“I wants you to tell me everything you knows about the Klan,” Poudlum said.
At first I was astounded by what he asked me, but then I considered his point of view, his wondering at the causes which made grown men chase boys up and down the river, so I resolved to do the best I could with my limited knowledge, but I still wasn’t in any hurry to get started.
“I don’t know a lot, Poudlum, and I ain’t sure what I do know is what really happened, but what I do know come from my brother Fred and my Uncle Curvin.”
“I ’spect it would be mostly right then,” Poudlum said.
It was mighty cozy in our tent, being high and dry with a small fire, while the rain continued to pour from an overcast sky.
“I like it in our tent,” Poudlum said. “It kind of makes you feel safe and secure like it did when we used to get in the hidey-hole way up the Satilfa under the Iron Bridge.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m sho’ glad Uncle Curvin thought to put this tarp in the boat.”
“You think he ever gonna get back from over in Choctaw County?”
“Not today he won’t. They won’t be nobody crossing the river in this weather. I figure wherever he is, he’ll stay there until it clears up.”
“I thought we was gonna talk about the Klan?”
“What you want to know?”
“Nothing in particular, just start way back as far as you knows.”
“From what I’ve been told it was started back during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War ended.”
“Seems funny they calls it the Civil War. From what I learned in school it was most uncivil.”
“You got me there, Poudlum. Uncle Curvin don’t call it that, he calls it the War of Northern Aggression.”
“Don’t matter what it was called. Let’s get back to the Klan.”
“Okay, what I heard was that after the war it was a time of corruption and destruction of society, a time when folks had no protection by the law for their property or even their lives, and the Klan was organized to keep all that from happening.”
“How come all that was happening, if it was?”
“Because of the vengeful laws passed by the Congress, which made it unlawful for Southern white men to hold public office. Because of them laws all the public offices was filled by carpetbaggers from up north.”
“What you been taught a carpetbagger is supposed to be?”
“I think that was what people from up north, the ones who came south just to make a big profit, was called.”
“So you saying the Klan came into being to protect decent folks after the war was over?”
“That’s what they say.”
“That ain’t how Professor Jamison tells it. He says that after the Civil War some white folks in the South used the Klan to get power back in politics and keep control over the freed slaves. He says they threatened, beat, and even killed folks till they got what they wanted.”
“Uncle Curvin said ain’t no need for the Klan nowadays.”
“Then how come they come down in the Quarter and pester folks like they did last night?”
“Nobody never give me the answer to that, Poudlum. But I ’spect it may just be bred into ’em or they just stuck in the past. It could also be they are afraid of change that’s coming, but to tell you the truth, I really don’t know.”
“One thing we does know,” Poudlum said. “We knows they is chasing us ’cause they think we discovered who the Exalted Cyclops is. What they don’t know is we know who the Night Hawk is, too.”
“You hit the nail on the head. They also think we was spying on ’em on behalf of somebody else, and ain’t nothing we can say or do gonna change their minds on that.”
“So what we gonna do?” Poudlum asked.
“We got to come up with a plan and stick to it.”
We spent the remainder of the dreary day considering and reconsidering our options. What we finally decided was we would paddle on down to Jackson, but would take our time about it and travel at night as long as the weather permitted. Along the way we would seek out another good campsite where we could be concealed, and get in as much fishing as possible.
Once we hooked up with Uncle Curvin we would get him to take us to see our lawyer.
Poudlum and I did have a lawyer. He was Mr. Alfred Jackson, who had represented us and sprung us from Sheriff Elroy Crowe’s jail, and he had also invested our reward money for finding the money Jesse and Frank, the bank robbers, had hidden in the Cypress hole way up the Satilfa Creek from where we were now. He let it out for interest so me and Poudlum, along with my brother, would have money to go to college on.
Actually it had been Uncle Curvin who had found the money, but he couldn’t have done it without our help, and he had given us credit for it.
Mr. Jackson had told us to come see him if we had any troubles, that his door would always be open to us. He was an elderly lawyer who provided a lot of free legal service to poor folks, white and colored alike, so we admired him very much.
“Mr. Jackson will know what we ought to do,” Poudlum said. “What time of day you think it’s getting to be?”
“I don’t rightly know,” I told him. “Hard to tell without being able to see the sun, but I think it’s getting on close to dark. What you think?”
“My belly is telling me it’s about suppertime.”
We inventoried our food supply and found we had a big hunk of cheese left, several slim boxes of crackers, four flat cans of sardines, three cans of beans, and a half-dozen cans of sausage. That’s what we dined on that night, the sausage with crackers and cheese, while the rain continued to pour down in torrents.
We retreated to the center of our tent to escape the dampness and threw a couple of lighter knots on the fire. Just before we drifted off to sleep Poudlum said, “This rain keep up like this, the river gonna be swelled up like a dead possum.”
It continued to rain hard all night and when morning came it was still overcast and drizzling.
Poudlum got our breakfast off one of the lines he had set out while I stoked up our fire.
While we were munching on the sweet fish fillets Poudlum said, “Look like this weather done set in. If the sun don’t come out soon we gonna get all mildewed and moldy.”
We smoothed off a place on the ground and played mumblety-peg until we tired of it. After that we sat around and told a few stories until we became weary of that, too.
About when we thought it ought to be noon, the rain stopped and a sliver of sunlight peeked through the dark clouds.
“Look at that,” Poudlum said as we peered out the end of the tent at the sun rays filtering through the trees. “Now that’s more like it. It ought to clear up good by nighttime and we can head on down the river.”
Within an hour there was bright sun flooding down on us from a clear blue sky. We flipped the boat right side up and hung our damp stuff on tree branches to dry. After it dried we packed it all up inside the boat and were prepared to light out down the river as soon as the moon came up.
We also cut the long, slim lighter-hearts out of some dead pine trees and loaded us up a half-dozen six-foot-long poles to use as torches if we needed them. We were all ready to depart, but the trouble was, we had several hours before we could.
After we folded up our tarp we placed it next to the trunk of a big tree and sat down on it so we wouldn’t get the seats of our pants wet.
As we were sitting there leaning back against the tree trunk Poudlum said, “I purely do despise to have to sit here with nothing to do—nothing to occupy our minds.”
“Why don’t we just sit and talk about whatever crosses our mind?” I asked
“That’s fine by me. What you want to talk about?” Poudlum responded.
“I don’t know. Oh, yeah, I read where you got a new principal at your school, that he had been one of them colored pilots in the war, the ones that went to school up at Tuskegee.”
“Uh, huh, that would be Professor Jamison,” Poudlum said with a good amount of pride in his tone of voice.
“Does he ever talk about the war?”
“He does sometimes, but nothing about shooting and fighting.”
“Well, what does he talk about then?”
“He talks a lot about what it was like over in Europe and up north, about how it was different from down here in the South.”
“How did he say it was different?”
“For one thing, me and you would be going to school together, and they don’t treat colored folks like they all one big ignorant lot.”
“What else does he teach y’all?”
“That things are gonna change ‘round here and we got to do a lot of hard work to get ready for it and make the best of it.”
“Colored folks already do a lot of hard work.”
“Uh-huh, they do, but the professor is teaching us to work hard with our minds, and to act proper as well as speak proper.” Our talk kept us occupied until we saw the moon come slipping up over the treetops. We got up and walked to the boat, which was closer to the water, then we stopped dead in our tracks when we heard the sound. It was a swishing and hissing noise, approaching a small roaring sound.
Poudlum said, “What you think that noise is?”
“I think it’s the sound of the creek,” I told him.
“The creek is rising from all that rain!”
We slipped through the bushes and found the creek had risen several feet and was a raging torrent before us.
“What you think?” I asked Poudlum as we gazed at it.
“Might be all right after we get out on the river, but the creek is flowing mighty swiftly.”
Neither of us wanted to spend another night where we were because if we did we would have to stay put all day tomorrow before we could start traveling on down to Jackson tomorrow night. We were anxious to get on down that way and hook up with my uncle and get away from the Klan, so we agreed to give it a try.
After we had dragged the boat to the water’s edge Poudlum said, “We got to be real careful ’cause that water is moving faster than a cat with his tail on fire!”
We eased the nose of the boat into the water and could feel the tug of the rushing water, then we got behind it, planted our feet on the solid ground, gave a mighty shove, and leapt aboard.
The powerful surge of the water caught us immediately and turned the boat sideways and water was lapping up over the right side and into the boat. We grabbed our paddles and righted the boat a moment before it capsized.
“Hold her straight!” I yelled at Poudlum as we fought the water with our paddles.
The swiftness of the current shocked me, but I thought it would ease when we exited the mouth of the creek out into the river.
I was wrong. As the creek swept us out into the river the raging water increased in its intensity and our boat was swept downstream as if it were some kind of toy. The current of the swollen river compared to the creek was like comparing a mouse to an elephant.
“I think we done made a mistake, Poudlum!” I yelled out.
“Uh-huh, a big one,” he yelled back. “What we gonna do?”
“Ain’t nothing we can do except try to use our paddles to keep pointed downstream.”
“Rate we traveling we’ll be in the Gulf of Mexico before morning,” Poudlum yelled as we fought the current.
We barely kept from capsizing several times and it was all we could do to keep our boat pointed downstream.
There was a bridge over the Tombigbee in Jackson, the place where Mr. Henry had told us he would tell Uncle Curvin to meet us. Sometime before daylight the mighty current of the river swept us underneath it and into a part of the river where we had never been.
Not long after that our arms gave out and we had to just let the current take us. By then the moon had set and we were engulfed in total darkness, and we moved to the middle of the boat and huddled close together as we awaited whatever fate had to offer us.
We expected to be capsized and have to swim for it, or to be rammed and sunk by some gigantic log, but to our surprise we came to a soft landing. It felt spongy when we hit it and we were engulfed in something which felt leafy and giving.
We could still hear the sound of the current rushing by, but it did seem to have abated somewhat. In the meantime we had come to a complete halt and were very fearful of where we were. Poudlum dug out a box of our wooden matches and lit the end of one of our torches. When the flame caught and burned bright enough to see, we discovered we were lodged in the upper branches of a giant oak tree which had collapsed into the raging river.
“As long as it don’t tear loose from the ground completely it ought to hold us,” Poudlum said.
“You think we ought to tie up to one of these big limbs?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” he answered. “But we’ll put a little slack in the rope so if the river goes down we won’t be hanging from a tree.”
We tied the boat up real secure to one of the giant limbs and by the light of our torch we ate a can of sardines and some soggy crackers.
The current was still raging, but once again we had found a little sanctuary, kind of like the hidey-hole underneath the Iron Bridge. After we finished eating we dug out our blankets and rolled up in them in the bottom of the boat.
“I ain’t never been this tired before,” Poudlum mumbled as in our exhaustion we drifted off to sleep.
“Me neither,” I told him. “You remember us going past the bridge in Jackson?”
“I do. Maybe tomorrow morning, if this river quiets down some, we can paddle back up that way and wait on Mr. Curvin.”
“You think the river will be down by morning?”
“Maybe. It’ll probably quiet down just as sudden as it rose up.”
“My arms feel like they too tired to ever do anything again. How about you, Poudlum?”
“Yeah, mine too. Fighting that river was worse than picking cotton.”
The river did sound like it was slowing down and I told Poudlum I expected everything would be back to normal in the morning.
He agreed with me just before we drifted off to sleep.
But we were both wrong.