The old Southerner coughed.
“I haven’t taken any part in your little argument, yet,” he said, stroking his long white beard, “for I reckon that’s something for younger and fightinger folks. But they say: Young men for fightin’ and old men for counsel. I sort o’ figgered that you fellows was sort of teasing this youngster that got mad.”
“Sure, that’s all I was doing, dad, having a little fun with him,” said the ad man. “Have a cigar?”
“No, thanks. Had enough. Too much tobacco bad for my heart. I sort-a liked the spunk o’ that young fella at that. Although nobody would a got mad at a thing like that in my day. But he’s right and you, too, young man. The nigger problem is a coming one. It’s been under cover for many years, but it’ll bob up again, sure as you’re born. Now, you might not know it, but I fit with the boys in gray; ’listed in ’65. I was a youngster, but I got in. I got a wound in my right thigh by a Yank musketball, I can show you, in the last engagement of the war—but I’ve no feelings against the North for that. Not any more. No, the South has forgotten the war. We’re all one country now.”
He went into a circumlocutory account of his experiences in the Civil War, of his home-coming and of the first post bellum days, while the rest listened respectfully and asked questions from time to time to show that they were still interested.
“You’re wondering where all this is leading to, well, you were talking about the nigger problem. But I saw a real nigger problem, compared to which this one isn’t a hill o’ beans. No, sir, not a hill o’ beans. Although this one may get to be like it. But we had a real problem.”
It was after the war. The Southern States had been compelled reluctantly, not merely to liberate, but to enfranchise the Negroes. Yankee carpetbaggers had descended from the North, both to invest money in enterprises and real estate that could be bought for a song and to obtain political control.
“Well, I lived in Tennessee, little town of Pulaski. When we got back, a few of us young bucks got together one May day in 1866, and formed a secret society, just for the dickens of it. I don’t know if you ever heard of it—”
“You don’t mean them Ku Kluxers?” broke in the Jewish drummer.
“That’s right!” exclaimed the old gentleman joyously. “How did you know? Knights of the Ku Klux Klan we called ourselves. Kuklux was a Latin word, meaning circle, and one of the boys who’d been to college thought it’d be appropriate.”