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.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Too Close Not to Touch”
Chapter 3 focuses on two related subjects: Robert Teel’s life in Oxford and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in eastern North Carolina.
Tyson marvels at the fact that Teel, a violent man steeped in white supremacy, chose to open a store in Grab-all. In fact, Teel owns a store, a barber shop, a coin laundry, and several other businesses on the edge of Northwest Oxford’s Black ghetto. One local Black man, Herman Cozart, recalls several racially charged conflicts with Teel. After receiving a medical discharge from the Army following a violent incident with a fellow soldier, Teel had moved to Oxford, gotten married, and used the patronage of an “elderly, effeminate bachelor” to establish himself financially (46). When his first marriage fell apart, Teel married Colleen Oakley, a widow with three sons. Robert and Colleen Teel then had four more sons together, one of whom died in infancy. Both husband and wife developed reputations for having short tempers. Teel also had several physical altercations with local police officers. All of Teel’s businesses served Black customers except the barber shop, which was “whites only.” Tyson believes—though he cannot prove—that Teel also joined the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 1960s, Klan activity in eastern North Carolina intensified. Tyson’s father once took him and his older brother to a Klan rally so they could learn what hatred looks like. Hooded Klansmen appeared at state fairs during the day while committing acts of terror at night. Tyson identifies three demonstrable surges in Klan activity since World War II. On two different occasions in the late 1950s, armed Klansmen under the leadership of Reverend James “Catfish” Cole were routed in clashes with their equally well-armed enemies, first a group of Black veterans led by local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Robert F. Williams, and later a group of Lumbee Native Americans led by Simeon Oxendine, also a World War II veteran. The story of fleeing, humiliated Klansmen landed a smiling Oxendine on the cover of Life magazine. In Oxford, however, racial violence was no laughing matter. In fact, in April 1970—two weeks before killing Henry Marrow—Teel pistol-whipped a Black schoolteacher named Clyde Harding. The incident prompted local Blacks to boycott Teel’s businesses and shatter his windows. An edgy and well-armed Teel began spending evenings at his barber shop.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Miss Amy’s Witness”
Tyson describes his first act of racially motivated cruelty. When he was six years old, his mother hired a Black woman named Fanny Mae McIver to help clean the house and watch the children. One day, Mrs. McIver brings her young son to work with her. Tyson and his close friend from kindergarten regard the little Black boy as an intruder and a pest, so, with unthinking cruelty, they shut the door on the boy and taunt him with the n-word over and over again. “I wanted this terrible thing to stop,” Tyson recalls, “but I didn’t have the courage to risk alienating my best friend” (63). Tyson uses this incident as an introduction to the story of his father, Reverend Vernon Tyson, who taught him that the n-word is evil.
The bulk of Chapter 4 tells the parallel stories of Reverend Vernon Tyson and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Vernon Tyson attends liberal Guilford College in North Carolina and then enters professional life as a Methodist minister in the stifling political atmosphere of the early to mid-1950s. In this same atmosphere, however, Martin Luther King Jr. emerges as the ideal theologian-crusader. King promotes nonviolent resistance to segregation, including sit-ins and marches. “The effect” of King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on Reverend Tyson is “electric,” for it seeks to rouse the white moderate from complacency (69). In Sanford, North Carolina, Reverend Tyson tries to persuade his congregation of the justice and inevitability of Black freedom. He invites Dr. Samuel Proctor, president of historically Black North Carolina A&T College, to speak at his Sanford church on February 2, 1964.
Word of the invitation provokes a firestorm. Reverend Tyson’s congregants have no desire to hear a Black preacher. The white reverend receives death threats and fears losing his job. On the night before Proctor’s scheduled visit, Reverend Tyson calls an emergency meeting of church administrators. Violent segregationists have terrified many timid souls who do not believe Proctor’s visit is worth the trouble. “Miss Amy” Womble, a respected 60-year-old schoolteacher, rises to defend Reverend Tyson. She tells the story of a Black airman from North Carolina who recently stopped at the scene of a near-fatal car crash and saved a white teenager’s life. Miss Amy’s intervention turns the tide. One grown man privately sheds tears over it. Dr. Proctor appears the next day as scheduled and preaches a sermon that touches on integration only gently, even humorously. His presence alone is victory enough for that day.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 are best understood by comparing the attitudes and behavior of three different pairs of individuals. Tyson does not draw these comparisons in any direct way, nor does he make the pairings explicit. Each pairing, however, illustrates something important about Tyson’s major arguments or themes.
The first pairing is Robert Teel and the author himself. It is an unlikely pairing because Tyson devotes all of Chapter 3 to Teel and the Ku Klux Klan, while Tyson himself appears only in the first two pages of Chapter 4. The comparison, however, is both striking to the reader and consistent with one of Tyson’s broader purposes. In the final paragraph of Chapter 3, Tyson quotes Teel’s lawyer, Billy Watkins, who described his former client’s violent temper and racial attitudes as akin to “two naked electrical wires. That if they ever touched, all hell would break loose—and they were too close not to touch” (60). At this point, the reader is prepared for the harrowing story of Teel’s hate-filled rage and Marrow’s murder. Instead, Tyson opens the next chapter with the following sentence: “I don’t know when or how I first became infected with white supremacy” (61). Tyson then recalls with shame that at six years old he and his friend slammed a door on a younger Black boy who annoyed them and then taunted the boy through the closed door by repeating “n*****” over and over again. The lessons are unmistakable. While there are obvious differences between a racially motivated murder and a six-year-old boy’s thoughtlessness, Teel’s violent rage and young Tyson’s heartless taunts were two sides of the same coin of White Supremacy. Furthermore, the moment the reader prepares to mount the high horse of moral superiority by condemning Teel, Tyson shifts the focus to his own behavior.
The second pairing is between the book’s two most important Christian voices: Reverend Vernon Tyson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” electrified white liberals such as Reverend Tyson, who called it “the best thing outside Scripture that I had ever found” (69). Reverend Tyson embraced King’s appeal and never deviated from King’s nonviolent approach. In some respects, this made Reverend Tyson more of a kindred spirit to King than were the Black Power militants of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This fact supports Tyson’s major theme of A Sanitized History, for it reminds the reader of the uncomfortable truth that Black Power militants achieved through violence or the threat of violence what men such as King and Reverend Tyson did not.
The third and final pairing is the most subtle of all. In Chapter 4, Tyson introduces “Miss Amy” Womble and Dr. Samuel Proctor, neither of whom appears again in the book. While both of these figures make positive contributions to equality and harmony, each plays a role prescribed by white supremacy. “Miss Amy,” the respected white schoolteacher, stands up at a meeting and chastises timid white moderates for bowing to segregationists. Dr. Proctor, the dignified Black college president, addresses his all-white audience not with deference but with humor, taking the edge off of what could have been a tense situation. Dr. Proctor could not have addressed his audience the way “Miss Amy” did and achieve the same results.
Related Titles
By Timothy B. Tyson
