Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Tyson’s father, Reverend Vernon Tyson, is a Methodist minister and a political liberal who opposes segregation both in private and from the pulpit. Reverend Tyson’s outspoken opposition to white supremacy costs him his church in Oxford, and the family relocates to Wilmington. Though a genuine liberal, Reverend Tyson appears as neither a preening moralist nor an ineffectual committee-monger. His belief in the truth and power of the Christian scriptures makes him a kindred spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Reverend Tyson plays a prominent role in the book. Son of a Methodist minister named Jack Tyson, Vernon Tyson followed in his father’s footsteps, received an education at liberal Guilford College, married Martha Buie, started a family, and settled in Sanford, North Carolina. When Reverend Tyson invites Dr. Samuel Proctor, president of a Black college, to preach at the Sanford Church, some congregants want Reverend Tyson dismissed. The reverend even receives death threats. In the end, however, people of good will rally to his defense, and Reverend Tyson settles into a comfortable life.

In 1966, however, Reverend Tyson believes that God wants him to go to Oxford, so he moves his family and takes over as minister of the Oxford United Methodist Church. He meets Thad Stem, a like-minded liberal and a man of some literary accomplishments as well as fine tastes. Their friendship assumes greater significance after the Marrow murder. On the Thursday after the killing, Stem and Reverend Tyson attend a meeting of the Human Relations Council in hopes of finding a way to ease racial tensions. Stem and Reverend Tyson also are the only two white people who attend Marrow’s funeral. Afterward, the two white men begin marching with the mourners from the church to the cemetery, but they feel out of place when younger marchers raise their fists in the sign of Black Power, so they duck out of the march and head home. Tyson uses this moment to illustrate the awkward isolation of the white liberal.

After Oxford, the family moves to Wilmington, where Reverend Tyson again tries to be a peacemaker by meeting with the young Black militant Ben Chavis. It does not work. Reverend Tyson appears again in the book’s epilogue, where he accompanies Tyson and a group of students on a disappointing field trip to Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana. Reverend Tyson leads the group in a prayer reminding them that they are all sinners.

Tyson’s mother, Martha Buie Tyson, appears in the book as a no-nonsense liberal-minded parent and teacher. Compared to Reverend Tyson, Martha Buie Tyson plays a minor role in the events her son describes. Tyson, however, acknowledges that as a professor, he has followed his mother’s educational calling.

Martha Buie Tyson rejects white supremacy. Tyson credits her with escaping this poisonous mindset at a young age. Her temperament and outlook, however, differ from those of her husband, for she is “not a romantic liberal, looking for some kind of redemptive interpretation of a tragic past” (312). Reverend Tyson recalls that he might have quit his church in Sanford during the controversy over Dr. Samuel Proctor had it not been for Martha’s encouragement and resolve.

Reverend Tyson’s close friend in Oxford, Thad Stem is a poet and son of one of North Carolina’s most prominent Democrats, the late Major Thaddeus Stem. The younger Stem, friend of Reverend Tyson, might best be described as a political liberal and a temperamental conservative. Stem has a Churchillian appreciation for the good things in life, such as whiskey and pretty girls, but he also has little faith in human nature. Tyson notes, however, that Stem “did not permit his pessimism about human possibility to translate into an easy defense of the status quo,” and this made Stem a political liberal (100).

Stem appears most often in the narrative as a friend of Reverend Tyson who deplores segregation but also despairs of white liberals with their endless talk of communication and finding common ground. Stem accompanies Reverend Tyson to the Human Relations Council meeting on the Thursday after the Marrow murder and also to the Marrow funeral that weekend. Tyson credits Stem with making him believe that being a writer would be possible.

Henry Marrow Jr., whose friends and family called him “Dickie,” was murdered on May 11, 1970, outside Robert Teel’s store in Grab-all, Oxford’s Black ghetto. A 23-year-old Black Army veteran, husband, and father of two girls, with another on the way, Marrow had been raised by his maternal grandparents and then moved in with the Chavis family when he was a teenager. Much like Tyson himself in later years, Marrow meandered through early adulthood before getting a job at a local hospital and settling into married life.

On the evening of May 11, Marrow approached Teel’s store. Apparently—we will never know Marrow’s side of the story—Marrow made a flirtatious remark in the direction of Judy Teel, Robert Teel’s 19-year-old daughter-in-law. Judy’s 18-year-old husband, Larry, confronted Marrow and a fight ensued. Marrow fled when Robert Teel and his stepson, Roger Oakley, appeared, one with a shotgun and the other with a rifle. The Teels and Oakley chased Marrow, shot him from behind, beat him and kicked him while he was wounded, and then one of the three—most likely Larry Teel, though only the murderers know for certain—fired the fatal shot. Marrow died in an ambulance shortly thereafter.

Robert Teel, his son Larry Teel, and his stepson, Roger Oakley, murdered Henry Marrow on May 11, 1970. Oakley was never arrested or tried for the crime, but his testimony led to an acquittal for the Teels. Although Tyson’s narrative makes it clear that all three men are responsible for Marrow’s death, Robert Teel emerges as the story’s central villain, the raging embodiment of Oxford’s white-supremacist regime.

Robert Teel is a barber. He also owns a coin laundry, the store where Marrow encountered Larry and Judy Teel, and several other businesses. When Tyson returns to Oxford in the early 1980s to conduct research and ask Teel about the murder, Teel gives Tyson a haircut. Teel also rates as something of a self-made man who came from humble origins in rural North Carolina, much like Reverend Tyson. All of these facts make Teel no less of a monster, but they make him ordinary, the sort of person anyone could become by succumbing to hatred.

On the one hand, Teel is simply a man with a temper and a violent streak, as evidenced by multiple run-ins with white police officers. On the other hand, white supremacy channeled Teel’s violent hatred in a particular direction. Tyson believes, though he cannot prove, that Teel joined the Ku Klux Klan. Regardless, neither Tyson nor anyone in Oxford can answer the puzzling question of why a man like Teel opened businesses in Grab-all. In the early 1980s, when Tyson asks Teel about the murder, Teel replies: “That n***** committed suicide, wanting to come in my store and four-letter-word my daughter-in-law” (293).

One of the young Black militants who helped set Oxford ablaze after the Marrow murder, McCoy plays a supporting yet crucial role in the narrative. In fact, without McCoy, Tyson would not have been able to write this book the way he did.

McCoy represents the anger and violence that distinguished the later civil rights movement from its earlier manifestation under Martin Luther King Jr. McCoy, for instance, joins the protest march to the state capitol in Raleigh, which remains deliberately peaceful, but McCoy recalls years later that the marchers were packing weapons just in case. “It wasn’t no nonviolence in Oxford” (166), McCoy tells a classroom full of Tyson’s students in 2003. In later years, McCoy becomes a respected businessman and political figure in Granville County, but he maintains connections to the Black Vietnam veterans who carried out most of the attacks on white-owned property in Oxford in 1970. McCoy introduces these men to Tyson, who tells their story while allowing them to remain anonymous.