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

FORCE THAT drove the bullet through Henry Marrow’s brain, if you were searching for something more explosive than gunpowder and more specific than that Cain slew Abel, was white people’s deep, irrational fear of sex between black men and white women, any single instance of which was supposed to abolish the republic, desecrate the Bible, and ring in the Planet of the Apes. But we should also consider the strange and nearly inexplicable fact that a man like Robert Teel had decided to open a store in Grab-all, a black neighborhood nestled on the northwest edge of town.
    My boyhood image of Teel is of how he walked into his house: eyes locked ahead, his gait more like that of a man the power company had sent to disconnect the electricity than a man coming home for dinner, his shoulders braced as if he were going to walk through the side of the house instead of the door. In four years of playing with his son nearly every day, I never heard his voice. And now I realize that the white supremacy that clouded all of our minds back then must have raged like a tornado in his. Looking back, I cannot imagine what he might have thought it would be like to run a store on the busiest corner of a black shantytown.
    There were some tidy middle-class homes in Grab-all—the neighborhood was mixed. Both segregation and strong community ties kept the black middle class rooted there. “We were all like family in Grab-all,” Nelda Webb recalled. But some parts, like the area behind Teel’s store, called Around the Bend, were hard scrabble and hand-to-mouth. “Those were some of the poorest people in the world,” a local black man explained. And everybody knew “Lynching Hill” near the Browntown section of Grab-all, a hill whose bloody history haunted the area.
    Some of the roads were unpaved, and car wheels churned clouds of dust in the summer and muddy ruts in the winter. Streetlights and sidewalks were few. Some of the houses in Grab-all were ramshackle wooden frame structures with swaybacked porches, most of them dilapidated and many of them painted the same rusty shade of red. “Those rental houses all belonged to one person, Mr. Bennie Watkins,” Mayor Currin explained to me, “and he got hold of a lot of red paint one year, I reckon, and just painted them all red.” It was a rough territory in spots. “It was hard even for a black to walk in Grab-all that didn’t live there,” William A. “Boo” Chavis told me years later, “much less white folks. The cops didn’t want to go out there no way.”
    When Robert Teel opened his store at Four Corners, the main intersection in the neighborhood, it is fair to say that Grab-all did not welcome him. “When he first come out there,” said Chavis, “didn’t nobody like the idea.” When I asked Teel about it years later, he freely admitted that “sometimes there was a little violence, sometimes there was some ugly words said,” but he maintained that accounts of the clashes were always exaggerated. “Sure, I had some trouble with a few blacks come up,” he conceded, “but when you’re running four or five businesses, you’re gonna have a percentage. If you have one place of business, and you have trouble with one person a year,” Teel argued, “then if you have five businesses, and you have trouble with one person per business per year, then that’s five per year. And it looks like you’re getting a black eye, when you’re not having trouble but with one person per business per year.”
    If anyone was getting a black eye at the Teel place, it certainly was not Teel. The establishment became known as a place where conflict was common and where Teel settled disputes in a brisk and direct fashion. “I have never been used to taking foolishness from people,” Teel told me a dozen years later. A local black political leader put it differently,