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man's country.” Mistakenly, in my view, Phillips called this determination for white supremacy “the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.” But the Tyson family's less common resolve, maintained as indomitably as any that Phillips could have described, reflected a vision of the love of Jesus that emphatically included everyone of whatever color. This did not mean that we were somehow untainted by white supremacy. We breathed it in with the tobacco smoke that wafted through every restaurant back in those days. But we were dissenters from the majority opinion among whites on the matter of race. Carl Degler, a historian of antislavery dissenters in the region, called people like us “the Other South.” The Tysons did not know there was an other South, and probably never heard the phrase. Like our ancestors, we took our stand in the only Dixieland we had ever known. If history had seen us defeated again and again, did that make the dissidents any
less
Southern than the slaveholders and segregationists? Lost causes ran in our blood.

Not necessarily
the
Lost Cause, though; my great-great-grandfather William Tyson, who was born in 1835 in Pitt County, North Carolina, bitterly opposed secession in 1860 and never believed in slavery. Early that year, as hotheaded secessionists in the Carolinas worked to foment a revolution against the United States, William Tyson sired a son and named him George Washington, after the founder of American nationalism. In 1862, a year after secessionist troops had surrounded the state capital, shoved the state out of the Union at gunpoint, and hitched North Carolina to the caboose of the Confederacy, William Tyson fathered another son. This time my great-great-grandfather looked to the more recent past for a name that would signal his disapproval. As Union troops overran New Bern, only a few miles away, William Tyson named the boy Henry Clay Tyson, after the Great Compromiser, who had sought to hold the Union together and favored gradual emancipation of slaves. My father once claimed that this was a little like a white Southerner naming his son Muhammad Ali at the height of the
Vietnam War, but that may have been an exaggeration. Henry Clay was not a black liberationist by any stretch, though his political creed—Whig nationalism—got drowned out in the crisis of the 1850s and 1860s, much as my father's liberalism got drowned out in the wake of the Black Power era. In any case, like thousands of his neighbors, William Tyson remained a Unionist like Clay, even while the Civil War engulfed his home, and refused to support the Confederacy.

In 1864, General George E. Pickett, who had led the famous Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, ordered twenty-two local boys in Kinston hanged in public for their loyalty to the United States. On a hastily constructed gallows at the Lenoir County courthouse, eastern North Carolina saw what the Confederacy was willing to do to its dissenters. After the mass hangings, Confederate soldiers went to the homes of the wives and children of the executed men, confiscated all their property, and forbade their friends and neighbors to help them. The Confederates would have hanged William Tyson, too, but he hid in people's barns and in an underground passageway down by the Neuse River at Maple Cypress. From his secret sanctuary, William Tyson would slip out only at night to see his family, eluding the Confederate “recruiters” who roamed the roads. At the end of the war, he was forced into the Confederate “Home Guard” for a short time, then almost immediately captured by Union troops and sent to a prison camp up North. Things had been so hard for working people in eastern North Carolina under the Confederates, he liked to joke in later years, that he actually gained weight as a Union prisoner of war.

My ancestor's experience was quite typical in eastern North Carolina. Too little evidence of William Tyson survives to say for certain, but it would not surprise me if he had been a member of the Heroes of America, known informally as “the Red Strings,” a secret society of anti-Confederate guerrillas and saboteurs across the state. There were roughly ten thousand of them, although you would never know it to hear the Sons of Confederate veterans talk these days. Some were motivated by religious objections to slavery. Many others believed that this war was “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight,” and that they themselves had no stake in the system of slavery. Still others objected to the tyranny of the Confederate government, which they had never consented to support. Poor whites resented Confederate impressment and taxation policies, but hated Confederate conscription laws that conveniently exempted wealthy slave-holders and their sons, one exemption for every twenty slaves owned. In 1861, one Rebel loyalist complained to the Confederate secretary of war that eastern North Carolina was “infested by Tories and disloyal persons.” When federal troops captured the northeastern North Carolina coast in 1862, almost a thousand white men volunteered for service in the Union armies. In 1864, Zebulon vance, the widely admired Confederate governor of North Carolina, conceded that “the great popular heart is not now and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians and not the people.”

Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, white supremacists and neo-Confederates have made enthusiasm for the Confederacy posthumously unanimous. Some of them will even try to tell you that the slaves loyally supported the Confederacy, which is just a damn lie. In fact, as soon as federal troops under General Ambrose E. Burnside, guided by runaway slaves, invaded eastern North Carolina, thousands of those “loyal darkies” fled straight to the Union encampments. “It would be utterly impossible to keep them outside of our lines,” the perplexed General Burnside reported to the secretary of war, “as they find their way to us through woods and swamps from every side.”

The actual history of the South too often rests in an unmarked grave, while the celebratory lies and politically convenient distortions march into immortality. In the 1990s, my father and I drove down to eastern North Carolina and plodded across a plowed field near Friendship Church to a small family graveyard that is William Tyson's final resting place. The stone reads: WILLIAM TYSON, 1835–1916. IN HONEST MAN IS THE NOBLEST WORK OF GOD—illiterate stonemasons had turned “an” to “in.” Ironically, given his Unionist politics, which he never recanted, we found a brand-new Sons of Confederate veterans marker on his grave. My great-great-grandfather hid from the Confederates in life, but their descendants caught him after death, when he could no longer flee, and claimed him as a Confederate veteran, violating his memory in order to polish up the Lost Cause. Daddy pulled up the marker and gently tossed it into the weeds, shaking his head. When we went back ten years later, the marker had returned, and I yanked up the iron stob and pitched it a long, long way into the nearby tobacco field.

That Southern dissenting tradition, however embattled, persisted in the life of my grandfather Marvin Earl Tyson, as well. He was a handsome string bean of a man with an insatiable intellect, born in 1901 near Friendship Free Will Baptist Church in Greene County, North Carolina. No one really knows exactly when or where Jack, as they called him, rejected white supremacy and began to preach a strange new gospel of equality; he came to it by degrees. Raised a fundamentalist, Jack was independent by nature, and as his mind grew he began more and more to live by his own reckoning. “My father was a kind of growing person,”
Vernon recalled. “He didn't come out of that root,” he said, referring to Jack's evolving ideas about racial equality, “but those branches came out of his life, and he just let them flower as they would.” Even when nearly everyone around him felt differently, Jack kept his own counsel and trusted his own interpretations of the world. “He didn't give a damn what other people thought about him,” my uncle Dewey said, “at least not about theological or philosophical questions, or how he was going to do things. If he did, anyway, we couldn't tell.”