The Weapon that Made Southern Men Free
What did your dad call his club with nails sticking out of it?
The real-life Buford T Pusser, crusader for Christ, warrior for justice and champion of decency, defender of the weak, knocker of skulls, both white and Negro
When I was a boy, my Dad had a club he carried in his car. It sat on the passenger floor and Dad had arranged a leather belt around the gear shift which the club slipped into, so the grip end stuck up, like a second gear shift, ready to hand.
It was eighteen or twenty inches long and swelled out like a baseball bat. In the fat end, he had drilled a hole, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and was about eight inches deep. This hole was filled with lead, making the club very heavy indeed. Pretty much every man in Dixie had a club like this in his car or truck. Although they were not designed or implied to be effective exclusively in convincing African Americans to behave, they were nevertheless universally known as nigger-knockers.
These handy dandies were often crowned with barbed wire, pronounced “bob wahr.”
If you doubt this, ask any Southern man over the age of 40 or so, did his dad have a club in the car and what was it called. He’ll tell you, “why sure! That was my daddy’s nigger-knocker.”
This fine artifact has been used so extensively it has cracked. The clever warrior used galvanized pipe hanger strap to prevent it breaking in half.
My Dad’s nigger-knocker was unique to him, fit to his style and preference. There were many different types. Some were skinnier, and sold in truck stops, ostensibly so truckers could use them to thump dualley tires during pit stops, to check for flats.
They could be seen thumping their tires while the pump monkey pumped diesel into the big chrome tanks, but they could and did use them to thump skulls too. So they were genuinely dual-purpose tools, as befit the impoverished practicality of post-war Southern men.
The little boy in the trailer down the road from us had a dad who drove trucks all week and raced stock cars on the weekend and he had such a store-bought club. The maker had burned the logo “TIRE BUDDY” onto the side, and old Mr Crenshaw carved “NIGGER-KNOCKER” right below.
Most folks eschewed store bought frivolities back then, considering them faggy. Lots of men made their nigger-knockers from axe handles, or baseball bats and they were either very large or weighted in the persuasive end, like my Dad’s.
Cops had department issue nigger-knockers they used to tremendous effect on the skulls Negroes and white alike. I once saw a cop beat some sense into a drunken Indian and I can tell you, the guy had obviously trained a lot. It was like watching Bruce Lee whip the snot out of forty Japs with his nunchuks. The same cop used to do speed checks down by the city limits, handing out $10 speeding tickets to “any bastard that won’t from around here and drove like he owned the damn town.” (You might never have heard won’t used that way, but back then it was synonymous for – and less faggy than -- the effeminate wasn’t.)
Me and my friends used to ride our bikes up and down the road near-by. I asked the cop to show me his nigger-knocker shortly after he beat down that Indian. He proudly showed it to me. It was all black and shiny, and very small and very heavy, about twelve inches long. The logo proclaimed PERSUADER.
The most famous nigger-knocker of all time was wielded, both in real life and on the silver screen, by the great, legendary hero and champion, Buford T Pusser, a real man whose adventures were portrayed in the cinematic masterpiece par excellence, Walking Tall. No, not the faggy remake staring that Flippa mystery meat rat “The Rock.” The REAL Walking Tall, staring Joe Don Baker. Best effing movie I have EVER seen and you cant say any different.
Which brings us to the reason we’re talking about this today. And, no, its not just because I get nostalgic about good old-fashioned race violence. That movie, and that weapon, represent the massively successful means by which outnumbered, defeated and impoverished Southern Man defended his home and culture for more than a century against all odds. Stick with me.
I won’t go into any plot details, except to say that Pusser retires from life on the road as a professional wrestler and returns to his family home, along with his wife and children, to live with his father and work for the family logging business (the Prodigal Son, again. See what I keep telling you?) He is shocked and dismayed that his little town has become sin city, complete with casino gambling and some primo whore flesh bouncing around in little camper trailers. When the casino rats try to cheat Buford’s friend, he steps in and they cut him up a treat and leave him for dead in the swamp. Problem is, he didn’t die. Instead, he carves out the world’s biggest nigger-knocker and begins handing out justice.
If you’re wondering, no, he doesn’t knock any black heads. Not that he wouldn’t’ve but they all know better than to give him any trouble. For now, let’s just say the criminal scumbags of the county stand no chance against Buford and that club of his. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor, then come back here and tip me for turning you on to such a great, life-affirming movie. Some really fine looking women in that movie, too, if that’s your thing.
I remember going to a high school football game when I was about 6 or 7 years old. Our boys were playing the high school about 15 miles away, the Indian boys. It was the big rivalry game and there were dozens of cops and hundreds and hundreds of men equipped with nigger-knockers. The fight erupted beneath the home bleachers right after half time. Thunk! Swish! Oooooo! HAHAHAHA! Thumk! BLOOOONKTP! Old scores were settled. New gripes were recorded. It was exciting! Not pleasant. Not even remotely. There was blood. Profanity. But it was cathartic.
And it was absolutely necessary. In a county where whites, Negroes and Indians were about evenly populated, these occasional, scheduled melee rounds were a vital part of the broader necessity of peace and mutual understanding. Multicultural equilibrium would have been absolutely out of the question without regular annual rumbles.
These rumbles nearly always featured less-than-lethal weapons and means; chains, tire irons, rocks and nigger-knockers. Our culture had a strong and ancient code of Chivalry, and that code means that when grown men do combat and nobody gets killed, no crime has been committed. The fight was fought and by sunrise, peace was restored. Southern life was a self-correcting mechanism, as old and rich as the dirt that nurtured our hardscrabble existence.
The concept here is part of what my dad used to call “The Mean South.” Our people had a reputation for meanness, for being quick to anger and quick to violence. We had a reputation for very high solidarity across class, what sociologists call “in-group preference”, such that no jury will convict one of our own in a dispute with an Outsider.
I’ll give you $5 to call these boys racist hicks to their face.
Today, we tend to value our reputation for friendliness, openness, hospitality, While those are very fine qualities in moderation, they render us extremely vulnerable to attack by those who hate us. The Mean South reputation our fathers cultivated was a highly effective shield. Very few Yankees dared come here and screw with us. They built interstate highways so they could zoom past us on their way to Florida without risking a serious ass-stomping in our dangerous little hick towns, and that suited us fine. When they did finally come to force their ideas on us, it was only when blacks agreed to serve them as human shields.
They weren’t Yankees, to be perfectly accurate, they were Jews. But we’ll have more on that in another piece.
But even before the “freedom March” nonsense, I believe our Mean South shield was stripped away from us by presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, when they sent US Soldiers to beat and shoot us if we tried to resist public school integration.
These lurid images of white Southerners getting pushed around by jack-booted thugs polluted the magazines and television screens all across Yankeeland.
We were coming up on the centennial of the Civil War and less-well morally grounded Yankees began masturbating at the thought of reliving old glories and victories and raining new hate and new humiliation upon the hated enemy. It was Uncle Tom’s Cabin all over again and none of them ever imagined that integration would ever become a problem in their own, almost Negro-free communities.
This was all long ago, of course. The dumb Yanks who pushed these horrible ideas on us are all dead now and it’s unChristian to cherish old grudges against the dead, so we won’t pursue that here.
The horrible result for us was, we changed. In an upcoming piece, we’ll look at how Hollywood began pushing “All Men Are Brothers” themes in the 1960s, including hints of it in Walking Tall. It seemed like a harmless, feel-good message, even a nominally Christian one, and our greenhorn dads fell for it. Fell for it like an egg from a tall chicken.
Click this timestamped link to see the great James Coburn call Cary Grant a “greenhorn jackass.”
One by one, and then all in a bunch, they put down their nigger-knockers, began smiling and waving stupidly at the rich Yankees and Jews who were building new mansions on dirt-cheap Southern land.
We were beaten. And we stood there grinning like dumb yokels in a Ma & Pa Kettle movie while they auctioned off our land, stripped us of our culture outlawed our memorials, desecrated the graves of our fathers and whispered to our daughters about the joys and thrills of black cock.
Listen, we live under foreign laws. Laws written by women and Jews and blacks and who knows what all outlandish creatures. These laws do not allow men to behave chivalrously. So until we get command of our own lives, until we regain the liberties our dads gave away so foolishly, we cannot use nigger-knockers as they were meant to be used. I’m not suggesting that.
But if you are fortunate enough that you still have your daddy’s old nigger-knocker, I suggest you dig it our, clean it up, polish the barbed wire, spray lacquer over the old caked blood stains and display it proudly over your mantle. Let it be a promise to your sons and grandsons.
We shall not forever suffer in humiliation and slavery.
Lance Peckerwood is Senior Writer and Editor-in-Chief for Dies Irae, a chronicle of the outpouring of God’s Wrath upon a rebellious and ruined earth. Dies Irae is a free publication. Please subscribe and please share.
This is fkn great! My uncle Billy was a long-haul driver practically all his life. He had a nigger knocker for every day of the week. "Don't be half a man, join the Klan" poster on his garage wall. Drank Budweiser in a can. Carried the Colt 1911 he brought back from France in his back pocket. Threatened to use it on JFK. Should have used it on LBJ. Sent all kinds of money to George Wallace. Predicted the demise of our country when integration became law. We knew he was right, he always was. Luckily, he passed away before a muslim illegal alien was selected to preside over our country. So, where to now? White culture is being replaced and an army within is being assembled through a nonexistent border. The crash of the mighty dollar is imminent, as BRICS sheds their excess baggage. The special money laundering operation in Ukraine has no specific direction. Un elected police state agencies can't wait to take our guns and ship us off to 15 minute cities or a large landfill. Jabbing us with poisons. Infecting the minds of our children with useless drivel and satanic litanies. The future's uncertain and the end is always near. Let it roll, baby, roll. I hope I die before I get old. Dig your words, my man.