Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

The book’s opening chapters establish all four major themes. Tyson dismisses the idea of voluntary desegregation as A Sanitized History filled with “cheerful and cherished lies” (10). He describes White Supremacy as so thoroughly pervasive in the American South of his childhood that “most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water” (17). He introduces his father as a Methodist minister and New Deal liberal doomed to clash with his congregants over the issue of race. Finally, he recalls walking past The Confederate Monument on his way to school after the first night of riots following the Henry Marrow murder.

These opening chapters also introduce three crucial elements of the story, all of which relate to one or more of the book’s major themes.

The first crucial element is racial paternalism (See: Index of Terms). While the book’s action revolves around violent episodes or phenomena such as the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in eastern North Carolina, the Marrow murder, and the riots that ensued, the most subtle and in some ways most insidious aspect of white supremacy involved paternalism. Well-to-do white Southerners assumed their own superiority and thus took their privileged positions for granted. Day-to-day interactions between whites and Blacks occurred in the context of this assumption. Well-to-do whites, for instance, often provided less fortunate Blacks with charity or other material assistance, but the provisions always came with an expectation that each party would play its prescribed role. The Black beneficiary must show the most effusive gratitude, smile the widest smile, and acknowledge the white benefactor’s generosity with a series of “Yes, sirs” and “Thank you, ma’ams.” The white benefactor, meanwhile, derived from these demeaning performances an exaggerated sense of importance, as well as a distorted impression of the true state of things between the races.

The second crucial element is the sexual taboo that got Henry Marrow killed. Few people who lived in the South during the waning years of segregation really understood the taboo’s origins. Tyson did not understand it either until he became a professional historian. When Marrow allegedly made a flirtatious remark in the direction of a white woman, he violated a centuries-old proscription on anything that even hinted at sex between white women and Black men. Tyson traces this proscription as far back in Southern history as the 17th century, when Virginia’s colonial legislature began to codify the statuses of interracial offspring. For much of its early existence, colonial Virginia operated primarily on the labor of white indentured servants; by midcentury there were only a few hundred enslaved Black people in the colony, and surviving records show that skin color was no impediment to land ownership or even to the ownership of enslaved people. Everything changed, however, when the legislature upended English common law by determining that children would inherit the status of mothers rather than fathers. This opened the way for white masters to take sexual liberties with enslaved female while knowing that any offspring would remain legally Black and therefore enslaved. It also meant that Black men and white women had to be kept as far apart as possible, for enslavers could not risk a competing population of light-skinned Blacks who inherited freedom from white mothers. “The whole system of racial bondage,” Tyson writes, “rested upon the fact that free white men could father ‘black’ slave children, while black men could never father ‘white’ children” (37). It would be impossible to overstate the significance of these laws for Southern history. In fact, Tyson believes that “‘[r]ace’ itself could have meant something entirely different without these rules about sex” (38).

The third and final crucial element introduced in these early chapters is the role of Black Vietnam veterans in the targeted violence that erupted in Oxford after Marrow’s murder. These veterans conducted military-style operations against high-value, white-owned economic targets, all the while escaping the notice of Oxford’s white-dominated police force and municipal government. Tyson describes one veteran’s reflection on the Oxford riots: “‘We tried to tear that bitch up,’ one of them boasted” (6). The phrase “one of them” illustrates that even by 2004, when the book was published, the men who participated in the riots still did not want their identities revealed.