Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson Page A

dinner at the new Hardee’s drive-in. Sucking on a chocolate milk-shake, I contemplated the mysterious grace of God.
    Neither Divine mercy nor threat of punishment actually made us stop smoking cigarettes, in part because this taboo was inextricably linked with our haunting prepubescent sense of ourselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God. If we couldn’t smoke the whole pack in one sitting, we’d hide them under a fallen tree, just like the dirty magazines we sometimes found there. We would repent predictably and promise God never to do it again, though we knew we would be back. But you couldn’t be taking that kind of stuff home with you, and it was hard to escape the deep uneasiness that it might somehow follow you and disrupt the warm goodness of family dinners, saying grace and singing hymns and hugging Mama good night. It was no accident that our father had made the leap from cigarettes to sex. This seemed appropriate—sin was sin, whether you smoked it or just peered at it with the fearful awe that gives way to the dry tightness in your throat and the strange stiffening in your pants.
    Sex was sinful. And sin was sexual. Both of them were inextricably bound up with race, which was something we all knew, the way we knew that Robert E. Lee was a hero and North Carolina was the basketball capital of the world. I could not help but notice that grown-ups always talked about both race and sex in exactly the same whispered tones. Hymns we sang in church promised that the blood of Jesus would wash our sins “as white as snow,” cleanse our souls of “one dark blot,” or help our “dark passions to subdue.” And I knew, without knowing how I knew, without ever being told, that the color line throbbed with sexual taboo.
    Segregation, I understood without ever having been told, existed to protect white womanhood from the abomination of contact with uncontrollable black men. Whites who questioned segregation confronted the inevitable and, for most people, conclusive cross-examination: Would you want your daughter to marry one? The answer never came, and it never had to come. Everybody knew that would be the most horrible thing imaginable, because interracial sex was inherently pornographic, unnatural, and perverted. If sex was sinful, interracial sex was the most sinful—and therefore the most sexual—that sex could get. And the worst abomination of all, of course, was sex between a black man and a white woman. It was that sin—or the faint hint of it—that got Dickie Marrow murdered.
    It took me many years and a Ph.D. in American history to find my way toward the roots of this strange folkway. The sexual obsessions of white supremacy, which were so evident to the children of Jim Crow, had their origins in the fundamental structure of the colonial economy three hundred years earlier. In 1662, the
Virginia legislature passed a statute that read, “Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother.” This reversed English common law, under which the status of a child followed that of the father.
    The new statute meant that white men who fathered children by their slave women increased their own material worth. violating their own deeply held beliefs, they sired offspring that would work in their houses and fields without fee and care for them in their old age without fail. Children born of white fathers and black mothers became black, not white, and remained slave, not free. Without that provision, growing numbers of apparently “black” people who were legally “white” would have populated the American colonies. The whole system of racial bondage rested upon the fact that free white men could father “black” slave children, while black men could never father “white” children. The children of slave mothers or fathers must always inherit that status. If large