Blood done sign my name
Timothy Tyson
Broadway Books 2004
355 pp
This is simultaneously history and autobiography: it tells how Tim Tyson, on 12 May 1970, at the age of ten, learned from a friend of the murder of Henry Marrow, black, who had been killed by Tyson's friend's father the night before; and from that beginning, the narrative moves back and forth in time to unravel the context, not only locally but nationally. The result sheds a light, simultaneously analytical and personal, on the struggle to end Jim Crow in the US
Returning later to Oxford NC to research the murder, and the race riots that followed, Tyson finds that the local newspaper accounts of those days have simply disappeared from every archive in which he knows they once were; he is told the court records from the trial -- in which the white defendants are all acquitted -- have also been lost, but he finds and manages to copy some of them, though when he turns later, those also have vanished. Some years afterwards, having written a graduate thesis on the topic, he leaves a copy in the now-integrated local library; and again later finds various pages torn from the library's copy
Tyson, now a professional historian, deconstructs comfortable mythologies about the triumph of the civil rights movement; and he also relates his own coming-of-age experience that many will recognize: the terrible disillusionment of the late Vietnam era, the inadequate individual rebellions against "the system," the retreat into self-destructive drug abuse ...
This is a book that demands and offers much: it insists on an honest view of the facts, so far as we can know them, about our own individual and cultural histories, while simultaneously expecting that such a clear-eyed view of many dreadful failures need not lead to unproductive cynicism