"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."