Blood Done Sign My Name (38 page)

If our material circumstances demanded great exertion, our countercultural lifestyle was morally less strenuous. Entirely persuaded of our own rectitude, we reveled in our superiority to “the South” all around us. In our minds, “the South” was white, and therefore hypocritical, uptight, and censorious. Black people, by contrast, were noble, soulful, and fun. It never occurred to us that black people could be Southerners or respectable or that Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard were only working different sides of the same street. And it was years later before any of us knew much of anything about our political ancestors—dissenting white Southerners from whose mistakes and achievements we could have learned. Instead, we drew our haphazard, well-meaning politics from thin air and the anger of betrayed children. We wore bib overalls in the style of the SNCC organizers who had lived in the rural South fifteen years earlier, but we knew little of their politics except to assume that they were, like ourselves, firmly on the side of the angels. Up and down Flat Branch Road, the black, rural poor lived in squalor; I remember the falling-down tenant houses, all but unheated, and the outhouses slumped behind them. The house where we sometimes bought moonshine liquor from a woman with ten children had fallen open to the weather at one corner and had collapsed at another. None of the black families on Flat Branch Road enjoyed running water or indoor plumbing; for the runaway children of the suburbs, poverty could seem romantic. But we did little to alleviate the abject deprivation all around us and rarely even contemplated it. It was enough that we were good, to say nothing of hip.

One source of self-congratulation was our racial politics. Here we actually achieved some things that still make me proud of that boy in overalls and his bleary-eyed band of brothers and sisters. To a degree that was almost unknown in that time and place, we managed to create meaningfully interracial lives. In a remote rural county, our farmhouse became a place where black and white young people gathered to laugh out loud without fear of the world. On the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, we built a basketball court where salt met pepper and forgot to keep score. The intelligent daughters of the leading white families in the county, the kind of young women who soon would be off for UNC or Duke, gathered at our house. We would sing and talk into the wee hours. Though there were only a few white boys in the community who wanted to get to know us, the young black men who partied at Flat Branch were charming rogues like ourselves. Friendships and romances developed across the color line, providing an education that was sometimes bountiful and occasionally cruel. All the girls knew about a local girl who'd ended up getting shipped away to boarding school the year before I got there because she had dated a black boy. Some white parents banned their daughters from our company. Young black men and women feared reprisals for hanging around with us. Occasionally, white boys with their trucks and guns threatened us for allowing “their” girls to meet black men at our house. In retrospect, I am astounded that our flouting of the color line caused as little trouble as it did.

One of the guiding angels of our secession was Perri Anne Morgan, the feisty and sumptuous daughter of one of the county's leading farm families. The year she turned fourteen, Perri helped cause a furor in Parker's Fork United Methodist Church, which her family had attended since antebellum days. It was Memorial Day, and the minister at Parker's Fork announced the formation of a whites-only softball league for the county's white children. The men of the community had decided to announce it through the churches only, he said, to avoid including “the other segment of the population.” After he had made his plug for segregated softball, the minister preached a sermon entitled “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” Most people probably didn't even think about the contradiction, but Perri and a few others grew more and more enraged. After his allegedly patriotic drivel was over, Beth Polson, who had grown up in Parker's Fork but had moved to California to work as a television producer some years earlier, stood up in the back row. “I have spoken in this church many times,” she said, “and I am afraid that what I have to say this morning won't be as welcome. But I have never heard such hypocrisy here before, and I am really disappointed.”

The misguided minister was clueless. “I don't know what you are talking about,” he replied.

Perri's mother, Doris Morgan, had been watching her daughter's face in the choir loft. In a brilliant stroke of motherhood, she piped up from the front row. “I think Perri Anne could tell you,” she said, loudly enough for everyone in the church to hear.

Fourteen-year-old Perri stood up right there in front of God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and declared, “I don't understand how you can stand up there and announce a softball league for white kids only, and then preach a sermon ‘America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.' It doesn't make any sense.” Perri sat down, and it was her mother's turn to speak.

Getting to her feet, Mrs. Morgan told the congregation that she had seen the faces of the young people in the choir during the announcement and the sermon. They were the future of the church, if it had one, she said, and their views needed to be expressed, which was why she had called on Perri Anne. And she wanted people to know that she agreed with her daughter. “I think this sets a terrible example for the young people,” she added. Some people started crying and others stomped out of the sanctuary. Maybe the minister never did figure out why the black freedom movement in the South had forced so many Christians to reexamine their white supremacist beliefs. But whatever it had accomplished, Perri became one of the leading lights of our merry band at Flat Branch. If her parents weren't entirely happy about the company she kept—and who can blame them for that?—well, it does sometimes appear that our subsequent marriage and two lovely children have helped them recover.

Though we bravely confronted some of the lies that the world had whispered into our ears even before we were born, the Flat Branch tribe rested upon our own fundamental falsehood: that we could find a hiding place outside of history. We could not secede from the South and build Utopia in the woods, safely beyond the hard history that had brought us there. What one friend laughingly called “the church of dissipation” offered no authentic moral center to sustain us. Though the liberal vision of my father had not proven adequate to the political collisions of the late 1960s, my dropout vision in the 1970s offered nothing more workable. There was no place to run from history; history was not just the past but also the present and the future. I was lost. I was utterly lost. When the Flat Branch gang fell apart, as inevitably we did after a couple of years, I wandered to Chapel Hill, apprenticed myself to a local culinary genius, and learned the craft of a restaurant cook.

After I had drained the fryers, cleaned the grills, and mopped the concrete floors, I staggered around the college town in the best tradition of the Gator, doing my best to lose myself still more deeply. Not only had I failed to find a hiding place from history; I could not even find a place to hide from the rage that seethed inside me. I tried to rinse away that rage in gin to no avail. I lived in a rooming house full of drunks and misfits. My nights were passed among the stoned out, the lonesome, and the forlorn. I knew every tribe of junkies and every barroom rowdy in town, and took comfort where I could. My idea of a perfect night was to get off work, swill some beers at the Cave, toss back a couple of shots at Tijuana Fats, go dancing at the Cat's Cradle, and persuade a carload of waitresses to go skinny-dipping at Clearwater Lake. My favorite song was Tom Waits's “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,” in which he avows, “I don't have a drinking problem, except when I can't get a drink.”

Local organizers from the Communist Workers Party, seeing a lost young man drawn by experience and temperament to a left-leaning politics of rage, invited me to attend some meetings in the fall of 1979. Led by a group of idealistic young medical professionals, the CWP worked among the poorest of the poor, offering free medical care and leftist agitprop to impoverished white working people and their underemployed black counterparts. If they had only been more fun, I probably would have joined, but I remained a reluctant recruit.

Still, I promised to ride with a carload of CWP loyalists to a rally in a Greensboro housing project on Saturday morning, November 3, 1979. I was supposed to meet them at eight that morning, but I had poured down my last beer of the evening at about five A.M. By the time I'd finished my coffee early that afternoon, I heard on the radio that Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis had come to the rally, calmly retrieved their rifles from the trunks of their cars, and killed five of the CWP organizers I had met only a few days earlier. An undercover agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had ridden with the killers; the vigilantes had carried a police department map of the march in the car. Even though the five killings had occurred while television cameras were running, an all-white jury acquitted the murderers. Watching the videotape of the Greensboro massacre and reading news accounts of the acquittals, needless to say, did little to still my anger and ease my alienation. Meanwhile, the country lurched further and further to the right, Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a campaign that made blacks and the poor his scapegoats, and America seemed less and less interested in the visions of racial justice that had nurtured my early political consciousness. My favorite political slogan from those years was something spray-painted onto the ice plant next to my apartment by a housing-project poet: “Who need ice when you got Nancy Reagan.”

One day soon after the Greensboro killings, I drove up to Oxford to see Thad Stem. At that point, he was beset with kidney failure and seemed pretty frail, and I was about twenty. He asked about my writing, and I told him I had scribbled some notes about what had happened in Oxford. I couldn't answer any of his questions about the writing project, though, and finally he reached over, squeezed my hand with a strange and lovely tenderness, and said, “You're too close to it, now, Tim, but you'll write about it someday.”

Leaving his house on Front Street, I walked to the graveyard, retracing the steps Thad and Daddy had made in 1970 on the day of Henry Marrow's funeral, when they'd left the Black Power chants and gone home for lunch. It was almost summer, just as it had been back then, and the smells of fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle made the air thick and sweet by the cemetery. I didn't know where he was buried. But I walked along the fence and straight to a small grave-stone in the back corner, as if I were family and knew the path by heart. The stone read, HENRY D. MARROW, JAN. 8, 1947–MAY 12, 1970.
Vietnam.

As I knelt beside his grave, I did not even try to pray. But some things came clear to me. My own scrawled indictment against the world had begun, though it did not end, with the words “Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a
nigger.
” Some people's worlds are organized around a wartime trauma, a lucky break, a crucial mentor, or a lost love affair. As the years pass, they come to see the whole world through that particular lens of loss or luck. In my case, what was lost was a kind of faith that I wondered if I would ever find again. I had not seen my family killed in front of my eyes. My village had not been obliterated from the earth. My people had not been categorically barred from acknowledgment as human beings. These cruelties occurred all over the world, but what held their place in my mind was the killing of a man I had not even known. The black veterans who'd buried Henry Marrow, having only a small stone on which to explain all that was wrong, had inscribed one word for a fellow soldier who had never left North Carolina:
Vietnam. In the graveyard of my own hopes, on the stone that marked where I had buried my past and my future, I wrote his name. And I drove back to Chapel Hill one step closer to finding my way home, though I did not know it at the time.

Soon after my trip to Henry Marrow's grave, my life of disengagement ended when I almost killed myself in a moment of inspired stupidity. The night I was named head chef at a local restaurant, I came home plastered after a long procession of tequila shots and salty margaritas at Tijuana Fats. A woman at the bar had given me a couple of Seconals—powerful barbiturate tablets—to take home “for later.” Never one to procrastinate when it came to pleasure, I grabbed a bottle of white wine from the fridge, polished off the pills, and sat down happily at my typewriter, flush with chemical inspiration. Tonight, I thought, I might write the thing that illuminated it all somehow. In the morning, when I woke up facedown on the floor beside my desk, there was a pool of dried vomit beside my face. In the middle of the pool sat half an undigested pill. If I had fallen backward instead of forward, I instantly understood, I would have drowned in my own vomit and never awakened. That day, I realized that I had to take control of my life. If I did not turn to confront the demons that drove me, they would eventually catch me from behind. I began to study and to contemplate the reasons why I was lost, and that process led me to examine what had happened to the movement that had once promised to redeem the soul of America from its original sin.

Though I no longer lived in the woods, I still scribbled in my journals and read hundreds of books. I thought I had fled school for good, and I never once aspired to go to college. My girlfriend, a dark-eyed beauty and gifted poet who endured my boozy chaos for a couple of years, had studied English at Exeter, Yale, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She glanced up from her writing one day and said, “You're completely wrong about college, you know. You will love college.” Something about her inflection was persuasive. A few weeks after that, Daddy drove me to enroll at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, mostly because they would admit anyone over twenty-two as a probationary “special student”; my D average and my indecipherable transcripts did not matter. And the first thing I did as a twenty-three-year-old freshman was to drive to Oxford, North Carolina, to ask Robert Teel why he'd killed Henry Marrow.