Blood Done Sign My Name (41 page)

When we got to drinking, sometimes we'd sing “When a Man Loves a Woman,” made famous by Percy Sledge. So when I heard that the great soul singer was playing at a bar not too distant, of course I called Herman. He said, “I'm there. Pick me up on your way through town.”

As I pulled up at his house, Herman walked out with Rhonda Lee, who had just arrived from Canada to start graduate school. Rhonda was a striking woman, over six feet tall with lovely fair skin, long brown hair, and legs that seemed to begin somewhere above my head. As usual in those days, she was not dressed to deflect male attention. We were quite a sight: Rhonda looking like the beauty queen from Planet Amazon, me resembling a tree stump in bib overalls, Herman tall and handsome with his dreadlocks and broad shoulders. Herman and I regaled our new Canadian friend with Southern stories, one or two of which may have had some basis in fact, as we rolled up the highway to Allen's Country Nightlife, a roadhouse on the highway just north of Greensboro, some seventy miles due west of Oxford.

At the door of the club, I asked the cashier if we could pay for our tickets with my credit card. As a blood relative of the Gator, I was concerned, naturally, that we'd have plenty of cash for whiskey and beer. When a Southern feller says “whiskey,” of course, he means bourbon, but a Canadian generally means Scotch. And Herman usually drank beer in those days. So we were waiting for our tickets and chuckling about the fact that a round of drinks for the three of us was the name of a famous blues song: “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer.” But our laughter was interrupted when a short, red-faced man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth walked briskly from inside the bar and stood in the doorway. “We don't allow blacks in the club,” he said. His name, I learned later, was Allen Willetts.

The words would not fit into my brain. “What?”

Willetts said it again. “We don't allow blacks in the club. You and your lady friend can come in if you want to, but we don't allow blacks in the club.”

Herman was standing right behind me, but the club owner would not look at him. Instead, Willetts kept his eyes fixed squarely on me. “We don't allow blacks in the club,” he repeated. I could see several large white men moving around in the shadows behind him, watching what was happening. The blood rushed to my face and I could feel my fists clinching at my sides. “Have you met Mr. Sledge?” I asked him.

“We make an exception for the entertainers,” the man said. “But we don't allow black customers in the club.”

“That is illegal,” I told Willetts. “That is a violation of federal law.” Apparently our distinguished colleague had not yet heard about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“This is a private club,” Willetts snarled, taking a last deep drag on his cigarette butt and throwing it past me. “You join at the door. And since it is a private club, we have the right to determine the membership.”

“You can't do that,” I replied. “That is definitely illegal. And it ain't right, either.” All the anger that had accumulated in my heart since I was a little boy in Oxford pulsed through my body all at once. The blood pounded in my temples, my chest swelled with rage, and all I could think about was knocking a hole in this man's head. I wanted to kill him for talking that way in front of Herman. I realized, too, that Herman was one of the few people I knew who might have a worse temper than I did. I had a bad feeling that this seedy nightclub owner was about to get double-Gatored. I did not want that to happen, but I damn sure did not see how we were going to stop it. This could be bad. I was too angry to back off, and I knew that behind my rage was the absolute determination not to fail Herman somehow.

“We
can
remove you,” the club owner said, glaring at me. “We have the right to remove you from the premises if you refuse to leave.” I glared right back.

I turned around to check with Herman, and sure enough his face looked like a stone wall, but somewhere in his eyes I saw murder. “I want to kill these motherfuckers,” I muttered. “What are we going to do?”

“What about Rhonda?” he asked. We both noticed that she was wearing heels, not exactly running shoes, and we both thought about the fact that she had been in the United States for only a few days, and probably had no idea where we were. If we got into a brawl here, she was going to have quite a bad night, at the very least. As Herman and I looked into each other's eyes in hopeless ferocity, he lifted his chin, signaling behind me. When I turned to look, I saw three or four big white guys coming around from behind the bar, and the first one had a baseball bat. This was not the World Series, and nobody had a glove or a ball. And sure enough, Rhonda couldn't run in those shoes worth a damn.

I pulled the rusty old Toyota out of the parking lot and gunned it down the highway, sputtering profanity and pondering revenge. As I veered off the road at the first rest stop, Herman and I had both already decided, independently of each other, to burn the place down. Anything that happened to that sorry bastard at the nightclub now, he had bought and paid for, I figured. We could buy a couple of gallons of milk, pour it out, and fill the jugs with gasoline. Then again, four out of the five arsonists I had interviewed in recent years had recommended empty quarts of Miller High Life. Herman was the first to point out that the club was full of people who had nothing to do with what had happened. Some of them could be hurt if we firebombed the place. “After hours,” I said. “We could wait until late, after everybody's gone.”

“What if the owner's brother-in-law passed out drunk and they left him to sleep it off in the office?” Herman said. “We could end up killing somebody we don't even know.” We were not going to burn the joint. I realize now that Herman might have saved me from going to the penitentiary or the graveyard; thank God he didn't say we had to go back and kill the sumbitch, or somebody—probably me— would have ended up dead. But I had to do
something.
I walked over to the pay phone and dialed quickly. “Who did you call?” Herman asked when I got back.

“The police,” I said.

“Did you tell them they kicked us out?” Herman asked.

“No, I told them that some crazy man had planted a bomb under Allen's Country Nightlife and that it would go off in twenty minutes.” We jumped back in the car and got out of there in a hurry, just in case they were tracing the call and dispatching a squad car to the phone booth.

I was reeling with rage and adrenaline, and Herman was angry and hurt. Rhonda was furious, too, and we all spewed venom steadily for several miles. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's not your fault,” he replied.

“I know, but I am just sorry you had to go through that.”

“Hey, I'm sorry any of us had to go through it,” said Herman.

And then we went back at it again, cursing the club owner's extended family tree and pondering elaborate modes of revenge. But soon it became clear that what all three of us needed was love and comfort from one another. I pulled over at a little rural convenience store, not unlike the one where Henry Marrow had died. We bought a six-pack of tall ones, and Herman and I stopped by the men's room. There were two urinals side by side on the plywood wall, and carved right between them were the letters KKK and a racist joke that does not bear repeating. When we got back to the car, we passed around one of the beers as if it were communion wine, downed it in seconds, and had a little group hug in the parking lot. Herman and I didn't tell Rhonda about the men's room.

At that point, Herman and I had been talking about race, violence, politics, sexuality, and all sorts of personal things nearly nonstop for almost a year. Our friendship was intimate and easygoing, and I thought we knew each other very well. We were capable of analyzing and then laughing about matters that most people would not even dare to bring up, especially in an interracial context. In those days, we were blood on blood, mafia, and there was nothing I would not have told Herman. I already knew that Herman's father had been a sergeant in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, when he'd met Herman's mother. And I was aware that his mother was white. Herman had sketched their family history for me. When the young family had moved back to the United States in the early 1960s, it had not been safe for his parents to even visit Wadesboro as a mixed-race couple. When they had gone to see Herman's father's family, his mother had had to crouch in the back seat of the car, covered with a blanket. They had decided to move to a city “up North,” where presumably things would be different. Milwaukee, however, had not treated them any better, so they had moved back to Germany. But nothing could have prepared me for what Herman said next: “They killed my sister.”

“What?” I stammered.

“They killed my sister.” His voice quavered, and when I glanced over at him from behind the wheel of the car, tears were streaming down Herman's face. “In Milwaukee,” he sobbed. “That's why we left the country. I had a little sister.”

Herman was six years old and his sister was only an infant. But the racial struggle in the North in the early 1960s was nearly as bitter as the struggles across the South—and the central issue was housing. Soon after they moved into what someone obviously considered the wrong neighborhood in Milwaukee, people who objected to their family's racial makeup threw a firebomb into the window of their home, where the Bennett children were sleeping. His baby sister perished in the flames, but Herman escaped.

No one was ever charged in the crime, and the trauma and loss resonated at depths of agony that lingered in bitter memories and in deep family silences that cannot be explored here. Suffice it to say that this act of murderous terrorism was why Herman did not grow up in America. Exiled from the country whose uniform he continued to wear, Herman's brokenhearted father moved the family back to Germany. The land that had produced Hitler seemed safer for a mixed-race American family than the nation that had lifted up Martin Luther King Jr. Herman grew up there on the army base, an American but not an American, haunted by the unspoken memory of this ghastly racial nightmare. And until we'd had this bizarre 1990s Jim Crow experience, Herman had never said one word to me about the murder that had driven his family from their homeland.

I don't quite remember what we said after Herman dropped his bombshell of memory and grief. But I drove us straight to my house, pulled down a bottle of bourbon, fried a chicken, made sweet-potato biscuits and sweet iced tea. We huddled around the kitchen table and listened to blues, gospel, and old soul music. After a while, we even played Percy Sledge's “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and sang it with improvised new lyrics: “When a Man Loves a Negro,” “When the Klan Loves a Nightclub,” stuff like that. At some point, when the camaraderie and the whiskey began to take full effect, Herman looked at me and said, “You ain't nothing but a damn redneck. You know that, don't you?”

“Don't make me cut you,” I replied. And we hugged each other tight and cried a little bit. What occurred to me then and still strikes me now is how much of the painful past we have yet to confront, even when we love one another and think that we know one another. So much of what agonizes and divides us remains unacknowledged. Even more of it simply fades into oblivion.

There it should stay, many people seem to think—why dredge this stuff up? Why linger on the past, which we cannot change? We must move toward a brighter future and leave all that horror behind. It's true that we must make a new world. But we can't make it out of whole cloth. We have to weave the future from the fabric of the past, from the patterns of aspiration and belonging—and broken dreams and anguished rejections—that have made us. What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip—even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged. We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.

And that was why I had to go back to Oxford and write this history. When I came back to do more interviews in order to complete my master's thesis, the ice pick in my pocket had been replaced by what Colonel Stone Johnson in Birmingham had taught me to call a “nonviolent .38 police special.” But nobody bothered me, and people seemed a little more willing to talk, too. Maybe the passing years had seen the old guard disappear. Watkins, for example, had been the victim of a legislative political coup that toppled the Ramsey machine and took away most of his power. In any case, I never felt threatened again, except by the remarkable and sometimes uncomfortable history that Eddie McCoy taught me.

I thumbed to James Edward McCoy's name in the telephone book because he was the head of the Granville County chapter of the organization Robert Teel knew as the “N-double-C-A-P.” Like Billy Watkins, he readily agreed over the telephone to talk to me. But I had no idea who I had actually called. I knew that McCoy was a prominent local black businessman. He had been the first African American elected to office in Granville County in the mid-1970s. In 1988, I knew, McCoy had been the county campaign manager for Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Jackson had taken the county, winning almost the entire black vote and a surprising number of white ballots. I had originally gotten McCoy's name from the state NAACP office, whose secretary had said he was president of the Oxford chapter. But the man I called on the telephone was a much more impressive and complicated figure than the average local NAACP official.

At first, Eddie was exactly what I would have expected, a well-dressed and friendly African American businessman, a little more easygoing and funny than the average fellow, but with a very serious side that would appear suddenly. We had some laughs and he shared some local political history, and I told him something about our family's story. He remembered my father only vaguely. “I wasn't much interested in white liberals in those days,” he laughed. “Especially a damn preacher.”