Blood Done Sign My Name Read Free Page B

murdered for having bad manners. Even our main crop would kill you.
    Every fall, the sharp, sweet smell of bright leaf tobacco wafted through the wide streets of Oxford as the farmers brought their crops to market. Trucks piled high with great burlap bundles rumbled in and out of the massive warehouses in the middle of town. This tobacco market town was the county seat of Granville County, which lay sleeping in the sun just south of the
Virginia border. Oxford was home to about eight thousand people, roughly half of them descended from the slaves who had been brought there two hundred years earlier to cultivate the precious leaf. Tobacco farming was a job of many hands, which was why Granville had had the highest slave population of any county in North Carolina. Throughout the antebellum period, and often afterward, it was said, Granville County produced more tobacco than any other county in the nation. Inside those capacious wooden warehouses, the auctioneers still chanted their singsong staccato of profit and loss.
    Millions of dollars changed hands on the spit-stained pine floors of the warehouses. And when the harvest was over and the auctioneers fell silent, black and white alike—but rarely together—celebrated with eastern North Carolina barbecue, marinated in red pepper vinegar and smoked with hickory wood in greasy pits beside the empty barns. Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.
    A hundred years after the fall of slavery, C. G. Credle Elementary School still didn’t open until mid-September, after the farm children were finished “priming” and “putting in” tobacco—picking the leaves and hanging them in wood-fired barns to cure. Bright golden leaves blew off the trucks and littered the streets every autumn. My friends and I would pick them up and tie them in bunches and hang them from the ceiling of our lean-to forts in the woods. When we played baseball, we chewed the dark, acrid stems and pretended not to get queasy. We forever tried to devise ways to smoke the fragrant leaves, without much success. Mostly we puffed store-bought cigarettes, not being adept enough to roll our own or to manage the corncob pipes that sounded so good when Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer talked about them, though we tried. When Gerald and Jeff and I rode with Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, we were Rebel soldiers smoking around the campfire.
    Smoking cigarettes, much like the racial slavery that had originally made tobacco profitable, was regarded as sinful by a substantial minority of folks, even though the entire economy rested upon it. Sin or no sin, anybody tall enough to see over the counter at Monk’s Grocery could buy a pack for thirty-five cents. Me and my brother,
Vern, bought them regularly, though we lived in terror of getting caught. “I need a pack of Tareyton’s for my mama,” I would say to the man at the register, as if my mother would be caught dead sending a child out for cigarettes. The lie was superfluous. Monk probably would have sold me the smokes if I had said they were for the little baby Jesus. I would stuff the pack into the pockets of my cutoffs and light out for the woods, where neither my mama nor the lie seemed likely to catch up with me.
    Since Mama and Daddy had not grown up in Oxford but had only just brought us to town, many people seemed to regard us as “not
from
here.” That was part of being a Methodist preacher’s family in those days, because it was an itinerant system, but Granville County was a harder place to belong than the others we had known. “Oxford,” my mother remembered, “was sort of a little blue-blood town and it was hard to really get
in
it.” People whose families had been in the county for anything less than several generations remained forever outsiders. The chamber of commerce erected a sign at the city limits that