“You had to get a pass from owners to go out at night. If you had a pass and the pateroles found you, it was all right if you hadn’t overstayed the time that was written on it. If you didn’t have a pass or if you had overstayed your time, it was still all right if you could outrun the pateroles. That held before freedom and it held a long time after freedom. The pateroles were still operating when I was old enough to remember those old quarters. They didn’t break them up for a long time. I remember them myself. I don’t mean the Ku Klux. The Ku Klux was a different thing altogether. The Ku Klux didn’t exist before the War. I don’t know where they got the name from—I don’t know whether they give it to themselves or the people give it to them. But the Ku Klux came after the War and weren’t before it.”
Ku Klux Influence on Negroes
“The Ku Klux Klan weren’t just after Negroes. They got after white folks and Negroes both. I didn’t think they were so much after keeping the Negro from voting as some other things.
“There was one colored fellow in Alabama—I think his name was Egbert Bondman—that wasn’t influenced. He was a politician and they got after him one time. He lived about six miles south of Vernon in Lamar County, Alabama. He went down to the hole where they watered their horses and stretched an old cable wire across the road just high enough to trip up their horses. He hid in the woods and cut down on them with his shotgun when they came up. I hear there was one more scramble when those horses commenced stumbling, and those men started running through the forest to get away from that shot.
“I remember one night my mother woke me up, and I looked out and there was a lot of the Ku Klux riding down the road. They had on long white robes and looked like a flock of geese in the dark.
“The main thing the Ku Klux seemed to try to do, it seemed to me, was to try to keep the colored folks obedient to their former masters and to keep the white folks from giving them too much influence. And they wanted to stop the white men that ran after colored women.
“But they didn’t last long. They whipped a fellow named Huggins in the early seventies, and he was a government man. After that government men camped on their trail, and they didn’t amount to much.”
Slave Breeding
“The thing they were fighting began in slavery. There were slave men kept that forced slave women to do what they wanted to do. And if the slave women didn’t do it, the masters or the overseers whipped them till they did. The women were beat and made to go to them. They were big fine men, and the masters wanted the women to have children by them. And there were some white men, too, who forced the slave women to do what they wanted to. Some of them didn’t want to stop when slavery stopped.”