Blood Done Sign My Name (35 page)

What occurred to Franklin, however, was that I was about to pick up that drink bottle and bash him upside the head with it. Realizing that, I ran with the concept. I picked up the bottle quickly and held it by the neck like a hammer. For all I know, Franklin figured he could take it from me and kill me with it if he wanted, but his face read as clearly as a billboard: “This white boy is crazy.” My dimes and quarters were getting too expensive. And when I sensed that, I saw my way to rescuing both my neck and my would-be manhood.

“Let's just forget about it, Franklin,” I said, lowering the bottle. “We got nothing to fight about.” I saw his edge fading and his fists falling. He still had not quite figured out how to leave. I said, “Hey, Franklin, let's just forget about this shit and go get a drink.” We both knew the way. We slipped off campus as though we were old friends and went to the vending machine, where I emptied my pockets and bought both of us a Nehi grape soda. On my way back to classes, just after Franklin and I slapped five and parted company, the gym teacher and the principal suspended me from school for three days for leaving campus without permission. I considered the whole episode a complete triumph, and spent three days reading on the couch, too. Daddy came home each day and took me out to lunch at the Neptune, our favorite spot at Wrightsville Beach, for clam chowder and cheeseburgers. I never even told him that I had left campus in order to defuse a bloody fracas.

Having a friendly acquaintance with a number of black kids, a good jump shot, and a reputation as a decent white guy provided me some protection at school. But often it was just a matter of luck. One morning between classes, I was getting something out of my locker, my head inside the metal door, paying no attention, when the floor began to rumble. Dozens of African American boys had massed at one end of the hallway and charged up the corridor, striking out at every white face that they saw. Before I collected my wits, someone ran into the locker door full tilt, slamming the door on my head. When I pulled myself out of the locker, a black boy swung a padlock on a string and hit me in the back of the head, splitting the flesh. The lights went out, and when I came to and touched my hand to the swelling knot on the back of my head, my fingers were bloody. I walked home and did not even mention it to my parents; I threw away the shirt I had been wearing to avoid having to explain the bloodstains.

My experiences of race, at that point, were so complicated that my early-teenaged self found the subject hard to discuss, even with my father. Liberal pieties offered little help. In the 1970s, my father had little direct connection to the black struggle but, to his children, at least, he continued to talk about race problems in a “civil rights” paradigm, as though all that we had to do was pretend that black people were white and accept everyone as God's children. In retrospect, I am sure that he did not believe it was that simple; he just didn't want us to become haters. But Daddy's approach of meeting anger with love did not help much at school.

Though awkward friendships did sometimes occur, most of the African American kids I knew at school wanted no political solidarity from a white boy. My white friends and I lived in a kind of prison-movie terror in the hallways. Few days passed without some black boy who seemed much tougher than me trying to separate me from my lunch money or my dignity. It appeared to me that the black boys instigated most of the violence at school. It seemed equally clear that school authorities punished them more severely than they did white boys. Of course, even then I realized that we were in the middle of a social revolution gone sour. And I also knew that the ROWP and the Klan had their youthful counterparts throughout the student body. The ordinary conflicts that occur in every schoolyard in the world would suddenly explode into dangerous brawls when some idiot muttered a racial epithet. Black kids perceived the suburban Roland-Grise Junior High as white turf where they were unwelcome guests and Williston Ninth Grade Center as black territory now occupied by invading white power. “We're in
their
school,” a black student at a suburban high school explained to a newspaper reporter in 1971. “They don't like it because it's their school and we had to join it. But our school was taken away from us.”

With respect to the racial crisis, the mostly white teachers and administrators were a mixed bag. Many of them were dedicated, noble, tired human beings confronting tough problems the best way they knew how. Others revealed plainly enough their nostalgia for the segregated all-white schools where they had worked until recently and that now seemed paradise lost. And still other adults in my life defended their outraged sense of white privilege. One of my junior high school football coaches showed me the sawed-off, weighted baseball bat he kept in his car. “This is my nigger knocker,” he bragged. Some grown-ups encouraged white boys to antagonize their African American classmates. My shop teacher took me aside and urged me to beat up Robert Hardy, a troublesome, loudmouthed black boy about half my size who was giving him headaches. “You're not afraid of Robert Hardy, are you, boy?” he taunted me. Small wonder that racial tension and open violence in the hallways nearly brought public education to a halt in Wilmington the year after we moved there.

This local inferno was only a microcosm of the racial crisis at the height of the Black Power movement. In North Carolina and across the country, it was an agonizing time for white liberals, but my father tried hard to ease the violence and nurture interracial community. In matters of race and many other questions, he always taught us to walk a mile in the other fellow's shoes before we passed judgment. Like many white liberals, of course, Daddy was still mired up to his ankles in racial paternalism. But unlike some white liberals, my father had guts enough to speak and brains enough to listen. And that is why he went to see Ben Chavis at the Church of the Black Madonna.

Daddy regarded Chavis's mother highly, knew the twenty-three-year-old reverend reasonably well, and often had recommended Chavis to white officials as someone they could trust. But the news coverage of the racial situation in Wilmington made Daddy wonder if Chavis had learned the wrong lessons in Oxford. As it had so often across the nation in the civil rights era, the question boiled down to the role of violence. In Oxford, Chavis may have used the black violence against white property to gain political leverage, but he had not been a man of violence himself. In Wilmington, however, many suspected that Chavis was encouraging a campaign of street violence to strengthen his political hand or, as young radicals used to say, to heighten the contradictions.

Daddy was not willing to rely on hearsay. He went to the Church of the Black Madonna to see for himself whether it was possible to build a bridge across the color line, even at this violent and chaotic moment. He had to walk through a war zone; both the Rights of White People militia and the Church of the Black Madonna had their headquarters downtown on Castle Street. Sniper fire had recently killed a white man who'd tried to approach one of the movement's churches. We knew at least a dozen white people whose windshields had been shattered by a brick or a bottle as they'd driven through downtown Wilmington. Although Daddy almost never wore his clerical collar, he put in on that day—he wanted everybody to know he was a preacher, not a combatant—and headed downtown. Parking about two hundred yards from the storefront church, Daddy walked down the middle line of the deserted street with his hands in plain view.

When he got to the Church of the Black Madonna, about a dozen young black men blocked his pathway. No white people were allowed inside, they told him. Daddy slowly reached into his shirt pocket with two fingers and slid out his business card. “Just tell Reverend Chavis that
Vernon Tyson wants to see him,” he told the guards, handing one of them the card. And there he stood, a middle-aged white preacher among young black revolutionaries in their berets and dashikis, wondering what kind of damn fool would even be here.

Ben Chavis, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar with his stylish Afro, appeared in a few minutes, shook Daddy's hand warmly, and led him inside, past the tables piled with Maoist and black nationalist literature, into the sanctuary where sixty or seventy people were sitting. The walls were bedecked with children's artwork and political posters. He served Daddy grape Kool-Aid and a sugar cookie and apologized for the guards. “How are you doing, Reverend Tyson?” he asked. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I hadn't seen you since Oxford,” Daddy replied, “and I just wanted to have a little talk.” Chavis indicated that he did not have much time but would be happy to hear anything my father had to say. “If all I believed about you was what I read in the newspapers,” Daddy told him, “I would think you were crazy. But I know you, and I know you are made of good stuff. I know you are a person of good judgment and leadership ability, and I am certain you have good reasons for doing what you're doing.” They looked at each other uneasily, sipping their Kool-Aid from Dixie cups. “I have come so that if you'll tell me what you're doing and why you are doing it,” Daddy continued, “I will help interpret you to the white community. We have got to make it possible for white people, at least the ones who will listen, to hear what you have to say. All they're hearing now is the language of war, coming from both sides. I don't see that any good can come of it.”

He'd gone to talk to Chavis, Daddy explained to me later, because there was hardly anyone else except the two of them who could build a bridge—and even their success was uncertain. “Most of the white people in Wilmington couldn't cross the color line and get anything done,” he said. “The Uncle Toms couldn't do it, because even if the white people heard what they had to say, the black community was not going to follow them. If peacemakers and community builders were going to emerge, it would have to be people like us. It might not have helped much, but we had to try.” My father had feared back in 1962 that it was too late for those whom Dr. King called “people of goodwill” to come together for racial justice; unfortunately, most of those people took almost another decade to begin to grasp the problem.

The delay was not because of a shortage of goodwill, exactly, but rather a gross imbalance of power. What needed to happen was for millions of Americans to find the political will and the material resources to help address slavery's lasting legacy. What my father may not have understood at the time was that this could not happen without some measure of coercion. Unless the people who believed in racial justice could summon the resources to force change, the hour would remain too late. If we had insisted on waiting for popular consensus, it would have been too late ever since the first slave ship arrived at Jamestown in 1619. And if we could not remember how to form the interracial political coalitions necessary to the process, then it had been too late in North Carolina for at least the seventy years that had passed since the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, of which Daddy knew nothing at the time.

We are all the captives of our origins, especially when we do not fully know and understand them. The conversation between my father and Ben Chavis at the Church of the Black Madonna drew its paradoxes and predicaments from deep in the American story. That American story does not begin with the blood of patriots at Lexington and Concord, though unlike my father, Chavis was descended from Revolutionary War soldiers. The American story did not start when Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men have certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, words perhaps penned by the light of a lamp fetched by his slave mistress or one of his slave children, human beings to whom he held a deed of ownership. The origins of the American story are much deeper, as deep as the dark Atlantic, where the bones of somewhere around ten million Africans settled into the sand, thrown overboard by the slave ships that plied those waters in the early days of the republic.

The slave trade and its consequences carved a chasm between my father and Ben Chavis as deep as the Atlantic and, paradoxically, bound them inseparably to one another. If it had been sufficient merely to ease the material predicaments of black Americans and ensure equal access to the resources of this society, perhaps the young black preacher and the older white one could have joined forces and moved forward together. But the slave trade was a crime so enormous that the men who profited from it had been compelled to concoct a justification for it. At first, they rationalized this profitable death machine by pointing out that the Africans were not Christians. But the conversion of the enslaved Africans to Christianity threatened to undermine that story of “heathens” from Africa, lifted up to Christ by their kidnappers. And so the slave traders and the larger society that depended on them conjured up the poisonous lie of white supremacy; that is, the notion that God conferred moral, intellectual, and cultural worth upon humanity on the basis of pigmentation, with lighter-skinned people inherently more worthy and darker-skinned people intrinsically less worthy. Both Ben Chavis and my father carried this poisonous lie deep in their minds, but there it operated in divergent ways that made it hard for them to work together.

As a white liberal, my father's unconscious white supremacy tempted him to feel that he knew what was best for the black freedom struggle. Never mind that he had rarely even been directly involved in that struggle. Of course, even if he had not examined all of his racial assumptions, he really did have a damned good political mind, and he knew what his congregation was thinking. To him, it was plain that most white people either opposed the movement or found it terrifying. Daddy thought the important thing was to persuade those who feared racial equality to examine the question calmly, so that they could join together and oppose those who insisted upon white domination.

You could call it naiveté, but Daddy practiced a wonderful kind of unjustified hope whose power derived from its gentle audacity. In the end, he believed, we were all God's children and we were all in this together. He believed that progress depended on dialogue, which depended on civility and communication. Lasting change required entire institutions to open their doors and rethink their traditions, and this would not happen overnight. He understood that black radicals like Chavis needed to press those institutions, but he also thought that they needed to be patient and avoid alienating potential white sympathizers. Because of his Tyson family history of dissent and service, Daddy was able to imagine himself as a “swinging door” across the color line, he told me later. He hoped to become a peacemaker and help explain blacks and whites to one another. For that reason, Daddy wanted the black freedom struggle to behave itself in a way that would help him reassure white people.