Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

The story begins on May 12, 1970. Timothy B. Tyson, age 10, is playing basketball in the driveway of his parents’ home in Oxford, North Carolina, when his young friend Gerald Teel tells him about something that happened the previous night: “Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a n*****” (1). Tyson’s mother calls him inside for dinner, where an awkward silence prevails. After dinner, Tyson and his younger sister, Boo, sneak out to the street corner for a glimpse of the Teel house, where a group of rifle-wielding men gather on the front porch, several of them wearing white robes and hoods. That night, a riot erupts in Grab-all, Oxford’s “black ghetto,” where Robert Teel’s store is located and where the Teels had murdered Henry Marrow on the previous night (4). At McCoy’s Pool Hall and the Soul Kitchen in Grab-all, a group of Black Vietnam veterans plan their next move. The next day, Tyson walks to school amid broken glass and other signs of destruction. Recalling these events more than three decades later, Tyson marvels at how they shaped the course of his life. As a professional historian, he now views them as part of a larger story in which the