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

numbers of white women had birthed mulatto children by black fathers, the system of slavery based on racial caste would have been undermined and might have been rendered unworkable. Some form of unfree labor would have persisted for a time, but racialized slavery, justified in the name of white supremacy, might well have never evolved the way that it did. “Race” itself could have meant something entirely different without these rules about sex.
    It was a different thing, of course, for a white man to father “black” children. Annie Bell Cheatham remembered her grandfather, born a slave in Granville County, telling her that white men would often have sexual relations with the slave women who worked in their houses, even if the woman had a black husband. “They would keep the woman in the house,” Cheatham said, “and she would do the cooking, and the white men would go with the black women. They didn’t have no choice.” The slave husband, her grandfather explained, “better not say anything about it—they will hang him.” Some white men who had black families on the side chose to free their black children, who were often called “free-issue Negroes.” “ ‘Free-issue’ people was white men taking black women and them having children,” Rachel Blackwell, born in Oxford in 1891, remembered. “And they would call them ‘issued free.’ The white man would help support that old colored woman and them children, and they would be real light-skinned but the other children would be black. My mother told me about this,” Blackwell continued, “but she couldn’t say or do anything about it.”
    The sex and race taboo that grew from these roots in slavery remained a mighty oak in my boyhood. The challenge to segregation that arose in those years shook that tree like a hurricane, and the white supremacists clung to its trunk for dear life. “What the white man fears and what the white man is fighting to prevent at any cost,” the editor of the
Warren Record
wrote in 1955, “is the destruction of the purity of his race. He believes that integration would lead to miscegenation, and there is some basis for his fears.” Of course, “miscegenation” was not the real concern; a system that gave all the power to the men in one group and virtually no power to the women in another group made “race mixing” in one direction almost inevitable, as many African Americans in Granville County could attest. The social order permitted white men in the South, by virtue of their position atop the race and gender hierarchy, to take their liberties with black women, while white women and black men remained strictly off-limits to each other. The much traveled sexual back road between the races was clearly marked “one way.”
    When I was growing up, many whites assumed that “race mixing” in schools would lead to rampant interracial sexual activity and that the “death of the white race” would inevitably follow. White purity and white power were imperative, all things good and decent hung in the balance, and sex was the critical battleground. Mainstream white conservative James J. Kilpatrick, whose national influence would persist well into the Reagan era, declared that white Southerners had every right “to preserve the predominately racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two hundred years.” William F. Buckley’s
National Review
agreed, and justified not merely segregation but disfranchisement for blacks, arguing that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in those areas where it does not predominate numerically.” The race-sex complex, with all its hypocrisies and contradictions, underlay the entire struggle. James Baldwin’s was one of the few