The old man says the Ku Kluxes was working fur a principle--the
principle of keeping the white supremacy on top of the nigger race. Fur
if you let 'em quit work and go around balloting and voting it won't
do. It makes 'em biggity. And a biggity nigger is laying up trouble fur
himself. Because sooner or later he will get to thinking he is as good
as one of these here Angle-Saxtons you are always hearing so much talk
about down South. And if the Angle-Saxtons was to stand fur that, purty
soon they would be sociable equality. And next the hull dern country
would be niggerized. Them there Angle-Saxtons, that come over from
Ireland and Scotland and France and the Great British Islands and
settled up the South jest simply couldn't afford to let that happen, he
says, and so they Ku Kluxed the niggers to make 'em quit voting. It was
THEIR job to MAKE law and order, he says, which they couldn't be with
niggers getting the idea they had a right to govern. So they Ku Kluxed
'em like gentlemen. But these here night-riders, he says, is AGIN law
and order--they can shoot up more law and order in one night than can be
manufactured agin in ten years. He was a very quiet, peaceable old man,
Mr. Davis was, and Bud says he was so dern foolish about law and order
he had to up and shoot a man, about fifteen years ago, who hearn him
talking that-a-way and said he reminded him of a Boston school teacher.
But Miss Lucy and Bud, they tells me what all them night-ridings is
fur. It seems this here tobaccer trust is jest as mean and low-down and
unprincipled as all the rest of them trusts. The farmers around there
raised considerable tobaccer--more'n they did of anything else. The
trust had shoved the price so low they couldn't hardly make a living.
So they organized and said they would all hold their tobaccer fur a fair
price. But some of the farmers wouldn't organize--said they had a right
to do what they pleased with their own tobaccer. So the night-riders was
formed to burn their barns and ruin their crops and whip 'em and shoot
'em and make 'em jine. And also to burn a few trust warehouses now and
then, and show 'em this free American people, composed mainly out of the
Angle-Saxton races, wasn't going to take no sass from anybody.
An old feller by the name of Rufe Daniels who wouldn't jine the
night-riders had been shot to death on his own door step, jest about a
mile away, only a week or so before. The night-riders mostly used these
here automatic shot-guns, but they didn't bother with birdshot. They
mostly loaded their shells with buckshot. A few bicycle ball bearings
dropped out of old Rufe when they gathered him up and got him into shape
to plant. They is always some low-down cuss in every crowd that carries
things to the point where they get brutal, Bud says; and he feels like
them bicycle bearings was going a little too fur, though he wouldn't let
on to his dad that he felt that-a-way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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