Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Now, when I look back on that period and reflect on the qualities of Mr Giddy, Mr Ransom, and their followers, I wonder why the people of Black Ankle County, particularly the people of Stonewall, stood for the Ku Klux Klan as long as they did. Traditionally, the people of Stonewall are sturdy and self-reliant. In fact, the town was named General Stonewall Jackson, North Carolina, when it was founded right after the Civil War; later the name was shortened to Stonewall. There was certainly nothing frightening about Mr Giddy, the Führer of the local Klan. His full name was J. Raymond Giddy, but he had a mustache on his plump face which he treated with beeswax and which stuck out sharply on both sides, and consequently he was almost always referred to as Mr Catfish Giddy, even in the columns of the weekly Stonewall News. He was rather proud of the nickname. He used to say, ‘I may not be the richest man in Black Ankle County, but I sure am the ugliest; you can’t take that away from me.’ Mr Giddy was a frustrated big businessman. Before he got interested in the Klan, he had organized the Stonewall Boosters and a Stonewall Chamber of Commerce, both of which died after a few meetings. He was always making speeches about big business, but he was never much of a big businessman himself. At the time he and Mr Ransom organized the Klan he was a travelling salesman for a chewing-tobacco concern. When he returned from a trip he would never brag about how many boxes of cut plug he had sold. Instead, he would brag that the cut plug manufactured in North Carolina in one year, if laid end to end, would damn near reach to Egypt, or Australia, or the moon, or some other distant place.

  ‘In the manufacture of chewing tobacco, my friends,’ he would boast, ‘the Tarheel State leads the whole civilized world.’

  He was the town orator and the town drunk. In his cups, he would walk up and down Main Street, singing. He had a bass voice and his favorite songs were ‘Old Uncle Bud,’ new verses for which he would make up as he went along, and a song about Lydia Pinkham’s vegetable compound and its effect on the human race, a song he had learned when he was a young man attending a business college in Atlanta. The high-school boys and girls, drinking Coca-Colas in the Stonewall Drug Company, would run to the door and stare and giggle when Mr Giddy got drunk and marched up Main Street. ‘Old Uncle Bud,’ he would sing, ‘is the jelly-roll king. Got a hump on his back from shaking that thing.’

  Mr Ransom was far more frightening than Mr Giddy. He was a gaunt, wild-eyed farmer. He was a religious fanatic, always screaming about wickedness. Even when he was dressed in his Ku Klux Klan outfit, he could easily be identified because he walked with a peculiar, hobbledehoy gait. He was a deacon in the Stonewall Jackson Baptist Church, the church I went to, and he used to ring the bell before services until he got a little too impassioned one Sunday morning and pulled the rope so hard the bell came unscrewed and fell out of the loft, giving a glancing blow to his left shoulder as it fell. After that accident he always walked as if his next step would be his last. Like Mr Giddy, he had a nickname. He was christened John Knox Ransom, but he was called Mr Spuddy because he habitually argued that the Southern farmer should quit planting cotton and tobacco and plant Irish potatoes. ‘Something you can eat,’ he would argue, smacking his palms together for emphasis. ‘Goodness gracious, my friends, if you can’t sell your crop, you can put it on the table and eat it.’ One winter he tried to live on Irish potatoes and got so thin his belt wouldn’t hold his pants up. His worried wife would urge him to eat some meat to get his strength back, and he would shout, ‘Is a mule strong? Does a mule eat meat?’ His wife, who was a sensible woman, would ask meekly, ‘Does a mule eat Irish potatoes?’

  I don’t think Mr Giddy, the drunken drummer, and Mr Ransom, the fanatical deacon, thought very highly of each other until Mr Giddy returned from a selling trip in the winter of 1923 with some booklets about the Klan he had picked up in Atlanta. Mr Giddy discreetly distributed the booklets among some of the loafers in Stonewall, and Mr Ransom got one. After reading it, he came to the conclusion that the best way to fight wickedness, the best way to drive corn-whiskey distillers, loose women, gypsy mule traders and fortune tellers, chautauquas, and Holy Roller preachers out of Black Ankle County was to organize the Klan there.

  He and Mr Giddy got together, hired the hall over the bank, painted the windows black for the sake of secrecy, and enrolled seventeen men in the Klan. They included a tobacco auctioneer, an undertaker, a grocery clerk, an indolent house painter, and a number of farmers. The farmers were all like Mr Ransom in that they spent less time in their fields than they did around the potbellied stove of the Stonewall Hardware & General Merchandise Company, arguing about religion and politics. Most of the men joined the Klan because it gave them an excuse to get away from their wives at night and because it seemed to them to have even more mystery and ceremony than the Masons or the Woodmen of the World. The undertaker and Mr Ransom were the only ‘respectable’ men in it; most of the others, according to the standards of Stonewall, were either ‘common’ or ‘sorry.’ Some were both – the house painter, for example. I once heard him summed up by an old woman in Stonewall, who said, ‘He’s common. Fishes in the summer and hunts in the winter, and when it rains he sits by the stove and plays checkers. He sure is one sorry man.’

  The fathers of some of my friends joined the Klan and gradually I learned many of the Klan secrets. I learned that the initiation fee was ten dollars and that the robe and hood cost six-fifty. A friend of mine swiped his father’s Klan books. One was called ‘The Platform of the Invisible Empire.’ I persuaded him to let me have it in exchange for Zane Grey’s ‘Riders of the Purple Sage.’ I still have it. On the cover is this declaration: ‘The Ku Klux Klan stands on a platform of 100-per-cent Americanism, white supremacy in the South, deportation of aliens, purity of womanhood, and eradication of the chain store.’ In the book are a number of denunciations of Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and labor unions. The kids in Stonewall spied on the Klan much as kids now play G-men and gangsters; it was a game. We were frightened by the Klansmen, but not too frightened to hide in the weed patch and watch them come and go. I remember one kid, lying beside me in the weeds, pointing to a robed figure and hoarsely whispering, ‘There goes Pa.’

  Mules are used almost exclusively instead of horses in the tobacco and cotton fields of Black Ankle County, and during the first weeks of the Klan’s existence in Stonewall the members rode plough mules on their night rides about the countryside. They preferred to ride cross-country, probably because that made them feel invincible, and they couldn’t use automobiles because they would quickly bog down in the sticky mud of the bottom fields and the sloblands, the black mud which gives the county its name. The mules were supplied by Mr Ransom and by other members who were farmers. That lasted until Mr Giddy and Mr Ransom, as the leaders, sent to Klan headquarters in Atlanta for some white horse-robes. They draped the robes over their mules one dark night and rode out to a sawmill in a swamp to keep a rendezvous with their followers. When they galloped up on their shrouded steeds the mules of the other Klansmen got frightened; they let out angry neighs, reared back on their heels, and stampeded into the swamp with their riders. One Klansman was thrown from his mule and suffered a broken leg and three fractured ribs. After that the Klansmen gave up cross-country riding. They stuck to the highways and used automobiles. Fat Mr Giddy undoubtedly felt out of place on the sharp back of a plough mule, anyway.

  The Klansmen began their terrorism by burning fiery crosses, huge crosses made of fence rails sprinkled with kerosene, in the yards of all the Negro churches in the lower part of the county. Then they kidnapped an aged, irritable blacksmith who was celebrated for his profanity. They covered him with tar. They sprinkled chicken feathers over the tar. Then they tossed him into Bearcat Millpond. I have heard that the old blacksmith crawled out of the millpond with ten brand-new oaths. A few nights later the Klansmen went after a mentally defective woman who used to wander about the county with her fatherless children, sleeping in tobacco barns and haylofts. They flogged her, clipped her hair close to her scalp,
and branded a ‘K’ on her head. Next day a rural policeman found the bleeding, frantic woman on a ditch bank beside a country road and took her to a hospital. Later she was sent to an asylum. One night, a few weeks later, they broke into a chain grocery in Stonewall, the A. & P., and wrecked it. The same night they went to a Negro café in the Back Alley, the Negro section of Stonewall, and smashed a big, loud Edison phonograph, which the proprietor of the café had mortgaged her home to buy. Then they began threatening a quiet, lonesome Jew who lived above his dry-goods store on Main Street. Some of the members of the Klan had charge accounts, long unpaid, at his store. At the post office one night, waiting around for the evening mail to be sorted, I heard Mr Giddy talking about him. He said, ‘He sits up there all night long, reading books. No telling what he’s plotting.’ The dry-goods merchant went to the hardware store one morning at a time when some of the Klan members were sitting around the stove and bought a double-barrelled shotgun and three boxes of twelve-gauge shells. He was not threatened any more.

  Late that spring it was rumored in Stonewall that the Klan had decided to do something about the corn-whiskey-distilling situation. The biggest distiller was Mr Sledge MacKellar; he employed four men at his copper still in Pocahontas Swamp. We knew he was immune from the Klan because he was Mr Giddy’s personal boot-legger, because he was fabulously expert with a shotgun, and because he had publicly served notice on the Klan. Mr MacKellar came out of the swamp one afternoon and said he was prepared for ‘the Bed-Sheets.’ By that time Klansmen were called ‘the Bed-Sheets.’ He said, ‘I’m a Democrat and I got my rights. The first time one of them Bed-Sheets sticks his head in my front gate, I’m going to take his head right off. I got a shotgun and I got it loaded and I’m just aching to pull the trigger.’

  We knew the distillers the Klan had in mind were the Kidney boys, and we were not surprised when we heard that a date had been set on which they were to be tarred and feathered. The Kidney boys were three drunken Irish brothers who lived in a house about two and a half miles out from Stonewall and operated a still in Big Cherokee Swamp, behind their house. Their names were Patrick, Pinky, and Francis. They drank about half the whiskey they manufactured. When they came to town that week for supplies, the clerks in the stores kidded them. ‘I hear the Bed-Sheets are going to call on you boys for a pot of tea Friday night,’ one clerk said.

  The Kidney boys had a hired man, an aged Negro named Uncle Bowleg, who later worked for a relative of mine. One time Uncle Bowleg told me how the Kidney boys brought about the downfall of the Invisible Empire in Black Ankle County. There were three entrances to the Kidney house – a front door, a back door, and a side door. When they heard the Klan was planning a call on Friday night, the brothers rented three dynamite outfits from a man who made his living blasting out tree stumps. They swapped him a gallon of charcoal-cured corn whiskey for the use of the outfits. They buried three great charges of dynamite in the yard, under the three paths leading to the entrances of the house. Wires led from the buried dynamite to batteries, to which switches were attached. The Kidney boys placed the batteries in the house, beneath three windows where they could sit and watch for approaching Klansmen. They planned to throw a switch the moment the Klansmen walked up one of the paths.

  That night the Kidney boys turned off all the lights and took places at the windows with the dynamite batteries and switches in their laps. Uncle Bowleg was in the house with them. The Kidneys soon got tired of staring out into the yard, waiting for Klansmen, and ordered Uncle Bowleg to fetch them a jug of whiskey and a pitcher of water. Uncle Bowleg said he was kept busy running from one Kidney to another with the whiskey. The whiskey made them happy and they began to talk, speculating on how much noise their blasts would make. ‘We’ll blow those Bed-Sheets to Kingdom Come,’ said Pinky.

  About ten o’clock, when the moon was high, Francis Kidney, who was guarding the side door, decided he could wait no longer. The whiskey had given him an irresistible desire to throw the switch on his battery.

  ‘Get ready!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘I just can’t wait no longer. I’m going to test this dynamite. The Bed-Sheets won’t come in by the side door, anyway.’

  He threw the switch and there was a blast that shook the entire lower half of Black Ankle County. It caused people to leap out of their beds. We heard the blast in my home, and I remember that my grandmother said she thought that Judgment Day or the Second Coming was at hand.

  Uncle Bowleg said the blast tore up a massive longleaf pine tree in the yard of the Kidney house and threw it into the highway. Uncle Bowleg was so frightened he jumped under a bed and hid. The Kidneys ran to the front porch and looked at the great tree lying in the highway. It pleased them. They laughed and slapped each other’s shoulders. They came in and poured themselves some drinks. Then Patrick and Pinky took their places again, but Francis had thrown his switch, so he lost interest and went to sleep in his chair. In about half an hour, Patrick Kidney, who was guarding the rear door, heard a rustle out in back of the house. He knew it was the wind rustling the leaves on the chinquapin bushes, but all he wanted was an excuse to throw his switch.

  ‘I think I hear them coming!’ he shouted to Pinky, who was sitting at the front door with his hand on his switch. ‘Get ready. I’m going to let go.’

  Pinky needed some excitement, too. ‘Throw the switch!’ he yelled.

  Patrick threw his switch. The blast rattled Pinky and he threw his switch, too. The blasts were almost simultaneous. The slats fell out of the bed under which Uncle Bowleg was hiding and bruised him all over. A big framed picture of the mother of the Kidney brothers fell off the wall and hit Francis on the head. The legs dropped off the kitchen range and it fell apart. The entire back porch was torn loose from the house. The blast blew up the chicken house and a barrel in which the two hounds slept. All the chickens were killed, except an old rooster, and he never crowed again. Next morning there were six dead hens on the roof of the house and dead hens and ducks were scattered all over the yard. The South Carolina line runs near the rear of the Kidney house, and Uncle Bowleg swears that the hounds landed in South Carolina and were so shocked and outraged they never crossed back into North Carolina again. The mule’s stall fell in.

  ‘The roof fell down on that old plug,’ Uncle Bowleg told me, ‘and he bolted out into the road with the roof on his back like a saddle and galloped two miles before he felt safe enough to slow down and look around. And there was a rocking chair on the back porch and the dynamite set it to rocking. Next morning it was still rocking.’

  When the noise died down that night, and when things stopped falling apart, the Kidney brothers looked at each other. They were shamefaced. Suddenly they felt frightened. Without their dynamite, they felt naked and defenseless. ‘If the Bed-Sheets come now, we’re sure done for,’ Francis said. His mother’s picture was raising a bump on his head. All of a sudden the Kidney boys ran out of the house and made a dash for Big Cherokee Swamp, with Uncle Bowleg following. Early next morning Uncle Bowleg got hungry and went back to the house for something to eat but the Kidney boys stayed in the swamp until noon.

  As a matter of fact, they would have been just as safe in their wrecked house as they were in the swamp, because the Ku Klux Klan never did show up. The Klan had postponed its scheduled call because Mr Giddy had arrived at the hall over the bank too drunk to take any interest in Klan matters. However, while the Kidneys were still snoring in the swamp, Mr Ransom, who hadn’t been able to get any sleep because of the three strange blasts, drove into Stonewall in his Ford and picked up Mr Giddy. Mr Ransom was sleepy and irritable and Mr Giddy had a bad hangover, and they were not a happy pair. They drove out to the Kidney house to see what had happened during the night. When they arrived, Uncle Bowleg was sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch, eating a plate of corn bread and molasses. Mr Giddy and Mr Ransom walked into the yard and looked into the three gaping holes. Uncle Bowleg watched them like a hawk.

  ‘Spuddy,’ said Mr Giddy as
he peered into the hole out of which the longleaf pine had come, ‘that sure is a damned big hole. I sure am glad I wasn’t around when those holes were dug.’

  ‘Catfish,’ said Mr Ransom in a frightened voice, ‘somebody might of got murdered last night. It’s a good thing the Klan didn’t ride last night.’

  Uncle Bowleg said they both stared into the holes and shuddered. Then they got into the Ford and drove away rapidly. During the day all the members of the Invisible Empire took occasion to drive by the Kidney house. They also shuddered when they saw the dynamite pits.

  Late that afternoon Mr Giddy showed up on Main Street. He was drunk again. He walked down Main Street, but he didn’t sing. He stopped each person he met and said, ‘Friend, I have resigned.’ ‘Resigned from what, Mr Catfish?’ people asked. ‘Don’t make no difference what I resigned from,’ he answered. ‘I just want you to know I resigned.’ The Ku Klux Klan never held another meeting in Stonewall. In a week or two the black paint was scraped off the windows in the hall above the bank and a ‘For Rent’ sign was hung out. One woman ripped up her husband’s Klan robe and made a pillowcase out of the cloth. Others heard about it and did the same. Mrs Catfish Giddy ripped up her husband’s robe and told her friends he was so fat she found enough material in it for two pillowcases, an apron, and a tablecloth.