Blood Done Sign My Name Read Free Page A

hot Southern summer, it is also the story of a nation torn apart by racial, political, social, and cultural clashes so deep that they echo in our lives to this day. The cheerful and cherished lies we tell ourselves about those years—that the black freedom movement was largely a nonviolent call on America’s conscience, which America answered, to cite the most glaring fiction—do little to repair the breach. There are many things we never learned about the civil rights struggle, and many others things we have tried hard to forget. The United States could find work for a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission like the one that has tried to mend the scars of apartheid in South Africa; any psychiatrist can tell you that genuine healing requires a candid confrontation with our past. In any case, if there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.
    The truth will set us free, so the Bible says, and my own experience bears witness. This story has carved changes in my life as deep as the enduring chasm of race in this country, but far more fortuitous. My search for the meaning of the troubles in Oxford launched me toward a life of learning, across lines of color and caste, out of my little boy’s vision of my family’s well-lighted place in the world and into the shadows where histories and memories and hopes abide.

CHAPTER 2
    ORIGINAL SINS
    MY FAMILY WAS as Southern as fried okra and sweet tea. Because my father was a Methodist minister, we moved from town to town every few years. But we always stayed in eastern North Carolina, where my father’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him had planted tobacco and preached the gospel. We ate collards and cornbread, pork barbecue and banana pudding. On car trips, Mama and Daddy taught us to sing “Dixie”— though mostly we sang spirituals like “Trampin’” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” Tyson children often had double names—I had cousins called “Thomas Earl” and “George Hart” and so on. We called my sister Martha Buie “Boo,” and everybody referred to my uncle Charles as “Bubba,” even though his mama had never been in prison and he did not even drive a truck. We called my father “Daddy,” which rhymes with “ready.” When we said we were going to do something “directly,” which is pronounced “dreckly,” we meant we were going to do it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don’t ask again. If I hadn’t learned to read, I might never have found out that “damn Yankee” was two words. But I already knew how to read pretty well by the time the big green-and-yellow Mayflower moving truck carried our household belongings to Oxford late in the summer of 1966.
    We followed the moving vans in “Chief Pontiac,” Daddy’s old gray sedan with the webbed seat covers and the musty smell and the Indian’s head symbol on the center of the steering wheel, singing our car songs and pestering Daddy to tell us when we were going to be there. Coming into town, I greatly admired the old Confederate soldier that stood guard atop a high granite pedestal in the center of the main intersection; my friends and I played “Civil War” just like we did “cowboys and Indians,” and we were always the Rebels. All the Yankees were imaginary. I mean, somebody might want to be a cowboy, but there were limits. Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were bighearted and friendly, though it was not the hardest place in the world to get