Blood Done Sign My Name Read Free

behind Burton Gibbs’s house saved us from an ass kicking. Panting in Jeff’s garage, terrified but safe at last, I wondered not only why I was walking with a damn fool who would pick a fight with half a dozen older boys, but also what would come of all this enmity and rage.
    Even then, I knew that there had been some kind of black uprising in the streets of Oxford the night before. It was neither the first nor the last such upheaval—the black veterans had already been planning what one of them called “a military operation” against white domination—but it was the first one I was aware of. What I could not imagine was how deeply these events and the dramas to come would reshape my life and my world. In the years ahead, I sometimes stood and stared down into the dust behind the old Teel store, along Highway 158, and thought about the blood that had soaked that soil in 1970. I pondered, too, the blood that beat in my own veins and the ways in which my family’s history was implicated in Henry Marrow’s killing—and perhaps even redeemed, since by the end of things, if anything ever really ends, his killing set our faces toward a strange new Jerusalem. It was the blood, to paraphrase the old spiritual, that signed our names.
    Before I could grasp what had happened in my hometown, I had to root through the basement of the courthouse, ransack the state archives, read a hundred years of old newspapers, and kneel beside the graves of blood kin and strangers. I had to get to know my own father and mother as real human beings, and to understand that the Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind. I had to listen to the ghost of my old friend Thad Stem, who taught me that it is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot. Above all, perhaps, I had to listen carefully to the stories of black men who had referred to one another fondly as “bloods” in
Vietnam and ponder why they had returned to Oxford ready to burn it down, if that was what it took to end the racial caste system. Like generations of black veterans before them, who had come home from France or the Philippines insisting that their sacrifices had bought them full citizenship, the
Vietnam generation demanded justice. Though they had paid the price, more would be required. “They didn’t just open the door up and say, ‘Y’all come in, integration done come,’ ” Eddie McCoy instructed me. “It didn’t happen that way in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around—you better believe it.”
    The stories of freedom-movement veterans like Eddie McCoy and twenty years of research in dusty archives and around dozens of kitchen tables taught me that the life-and-death struggle in Oxford that summer was inextricably bound up with much larger and more enduring conflicts about the meanings of race and nation and freedom. Only a week before Henry Marrow’s brains were blown out, National Guard troops fired into a crowd of antiwar protestors at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding eleven. The day after Marrow died, a mentally retarded black teenager was beaten to death in an Augusta, Georgia, jail, setting off riots in which white law enforcement officers killed six blacks and wounded dozens more. On May 16, 1970, five days after the killing in my hometown, Mississippi state troopers fired 350 rounds into a women’s dormitory at historically black Jackson State University, killing two students and wounding twelve. In
Vietnam, racial clashes in the U.S. Army made America’s misbegotten war almost impossible to pursue. The country seemed to teeter on the brink of apocalypse. “This is a dangerous situation,” the editors of Business Week declared. “It threatens the whole economic and social structure of the nation.”
    So while this is the story of a small boy in a small town one