Patrollers, Jayhawkers, Ku Klux, and Ku Klux Klan

“They had pateroles going ’round watching the colored people to keep them from running off.  That’s all I know ’bout them.  I don’t remember hearin’ anything about the jayhawkers.

“I heard lots ’bout the Ku Klux.  They were terrible.  The white folks had one another goin’ ‘round watching and keeping them from runnin’ off.  The Ku Klux would whip people they caught out.  They would whip them just because they could; because they called themselves bosses, because they was white and the colored people was niggers.  They didn’t do nothin’ but just keep the slaves down.  It was before the war that I knew ’bout the Ku Klux.  There wasn’t no difference between the pateroles and the Ku Klux that I knows of.  If they’d ketch you, they all would whip you.  I don’t know nothin’ about the Ku Klux Klan after the war.  I know they broke them up.

Slave Houses, Furniture, Food, and Work

“Before the war, we lived in a old log house.  It had one window, one door, and one room.  Colored people didn’t have no two or three-room houses before the war.  I’ll tell you that right now.  All the furniture we had was bed stools and quilts.  ’Course we had them old stools that pa made.  We kept food right there in the house where we was in one corner.  We didn’t have no drawers—­nothing like that.  The white folks fed us.  They give us as much as they thought we ought to have.  Every Saturday night you would go to the smokehouse and get your meat and meal and your molasses.  Didn’t get no flour, no coffee, no sugar.  Pa was an ox driver and when he would go to Rodney to carry cotton, he would buy sugar and coffee for himself.  You see, they would slip a little something and make a little money off it.  Like they was goin’ to Rodney tomorrow, they would slip and kill a couple of hogs and carry them along with them.  That was the only way they could get a little money.  My pa’s main work was shoemaking, but he worked in the field too.  He was a driver chiefly when he was out in the field.  He hoed and plowed.  He was the leader of the gang.  He never got a chance to make no money for hisself before the war.  Nope, the colored people didn’t have no money ’tall lessen they slipped and got it.

Slave Marriages

“Say I wanted this woman for my wife.  We would just put down the broom and step over it and we would be married.  That is all there was to it before emancipation.  Didn’t have no matrimony read nor nothing.  You were married when you stepped over the broom handle.  That was your wife.

A Lincoln Story