54 pages • 1 hour read
Timothy B. TysonBlood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 11-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “We All Have Our Own Stories”
The Teels’ acquittal leads to a massive Black economic boycott in Oxford that produces tangible results, as white businesses begin to desegregate in earnest. Even the Confederate monument is relocated to a less conspicuous place. Meanwhile, exhaustion from the racial tension of recent years forces the Tysons out of Oxford altogether. The family moves to Wilmington, North Carolina, where Reverend Tyson begins preaching at a new church.
Still only 11 years old, Tyson becomes increasingly aware of racial tensions in his new city. School integration leads to periodic clashes between students along racial lines. Like much of the country, Wilmington teeters “on the edge of racial cataclysm” (258). Ironically, Ben Chavis also moves to Wilmington, where he becomes an ordained minister, opens a Black Power church, and drifts toward Maoist militancy. In hopes of bridging the divide, Reverend Tyson visits Chavis at the new Church of the Black Madonna. Chavis is “polite, even warm,” and yet “it would have been a shocking departure if he had not rejected my father’s liberal logic” (268). Tyson uses this incident and other parts of Chapter 11 to reflect on the limits of white liberalism, particularly when it is steeped in racial paternalism. In later years, Chavis emerges as a figure of national prominence. At church, Reverend Tyson learns that the city’s Black parents have long historical memories. One Black woman cites the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot as the event that started all the current trouble. Tyson describes the events of 1898 and their lingering impact on Wilmington.
As he enters his teenage years, Tyson grows disillusioned, skips school, and eventually becomes a hippie. At 16, he runs away to live with friends in a makeshift commune in rural northeastern North Carolina. After tracking down their son and ensuring that he is OK, Tyson’s parents decide that living on his own might be a good wake-up call for the boy. In hindsight, Tyson acknowledges both the silliness and seriousness of it all: “With our vast teenage overview of world history, we children of the middle class saw that American society was insane and, in fact, doomed, and we became profoundly ‘alienated,’ as people used to say” (280). Yet, “the confused legacy of the 1960s and 1970s”—a legacy that lies at the heart of Tyson’s book—was very real (280).
Unable to live commune-style for more than a few years, Tyson makes his way to Chapel Hill and becomes a restaurant cook. Depressed by the country’s rightward drift as the 1980s approach, Tyson returns to Oxford to see his father’s ailing friend, Thad Stem. On that same trip, Tyson visits Henry Marrow’s grave. Not long after he returns to Chapel Hill, a drug-and-alcohol-induced brush with death convinces Tyson that he needs to change his life. His girlfriend convinces him to try college. Thanks to his D average in high school, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro accepts Tyson as a probationary student. The “first thing” Tyson does “as a twenty-three-year-old freshman” is “drive to Oxford, North Carolina, to ask Robert Teel why he’d killed Henry Marrow” (287).
Chapter 12 Summary: “‘Go Back to the Last Place Where You Knew Who You Were’”
After arranging an independent study with a history professor, Tyson returns to Oxford to question Robert Teel about the events of 1970. Tyson enters Teel’s barbershop. After greeting the young man whom he regards as simply another customer, Teel notices that Tyson is nervous. Tyson informs Teel of his childhood friendship with Teel’s son Gerald, which Teel does not seem to remember. When Tyson explains, however, that he is writing a history paper for school and would like to talk to Teel about the events of 1970, Teel surprisingly agrees to a taped interview. Teel explains that his life fell apart after the Marrow killing, but he is paranoid and thus reluctant to share details about the killing itself. Tyson changes the subject to sports and waits while Teel cuts another customer’s hair, but he feels an intense desire to understand Teel, and he senses that Teel, for all his paranoia, really wants to talk. Eager to stay as long as possible to hear Teel’s story, Tyson decides to get a haircut. Gerald Teel walks in the door, and for a few minutes the childhood friends exchange warm reminiscences. Finally, Robert Teel turns on the tape recorder and begins talking: “That n***** committed suicide, wanting to come in my store and four-letter-word my daughter-in-law” (293). “That,” Tyson recalls, is “the moment I became a historian” (293).
Beyond Teel, however, Tyson discovers a conspiracy of silence. Microfilms of the local newspaper have mysteriously vanished from the public library. Courthouse clerks claim that trial records are gone. Billy Watkins, the Teels’ defense attorney and now a state representative, treats Tyson to a courteous-yet-paternalistic monologue about how race relations were always good in Granville County. At the police department, two part-time detectives who had been on the force in 1970 escort Tyson to the basement and insist that he cannot write about what happened. Tyson drives away undeterred, but the intimidation persists. A large blue police van tails Tyson all the way to the edge of town, riding his bumper and following him at every turn.
A few years later, Tyson enrolls in the Duke University history department’s PhD program. He befriends Herman Bennett, “a big, dark-skinned fellow, charming and warm, if somewhat stormy and brooding at times, too” (301). Tyson learns the cause of the storminess and the brooding. One night, Tyson, Bennett, and a fair-skinned graduate student who had recently arrived from Canada named Rhonda Lee go out to a roadhouse called Allen’s Country Nightlife. They enter and purchase drinks. The club owner, Allen Willetts, informs them that the club does not allow Blacks. This is 1992. An enraged Tyson insists that this is illegal, but the club owner replies that it is a private club, so he can do as he pleases. Rhonda has only been in the country for a few days and is wearing heels, so Tyson and Bennett feel they have no choice but to leave without causing an incident. On the ride home, Bennett reveals that in the early 1960s terrorists had firebombed his family’s home in Milwaukee, presumably because they had crossed racial lines and moved into the wrong neighborhood. Bennett’s baby sister died in the fire.
Tyson uses this story to explain why he needed to write the book. He concludes the chapter by acknowledging the invaluable assistance he received from Eddie McCoy, a prominent Black political figure in Granville County. McCoy holds public office and serves as chair of the local NAACP, but he is also an Army veteran who maintains connections to other Black veterans in the county. McCoy introduces Tyson to the (still unnamed) Black veterans who carried out much of the destruction in Oxford after the Marrow murder. “You can’t get this history out of a book,” McCoy says (308).
Epilogue Summary: “Blood Done Sign My Name”
In 2001, Tyson takes a group of Wisconsin college students on a bus trip through the South to learn first-hand about the history of slavery and segregation. Reverend Tyson accompanies them. At Destrehan Plantation near New Orleans, site of an uprising of enslaved individuals in 1811 that was brutally quelled by the US Army, the students are shocked and grieved to discover that private investors have restored the plantation house as a shrine to the Old South. After the sanitized tour, Tyson’s students curse and weep. On the bus, Reverend Tyson leads them in a prayer “for all those who lived and loved and labored in this place” (314). Reverend Tyson, however, chooses not to rest “on the high horse of moral superiority,” for he confesses to God that “we, too, like the men who once owned Destrehan Plantation, have been tempted to love things and use people, when you have called us to love people and use things” (315). Reverend Tyson’s prayer comforts the students while simultaneously imparting a feeling of humility they did not expect. Tyson concludes with an appeal for humility but also an honest confrontation with the past.
Chapter 11-Epilogue Analysis
In the book’s concluding chapters, Tyson explains how the Marrow murder altered the trajectory of his own life. At this point, the story becomes autobiographical but does not lose focus on its major themes.
Tyson’s personal ordeal begins shortly after the family moves from Oxford to Wilmington. School integration brings trouble. Racist paramilitary groups threaten to plunge the city into race war. As a teenager, Tyson grows disillusioned with the world. Like his father and Thad Stem, he develops a liberal worldview. Unlike his father and Thad Stem, he lacks the perspective necessary to preserve his liberal ideas while still engaging with the world. He treats his commune experience as almost comically stereotypical: In this episode the young hippie who cares more about showing the world how much he detests it than he does about improving it in any way. Tyson then meanders through early adulthood before finally getting his life together. None of this would distinguish Tyson from many angst-filled young people were it not for the fact that he traces all of this youthful disillusionment and meandering to the murder of Henry Marrow. Tyson’s ordeal assumes its own unique character, but in substance it mirrors that of his liberal father, Reverend Tyson, who never does find a way to bridge the gap between himself and Black militants such as Ben Chavis.
These concluding chapters also demonstrate the malignant effects of sanitized histories. In Wilmington, few white people seem to know about the white supremacists’ violent political coup in 1898 (thanks in part, no doubt, to the Confederate monuments), but Reverend Tyson learns that the city’s Black residents have kept that memory alive. Likewise, when Tyson returns to Oxford to interview Robert Teel and others, he encounters a conspiracy of official silence. Newspaper microfilms from 1970 have vanished, as have court records. The police try to intimidate him into dropping the story. By the early 1980s, Oxford’s white residents and former officials have reason to feel ashamed of their former behavior, so they have tried to create A Sanitized History with their memories by eradicating history altogether. When Tyson and his father take a group of students to Louisiana’s Destrehan Plantation in 2001, they discover “[y]oung women in swirling skirts and sun bonnets,” as well as a tour that features “virtually no mention of slaves or slavery, let alone the 1811 revolt” (314). The dark history of forced labor, rebellion, and murder has been sanitized.
Throughout the book, Tyson reminds the reader in subtle ways that the distance between good and evil is never as far as we like to believe. In an earlier chapter, he notes that his father and Robert Teel grew up in the same part of rural North Carolina and lived under similar material conditions. The darkness that consumed Teel lives in everyone. Thus, when the students express anguish at Destrehan Plantation, Reverend Tyson leads them in a prayer of self-reflection:
And we ask your help, Lord, that we not become prejudiced against those who are prejudiced, or whose prejudices may not be our own. For we acknowledge and confess to you that we, too, like the men who once owned Destrehan Plantation, have been tempted to love things and use people, when you have called us to love people and use things (315).
Related Titles
By Timothy B. Tyson
