Blood Done Sign My Name (8 page)

The climax of the Klan's Robeson County campaign was to be a heavily armed rally on January 18 near Maxton, North Carolina, at which, Cole predicted, five thousand Klansmen would remind Indians of “their place” in the racial order. “He said that, did he?” asked Simeon Oxendine, who had flown more than thirty missions against the Germans in World War II and now headed the Lumbee chapter of the veterans of Foreign Wars. “Well, we'll just wait and see.”

That Friday night, as a few dozen Klansmen gathered in a roadside field in darkness lit only by a single hanging bulb powered by a portable generator, more than five hundred Lumbee men assembled across the road with rifles and shotguns. The Lumbees fanned out across the highway to encircle the Klansmen. When Cole began to speak, a Lumbee dashed up and smashed the light with his rifle barrel; then hundreds of Indians let out a thunderous whoop and fired their weapons repeatedly into the air. Only four people were injured, none seriously, all but one apparently hit by falling bullets. The Klansmen dropped their guns and scrambled for their cars, abandoning the unlit cross, their public address system, and an array of KKK paraphernalia. Magnanimous in victory, the Lumbees even helped push Cole's Cadillac out of the ditch where his wife, Carolyn, had driven in her panic; the Grand Wizard himself had abandoned “white womanhood” and fled on foot into the swamps. Laughing, the Lumbees set fire to the cross, hanged Catfish Cole in effigy, and had a rollicking victory bash. Draped in captured Klan regalia, they celebrated into the night. The cover of
Life
magazine featured a playful photograph of a beaming Simeon Oxendine wrapped in a confiscated Ku Klux Klan banner.

Faced with escalating terrorism, black Southerners who remained politically active in those days generally armed themselves. Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader from Jackson, Mississippi, who was assassinated in 1963, seriously pondered the possibility of launching a guerrilla war in the Delta.
The Eagle Eye: The Woman's voice
, a black women's newsletter in Jackson, argued in 1955 that “the Negro must protect himself” because “no law enforcement body in ignorant Miss. will protect any Negro who is a member of the NAACP” and warned “the white hoodlums who are now parading around the premises” of the publisher that the editors were “protected by armed guard.” Daisy Bates, the black heroine of Little Rock, Arkansas, wrote to Thurgood Marshall in 1959 that she and her husband were under constant attack and “keep ‘Old Betsy' well-oiled and the guards are always on the alert.” Even Martin Luther King Jr. relied on guns and guards in the late 1950s. Reverend Glenn Smiley, who visited Dr. King's home in 1956, reported back to his employer, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, that “the place is an arsenal.” If nonviolence now seems the inevitable or even the most likely strategy for black Southerners, no one could be sure of that in the late 1950s.

The Klan's resurgence in the mid-1960s, when Robert Teel seems to have joined, gave white Southerners a voice for their fears and resentments about the gains of the civil rights movement. The Klan in North Carolina “had long lived in shadows,” historian David Cecelski writes, “but between 1964 and 1967 it rose out of its obscurity and walked in broad daylight.” The Democratic Party, which had once called itself “the party of white supremacy” and which still included people like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, seemed to have deserted
their
South. President Johnson, a white Southerner himself, had signed the Civil Rights Act and the voting Rights Act, and the entire North Carolina congressional delegation opposed the voting Rights Act. Many white people in eastern North Carolina felt that they had nowhere to go—and so they ran to the Klan. A few years later, Helms and Thurmond helped Richard Nixon push his “Southern strategy” and led white Southerners into a new, Southern-based Republican Party that railed against “forced bussing” and the intrusions of the “feddle gubment,” and the Klan faded again. But Robert Teel had no patience with just talk. Though he claimed to have harbored no resentments against blacks, he ruled his little empire in Grab-all with an iron hand, and black people who crossed him usually regretted it.

The worst incident at Four Corners came in late April 1970, only about two weeks before the killing and the conflagrations of that fateful summer. Clyde Harding, a local black schoolteacher, was washing his car at the self-service car wash that Teel had built across the street from his store and his barbershop. “Jerry Oakley, my stepson,” Teel recounted, “came out there on his lunch hour and wanted to vacuum out his car, and he came running in and said he'd had some trouble with a black guy over there.” According to witnesses, Jerry Oakley had roared up in his car and demanded that Mr. Harding move his vehicle immediately. Harding continued to wash his car, and Oakley ran across the street and into the barbershop. A few seconds later, Robert Teel emerged from his place with a pistol tucked into the front of his belt and stomped across to the car wash. Teel told me, “I pulled out the gun with one hand and slapped him upside the head with the other hand.” Medical and court records, however, indicated that Teel pointed the gun at the black schoolteacher and then pistol-whipped him, breaking several teeth and cutting his face.

The magistrate in the Harding case, J. C. Wheeler, charged Teel with assault by pointing a gun and assault and battery. Despite the fact that Teel was already serving
two
suspended sentences for crimes of violence—in both instances, beating up police officers— Billy Watkins was able to persuade the judge to acquit Teel on the first count and issue a prayer-for-judgment continuance on the second charge. The court did require Teel to pay the schoolteacher's hefty medical and dental bills. Lacking any semblance of equal justice, young blacks in Grab-all went to Clyde Harding and offered to avenge the beating; the black schoolteacher firmly discouraged them. “If Clyde had wanted us to do something,” Boo Chavis speculated, “we would have burned Teel up, ain't no probably about it. But Clyde didn't want to push the issue.”

The Clyde Harding incident and the court's apparent lack of concern about it hardened resentments toward the Teel family in Grab-all and smoothed a pathway for the destruction soon to follow. Blacks began to boycott the little shopping center, which infuriated Teel. Some black parents forbade their children to go to the store because it was a dangerous place, while other local blacks organized an informal protest boycott. Teel complained later that his business dropped by half almost immediately. “This is when my windows started getting knocked out,” he added. “They were boycotting my place. I had other people in here washing and then people come in there and help people get their clothes out the washers, get them off the yard, and cross the road hollering, ‘Don't trade with him, he's a black hater!' ” Years later, Teel resisted the description: “I've had colored people come in and brag on what a nice place I had put up for them to shop, and how much they liked me, and things like that. Eightyfive percent of my business was black.”

Teel had always kept a pistol handy, but after the Harding incident, the black boycott, and the breaking of his store windows, he and his sons moved two more guns to the barbershop: a 12-gauge pump shotgun and a .410-gauge shotgun with a .22-caliber rifle barrel attached in the over-and-under style. Teel and his boys began to spend nights in the barbershop with their guns, hoping to catch whoever had shattered the windows. There was an atmosphere of war around the place. It remains a matter of curiosity for some people in Oxford as to why Teel, a man known to dislike black people and widely rumored to be a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, would set up shop in Grab-all. His attorney, Billy Watkins, wondered the same thing. “It was bound to happen,” he said, referring to the imminent racial tragedy. “With his temper and his attitudes, it was like two naked electrical wires, that if they ever touched, all hell would break loose—and they were too close not to touch.”

CHAPTER 4

MISS AMY'S WITNESS

I DON'T KNOW WHEN or how I first became infected with white supremacy. But when I was no more than six years old, I discovered within myself both that monstrous lie and the moral cowardice necessary to its preservation. Though only a first grader, I was forced to confront what James Baldwin called “the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless.” I wished then and I wish now that this was not the truth, and that I had no part in it, but it is and I did.

At that time, we were living in Sanford, North Carolina, a little town where my father served as minister of Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church. My mother had stopped teaching when I was born, but she had taken up her chalkboards and construction paper again as soon as I started kindergarten. Mama had hired a black woman, Mrs. Fanny Mae McIver, to keep house and tend to my brother and me. “She got her right out of the cotton field,” Sarah Godfrey, our neighbor and friend, told me later. “That was Fanny Mae's first job working indoors, working in white people's houses. She was a fine woman,” Sarah continued. “All three of her boys ended up with good jobs in New York and bought her a new home here, and were always good to her. They all turned out real nice.”

Ironically, perhaps typically, my spineless act of cruelty was rooted in love. That first year in kindergarten, when I was not quite six, I befriended David Barrett, a towheaded boy with a crooked grin, a zany laugh, and a big heart. We quickly became infatuated in the way of preadolescent boys, organizing the “Rat Fink Club” together, playing Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in the woods, and taking turns sleeping over at each other's houses. I especially loved to stay at David's house on Saturdays, when his father grilled steaks and his mother made blueberry pie.

At bedtime, we developed a ritual that David dubbed “Tim's Tall Tales.” We would lie there in the dark in the twin beds, and I would tell him stories, making them up as I went. His fierce and unfeigned enthusiasm for these rambling odysseys was like a drug to me. I loved him unreservedly, and preferred his company to anything else in the world. The year I turned seven, when my family moved to Oxford, David and I pledged to meet at the Washington Monument when we turned twenty-one. That we did not keep the appointment takes nothing away from the depth of our attachment.

One day David and I were playing at my house, and Mrs. McIver brought her little boy to work with her. I can't remember his name, though I recall that he was smaller than David and me, and perfectly nice. But no one could penetrate the fog of infatuation that enveloped David and me in those days, and anyone else's presence would have constituted an intrusion. The little black boy was a pest, we concluded, and we shunned him. He followed us from room to room, imploring our acceptance, no doubt adhering to his mother's instructions to be nice to her employers' children. But we shut him out, quite literally, closing a door in his face. And when we were safely on the other side of that door, holding it closed, David began to taunt him in the singsong rebuke that children around the world still sling at one another. You can hear the tune in your own mind's ear, where it may sting even now: “nah-nah-nah-nah-naaaaaah-nah.” But the words to David's rendition must have burned in that boy's brain: “Nigger-nigger-niiiiiii-ger, nigger-nigger-niiiiii-ger.” And the blood ran hot to my face, as it must have run much hotter to the face on the other side of the door.

I wanted this terrible thing to stop, but I didn't have the courage to risk alienating my best friend. Like many people who fail to live up to their best lights, I found that my deep sense of belonging and my tenacious desire for acceptance trumped my moral judgment. I joined in the song.

I knew that we were being cruel, though I had no way to understand how cruel, and I knew that what I was doing was wrong. I wasn't punished for it, however. Surely the little boy told his mother, but she must not have felt at liberty to tell mine. Afterward, David and I simply pretended it hadn't happened, and no one ever said a word to us about it. But the episode violated everything that I had been taught—nearly everything, that is. Obviously, if someone had taught me that it was wrong to call another person
that
word, someone else had taught me that there was such a category. Still, I knew that it was my solemn duty to be kind to our guests, to see that anyone who came into our home was treated graciously and warmly. Color was not at issue in that sense. Beyond that, however, I knew that it was not only evil to
say
that word, of course, but that it was unspeakably wicked even to
think
that word, to place another human into a category separate from our own.

The very
idea
of “nigger,” quite apart from the specific racial context of our particular lives, was the heart of human evil, the avenue down which the Nazis had marched into Poland, and David and I, like some of the Poles, had somehow welcomed them. The fact that this cruelty violated my relationship with Mrs. McIver, whom I called Fanny Mae, of course, was only the top layer of the sin that we had committed. The thick bottom layer was the whole idea that another child of God could belong to a category less than human. My father had explained much of this to
Vern and me at the Ku Klux Klan meeting, and that was far from the last lesson.

Daddy had observed the escalating violence of the black freedom movement of the 1960s with growing uneasiness. Yet he knew that remaining silent about race would betray his calling. Born in 1959, I don't remember learning that race was
the
issue for my father and my five uncles who were Methodist ministers, or for any white preacher in the South. That's just the way it was. In our family, at least, if you didn't take a stand at all, you weren't much of a man or much of a preacher; the “race question” was the acid test of integrity. At the same time, it could destroy your ministry, and the point was to lead the people as far as you could without losing influence or your livelihood. You wanted to remain true to your lights and yet avoid the fate of the irrelevant crusader. If the people in the pew were ever going to imagine a new world, beyond the boundaries of white supremacy, someone they respected had to make the case.

If he hoped to stay in the conversation, a preacher who believed in racial equality could never afford to neglect to shine his shoes or forget to visit a parishioner in the hospital. “It forced me to be a better pastor than I probably would have been,” my father explained later, “because I found that people who opposed me on race would often attack me on other issues, because I hadn't been to see their grandmama. And sometimes, if I had been to see Grandmama in the nursing home even more than they had, it made it hard for them to oppose me on race, and they'd stand with me even when they didn't agree with me.”

My father's commitment to civil rights grew over the same years that the Ku Klux Klan went through its series of revivals and as black Southerners pushed the issue of racial justice to the forefront of American life. Daddy's beliefs came in part from his own family heritage, but his moral and intellectual world had expanded a good deal when he was an undergraduate at Guilford College, a Quaker school in Greensboro with a liberal social vision. From its founding in the 1830s, Guilford had been coeducational, advocating an unusual egalitarianism between the sexes. There Daddy had read the work of Southern dissidents, like Lillian Smith's
Killers of the Dream
and Stetson Kennedy's
Southern Exposure
. He'd studied with Gordon Lovejoy, who'd preached racial equality for the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the great African American educator, had come to speak at Guilford from Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, just down the road, and made quite an impression on him.

In about 1950, early in his college days, my father went home to Biscoe and attended a meeting of the Lions Club with Charles Buie, the father of the girl he intended to marry. Mr. Buie liked young
Vernon, though the prosperous Buies were uneasy at the prospect of their daughter marrying a poor preacher's son. What happened next could not have helped matters. When the meeting opened with everyone standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, my father would not say the words. “It said ‘liberty and justice for all,' and I knew that was a lie, and just not true,” Daddy told me years later. “I knew it ought to be true, but it was no more true than the tooth fairy. I couldn't say it.” The troubling thing, however, was that his wealthy and imposing prospective father-in-law, whom he greatly admired, was standing beside him. But Daddy wasn't going to say that pledge. “Mr. Buie flashed his eyes at me and he realized that I wasn't going to say it,” my father said. “It was a hard thing. I don't think he really understood why I wouldn't say it. We didn't speak of it again.”

He clashed more openly with his own father in those years when his mind was growing in all directions like ten acres of kudzu. One day, overtaken by the powerful logic of A. J. Muste, the dean of American pacifism,
Vernon called his father on the telephone to tell him that he'd decided to register as a conscientious objector. In the days after World War II, as the McCarthy era opened in all its repression and conformity, announcing one's unwillingness to fight for one's country was not especially fashionable. In the small-town South, particularly, this was not how to win friends and influence people. Jack Tyson told his son to come home and talk it over with him. “I told him I hadn't called to discuss it, I had called to tell him what I was going to do,” Daddy remembered. “He said I was making a big mistake. And when I went down to the draft board to register as a conscientious objector, my best friend's mother was working at the desk. For the rest of my life, she never spoke to me again.” That hurt, but what really hurt was to break with his father on an important issue. “I went in my room and laid down on the bed and cried,” he recalled. “I'd never parted with him on anything serious before. And the funny thing was that within a year reading Reinhold Niebuhr shot my pacifism all full of holes.” Like his father before him, Daddy became a growing person who felt the call of conscience and frequently acted on it. And the most important issue, of course, was race.

In 1952, when my father took his first appointment as the student pastor at Oak Ridge Military Institute, Zack Whitaker, one of the officials at Oak Ridge, took him aside and urged him to go easy about racial matters. “I don't know how you feel about things,
Vernon,” Whitaker said, “But I know you're a young man. And I know we haven't treated the nigrahs right. But this is not the time and Oak Ridge is not the place to talk about things like that.” My father hadn't even delivered his first sermon, but he'd grown up in a preacher's house and knew exactly what was happening.

“He was trying to put his hand over my mouth before I had even opened it,” Daddy remembered. On the second Sunday in February—“Race Relations Sunday,” the Methodist church hierarchy had designated it—Daddy preached about the inevitable crisis of race that faced the church, advocating a new openness to equality for all Americans, and led his congregation in singing “In Christ There Is No East or West.” The great hymn reads, in part, “Join hands, then, brothers of the faith / Whate'er your race may be. / Who serves my Father as a son / Is surely kin to me.” Later in the spring, he took the church youth group to hear Marian Anderson, the famous African American contralto whose historic defiance of segregation in 1939 had echoed from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the palaces of Europe. Daddy made sure that Mr. Whitaker's daughter was on the bus.

The 1950s marked a lonely vigil for Southern liberals like my father, who operated under galling strictures that made it hard to take a meaningful stand. In 1955–56, however, the patient toil of generations of black Southerners in Montgomery, Alabama, lifted up a stirring young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision gave voice to a prophetic tradition nurtured since the days of slavery. Knowing white Americans better than they knew themselves, King did nothing to stanch the rivers of ink that described him as a Southern black Gandhi, “the little brown saint” of Alabama. King blended the nonviolence of Gandhi with the political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, who had taught a generation of theologians, including my father, that good intentions were not good enough. In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.

No dreamer at all, King understood the world that confronted black Southerners as they called for their freedom. The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union offered African Americans the unique leverage to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the world. The demonstrations in the streets of the civil rights–era South were carefully staged dramas that forced the contradictions of American democracy to the surface. The street-theater morality plays that King and his organizers presented in Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, and Selma captured in almost poetic fashion both the brutal social order of Jim Crow and the obvious justice of black demands. But their audience included a mostly dark-skinned world torn apart by the Cold War, and their intention was to force the federal government to intervene on behalf of black Southerners. Once the campaign began, King made no secret of his strategy. “Mr. Kennedy is battling for the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and Africa,” he told a crowd in Birmingham, “and they aren't gonna respect the United States of America if she deprives men and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skin.”