Blood Done Sign My Name (7 page)
Between 1969 and 1977, Teel was arrested many times, charged with at least a dozen different offenses, including driving under the influence of alcohol; two separate counts of assault on a police officer; assault by pointing a gun; assault and battery; aiding and abetting murder; assault with a deadly weapon; assault on a female; and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury. Judges dismissed eight of these charges, and the other four netted Teel only suspended sentences and small fines. “It always seemed like there was some kind of loophole,” said one court official who had been present at most of the proceedings. “I don't think it was by design, I just think that was how things worked out.” A local African American businessman saw things differently: “Had Teel been a black man, he would have been in jail after his first assault. There would have been no suspended sentences.”
Not all of the clashes at Teel's place involved race. “He didn't care who it was,” observed one young black man who frequented the abandoned Tidewater Seafood Market next door. “He was a mean personâto anybody. Didn't make no difference who, black or white.” Other observers noted that Teel didn't seem to like the poor whites that used his washing machines any more than the blacks. Boo Chavis claimed to have seen Teel bodily remove a troublesome white customer from the laundry. Herman Cozart, who knew something about physical labor, generously speculated that one reason Teel was testy was because he had to work so hard. “He had to pump gas and cut hair and run all them washers and take care of everything,” he noted. “He had to work like a man, I could see that much.”
Two notorious brawls exploded between Teel and Archie Wilkins, the white police lieutenant who later became Oxford's chief of police. These fistfights, both of which Teel won handily, created bad blood between Teel and the police department. The first time, Wilkins pulled Teel over for drunken driving and quickly ended up on his back in the street, Teel standing over him with his fists cocked, asking did he want some more. Another time, Wilkins took a second officer along with him and went to the store to hassle Teel about something. “I saw the cops go over there,” Boo Chavis said later, “two of them, and he beat 'em up, both of 'em, beat both of 'em up pretty bad.” A state trooper came to the store and arrested Teel that time. “He didn't respect the cops,” Chavis recalled. “He
was
his own law, as far as he was concerned.” After he beat up Officer Wilkins, Teel said later, he “couldn't get no police protection for my businesses, no matter what.” It was certainly true that the police were not eager to come to Grab-all for any reason. Other blacks speculated that the police steered clear simply because they were afraid of Teel.
Each time there was violence, Teel called upon Billy Watkins, the powerful local attorney who served in the state legislature. “I think he had good legal representation,” one of the local courthouse gang sniffed when I asked him how Teel had managed to draw only small fines and suspended sentences for these clashes. Some local blacks believed that the police let Teel alone because many of them were his fellow Klan members.
The evidence seems strong that at some point Teel joined the Granville County klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Though the membership lists have never been public and I cannot prove he was a Klansman, the KKK held fish fries, barbecues, and square dances at which Teel was seen on any number of occasions by people who were loath to admit having attended themselves. “It was just how we rallied around in those days,” one local woman admitted, echoing a local refrain of remorse, “because of all the race trouble. I was afraid my daughter was going to bring home a black boy. My impression was that Teel was one of the leading people in the Klan. He asked me to dance one time, but I didn't do it. I never went back to that thing again, either.” While remarks like these could be dismissed as hearsay, it is true that when Teel got in trouble in 1970, the Klan held rallies for him and protected his house and his place of business with armed guards. If he was not a member, he certainly had no trouble calling upon the organization's resources when he needed them.
That was why Boo and I had seen the crowd of Klansmen all over the Teel family's front porch the evening after the murder. We knew all too well what those robes and hoods were intended to say to the world: that Gerald's daddy belonged to the evil order that our father had taught us was a force of pure hatred in this world. But Daddy had also taught us to confront hatred with love, and that some people you just had to leave in the hands of the Lord. “We just have to let God handle that one,” Daddy would say. “The Lord isn't quite finished with him yet, or you either.” I knew that the Klan wanted people to fear them, but I never saw any evidence that my daddy was afraid of anyone or anything, and I walked through the world blanketed by his protection. Daddy didn't tremble at a bunch of pointy hats and what my uncle Bobby laughingly called “those reversible choir robes.” If they were so dangerous, why did Daddy take us to one of their meetings?
I reckon we were not the first white Southerners whose daddy took them to a Klan rally, but our visit was probably different than most. One evening when I was about six, the year before we moved to Oxford, Daddy trundled my brother,
Vern, and me into “Chief Pontiac.” Vern, who was almost ten, sat in the front seat and I perched in the back, my arms hooked over the seat between him and Daddy; back then, nobody wore safety belts. We rattled down Highway 87 through the peach orchards of the Sandhills, across Little River, to the county line where Lee meets Cumberland, near Peggy's Fish House. Daddy stopped the car on a dirt road uphill from a big, grassy field. We watched the carloads of people arriving and looked down as they used cables to erect a giant wooden cross. Chief Pontiac was parked close enough so that we could hear the fiery speeches and see the fiery cross, a scene that took on the air of some kind of strange county fair. But as the flames flickered below, Daddy told us about racism and hatred and evil. Riding home together in the darkness, we sang “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world / Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” At some point, one of us asked Daddy exactly why he had taken us to see the cross burning. “I wanted you to know what hate looks like,” he said.
In those days, the hooded order was having a revival in eastern North Carolina, barnstorming the countryside night after night. “North Carolina is by far the most active state for the United Klans of America,” a congressional investigation reported in 1965, listing 112 local klaverns. Taking advantage of the fear and resentment aroused by the civil rights movement, the Klan plunged for the mainstream. At their almost nightly gatherings across the state, the KKK served barbecue and fried fish plates. They raffled off cases of motor oil, coconut cakes, and trips to Myrtle Beach. Hooded Klansmen staffed a booth at the state fair, and the head of the Johnston County klavern, Billy Flowers, was invited to speak on “Today's Problems” at a Methodist church in Smithfield, alongside the chair of the local Republican Women's Club. Five thousand attended a 1965 Klan wedding in a cornfield near Farmville. A rally near Fayetteville drew almost fifteen thousand people in November. Speakers railed against “burr-headed niggers” who aspired to “sit beside our sweet little white girls in school.” The chair of the state Republican Party, Jim Gardner, attributed the Klan's success to “a general dissatisfaction with the Johnson administration,” especially on matters of civil rights. But he warned against believing Klan claims to having members in the state legislature and against taking the huge rallies in eastern North Carolina as indications of the Klan's actual size. “I believe there are many persons sympathetic to the Klan,” Gardner said, “who do not belong to it.”
Though the Klan that supported Robert Teel made a bid for mainstream acceptance, they remained openly committed to terrorism and launched a statewide campaign of violence in 1965. Klansmen tried to assassinate attorney James Ferguson, who would later help prosecute Teel for the death of Henry Marrow. They bombed a black-owned funeral home in New Bern and a black migrant labor camp near Swansboro, and they dynamited the cars of several New Bern civil rights activists. Klansmen torched two barns owned by the white mayor of vanceboro, Royce Jordan, because he also directed a job training program that helped poor blacks. Night riders fired dozens of shotgun blasts into a house where ten college student volunteers were sleeping as part of an antipoverty program in Craven County. In Harnett County, two Klan terrorists held a white man and a black man at gunpoint and tortured them with knives for being friends too conspicuously and “frequenting Negro houses and drinking whisky together,” the Klan's attorney explained. Klan terrorists burned a black school in Mars Hill and another in Johnston County. On May 28, 1965, the Klan burned a cross on the courthouse lawn in Oxford, and also on the grounds of courthouses or city halls in Currie, Ward's Corner, Burgaw, Roxboro, Salisbury, Henderson, Statesville, Tarboro, Whiteville, Elizabethtown, Southport, and Wilmington, all on the same day.
Judge Pretlow Winborne of Raleigh won my daddy's heart on November 2, 1965, with his response to a Klan cross burning at his home. The white jurist had lashed out at the KKK and at “bigots” generally when he sentenced a seventeen-year-old Klan member to jail for a random assault on an elderly black man. A few nights later, Judge Winborne said, “I had gone to take the maid home that night, and when I returned I saw a fire on my lawn. The least they could have done was burn the damn thing while I was home and could enjoy the full effect.” But the judge's family responded quickly and effectively. Winborne and his brother-in-law invited several neighbors over, and they all roasted wieners over the dying flames of the cross in their yard. “We just had a good old time,” the undaunted Judge Winborne laughed. But he knew as well as anyone that the Klan's rampage was no laughing matter.
The Klan revival of the mid-1960s was actually the third since World War II. In the late 1940s, a cigar-chomping wholesale grocer named Thomas Hamilton had become Grand Dragon in the Carolinas and launched a reign of terror aimed at stamping out the gains that black Carolinians had made during the war and its aftermath. According to the Southern Regional Council, white terrorists bombed the homes of more than forty black families in eastern North Carolina in 1951 and 1952, and dozens of similar attacks were not reported. In one notorious incident near Tabor City, fifty Klansmen fired more than one hundred shots into the home of a black family and dragged the woman of the house outside and whipped her. More than five thousand people attended a rally halfway between Tabor City and Whiteville in 1951, hearing Hamilton bellow, “Do you want some burr-headed nigra to come up on your porch and ask for your daughter's hand in marriage?” The Grand Dragon, who claimed to be a devout Christian above all else, warned especially against white ministers like my father, whom he said advocated “mongrelization, which God never intended. If your preacher is telling you that,” the Grand Dragon ranted, “then he needs a special thermometer in hell to burn him with.”
Though the first postwar Klan faded somewhat in the early 1950s, white reaction to the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision injected the bedsheet brigade with new life. Reverend James “Catfish” Cole, a former carnival barker and Free Will Baptist tent evangelist from Marion, South Carolina, tried to bring together all the splinter Klan groups and disaffected whites in the Carolinas under his charismatic leadership. The Reverend Dr. Cole, as the rabble-rousing racist billed himself, hosted the
Free Will Hour
radio show on WFMO in Kinston, peddled spurious diplomas from “Southern Bible College,” and whipped crowds into a frenzy with his diatribes against “race mixing” and communism. Like my daddy, who'd grown up in the same mudhole, ol' Catfish had formidable oratorical gifts, and did well for himself; newspaper accounts report as many as fifteen thousand people at some of his rallies in 1956 and 1957.
Cole's rabid rhetoric was not just empty talk. On November 18, 1957, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Clay, an African American couple in East Flat Rock, North Carolina, were found shot and slashed to death in their home after a series of telephone threats from callers claiming to represent the Klan; neighbors found a cross smoldering in their yard. A few days after the Clays were murdered, Klan terrorists hurled what the local chief of police called “enough dynamite to blow the place to Kingdom Come” into the Temple Beth-El synagogue in Charlotte. The only thing that spared the lives of the forty Jewish clubwomen inside was that the lighted fuse fell out of the bomb.
When Cole's Klan attacked blacks in Monroe, North Carolina, a local NAACP president named Robert F. Williams organized black military veterans to meet Klan gunfire with gunfire of their own. After Williams began to pressure city officials to let African Americans use the tax-supported municipal swimming pool, Catfish Cole came to town with his Klan organizers. “A nigger who wants to go to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath,” Cole told a crowd of two thousand local whites. “He is looking for a funeral.” On October 7, 1957, Cole led a heavily armed Klan motorcade in an attack on the home of Dr. A. E. Perry, the vice president of the NAACP. Firing their guns into Dr. Perry's house and howling at the top of their lungs, the Klansmen ran head-on into a hail of disciplined gunfire. Williams and his friends fired from behind earthen entrenchments and sandbag fortifications, and sent the Klan fleeing for their lives. “When we started firing, they run,” one of the black men recalled. “Them Klans hauled it and never did come back to our place.”
His manly honor in tatters, Reverend Cole retreated to south-eastern North Carolina to rebuild his following. In Robeson County, which had a history of strong support for the Klan, the evangelist of hate hoped to rally his forces among a population divided almost evenly among African Americans, whites, and Lumbee Indians. On January 13, 1959, the Klan burned a cross on the lawn of an Indian woman in the town of St. Pauls as “a warning” because, Cole claimed, she was “having an affair” with a white man. The cross burnings continued, with Reverend Cole ranting at each gathering about the terrible evils of “mongrelization,” the loose morals of Lumbee women, and the manly duties of white men “to fight [America's] enemies anywhere, anytime.” Cole's favorite subject at the time was Ava Gardner, eastern North Carolina's own homegrown movie star, born in Grabtown, near Smithfield, and in the late 1950s said to be having a Hollywood affair with Sammy Davis Jr., whom Cole contemptuously referred to as “that one-eyed nigger.”
