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black citizens had their own lives, families, churches, and social institutions, which they had little desire to abandon, they did not accept this “way of life” that relegated them to a lower caste. In the spring of 1970, blacks in Oxford complained bitterly about the lack of parks. Most of the parks in white neighborhoods had been closed to avoid integration, while the city had never built one single park in a black neighborhood. Mayor Currin explained that most of the land for Oxford’s city parks had been bequeathed to the city with legal clauses that would rescind the gift should the parks ever be opened to black people. The United States Supreme Court had ruled in the late 1940s that such restrictive covenants were unenforceable, but the law did not matter. In any case, the city government ignored several offers from private citizens of free land for public parks. It rejected an offer from Carolina Power and Light Company to provide free basketball goals. The town’s Recreation Committee never drew a quorum for meetings, said local blacks, because there was a tacit understanding that no recreational facilities would be provided so that none would have to be integrated.
    A few weeks before the killing of Henry Marrow, city workers closed one of Oxford’s few remaining public parks in a white residential area and removed the basketball goals, alleging that “noise” bothered the neighbors. According to local blacks, however, the reason the city closed the park was because it had begun to draw interracial basketball games—playing “salt and pepper,” the boys called it. During one such game, a white man had emerged from one of the nearby houses and told the boys, “Niggers can’t play here—y’all got to leave.” One of the black youths talked back to him and he slapped the young man hard across the face. Two days later, the city truck arrived and workmen uprooted the basketball goals. Years afterward, one of the neighbors admitted to me, “The grown-ups were all scared. We should have listened to the children.”
    If my own mother, Martha Buie Tyson, ever sought the guidance of her children on racial matters or anything else, I do not remember it. She stood along the banks of our lives like a tree. What she believed and what she did was between her and the Lord, and what we believed and what we did was between us and the Lord and Martha Buie Tyson. Mama was a quietly beautiful woman with pretty brown hair, cream-colored skin that deepened past beige in the summertime, and rich brown eyes. She’d grown up in a big white house, the oldest daughter of the leading family of a small mill town not far from Oxford. “The bell cow of Biscoe,” my father sometimes called her, although he only said that when she was visibly sunny; one did not trifle with my mother.
    Her telephone voice sang in that sweet lilt of the Southern belle, but there was nothing merely ornamental about her. She wore a gold charm bracelet that jingled decorously when she walked. It had one charm for each of her children, a little brass schoolhouse, my father’s high school ring, and a small gold medal she had won in a county-wide speaking contest in high school for her oration on world peace. She had been the president of the senior class at Greensboro College and was brilliant, too, I realize now. When I was ten, women could be virtuous and kind, but who knew they could be brilliant?
    Mama read constantly, and her first visit to the local public library gave her a taste of the embattled racial atmosphere in Oxford. She picked up a copy of
Jubilee,
by Margaret Walker, a black novelist and poet from Jackson, Mississippi. Everyone who worked in the public library was white in those days, except the janitor, and it was segregated, although there were no signs to that effect. When Mama handed
Jubilee
to the librarian behind the counter, the woman peered over her glasses and said,