“I have seen the Ku Klux. I have washed their regalia and ironed it for them. They wouldn’t let just anybody wash and iron it because they couldn’t do it right. My son’s wife had a job washing and ironing for them and I used to go down and help her. I never did take a job of any kind myself because my husband didn’t let me. The regalia was white. They were made near like these singing robes the church choirs have. But they were long—come way down to the shoe tops. That was along in the nineties,—about 1890. It was when they revived the Ku Klux the last time before the World War. In the old days the patrollers used to whip them for being out without a pass but the Ku Klux used to whip them for disorderly living.
“Way back yonder when I was in Alabama, too, I can remember the Ku Klux riding. I was a little child then. The Republicans and Democrats were at war with each other then and they was killing everybody. My brother was one of them they run. He could come out in the daytime, but in the night he would have to hide. They never got him. He dodged them. That was ’round in 1874. In 1875, him and my uncle left Alabama and went to Louisiana. They called him a stump speaker. They wanted to kill him. They killed Tom Ivory. He was the leader of the Republicans—he was a colored man. His father was white but his mother was a Negro. His father educated him in slavery time. He had been up North and was coming back. They knew he was coming back, so they went up the creek and waited for him—his train. They flagged it down, and some one on the train commenced hollering, ‘Look yonder.’ Ivory stepped out on the platform to see what they were hollering about, and all them guns started popping and Ivory fell over the end of the platform and down on the ground. He was already leaning over the gate when they fired. Then they come up and cut his tongue out before he died. They said if they got him that would stop all the rest of the niggers. You see, he was a leader.
“Niggers was voting the Republican ticket ’long about that time. They just went in gangs riding every night—the Ku Klux did. Ku Kluxing and killing them they got hold of.
“The police arrested all the men that had anything to do with Tom Ivory’s killing. The leader of the killers was a white man they called Captain Hess. I never knowed how the trial came out because we left there while they was still in jail.”
How Freedom Came
“I heard my mother say that when the Refugees came through Sumter County, Alabama, she wasn’t free but was ‘sot’ free later. The refugees came through along in February. Then the papers was struck and it went out that the niggers all was free. Mother’s master and my oldest brother who had stayed in the War with his master four years came home. The refugees was in there when he got home. They went on through. They didn’t tarry long there. Then the papers came out and the next day, master called all the hands up to the big house and told them they was free. Mother was set free in the latter part of February and I was born June 5, 1865, so I was born free.”
Leaving Alabama
“We left Alabama in the same year Tom Ivory got killed. More than fifty colored people left on the train and come off when we did. People was leaving Alabama something terrible. I never did know what happened to Tom’s killers. I heard afterwards that Alabama got broke, they had to pay for so many men they killed.”