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

the best jobs in the state, and that Mr. Wells would do right by me.” Teel and his little boy moved to Oxford on March 11, 1953.
    Wells, an elderly, effeminate bachelor, apparently fell in love with Teel and did everything he could to help the young man establish himself in Oxford. “Teel had a power over Mr. Wells,” recalled the gracious older woman in whose home Wells boarded. “It was like he wanted so badly for Teel to love him.”
    The relationship paid off handsomely for the ambitious new-comer. Teel performed his duties well, attracted considerable business and eventually, with a coworker, bought the older man’s business. “We sort of more or less pressured him,” Teel said. The pair informed Mr. Wells that they were planning to open a barbershop down the street. “He said, ‘I won’t be no good without you at my age, and I’d rather sell to you than have you competitive against me.’ That’s how we done it.” Whatever Teel lacked in polish of education, he made up for in crude charm and raw cunning. He built up a reputation as a talented barber and began to cut the hair of Granville County’s economic and political elite at his shop downtown. “He cut my hair many times,” Mayor Hugh Currin recalled. “Good barber, and a right good fellow, too, though I would not advise you to cross him.”
    Others saw Teel as “a man very much out for his own personal gain,” which rubbed some of the more traditional Southerners the wrong way. If grasping ambition ran against the grain of Granville County’s rickety agricultural elite, however, it was perfectly acceptable to the rising class of merchants and lawyers who had begun to lure industry into the county. The 1960s were boom years for Oxford. Despite some resistance from old planter families, who feared wages going up and Yankees coming down, Granville Developers Inc. recruited roughly 4,000 new manufacturing jobs to the county during the decade. Not quite all of the new jobs were reserved for whites. Teel fit into the new spirit well, his conversation ambling in the old tobacco-farming style but his aspirations honed to “New South” boosterism. “I’ve always had the ambition to want a nice home,” said Teel, “a ten-thousand-dollar brick home, a nice, big Cadillac, at least one boy, things like that.”
    Having gotten a good start financially, Teel met and married Colleen Oakley, a high-strung widow from the nearby township of Berea. Oakley’s first husband had died in an industrial accident, leaving her with three children—Elbert, Jerry, and Roger Oakley. The first children Colleen and Teel had together were twins born prematurely; one of them, Alton, died almost immediately. The other twin, Alvin, Teel explained, “always had some hearing problems, and eye problems, and an allergy-type thing.” Two healthy boys followed the twins: Jesse and then Gerald, the last one born, like me, in 1959. Half of them were Teels and half of them were Oakleys, but they all seemed to be young men with dark hair, olive skin, and a reputation, deserved or not, for a bad temper.
    It wasn’t just the men. Colleen Oakley Teel could cut quite a shine herself. When I was in the fourth grade at Credle Elementary, one of my mother’s fellow teachers gave one of the children a bad grade, and his mama reportedly came to school and beat the teacher over the head with a pocketbook. Black children who grew up in Oxford remembered Mrs. Teel chasing them after a disagreement over a tricycle. “Y’all black niggers!” they said she yelled. “I’m gonna kill every last one of you!” One of Teel’s lawyers, thinking back on the family twenty years later, considered the problem to be congenital. “I guess it just runs in the family,” the attorney told me. “He was hotheaded, his wife was hotheaded, and the children were