Blood Done Sign My Name (24 page)

Jack was the oldest of the seven children of Willie and Patty Mae Tyson, a farming family. They were poor as Job's turkey. Willie broke his leg one spring when the boy was in the eighth grade, and Jack quit school to plow and plant his daddy's tobacco crop. He and his uncle Alonzo Tyson, who was a Free Will Baptist preacher, farmed side by side and never tired of talking about the things of the Spirit. Early one morning Jack went over to borrow a wrench to reset the sweep of his plow, and they got to talking about God, and when the dinner bell rang at noon, the two men were still standing out in the unplowed tobacco field, discussing the meaning of salvation and the doctrine of original sin. No wonder they stayed poor.

Free Will Baptists had abandoned the old Calvinist belief in predestination and believed in “free will, free grace and free salvation.” A morally meaningful decision had to be taken freely, and humanity must choose its path to God. In those days, the generic term
Baptist
in eastern North Carolina generally meant Free Will Baptist. They did not get so far in the towns and cities, but out along the rural roads and up at the branch heads, country folk flocked in to hear the fiery sermons and sing the ancient hymns. Free Will Baptists displayed more emotion in church than Methodists and would have made an Episcopalian squirm, but they did not “speak in tongues” and cavort like the Pentecostal holy rollers. Some called them “foot-washing Baptists,” and Free Willers did hold quarterly meetings during which they washed one another's feet. Jesus had washed feet, and that was good enough for them. At the end of the service, they would file up, row by row, and take turns kneeling before one another with tin basins and clean towels in a quiet drama of tender humility. This sacramental act underlined the fact that Jesus had called his followers to the way of humble service. Men washed the feet of men and women washed the feet of women; there was a clear understanding that young men and women washing one another's bare feet were unlikely to keep their minds on the things of the Spirit.

Jack attended these services a good deal, but his thoughts seem to have wandered from the things of the Spirit pretty regularly. When he was about eighteen, he was standing with some boys beneath the oaks at Friendship Free Will Baptist Church and saw a pretty girl walking across the yard. He asked who she was, and someone told him that she was one of the daughters of Reverend Willie Hart, the new preacher. “Well,” he announced to his companions, “I believe I am going to give that preacher a hard time.”

Eighteen months later, when Willie Hart came home one Saturday afternoon, his five-year-old son met him at the road. “Daddy, Daddy, you better come quick,” the youngster yelled. “Irene has run off and married Jack Tyson, and Bessie thinks
she
is about grown!” Bessie was Willie's fourteen-year-old girl and, according to family lore, she had rouged her cheeks with brick dust and steadfastly insisted that Irene, who was only two years older, was
plenty
old enough to get married.

Jack had taken Irene to Greenville, the county seat of Pitt County, to get the marriage license, and then he'd driven to his uncle Alonzo's house three miles outside Farmville, in Greene County, to get married. But Alonzo said that he couldn't perform a wedding in Greene County; the ceremony wouldn't be valid, since it was a Pitt County license. And so they all got in the Model T Ford and drove just across the county line at Middle Swamp in the rain, where Jack and Irene said their vows in the back seat of the car. Lots of folks back then got
engaged
in the back seat of a car, though sometimes they did not realize it right away, but Jack and Irene actually got married there. In later years, Irene liked to joke that only the front end of the car was in Pitt County, but that the back seat was still in Greene County and therefore she wasn't legally obligated to honor or obey.

In the early 1920s, Jack Tyson joined the Ku Klux Klan. My grandfather's cousin Henry recruited him into the brotherhood of the bedsheet and sold him his first and only robe and hood. We should never forget that the Klan was about as mainstream as the Rotary club in the 1920s; membership nationally soared into the millions and included U.S. senators and, for example, the entire state legislature of Indiana. The mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, where I live now, openly endorsed the Klan. The Klan pumped its own muscular brand of Protestant morality; Cousin Henry had described it as a Christian men's group devoted to providing cornmeal and sweet potatoes for widows and buying shoes and school books for orphans. If some sorry sumbitch was laying up drunk and his pregnant wife was out in the yard splitting wood, Cousin Henry told Jack, the Klan would drop by in their sheets and tell that man to sober up and that if there wasn't a big pile of stove wood on the porch by the next evening, they would tan his hide but good. My grandfather joined the KKK out of both misguided piety and ignorant bigotry. I find it fascinating, and even hopeful, that Jack could go from klansman to race rebel. But it must have embarrassed my family because I learned about Jack's later racial egalitarianism decades before I heard that he had been in the KKK. Most of us would rather claim to have always been perfect than admit how much we have grown. It occurs to me that my grandfather's turn against white supremacy may have had something to do with his Klan experience, but apparently he never explained. Jack quickly discovered that the Klan was more committed to prejudice than piety, and he left after only a few weeks. Wearing the mask encouraged good people to do bad things, Jack told his children in later years, and the Klan's obsession with white supremacy would not stand up to the injunctions of the New Testament.

Growing up the daughter of a preacher, Irene was neither surprised nor dismayed when her young husband began to feel that the Lord was calling him to the ministry. In those days, Jack was an evangelical fundamentalist. He led the singing at camp meetings, held prayer meetings at their house, and began “exhorting” a little at Friendship Church. But his great shame was that he had no education beyond eighth grade, and he was sharp enough to know his own limitations. One day while he was teaching Sunday school, the principal of the local high school walked in and sat down. Jack was mortified that this man of learning was sitting before him, ignorant as he was, and later Jack told his children that he'd wished the floor would open up and let him through. But a few days later, John Holmes, the owner of the John Deere tractor dealership in Farmville, sent for Jack. “The school man told me he heard you at Friendship Church the other day,” Holmes told my young grandfather, “and he says you have great gifts for preaching but that you could use a little education.” Jack thanked him and conceded that he sorely lacked book learning. Mr. Holmes then offered to place fifty dollars a month in a bank account for Jack if he'd go to school. At the time, grown men cut timber all day long for a dollar, and fifty dollars a month was good money. And so Jack went first to Eureka College, the Free Will Baptist school in Ayden, and then moved down to Buies Creek and attended Campbell College, which also offered high school courses.

Through this almost bizarre gesture of Christian fellowship from a near stranger, Jack Tyson got his high school diploma and acquired a little polish of learning when he was thirty and the father of seven children. He continued to take correspondence courses. Though he could only dream of graduating from college, he became a voracious reader and dedicated biblical scholar, and his mind ranged freely. His gifts made him a renowned Free Will Baptist preacher, and he conducted revivals all over eastern North Carolina. Jack Tyson had grown up in a world where preachers didn't admit to preparing sermons; you just opened your mouth and God filled it. That kind of preacher would just “beat the Book and holler,” Jack liked to say derisively. But his reading and writing, combined with the evangelical style that he had learned growing up among fundamentalists, gave him a striking combination of preparation and passion. (“You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose,” he taught my daddy.) His inclination to study, undoubtedly a good thing, nevertheless encouraged his persistent temptation to regard his own views as divine writ; he did not think that he was God—that would have been blasphemy—but he sometimes seemed to think that God agreed with him on a pretty regular basis.

Education also encouraged Jack Tyson to break the shackles of fundamentalism. The Bible is not a history text or a biology book, he said. It is the highest that we know of God, but we do not know everything about God, nor are we likely to understand Him fully on this side of the river Jordan. He didn't need a Divine blueprint; a God small enough for him to understand, Jack Tyson liked to say, would not have been big enough for him to worship. As he pondered the Scriptures and the world around him, his social views became increasingly liberal. He kept company with New Dealer sociologists and social prophets, and ran with radicals and renegades of various stripes. He became fast friends with a left-wing Methodist preacher named Key Taylor, a wild-eyed populist who supported cotton mill strikers and treated “colored people” exactly as if they were white. In 1943, when the Free Will Baptist convention voted down a proposal that the denomination move toward having a formally educated clergy, Jack Tyson left the Free Will Baptists and became a Methodist preacher.

Our family's religious journey seems to ratify the old joke that a Methodist was just a Baptist who had learned to read and write. The rumor among resentful Baptists was that Jack had sold out for filthy lucre, that the Methodists had bought him by promising to send his children to college. That was not true, in any literal way, but all six of his sons became Methodist ministers and most of them attended Duke Divinity School; unlike the Free Will Baptists, the Methodists required an educated clergy. That denominational switch changed the whole history of our family. The Methodists were a more middle-class denomination, and Methodist preachers had minimum salary protection and a retirement plan. If I grew up with a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall and books in the house, it was partly because we became Methodists.

Jack served small-town and country churches, and he never made any money. But life was a little easier. “When my daddy was driving the car and he was dressed up,” my own father remembered, “I thought he was so handsome. He had store-bought clothes on, nice suits, and his shoes were shined. He had Palmolive shaving lotion on and vitalis hair stuff, and I thought his hat smelled good. I thought that any wind that went by him and came in my nostril was a sweet wind.”

Life in eastern North Carolina did not always smell so sweet. Though people tend to think of poor, rural white Southerners as the worst racists in the country, these were not the people who redlined black folks out of their neighborhoods, the way northern bankers and real estate agents did. They were hardly in a position to keep blacks out of America's most elite schools, the way northeastern academics did. And white country people in the South often lived right alongside blacks, in similar material conditions, which both softened and sharpened racial clashes. Karl Marx exaggerated only slightly in pointing out that poor whites had nothing to lose but their chains. But Marx couldn't have known that the links that white supremacy and the Civil War had hammered into those chains gave white working people in Dixie a bone-deep sense of themselves as white Southerners, tied to a bloody history that usually pitted them against African Americans, even in opposition to their own interests.

The landscape poor whites shared with blacks, in rough and unequal fashion, was a hardhanded world of hog killing, hookworm, and backbreaking labor, where the Great Depression came early and stayed late. Indoor plumbing was practically unknown; the outhouse, with its Sears Roebuck catalog, and the slop jar under the bed were standard equipment. Kerosene lamps provided what little light was needed, since men and women who had worked from dawn until dusk rarely sat up late reading. The Tyson boys shared shoes when one of them needed to look nice, and cardboard patches made shoe leather walk a little farther. Irene Hart Tyson stitched pajamas and underwear for the children out of flour sacks. Her boys bickered over socks; after my father grew up, his sock drawer was always brimming with new socks, neatly rolled in homage to the painful memory of having had so few to wear when he was a boy.

When there was no meat and not enough eggs in Irene's larder, she would make egg gravy and biscuits. Or else she would fry out a little fatback pork, add flour, and make thin gravy with black pepper, Tabasco sauce, salt, and water. She would slice leftover biscuits into the gravy and simmer them, a dish she called “stewed biscuits.” On cold winter mornings, she would break up kindling and light a fire in the stove, and serve fried dough with homemade jam as a treat for her brood. Irene worked hard and loved harder, and managed well through every hardship except losing her children; she had ten children in all, but three of them died as infants or toddlers.

The first one, Thelma, was a curly-headed three-year-old angel and Irene's only girl when she died of pneumonia in 1929. For the rest of her life, Irene would pass girls on the street and say, “Jack, look, she's about the age Thelma would be if she had lived.” Thelma's picture occupied a permanent place of reverence on the mantel-piece. “I know that when my mama died,” Daddy said, “and she met God, she didn't say, ‘Tell me about the Trinity, I've always wondered how God could be three in one.' What she said was, ‘Have you taken good care of my Thelma? And when can I see her?' ” A second girl, velma, died of diphtheria in 1938, when she was ten months old.

Soon after velma died, Irene entered her eleventh pregnancy. The family doctor thought that having another baby would be a threat to her health, and her husband sided with the physician. After much persuasion, Irene checked into the little country hospital in Wilson to undergo a hysterectomy, which would abort this pregnancy and prevent any more. When Jack left the house to see her, he sternly instructed the seven older children to take good care of little Eugene, who was three, and to scrub out the entire house. The boys boiled water on the stove and dumped each full pot into the galvanized tin tub set on the wide boards of the kitchen floor. But before they had filled the washtub, little Eugene teetered backward, plopped down into the scalding hot water, and screamed.