Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson

Author:Timothy B. Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419934
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE CASH REGISTER AT THE POOL HALL

WHILE MY CRAZY uncle Earl believed that the Lord would take care of you if you’d let Him, the Black Power generation took the more conventional view that the Lord helps those who help themselves. Even though the new movement in Oxford had been launched from the steps of the First Baptist Church, the Black Power crowd attended services, you might say, at the Soul Kitchen, the old Ridley Drive-In on the Chavis homeplace, which Ben Chavis had reopened when he’d moved back to town in 1969. “It was a nice little spot that everyone would go to,” Carolyn Thorpe, a young black activist, recalled. “Because of course there were no activities for young black people in Oxford—it was a nightspot where everyone gathered.” The Soul Kitchen was a simple setup with booths, a bar, a meeting room, and a dance floor. Its kitchen poured forth steaming platters of fried chicken that remain legendary. The jukebox pounded out “Otis, Marvin, the Temptations, a lot of James Brown,” according to Thorpe. Another regular, Linda Ball, bragged, “Honey, we could dance!” Junior Walker’s “Shotgun” and James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Payback, Part 1” were favorite hymns.

The tone of the Black Power crowd disturbed some of the older, more traditionally minded African Americans in Oxford. A lot of the uneasiness was nothing more than the shopworn worries of an older generation. More thoughtful observers, however, fretted that the young people hadn’t experienced enough to understand the battle before them, and that their rhetoric sometimes served psychological needs rather than political goals. Some thought the militants were not rooted enough in the gospel vision that had helped black folk survive for four centuries. Even those uneasy with Black Power, though, knew something decisively important was afoot.

When Aretha Franklin demanded “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” the dance floor at the Soul Kitchen pounded out the rhythms of a new black sense of self. Like the Soul Kitchen itself, which had been a black-owned business in earlier incarnations, and had always been owned by a political family bent on black uplift, Black Power was not entirely new. Its communal and defiant ethos drew on African American traditions and echoed the spirit of the sanctified church, even if it expressed itself in an angry new voice. But nonviolent direct action held little promise for these young people. They had little appreciation for mere “civil rights” if it meant that black people could buy an Orangeade at the drugstore but were still regarded as a class of untouchables by whites and apparently could be shot down with impunity.

The assassination of Dr. King sealed the death of nonviolence, even as a tactical approach. In short, virtually nobody believed anymore, as Dr. King had, that “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” And in Oxford, the murder of Henry Marrow “made us look again at every aspect of our situation here,” Ben Chavis explained. “The fact that there were no blacks working downtown.

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