Blood Done Sign My Name (39 page)

CHAPTER 12

“GO BACK TO THE LAST PLACE WHERE YOU KNEW WHO YOU WERE”

IF, IN MOVING through your life, you find yourself lost,” said Bernice Johnson Reagon, the guiding spirit of the SNCC Freedom Singers and now Sweet Honey in the Rock, “go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.” Soon after I took her advice, I found myself with a straight razor at my neck—held by none other than Robert Teel. The first thing I had done as a college student was to arrange an independent study with one of my history professors. In the course of that study, I went back to Oxford and interviewed as many people as I could persuade to talk to me about what had happened back in 1970—starting with Teel.

Though he had been the champion of white resistance in the summer of 1970, aided and applauded by the country club and courthouse crowd, those same people had dropped Teel like a dirty tissue after the trial ended. When they discovered that the changes the black freedom movement brought did not land a black man in every white woman's bed or have Granville County declared a Soviet republic, the white upper classes did not wish to be reminded that they had sanctioned public murder and had turned a violent tragedy into a late-model lynching. Teel had lost his big white house on Main Street with the columns and the magnolias. At sixty, he lived in a small brick bungalow beside a barbershop he'd opened on the outskirts of Granville County, in a remote crossroads community called Stovall. As the tires of the old gray-blue Falcon I'd borrowed from Julia crunched the gravel of his driveway, I wondered who else would drive this far to get their hair cut. And I wondered if I should have come that far myself.

Frankly, I was scared. At the courthouse earlier that morning, I had read Teel's arrest record. Over the years, he had been charged with virtually every violent crime I'd ever heard of, more than a dozen different charges. Getting on the fighting side of Robert Teel was not hard, and it had landed several people, including two cops, in the emergency room. Pulled over for drunken driving on two occasions, each time he had pounded the arresting officer unconscious with his fists. Reading over the long list of charges, I had learned that Robert Teel had an enduring habit of attacking anyone who crossed him, with whatever weapon lay at hand. The fine legal distinctions between “assault with a deadly weapon” and “assault with a deadly weapon
with intent to kill
” suddenly seemed very interesting, even compelling. How hard did you have to hit someone with the hammer to demonstrate “intent to kill”?

Before I went to see him, I took an ice pick, impaled a marble-sized wad of duct tape on its tip to keep it from poking through my jacket, and slipped it into the pocket of my old gray suit. As I pulled into the driveway, my hand instinctively moved down to make sure that the ice pick was still there. I hadn't come to fight with him, and I wasn't even planning to argue with him. But if the sumbitch tried to hurt me, it was going to be blood for blood—or so I told myself.

When I walked into the barbershop, Teel was sitting in his own chair, reading the newspaper as if he were waiting for a haircut. He was red-faced, short, and husky, a fireplug of a man, but hardly an imposing figure. Except for a certain hardness around his eyes, he did not look like a killer or the kind of fellow who coldcocks the same police officer twice. When I offered him my hand, he took one finger, very gingerly, as if he had never shaken hands before. My heart sank at his reluctant reception, but I lowered myself onto the red leatherette couch across from him. We had been neighbors years before, I explained, and I had been good friends with Gerald, his youngest boy. Teel plainly did not remember me or my family, which was some comfort, although I kept worrying that he was lying about that part. I lit a Marlboro to calm my nerves, but the glowing cigarette, waving visibly, only called attention to my sudden palsy. Teel saw my quaking hands at the same time I did, and I winced until I caught the unmistakable pleasure in his expression. I think he liked people to be afraid of him. “You're shaking like a leaf, boy,” he said, with evident satisfaction.

“I think I had too much coffee this morning. I'm not used to drinking coffee,” I lied. I was a restaurant cook, a college student, and a would-be writer at the time, and two pots a day was the minimum daily requirement. I explained to Teel that I was writing a history paper for school on all the stuff that had happened back in 1970—the death, the burning, the trial, and so on. That was true, as far as it went. I mean, that is how this all got started. It seemed an unlikely homework assignment to him, I could tell. At the same time, the murder had been his moment, and I could see that he wanted to talk about it. When I asked if I could tape an interview with him, he said, “Sure, I will talk to you. What do you want to know?”

I started with some questions about his early life. Teel quickly began to narrate the history of his rise to success as a businessman in Oxford in the 1960s. The killing of Henry Marrow, it became clear, was the crucial point at which his life had fallen apart, and Teel saw himself as the principal victim in the matter. “People still ask me, ‘Why'd you have to kill him?' ” Teel said, “and I say, ‘Yeah, if you'da told me he was coming I woulda been in Florida, why didn't you tell me?' ” But Robert Teel steered away from the particulars of the killing itself. “I could see my way clear to being a millionaire,” he told me, “before what happened happened.”

I saw my opportunity. “So, what happened?” I asked him.

Teel fell silent. I felt the blood rush to my face. He looked at me with a blank, strangely animal expression, his eyes darting back and forth. He thought hard, then let out a long sigh, reached over, and turned off my tape recorder. “I can't talk to you about that,” he said. “I am sorry, but I just don't remember you. I am sure you are who you say you are, but I just don't remember you. It's been a long time. No offense, I like you just fine, but for all I know you are working for the N-double-C-A-P.” N-double-C-A-P. I did not laugh. “Feller came out here some years back,” he said, “and he seemed like a nice enough feller to me, and I talked to him about it, and it turned out he was writing for some communist magazine up in New York City. I just can't talk to you.” Teel walked over to the red metal icebox and fished out a seven-ounce Coca-Cola, thrusting it toward me. “You want a drink?”

Making a note to check communist magazines for articles about Oxford, I decided to stick around and talk to him about sports, the weather, anything he wanted, until he asked me to leave. When he wanted me to leave, though, I didn't plan on sticking around one minute longer. I was still scared half to death that he was going to suddenly remember that race-traitor preacher who'd lived around the corner on Hancock Street. Thank God the Teels had not been members of our church. A customer came in for a haircut, and I watched Teel work, taking careful mental note of his mannerisms and his rhythms of speech, hoping that it would help me describe him someday. I wanted to hold on to his every word and gesture, to forget nothing. The intensity of this hunger to understand surprised me; now that I was there, I had an almost physical craving to hear what Teel had to say, and I wasn't going to leave until I had.

Teel seemed to have a similar urge to tell the story. Once in a while, as he was working, he would be unable to restrain himself and would unleash an outburst about racial politics or the Marrow murder case. “I'll tell you one goddamn thing,” he would say, then voice his festering resentment about how everyone had forgotten him or how much easier life would be if he had been a black man. Even the Klan came in for a scornful attack; the bedsheet boys, too, had abandoned him in his hour of need. “Oh, yeah, if you wanna drink a bunch of liquor and sit around talking about the niggers, they're behind you all the way. They're all behind you,” Teel snarled. “But if you wanna talk about shooting somebody or burning somebody out,” he continued despairingly, “the Klan is behind you, all right—waaaaaay behind you.”

This was when I decided to have Teel cut my hair. Another barber had shorn most of my bushy curls the week before, so I wouldn't look like a hippie, but there was still plenty left for Teel. I remembered as I was settling into the barber's chair that he had given me several of the only crew cuts I had ever had, back on Saturday mornings in the 1960s. I smiled to myself as Robert Teel chattered on about race, politics, and local gossip and once more skinned me damn near bald with his electric clippers. Finishing my buzz cut and brushing the hair off the back of my neck, he turned to another task and I pondered the past.

My amusement, nostalgia, and the buzz of the clippers were sharply interrupted by the rhythmic popping of the strop as Teel whisked the blade of a straight razor across it. His cadence slapped out a familiar barbershop sound from the old days, one that I associated with the clean aroma of lather whipped up in a cup with a wooden-handled brush and the cloying smell of hair tonic. But now it took on a perilous aspect as I pondered the prospect of Robert Teel shaving my neck with a straight razor. I wished I hadn't seen his criminal record that morning at the courthouse. If his voice hardened and his razor hand curled inward, pressing that blade across my throat, would it be first-degree murder? Manslaughter? Accidental self-defense? If somehow I managed to escape, would that make it assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury? Underneath the smock he had tied around me, my hand slipped to the ice pick in my jacket pocket. Somehow I managed to hold myself together as the razor slowly scraped my neck, then was replaced with a hot towel. Teel tenderly cleaned the leftover lather from my ears and my temples, which were pounding with unspilled blood.

Just as he brushed the hair off my shoulders and pulled the tissue paper from around my neck, an orange four-by-four pickup with headlights mounted across the top of the cab pulled up in front of the barbershop. Even before I saw him, I somehow knew that it was my old friend Gerald stepping out of the truck. He walked into the shop wearing brogan boots like the ones we used to wear as boys, jeans, a flannel shirt, and a baseball cap. We had not seen each other in years, but he did not even pause.
“Tim Tyson!”
he said, grinning at me happily and extending a warm handshake. He hadn't laid eyes on me, he said, since the old days when he and Jeff Daniels and I used to smoke Jeff 's mama's cigarettes in the woods. Seeing Gerald again was like seeing a ghost; a dozen years earlier, this young man had said something that had changed my whole life, and then we'd both moved away. Now somehow it appeared to have been no big deal.

We chatted for a few minutes about our days as juvenile delinquents. Gerald was working at a local factory. I talked about working construction, cooking in restaurants, and how my girlfriend had persuaded me to try going to college. He wanted to get together and have a beer one of these nights, and I got directions to where he was living. While we were laughing and talking, his father wordlessly picked up my tape recorder off the Formica-topped coffee table and plopped into an armchair with the device on his lap, studying the buttons. He pushed “Record” with both thumbs and said, “I'll talk to you. Is this thing on?” As I stepped toward him to make sure it was, Teel issued what he considered the summary assessment of what had happened back on May 11, 1970: “That nigger committed suicide, wanting to come in my store and four-letter-word my daughter-in-law.” That was the moment I became a historian.

During my research trips to Granville County, which continued for years after Robert Teel uttered those fateful words, I always stayed with Ben and Joy Averett on their farm, which was on the outskirts of town in more ways than one. Though I had no way of knowing it when I'd met them as a little boy, I now came to understand that Ben and Joy operated their own little bohemian arts colony of a sort. Their annual Brunswick stew, made outdoors over a fire in a huge cast-iron cauldron, brought musicians and writers and friendly folks from across the country. Thad Stem was the only person allowed to smoke in their house, and he relished their company and their cooking. Their lovely cottage in the woods was filled with books of all kinds. Ben built Joy an elevated dance floor in the woods behind the house. When they had enjoyed that for a while, he turned it into the floor of a little cottage where she could pursue her weaving, painting, writing, and pottery. Though they had both grown up in Oxford and hardly seemed foreign to its folkways, Joy and Ben provided a well-rooted example of how to live an independent and artful life without “getting above your raising,” as the old saying goes. I was not only lucky to know them while I was growing up but lucky to have a place to stay while I searched for the story of what had happened to Henry Marrow, and to me, that summer in Oxford.

Journalists have an old saying: “R.F.P.,” which means “Read the blankety-blank paper,” and that is where I began. After I had exhausted the coverage in the Raleigh
News and Observer,
which was available in the college library, I drove up to Oxford to see if I could find the
Oxford Public Ledger.
The local newspaper had been owned for decades by the Critcher family; their contributions to local political culture, as I have said earlier, included responding to the worst moment in Oxford's racial crisis with an editorial calling for more attention to “the graves of the men who fell in the War Between the States.” The Critchers printed ads for Ku Klux Klan rallies but blamed blacks for all their troubles. Even so, the
Ledger
would provide an important gauge of local opinion. But when I went to the public library to look it up, the librarian came back to the desk with a puzzled look on his face. “It's gone,” he said. “I know we had it once upon a time, but the microfilms of the
Oxford Public Ledger
from that entire period have just disappeared.”