Pine Knots and Prejudice
A True Story of Race, Friendship and the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South
Until the early 20th Century, tall trees waved in the sticky air as far as one could see across the central Louisiana flatlands of LaSalle Parish. But the arrival of the sawmill permanently changed the landscape.
Growing demand for cut timber and pulpwood began the fervent harvest of indigenous pines. They cut trees as fast as mill owners and operators could get them processed. Replanting rarely occurred, leaving barren fields of scrub.
Amid land left unprotected and scorching in the sun, new communities sprouted like well-watered seedlings. Workers moved in to meet the growing demand for labor at the mills, and schools and churches grew in accord, yielding promise for the future and a healthy fear of God.
The Pursers from southern Arkansas were among families finding opportunities in LaSalle Parish. They moved the town of Good Pine, where Mr. Purser took a job at the local sawmill and became a member of the school board and taught a youth Sunday-school class at church. Mrs. Purser worked in the home and spent considerable time making sure her family, including an older daughter and a younger son, followed the word of God.
Stuart, the son, was eight years old when his family made a move to Good Pine. He adapted quickly to friends and school, comforted by his quintessential family life, including a hardworking father, a Bible-revering, children-devoted mother, and a confidant sister two years his elder. The family traveled together in the summertime for two or three weeks to see Stuart’s mother’s family in Oklahoma and Texas and his father’s in East Tennessee.
Purser was a wiry lad who liked drawing as a hobby, using art supplies given by his mother’s family for Christmas presents. But at an early age, he spent more time with a pellet gun and a .410 shotgun, gifts from his father, who believed his son should be a boy’s boy.
Stuart Purser tramped the fields and wetlands around his home with a pellet rifle searching for quail and mallard ducks until his mother suggested that killing for no reason was against God’s will.
So he stopped.
On Friday evenings, Purser found notes written by his father of chores to do over the weekend. And, he knew better than to ignore the lists, or a belt whipping awaited.
He was eleven years old when he first collided with the harsher realities of life in Good Pine. Initially, he wanted to dismiss the obvious. Yet even a youngster has instincts.
Sure, the white robe he saw might be unusual apparel. He knew better, though. It was hanging farthest reach of his father’s closet, adorned with a hood and bearing the emblem of a fiery cross.
Purser was merely looking for his misplaced boots when he stumbled on the robe. Shaken, he shut the closet door and ran off, forgetting about the boots. The robe looked identical to one he had seen on the front page of the weekly parish paper, the LaSalle Times, and he could not get the image of the robe, and questions about his father, out of his mind.
The year was 1918, and Good Pine was more a pine-knot crossroads than a town, despite the recent growth fueled by the timber business. The Bradshaw Lumber Company mill was the centerpiece, and just a few miles down Louisiana Highway 84 was the larger parish seat, Jena (pronounced Jeen-a).
Lumber production was almost nonexistent in Louisiana until the early Twentieth Century, but as wood supplies in the East diminished, timber companies set up mills in pine-rich northern Louisiana.
The fast-paced sawmill production required hundreds of hands, requiring recruitment from across multiple states. And since rural communities like Good Pine had sparse infrastructure, mill operators had to provide housing, law enforcement, and even school funding to bring enough workers to town. The new jobs, moving entire families to town, rapidly changed longstanding racial and cultural mix in the area.
White Midwestern mill owners and bosses with names like Ludwig, Hansen, and Mann migrated south to rural Louisiana from Wisconsin and Minnesota. The community also had a large collection of local natives referred to as “Lakites.” A mix of French, Indian, and Spanish heritages, they lived in low, swampy sections between Good Pine and the Mississippi River bottoms bordering nearby Catahoula and Concordia lakes.
Cajuns moved into the area from southern Louisiana for work, so did Anglo-Saxons like the Purser family, from southern Arkansas, eastern Texas, and northern Louisiana. Negroes, as they were called by the discerning non-black residents, made up 40 percent of the population.
The mill owners and bosses were among the more powerful members of the community. They often lived alone, leaving their families back home. Supported domestically by black help during the week, they sought entertainment and refuge in larger cities like Alexandria and New Orleans on the weekends.
Locals identified the working-class Lakites by their dark, almost smoky, reddish complexions. Most whites considered the Lakites’ lineage to be partly Negro. Whites were also disturbed by the Lakites’ clannish behavior and their preference for hunting and fishing over working in the mills. But the Lakites were also known for their fearlessness and for being excellent workers when so inclined, so they were tolerated most of the time.
The Cajuns kept mostly to themselves, living carefree lives highlighted by Saturday-night community parties of drinking, dancing, and frivolity called fais do-dos. Nobody had much trouble with the Cajuns unless they tried to crash one of the parties without an invitation. Most people knew better, of course.
Negroes were assumed by local whites to consist of two factions. One included longtime residents who grew up working on farms in the region. They could be trusted. The other was a smaller group that had migrated to central Louisiana from the East in search of work, moving from fishing and riverboat jobs along the Mississippi to employment in the timber industry. Whites considered these blacks to be drinkers and gamblers in possession of a mean streak.
LaSalle Parish was under the order of a sheriff and deputies, but they were understaffed and had little influence among citizens. The supreme law in the community was dictated by a less recognizable but much more powerful group. More than half of all white men in LaSalle Parish were sworn under oath to protect the white citizenry using whatever means necessary as members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Members justified violent actions-including threats, beatings, and lynching against blacks believed to have acted disrespectfully toward whites-as “sending a message” or as “God’s justice.” No other explanation was necessary.
Founded in Tennessee in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War as a means of keeping newly freed blacks from obtaining equal rights, the Klan had all but died out in the South by the turn of the twentieth Century. But, a regional rebirth was well under way by Stuart Purser’s childhood as whites sought to maintain power and their view of rightful order in labor-sensitive areas with black populations. The all-male Klan membership paid dues to the brotherhood and wore white robes with hoods to cover their identities. More often than not, the rolls included church members and business owners, self-professed men of God, and pillars of the community.
Drawing strength from a national association stretching from New Orleans to Memphis to Detroit that grew to four million members by 1920, the LaSalle Parish Ku Klux Klan controlled matters of law and morality, particularly those involving blacks and other non-whites. Most times, life in LaSalle Parish was quiet, and the Klan went unnoticed. Men worked in the sawmills and other businesses, while women tended the households, and children went to school. Community members in good standing were expected in church on Sunday.
Yet tension was always present. When the women and children settled quietly in their homes at night, white men of the community, including Mr. Purser, reached into their closets, pulled out their white robes, and rode off in pickup trucks to destinations unknown to everyone else. They did not speak of where they went or what they did. They did not have to. If a black man, or even a white on occasion was not providing for his family, or was drinking heavily, or was gambling and fighting, or was creating disturbances, and the sheriff failed to punish him properly the Klan would administer lashings or issue stern warnings. Or even worse, as Stuart Purser discovered one Friday afternoon just before school dismissed for the week.
He was waiting to play in a pickup basketball game with friends when he noticed a group of boys in a huddle just off school property. Curiosity got the best of him. Moving closer to the group, he recognized Tom Girley as the young man on the stump. Girley, a Lakite boy a few years older than Purser, had a long rope in his hands and was speaking in an evangelistic cadence.
“Sure,” he told the assembled crowd, “this is the rope. If you don’t believe it, you can ask the sheriff at Little Creek. He is the one who gave it to my dad. My dad said they might need it again if some of these niggers don’t cake notice. But to cut chis ten-foot piece wouldn’t hurt it any. He says that every real man should have a piece of lynching rope over his mantel to remind him of his duty to protect his woman against niggers.”
Little Creek was another crossroads community in LaSalle Parish. Located six miles from Good Pine, it had a post office and a store to serve its fifty-two residents. Purser was cold by a friend in the gathered crowd that a ‘nigger’ boy had raped a white girl at Little Creek, and that the Klan had taken the law into its hands, hanging the boy with the rope now on display.
The boy on the stump was cutting the rope into eight-inch pieces and bartering the small keepsakes for valuables like marbles and arrowheads. He offered a rope piece to Purser in exchange for shotgun shells, but Purser declined without responding, backing away from the crowd. The backs of Purser’s eye sockets felt as if a vice were squeezing them. Nauseated by the sight of a rope that had hanged a boy to death, he eventually had to lie down to gather his thoughts.
By the time he reached home, Purser was shaking with sobs. He knew he could not discuss the incident with his father. He had seen the robe in the closet, after all. But neither could he swallow his question any longer.
After a restless night crowded with images of what the black boy might have looked like dangling from the rope, he awoke on Saturday morning to an invitation from his father to join him on a drive to Jena. Purser declined, seeking time alone with his mother.
Sensing he was disturbed, Purser’s mother invited him to sit in the porch swing with her. Comfortable at his mother’s side, he finally asked the question he had held so tightly.
“Mother,” Purser asked, “is Dad a Ku Klux?”
His mother did not answer, but neither did she avoid the truth. She believed the Klan was necessary for law enforcement until the sawmill owners provided more officers for the sheriff. The local mill had created the
Sheriff’s department and paid the sheriff and his deputies. But because law enforcement officers worked for the mill, not the people, they were mostly ineffective.
Good Pine, Purser’s mother said, was a different kind of town with different types of people, a place void of capable and willing law enforcement. She suggested that their fellow church members lobby the mill owners for more officers and “really pray” over the situation.
Convinced his father was in fact, a member of the Klan, Purser asked an even more pressing question.
“Mother, did Dad help hang the Negro at Little Creek?”
His mother looked away before replying.
“No, son,” she said. “Your dad did not, nor did the Klan take part in the lynching at Little Creek. It was done by the father of the girl who claimed that she was raped, with the help of kinfolks and others in the community.”
She said she was sorry for the hanged Negro boy, and just as sad for the boys who would want such a souvenir as a piece of the rope that killed him. She would ask the ladies of the church to pray for the boys, who had obviously “not had the right teaching.”
Most of the boys were members of his father’s Sunday school class, but Purser assumed the lynching would not get discussed there. He did notice, however, that the pastor spoke from the pulpit of the wrongness of teaching children to celebrate such cruelty, undoubtedly because Mrs. Purser had talked to him about it. His mother further warned Purser and his sister about subscribing to the “wrong kind of thinking in the world.”
His father’s Klan membership did not dictate the family’s friends. The Pursers spent most time with the Jacksons, a black family living two miles outside Good Pine. Seventeen-year-old Emalina Jackson, who was said to have the natural beauty of an Egyptian princess, helped Mrs. Purser with cooking and cleaning. But she was more than just domestic help. She was a friend and confidant — as much as a young black girl could be to an older, married white woman.
Emalina’s brother, named Henry at birth but nicknamed Applehead as a child, was Stuart Purser’s age. The boys hunted and fished together year-round. Purser’s father even hunted regularly with Applehead’s father, Old Newt, and brothers Young Newt and Chris.
Mr. Purser routinely took members of his Sunday-school class possum or raccoon hunting on Saturday nights with the Jacksons, letting Applehead and Stuart come along. The group would meet at seven in the evening and hunt past midnight. The excursions were unpopular with many church members outside Mr. Purser’s Sunday-school class, probably because of the racial mix of the participants and the late nights. The hunts made for exemplary Sunday school attendance, however. Mr. Purser believed they kept boys from Saturday-night waywardness.
Emalina was a professed Christian who held Sunday-school classes for area children in her home, using lessons purchased and donated by Mrs. Purser. She had aspirations of attending all-black Grambling University and becoming a schoolteacher. To earn more money for her education, she took a job cooking and housecleaning for a single white mill boss many years her elder. The work paid well for the time and place, but she found the mill boss wanted more than her domestic services in return. One day’s friendly pat on the arm became another day’s grope of the buttocks, which became another day’s direct invitation for sex.
“Why don’t you lie down with me?” the mill boss inquired.
Emalina was stunned silent, turning down wordlessly the offer of a three-dollar-per-week raise in return for sex. She needed money, but not at that price.
The mill boss said, “Fine, then.” Emalina should suit herself. “Leave town by Monday,” he ordered.
Later that day, the sheriff visited Emalina and told her the very same thing.
“Leave town by Monday,” he said.
Though the sheriff worked indirectly for the mill boss, he was also the designated law of the community. If he said to leave town, she had no choice but to obey.
The next day, Emalina choked back tears while confiding in Mrs. Purser what had happened. Mrs. Purser told her husband even though Emalina had asked her not to and Mr. Purser was as distraught by the news as his wife. He worked for the mill boss, but empathetically liked the Jackson family.
When Mr. Purser visited the mill boss to discuss the situation, he lost his temper midway through a terse conversation, and in a raised voice, he accused the man of preying on the young lady.
“You old bastard,” he said. “You are not fit to sleep with the dirtiest Negro girl alive.”
Likely due to his stature with the Klan, an organization feared and loathed by the mill bosses, Mr. Purser did not lose his job. But Emalina did leave town, living for a spell with relatives elsewhere in the state. Weeks later, though, Mr. Purser announced to his family that Emalina was coming back home. He even drove to the train station to pick her up and delivered her and her luggage to the Jackson home.
Over the years, Stuart Purser’s friendship with Applehead flourished. They did not attend the same school, of course, since blacks and whites learned at separate schools. But after classes and home chores, Purser and Applehead were often together all around town. They mixed together like sorghum and biscuits, Applehead said.
Tall and skinny, with a small head that inspired his nickname, Applehead was the youngest of the Jackson boys. He could run faster than all his peers, was the best at any sport played by boys black or white, had a knack for fishing and hunting, and was smart. Applehead was also thrifty and dependable and would not tell a lie.
Purser often walked several miles to the Jackson house. He played there for hours with Applehead’s three pet raccoons and in a nearby creek that ran behind the home. Purser’s father admired Applehead, considering him a worthy friend for his son. He did not object to the considerable time they spent together, including meals at the Jackson home, where the featured dish was a possum and sweet potatoes.
Applehead professed love for his pet raccoons, handling them in their large pen the way other people played with their cats and dogs. He once confided to Purser that he did not understand why white people called blacks “coons” to suggest their worthlessness.
“Coons are not worthless,” said Applehead. “They can say whatever they want about me, but suggesting a coon is no good just makes me furious.”
When Purser was fourteen, he and Applehead were still part of Mr. Purser’s Saturday-night possum hunts. Tom Girley, the Lakite boy who had sold pieces of the lynching rope at school, joined the group, too. Girley, known as a troublemaker, had twice run away from home. But he was a hero among many of the white boys in LaSalle Parish because of his strong-willed, rebellious personality. He and Purser were little more than indifferent acquaintances; however, the result of the rope incident and a beating Girley once gave Purser over a prank pulled at Girley’s expense during a church service.
On one hunt in late November, Mr. Purser could not go along. In his absence, Tom Girley and several other Lakite boys were left to their imaginations without adult supervision except for Old Newt, Applehead’s father. The group was just about to call it a night when Old Newt’s hunting dogs ran a raccoon up a tree. The Lakites brimmed with anticipation.
Girley and his friends thought good entertainment would come from wresting the raccoon from the tree to let it fight on the ground with the dogs. Raccoons always lost such encounters eventually, getting ripped to shreds by the dogs. Still, some could fight for hours, a possibility that made an otherwise routine central Louisiana night positively captivating for the Lakites.
Old Newt disapproved of the fight, but the Lakite boys would not listen to the black elder. Girley picked up a sharp stick, gouged it into the treed coon’s fur, and twisted it in an attempt to cause enough pain that leaving the tree to join the boys and dogs on the ground would seem appealing to the animal. The coon squirmed and squealed.
Girley’s attack and the animal’s discomfort struck Applehead hard. He broke out running toward Girley. He kicked Girley in the shins and punched him before the boy could respond. Applehead knew in the deeper reaches of his mind that a black could not strike a white, even if provoked, but he simply could not stop.
Incensed by the attack, Girley lunged back at Applehead, yelling that he would “kill the coon,” but the other boys held him back. With Old Newt there, they could not give the Negro the beating they felt he deserved, and Girley and Applehead parted ways that night without making peace.
Several years passed. Nothing more came of the incident, though it simmered with Girley. Applehead avoided the Lakite boy but held him in silent contempt.
Stuart Purser went away to college, attending a small, all-white Southern Baptist school in nearby Pineville, Louisiana. He majored in art, his passion, focusing on painting, landscapes in particular. He and Applehead continued to see each other when possible, and he warmly referred to his friend in short, as ‘’Ap.”
When Purser was home for Christmas his freshman year, he and Ap duck-hunted together. And in June 1925, after Purser’s freshman year, he and Ap entered the annual local fishing contest they had won three out of the past four years. They triumphed again, thanks to a full stringer of bream.
In the weeks after the fishing contest, Purser traveled with his family to East Tennessee to visit relatives in the Dayton area, where the Scopes Monkey Trial was underway. High-school teacher John Scopes was charged by the state of Tennessee for unlawfully teaching evolution in the classroom. The American Civil Liberties Union-inspired case made national news, pitting man’s evolution from apes against the Bible’s divine creation. To reinforce the theory of evolution, a New York lawyer who was a member of the defense team brought a trained chimpanzee to Dayton to show how closely related it was to man.
When Purser and his family heard the chimpanzee was going to be at a Main Street diner in this small town, they went together for a bite of lunch, hoping for a peek.
Dressed in a gray tweed suit with a red tie, the chimpanzee pulled out chairs and seated those at its table, tucked a napkin into its shirt before dining, and puffed on a cigar after the meal, blowing smoke rings. When the New York lawyer saw Purser’s uncle Jack across the room, he approached and made mention of Jack’s receding forehead and protruding chin.
“This is the perfect example which proves man evolved from the ape,” the lawyer said loudly, so everyone in the diner could hear.
Angered by the man’s words, Uncle Jack stood up.
His fist closed.
Whack.
The lawyer fell to the floor.
The local police arrested Uncle Jack for assault, but the charges later dropped.
Stuart Purser was amused by the event, yet brief his brush with the Scopes trial drew his attention to conflicts of race and the plight of black Americans.
One week after registering for his sophomore year at Louisiana College, Purser received an early-morning telephone call from his father, urging him to come home at once.
‘’Ap is in trouble,” his father said.
Purser boarded a bus in Pineville on a Thursday morning and arrived in Jena that evening. His father picked him up at the bus station and filled him in on what had transpired.
The previous Saturday night, the local Negro baseball team had played against the Natchez (Mississippi) Blues. Customarily, local whites showed up to watch the black teams because the play was so competitive. Among the observers that night was Tom Girley, watching the game with friends from the third base line. He was close enough that the players could easily hear his remarks.
Ap played for the local black team. When he came to the plate, Girley yelled to the pitcher, “Throw him a sweet potato with a little possum grease on it! Maybe he can hit that!”
The pitcher willingly joined the conflict, throwing his first ball high, hard, and inside, brushing Ap’s chin and knocking him to the ground.
The crowd murmured.
Ap stood up, brushing off the dust.
“That’s right!” yelled Girley. “Kill the damn coon!”
Ap heard the remark loud and clear, raising his head and eyebrows toward Girley.
Ap then turned and hurled his bat in the direction of Tom Girley’s voice. Girley saw it coming and ducked, but it struck an eight-year-old white boy in the temple, sending him to the emergency room at the Jena hospital.
The sheriff arrested Ap on a charge of assault. But since Good Pine did not have a jail, he was held temporarily in a back room at the local doctor’s office.
That night, a group of angry Lakites came to get Ap for lynching. The sheriff suggested they wait to see whether the injured boy lived or died before dealing with Ap. If the boy died, lynching would be in order. If he survived, an excellent scar-inducing lashing might suffice.
Ap overheard the conversation.
After the crowd dispersed and the sheriff left, Ap removed putty from a window sill, slid out the panes, and escaped, running into the nearby pinewoods.
The bloodhounds sent out the next morning could not find Ap. Days passed with no sign of the escapee.
Mr. Purser suspected Ap was still in the area and thought Stuart could find him. If someone did not reach him quickly, the Klan would sooner or later get him and almost certainly hang him, producing another souvenir rope for Girley.
Fellow KKK members had been pressing Mr. Purser for a meeting to decide what to do about Ap. Most had no idea Mr. Purser knew the escapee so well. Mr. Purser hadrefused calling a meeting, causing members to question his leadership, but he could not stand the thought of Ap getting lynched.
If Stuart could find Ap, perhaps they could help him.
And sure enough, within an hour of beginning the search for his friend, Stuart Purser found Ap near the fishing hole they had used to win the recent contest.
Ap’s first question was about the condition of the boy struck by the bat.
“He’s shown improvement,” Purser said. “He’s going to be okay.”
Ap was relieved.
“We have to get you out of here,” Purser said.
But Ap did not want to run away.
“If I could get a fair trial…,” he said, words trailing off.
No chance, Purser said. A black man who injured a white boy in Good Pine could not get an impartial jury. And the Klan would not allow him to reach trial anyway.
They’d kill him first.
So Mr. Purser coordinated with the sheriff to formulate a relocation plan for Ap. They would pick him up at midnight and drive him to another parish, leaving him in the hands of the local sheriff. He would face trial there.
They left as planned for the transfer. On the other side of Jena, they saw in the distance thirty or more cars gathered in an empty lot illuminated by flames. Light from the fire revealed men were wearing white robes.
The Klan must have received a tip, Mr. Purser assumed.
He turned the car around, afraid the group might try to intercept it and take Ap. Mr. Purser told the sheriff they should try the next night again.
The sheriff agreed.
Mr. Purser took the sheriff home and returned Ap to his hiding place.
Back at the house, Mr. Purser confided in Stuart that he feared Ap would never be treated fairly if left with law enforcement in any parish in Louisiana. Perhaps, he suggested, Ap should be encouraged to run away from LaSalle Parish that very night. If Ap left soon, Mr. Purser said, he could be in northern Louisiana or Arkansas before the sheriff or anyone else started looking for him.
Stuart Purser did not want to see Ap run away from punishment. But like his father, he knew if Ap did not flee, the Klan would eventually find him and probably kill him.
Agreeing on the change in plans, Stuart and his father drove in the early-morning hours to meet Ap. They gave him a knapsack containing food, a jacket, and seventeen dollars and instructed him to leave immediately, heading north.
They then watched him disappear into the dark of night.
The sheriff never told anyone that Mr. Purser had helped Ap getaway.
Ap made a new life for himself after the escape, first working in another Louisiana sawmill town and later in St. Louis, Missouri. The boy he injured survived, but only after a lengthy recovery of more than a year, and with a metal plate placed in his skull.
Mr. Purser later learned the Klan had not been waiting for them that night as he assumed. Rather, it was meeting instead to elect a new high official to replace him.
He permanently distanced himself from the Ku Klux Klan after the incident.
Stuart returned to college, majoring in art. His niche became portraying the story of rural blacks on canvas. In the late 1940s, Purser was named the first chairman of the art department at the University of Mississippi, where he discovered and folk artist M.B. Mayfield. Years later, as chairman of the art department at the University of Florida, Purser found and elevated awareness of work by sculptor Jesse J. Aaron.
You can read more about Stuart Purser here.
David Magee is the author of a dozen books, including The Education of Mr. Mayfield, named a top non-fiction book in the south (2009). This true story is excerpted from that book. You can find it here.
