Read Online Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson - Free Book Online

public voices that could pierce the fog of “miscegenation” rhetoric, and he offered a timeless retort to the question “Would you want your daughter to marry one?” In a television debate with Kilpatrick, he explained, “You’re not worried about me marrying
your
daughter—you’re worried about me marrying
your wife’s
daughter. I’ve been marrying
your
daughter since the days of slavery.”
    The fall of Jim Crow tested these deeply rooted taboos. In 1970, for example, when I was eleven years old, the county fair just up the road in Yanceyville began to admit black people on the same day as whites; in the old days, the fair in Oxford and other towns nearby had set aside a day or two for “Negroes,” and whites otherwise had their run of the place. The new arrangements may have seemed unthreatening; black and white Southerners, after all, lived and worked in close proximity to one another, and it was only the county fair, for goodness sake. Why couldn’t black and white shuffle through the turnstiles together, munch cotton candy, and throw up on the Tilt-A-WHIRL? What the authorities had failed to consider were the “girlie shows,” carnival burlesque performances in which pale white girls from somewhere else danced out of their skimpy clothing and bumped and grinded for a hooting tent full of men. When the ticket taker admitted a group of young African Americans to the show, things inside the tent got tense. After one of the black men yelled out his appreciation for the white dancers, a white man behind him smashed a wooden folding chair across the black man’s head. Fists flew, knives flashed, and blood flowed both ways across the color line. The fighting spread from the fairgrounds to the streets of Yanceyville, and the mayor had to call a curfew and bring in state troopers for several days to stop the violence.
    The central political fact that hung over the spring and summer of 1970 in Oxford, rooted in four hundred years of history, was that the Granville County schools were scheduled to undergo full-blown racial integration that fall. Three years earlier, Oxford had taken the first ineffectual and involuntary steps toward desegregation. Two African American children had left Orange Street School, the segregated all-black elementary school, to enroll at previously all-white C. G. Credle Elementary. The school board had carefully selected two middle-class black boys and assigned them, just like me, to Mrs. Emily Montague’s third-grade class at Credle, where they said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning like the rest of us.
    Thirty years later, when my own children were learning the Pledge of Allegiance, I suddenly remembered another set of words that schoolkids had chanted in unison at my elementary school: “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street.” It just came to me in the shower, a singsong echo in my mind, like a forgotten football cheer or an unwelcome snatch of music that would neither finish nor stop: “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street.” At first I had no idea where it came from—my first theory was that it was from “Goin’ Back to Indiana,” an old pop tune by the Jackson Five. I called my sister Boo, who reminded me that Orange Street was the black school in Oxford, the school that those black children at Credle would have attended had the Supreme Court held its tongue. And then, of course, I knew very well where I had learned the words. I have no clear recollection of any protests against integration at Credle Elementary. But standing in the shower, thirty years later and a thousand miles away, I could still hear a chorus of schoolchildren chanting, “Go back, go back, go back to Orange Street,” and I cannot help but ponder how those two brave and unfortunate black children must have felt as they made their way up the sidewalk to a school where they were not wanted.
    My first