Blood Done Sign My Name Read Online Free PDF

“You don’t want to read that,” setting the book aside as though my mother were a little child who’d found a poisonous mushroom. “I
do
want to read it, actually,” my mother insisted, reaching past the librarian for the book. The librarian reluctantly handed over the novel, shaking her head at Mama’s disreputable choice. “They tried to segregate your mind,” my mother recalled of the incident, looking like she wanted to spit.
    If Mama’s mind was flint and steel, her hands were soap and sympathy. I loved to share a hymnal with her at church. She always held the red leather book low so that I could read it, and her soprano was sweet milk to me. Her mothering style was quickstep and unwavering. Chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches materialized as if she had summoned them by sorcery; heads were patted, cheeks were kissed. In love and work, her household moved at a brisk and consistent pace. Though she resisted playing any set role as “the preacher’s wife,” Mama also took care of dozens of other people, in ways large and small, without any fanfare. “I do the preaching, she does the practicing,” Daddy liked to say, though she preached and he practiced more than the joke acknowledged.
    Mama’s congregation was a classroom of third graders at C. G. Credle Elementary School. In those days some people at church considered it somewhat disgraceful for a white woman—especially the preacher’s wife—to work after she got married. But Mama paid them no mind and remained a consummate professional. She wore long skirts, practical shoes, and cotton sweaters with things stitched onto them—ribbons, bells, wreaths, one-room schoolhouses. It did not bother me that she taught right down the hall from the classroom where Miss Sue Bryan ruled me with an iron hand. Mama belonged at school. Every time the bishop appointed my father to a new church—my baby sister Julie once pointed to the bishop’s name on a church bulletin and muttered bitterly, “I do not like that man”—we would cart dozens of boxes of her teaching supplies out to her station wagon and into her new school. It never struck me as odd that Mama was at Credle Elementary, nor did I notice that it conferred certain advantages when I got in trouble with Miss Bryan, as I often did.
    Miss Bryan had been teaching the fourth grade at Credle since large reptiles walked the earth. She was an utterly unreconstructed Confederate. When she talked about the Civil War, which she firmly insisted that we refer to as “the War Between the States,” I was pretty sure that she had marched up Cemetery Ridge with Pickett, though this could not have been true or the Yankees never would have won at Gettysburg. I had run afoul of Miss Bryan early in fourth grade, when she gave a true-false quiz on North Carolina history, the final question of which was “Granville County is the best place to live on earth.” Methodist ministers moved every few years, and so I considered myself a man of the world. My grandmother’s house, for example, was only eighty miles from Oxford, and anything that I wanted at her local drugstore lunch counter—fresh-squeezed orangeades and limeades, a “cherry smash”—was charged to “Miz Buie” without my even asking. And so I naturally marked the statement false, a mistake that Miss Bryan designated with a big red X and for which she deducted ten points. No discussion. As far as she was concerned, this was a simple point of historical fact.
    My ardor for books did not impress Miss Bryan. I think my mother and Mrs. Patsy Montague, the rosy-cheeked woman with white hair and pink suits who served as principal, both realized that the less time Miss Bryan and I spent together, the better off everyone would be. For the rest of the year, “Miz Patsy” would periodically summon me out of Miss Bryan’s class and