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memory of being in school with black children was standing behind one of the two black boys at the water fountain on the playground at Credle. It was an old cast-iron fountain with a foot pedal, and a couple of seconds after you stepped hard on the pedal, bitter-smelling water gurgled up from the primordial depths of the earth, tasting like iron. I hadn’t noticed the black boy in the line, and suddenly there he was in front of me, bent over the old iron spout. Deep down, I did not want to drink after him. Without really understanding why, and even though I knew better, somewhere inside I had accepted white supremacy. The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain, at the core of the lie a crucial silence, since there was no
why.
Black was filthy, black was bad, I had somehow managed to learn. Many of my white classmates turned away from the fountain in disgust rather than drink after a black child. And even at that moment, because I had been taught to know better, I knew that my revulsion was a lie, someone else’s lie, and an evil thing. This time, I decided not to give the lie the power it demanded. I suppose I was both resistant and complicit, in the same moment. I could not turn away—I lowered my head and drank after him. But I succumbed slightly; when he moved, I took my turn and pressed the pedal down, and let the water run for a few seconds before I drank, bending over the arc of cool water but pausing for a moment to let the water rinse the spout before I touched my lips to the acrid stream. I guess that made me a “moderate.”
    It was the logic of moderation that permitted schools across the nation to evade the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling for almost twenty years, but when defiance and evasion finally became untenable, “seg academies” sprouted across the landscape. Fearful white parents flocked to the all-white Christian academies, abandoning the public schools in the hour of their deepest need so that their children would not have to attend school with black children. This set a terrible and enduring example and undid any possibility that integration might work. At the molten core in the very center of white fears of school integration was the specter of sex between black males and white females. That simmering sexual subtext overwhelmed the feeble official efforts to ease racial tensions in Oxford after the killing.
    â€œWe had tried to do everything we could to get things quieted down after the riot,” said Mayor Currin, “and finally we decided, ‘Let’s get the ministers together.’ ” Reverend Don Price, a white Baptist minister, recalled that the mayor “was trying to say, ‘Hey, we’ve had enough violence in this community, let’s talk to our congregations and try to be peacemakers.’ ” Currin contacted most of the ministers in the county, black and white, and invited them all to meet at my father’s church. “We were talking about the situation,” the mayor remembered, “and we got back to what had brought on the trouble at Teel’s place, and somebody said something about the black man saying something to a white woman, and that was all she wrote.”
    The visceral reaction among some of the white ministers was so strong, Currin recounted, that “I will never forget this as long as I live. I will never forget this. This white preacher rears up in his chair and yells, ‘
What
did you say, brother?
What
did you say?’ And then he made his little speech about race mixing.” According to the mayor, his official efforts to turn preachers into peacemakers “ended right then and there, as soon as he made that statement.” For many whites, the allegation that Henry Marrow had made a lewd remark to a white woman turned public murder into justifiable homicide, transforming a crime of passion into a late-model lynching that fateful May.

CHAPTER 3
    â€œTOO CLOSE NOT TO TOUCH”
    THE