Hannah Irwin

Hannah Irwin was twelve when the war ended. She was born on the Bennett plantation near Louisville, Alabama, to Hester and Sam. When interviewed she was elderly and living mostly alone in a one-room house on a knoll above Chewalla Creek, visited now and then by friends bringing fruit or a little money.

Her clearest memory was a night during Reconstruction, when Black families on a neighboring plantation, whose enslaver had been killed in the war, moved to take land there. The widow came to the Bennett place in alarm. Bennett left without a word, and soon Hannah saw a band of white-robed riders on white horses gallop past her cabin. The Klan threatened the Black families with death, and afterward, she said, Black people around Louisville kept quiet. She first took the riders for ghosts, and she told the interviewer she later learned Bennett was one of them.

She said a Union officer once asked her what the "white flowers" in the field were, not recognizing cotton. She described herself as never feeling unfree on the Bennett place. She had no use for conjure women who promised to heal her hip in exchange for half her government rations.