Baptism "Daddy and Roger and ''em shot ''em a nigger." That''s what Gerald Teel said to me in my family''s driveway in Oxford, North Carolina, on May 12, 1970. We were both ten years old. I was bouncing a basketball. The night before, a black man had "said something" at the store to Judy, his nineteen-year-old sister-in-law, Gerald told me, and his father and two of his brothers had run him out of the store and shot him dead. The man''s name was Henry Marrow, I found out later, but his family called him Dickie. He was killed in public as he lay on his back, helpless, begging for his life. I was stunned and bewildered, as if Gerald had informed me that his family had fried up their house cat and eaten it for breakfast.

We did not use that word at our house. It was not that I had never heard it or had never used it myself. But somehow the children in my family knew that to utter that word in the presence of my father would be to say good-bye to this earthly life. My daddy was a Methodist minister, an "Eleanor Roosevelt liberal," he called himself in later years, and at our house "nigger" was not just naughty, like "hell" or "damn." It was evil, like taking the Lord''s name in vain, maybe even worse. And now my friend Gerald was using it while talking about his daddy and his brothers killing a man. Before Gerald could say anything more, my mother opened the front door of our house and called me in for supper. "What are we having?" I yelled back at her.

"I am not announcing my menu to the neighborhood," Mama said in a clear but quiet voice. I hurried inside, dumbstruck, wondering what the grown-ups in my world were going to say about Gerald''s news. Could this be true? Or was it just a little boy''s boasting? Mama and Daddy would know. Mama wielded an abundantly sharp sense of how things were and were not done. That was why she was "not about to advertise my dinner menu up and down Hancock Street," as she reminded me when I came into the kitchen. Pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, peppery cabbage simmered with fatback, and crisp fried cornbread served with sweet iced tea seemed no cause for shame. Mrs. Roseanna Allen, the black woman who worked for us, had also made us a chocolate pie that afternoon, as she often did when I begged her.

But the details of our supper were beside Mama''s point. Yelling like that was "tacky," a label that applied to a disquieting number of my habits. I figured that Mama and Daddy would talk to us about what had happened, but instead an eerie hush hung over the supper table. Somewhat oddly, Daddy refrained from his custom of interviewing us one by one about our day. He and Mama exchanged knowing words and weighted glances whose meanings were indecipherable to me. My twelve-year-old brother, Vern, and I talked halfheartedly about something--how fast Dudley Barnes, who pitched for A&W Root Beer''s Little League nine, could throw a baseball, something like that. But a deep silence had fallen among us. After supper, my little sister Boo and I crept out of the house and down to the corner, where we huddled on the sidewalk behind Mrs.

Garland''s cement wall, across the street from the Teel house. Boo was seven years old, blond and freckly, by turns deferential and officious in the way of little sisters, and she went wherever I did, provided I let her. In the Bible, Ruth tells Naomi, "Entreat me not to leave thee; or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge," and while this was frequently quoted as a tribute to filial devotion, I always noted that we never heard from Naomi on the point. When I came home from church one Sunday and announced that I was going to become a missionary to Africa, Boo immediately declared her intention to become a nurse and accompany me. I shot back, "What do you think I am going to Africa for?" But truth be told, I was glad to have her with me this particular evening. We could see the house clearly through the budding crape myrtles that laced the long traffic island in the middle of Main Street. Gerald''s family lived in a gracious, older two-story structure with white columns, wide porches, and a carport on one side that must have been built originally for carriages. At least a dozen men with shotguns and rifles stood guard on its porches as Boo and I peered across the corners of Hancock, Front, and Main Streets.

A couple of the men were draped in white hoods and robes, but most of them looked for all the world like our own father when he went bird hunting. We did not know exactly how these men pertained to Gerald''s announcement, but we knew something perilous was unfolding. For one thing, neither of us had ever seen anyone who didn''t live there go into the Teel house. I played with Gerald Teel practically every day, but the boys in our neighborhood came to my house or we ran the woods and fields that stretched out beyond my backyard. Sometimes we smoked Jeff Daniels''s mother''s Tareyton cigarettes down by the creek. We played football in the front yard of the old Hancock place, a once palatial but now rotting three-story white structure with huge wooden pillars that stood empty across the street from my house. Gerald, Jeff, and I wore the same brand of brogans as a kind of uniform--our look was straight-leg blue jeans, army surplus jackets, and those brownish-orange work boots--and we fought together in the forbidden BB-gun wars that raged in our neighborhood on Saturday mornings. Gerald was a slight, olive-skinned boy with dark hair and eyes.

He rarely talked much. We considered him a respectably tough kid, a member of the gang in good standing, but he also had a kind of whipped-dog manner, a shyness that said something was wrong. You''d say we were friends. But I did not visit in Gerald''s house and, as far as I knew, neither did anybody else. All Mama would say, in her offhand, gracious way, was that they weren''t really our kind of folks, but it was worse than that. Everybody was afraid of Gerald''s daddy, who never spoke in my presence until many years had passed. That night, after kneeling beside the bed with my father to say my prayers as we usually did, I lay me down to sleep on the cool, clean sheets, wondering about what had happened and fearing, without really knowing what to fear, the things that might happen now. The attic fan in the top of the house pulled the gauzy white curtains inward on a cooling breeze; two weeks into May it was already hot, and not everyone had air-conditioning in those days.

From my upstairs window, I could see the blinking red light of Oxford''s radio tower. The raspy, playful voice of "Julius''s Jukebox." WOXF''s "Little Round Brown Mound of Sound," beamed from the transistor radio propped in my windowsill, announcing song dedications--"This one goes out from Shirley to S.O.S."--and spinning Otis Redding, James Brown, or Aretha Franklin. Every night that summer, the ominous pulse of Marvin Gaye''s "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" pounded on the airwaves, and what may have seemed a haunting anthem of lost love for some listeners sounded a dire warning to me. Sleep was slow to come.

While I slumbered, six blocks away in downtown Oxford hundreds of young blacks exploded into rage. At least half a dozen people had witnessed the murder in Grab-all, the black ghetto where Mr. Teel''s store was located. Word traveled fast. "This won''t no goddamn murder mystery," one of the young blacks spat, "and the son of a bitch lived three blocks from the police station." Rumors flew through Oxford that the magistrate, J. C. Wheeler, refused to swear out a warrant against the Teels, and that the police were not planning to arrest anyone.

This poured the gasoline of indignation onto the flames of vengefulness. "When Dickie was first killed," one black witness to the murder told me years later, "people in Grab-all was talking about ''everything white dies.'' " Though neither blood vengeance nor race war ensued, I learned years later that two or three hundred young African Americans ran through the well-ordered streets of downtown Oxford that night, smashing windows and setting fires. The angry throng would assemble in one place, demolish the agreed-upon storefront, and then sprint at breakneck speed through the alleyways to another target. At the American Oil station, some of the insurgents paused to loot beer and cigarettes, also making off with a portable television. The screaming alarm at Edwards Jewelry Store did not deter the mob from emptying the window of wristwatches. Behind the Western Auto hardware store, they stacked up old tires against a heavy door and set them ablaze, trying unsuccessfully to get inside and find guns and ammunition. The rioters retained the presence of mind to distinguish between white-owned property and the handful of establishments owned by blacks; they also pelted passing cars with bricks and bottles, but only those vehicles whose drivers appeared to be white.

At one point, a group of the rioters ran to the Confederate monument, threw a length of rope around the old Rebel''s neck, and tried to pull him off his granite pedestal, but the bronze infantryman would not budge. When the first police car arrived, half a dozen bricks smashed the windshield and the mob heaved the car over onto its side. The terrified officer inside clambered out and ran for dear life. Two or three more squad cars screeched up, but there was little they could do against the small, angry army in the streets. Some whites criticized Mayor Currin the next day for not ordering his handful of men to shoot down the rioters. Currin understood his town, knew the limitations of his small and unsophisticated police department, and kept his cool. "With the police department we had," the mayor told me later, ".