Free Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson

though how accurately I do not know: “Didn’t nobody want to mess with him because the Klan was backing him.”
    Herman Cozart, a dark-skinned black man who hauled pulpwood for a living, often stopped by the store at Four Corners in the early days, and he developed a low opinion of Robert Teel. Cozart recalled that Teel denied him change for a dollar on two separate occasions and cussed him for asking the second time—an odd posture for a man who owned a coin-operated laundry. Cozart, though he was an affable, easygoing fellow, could have passed for an NFL lineman. A massive, thick-chested hombre who spent his days handling huge timbers, Cozart was known to carry at least one gun almost everywhere he went. He was not afraid of Teel, but he watched him carefully.
    Cozart’s account of one encounter he had with Teel in the barbershop revealed the degree of racial tension down on the corner. “One Saturday evening we were coming through there after I had got off work,” Cozart recounted, “and I figured, you know, I got to go to church tomorrow, and the boy in there was shining shoes.” Taking his dress shoes off the seat of his truck, Cozart walked into the barbershop. “I said, ‘I need a shoe shine here,’ and the head man looked at me and said, ‘We don’t shine y’all’s shoes in here.’ ” Miffed, Cozart pushed Teel a little. “Well, how about a haircut? You got a barbershop.” The black man flashed a roll of bills.
    And Teel glared at him, saying, “We don’t cut
y’all’s
hair.” Cozart was slow to anger, but he wasn’t afraid, and he made his point before leaving.
    â€œNo problem,” he said, slipping the bankroll back into his pocket. “I got plenty of money and I can take it someplace else. Cutting hair ain’t nothing noways. I cut hair myself, and I’ve cut black hair and white hair. What’s the difference? Clippers ain’t gonna catch no germs, is they?”
    Teel bristled. “He turned all red,” Cozart recalled, “and said, ‘I DON’T cut y’all’s hair!’ And I said, ‘All right, then,’ and I looked at him and I thought, ‘This booger-bear ain’t gon’ be up at
this
corner very long.’ ” Cozart strolled calmly out of the barbershop, feeling no need to prove himself in a fight with a little bantam rooster of a white man whom he regarded as a dangerous idiot. “I knowed Teel was a tough hog,” Cozart said, “and I knowed somebody was gon’ have to hurt him one day, or he was gon’ hurt somebody, one.”
    It had taken Teel more than fifteen years to open the place at Four Corners. Arriving in town on a rainy Wednesday morning in 1953, Teel remembered, he had not known “one soul in Granville County.” In a town organically suspicious of outsiders, Teel had been determined to make good as a barber. He had not had much luck before he came to Oxford. He’d enlisted in the army just after World War II, but had left the service after a fellow soldier had knocked out all his front teeth with a rifle butt. Returning to eastern North Carolina in 1946 with a medical discharge and disability benefits, Teel got married and worked hard, first in a lumberyard at Mount Olive and then in a textile mill in Carrboro. These jobs paid little and did not satisfy Teel in any case. His first marriage fell apart quickly, and in an arrangement most unusual at the time, Teel retained custody of his toddler son, Larry Teel. After a few years, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend the Durham Institute of Barbering. Upon his graduation in 1953, an elderly bachelor from Oxford named C. R. Wells offered him a job cutting hair. “I had never heard tell of Oxford before,” Teel recalled. (Everyone called him Teel, even his wife and children.) “But my instructor and the state examiner both told me it was one of