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

hotheaded. I think it was just in their blood to be hotheaded. I mean, you just didn’t need to be messing with the Teels.”
    As the Teel family grew, they also became quite prosperous. Teel bought a big, gracious home on the corner of Front and Main. It was a white two-story house with ample porches held up by carved pillars. Magnolias and crape myrtles perfumed Front Street in the summer, and the victorian-era homes on the broad, tree-lined avenue—one or two of them literally mansions—belonged to some of the county’s wealthiest families. Front Street was only one block over from Hancock, where we lived, but I realize now that it was a long way socially; houses on Hancock were far more humble, though I’d never even noticed when I was growing up. But while the Teels had the money to live on Front Street, they lacked what their more aristocratic neighbors would have thought of as “background.” They were still uneducated and, like my family, they were still from somewhere else. And so perhaps it is not surprising that, apart from the youngest children, they kept to themselves. Besides, Robert Teel was too busy for social climbing, even if he had entertained such aspirations. He made his money not from an inherited plantation or a position at the bank, but with his own hands.
    In fifteen years cutting hair downtown near the courthouse, Teel won the trust of a number of Oxford’s bankers and landowners. In 1969, these connections helped him buy the large lot at Four Corners, literally across the tracks from the rest of Oxford, in the heart of Grab-all. Beside the roughest part of Grab-all, “around the bend,” where many houses did not even have indoor plumbing, let alone washing machines, Teel erected four cinder-block storefronts. Before he knew it, Teel had managed to install what amounted to a little shopping center without investing a nickel of his own money.
    The coin laundry was the most lucrative of Teel’s businesses. His convenience store offered his African American customers basic groceries at high prices, but within walking distance. Besides these, gas pumps, a car wash, a Yamaha motorcycle dealership, and a barbershop kept the Teel and Oakley boys busy and the money rolling in. “Out there it was a percentage black and a percentage white, it was near about a fifty-fifty deal, and people could decide whether they wanted to go all-black or all-white,” Teel recalled. The neighborhood was all black, of course, and so the walk-in customers were black, but the store’s location at the intersection meant that perhaps half his customers were white.
    The grocery store and the coin laundry were open to anybody, but the barbershop was whites only. “And the races were mixing some out there,” Teel said, “and I figured I could just stand there and take up the money.” Before the killing occurred, Teel said, “Mr. Roger Page had told me he’d help me put in volkswagens to sell on that lot next door, and that would have been another business over there.” Even without the car dealership, Teel claimed, his road to becoming a millionaire was clear to him within the first year. Richard Shepard, the owner of a funeral home in the black community, felt that Teel was not exaggerating: “He would have been rich if he had stayed out of trouble.” But trouble always found its way to Teel’s door.
    Between 1969 and 1977, Teel was arrested many times, charged with at least a dozen different offenses, including driving under the influence of alcohol; two separate counts of assault on a police officer; assault by pointing a gun; assault and battery; aiding and abetting murder; assault with a deadly weapon; assault on a female; and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury. Judges dismissed eight of these charges, and the other four netted Teel only suspended sentences and small fines. “It