Ring Shout

by P. Djèlí Clark

  Still, Sadie’s bought me precious seconds. Above, Chef is calling with an arm extended. But I won’t make that climb—not before the Ku Klux is on me. Searching frantic for a way out, my eyes land on a window. I slide down the rope, palms burning on the coarse fibers. Please let it be open! Not open, but I almost shout, “Hallelujah!” when I see it’s missing glass on one side. I grab the upper edge with a hand while planting a brown Oxford on the bottom. Above I hear shouts, and from the corner of my eye catch the Ku Klux running for me and leaping, claws extended and mouth wide.

  I push through that open slot and practically fall inside, just before the Ku Klux hits the wall. A long snout breaks through the remaining glass, snapping at air. Sadie’s rifle goes off again, and the monster roars in pain. Turning its gaze up, it digs bony claws into the brick and starts to climb.

  I watch all this lying on a bale of cotton. Lucky, because I’d be a sight more tore up landing on the wood floor. Still, that fall hurt something awful. It takes a moment to roll off my back and stumble to my feet, feeling bruised all over. Except for sunlight streaking through windows, it’s dark in here. Stifling hot too. I shake my head to clear it. Don’t hear no more rifle shots, but I know there must be a fight on the roof. Need to get back up there to help Chef and Sadie. Need to—

  Something heavy rams the warehouse doors, making me jump. Did somebody finally hear all the noise we making behind the fireworks and whatnot and come looking? But when the doors get hit again, strong enough to almost buckle them, I know that’s not people. Only thing big enough to do that is—the doors are ripped near off their hinges before I can finish the thought, spilling in daylight and monsters. The two other Ku Kluxes. My luck done run out.

  They easy enough to recognize. One missing an arm. The other, possibly the biggest Ku Klux I ever seen, got a dent in its pale white chest. The two sniff at the air, searching. Ku Kluxes don’t have good eyesight, even though they got six. But they can smell better than the best hound. It takes two heartbeats for them fix on me. Then they’re galloping on all fours, snarling and marking me as prey.

  But like I said already, I hunt monsters.

  And I got a sword that sings.

  It comes to me at a thought and a half-whispered prayer, pulled from nothingness into my waiting grip—a silver hilt joined to smoke that moves like black oil before dripping away. The flat, leaf-shaped blade it leaves behind is almost half my height, with designs cut into the dark iron. Visions dance in my head as they always do when the sword comes: a man pounding out silver with raw, cut-up feet in a mine in Peru; a woman screaming and pushing out birth blood in the bowels of a slave ship; a boy, wading to his chest in a rice field in the Carolinas.

  And then there’s the girl. Always her. Sitting in a dark place, shaking all over, wide eyes staring up at me with fright. That fear is powerful strong—like a black lake threatening to anoint me in a terrible baptism.

  Go away! I whisper. And she do.

  Except for the girl, the visions always different. People dead now for Lord knows how long. Their spirits are drawn to the sword, and I can hear them chanting—different tongues mixing into a harmony that washes over me, settling onto my skin. It’s them that compel the ones bound to the blade—the chiefs and kings who sold them away—to call on old African gods to rise up, and dance in time to the song.

  All this happens in a few blinks. My sword is up and gripped two-fisted to meet the Ku Kluxes bearing down on me. Big as it is, the blade is always the same easy balanced weight—like it was made just for me. In a sudden burst the black iron explodes with light like one of them African gods cracked open a brilliant eye.

  The first Ku Klux is blinded by the glare. It stops short, reaching its remaining arm to put out the small star. I dance back, moving to chants thrumming in my head, their rhythm my guide, and swing. The blade cuts flesh and bone like tough meat. The Ku Klux shrieks at losing a second arm. I follow through with a slash at its exposed neck, and the monster crashes down, gurgling on dark spurting blood. The bigger Ku Klux lumbers right atop it to reach me and there’s a sharp crack I think is the wounded monster’s spine.

  One down.

  But that big Ku Klux not giving me time to rest. It launches at me, and I jump out the way before I get crushed. I give a good biting slash as I do and it howls, but lunges again, snapping jaws almost catching my arm. I duck, moving deeper into the maze of bundled cotton, zigzagging before squeezing into a space and going still.

  I can hear the Ku Klux, raking claws through cotton bales, searching for me. My sword has thankfully gone dark. But I won’t stay hidden long. I have to become the hunter again. End this.

  C’mon, Bruh Rabbit, my brother urges. Think up a trick to fool ol’ Bruh Bear!

  Pulling out my pocket watch, I kiss it once. Quick as I can, I rise up and hurl it clattering across the wood floor. The Ku Klux whips about, tearing after the noise. As it does I climb onto the bales, running and hopping from one to the other, until I get to where it’s hunched over, sniffing the pocket watch—before smashing it under a clawed foot.

  That makes me madder than all else.

  With a cry I hurl myself at it, the chants in my head rising to a fever pitch.

  I land on the monster’s back, the blade sinking through flesh into the base of its neck. Before it can throw me off I clutch at ridges on its pointed head and with my whole body push the blade up and deep. The Ku Klux jerks once before collapsing facedown, like its bones turned to jelly. I fall with it, careful not to get rolled under, still gripping the silver hilt of my sword. Regaining my breath, I do a quick check to make sure nothing’s broken. Then, pushing to my feet, I press a boot onto the dead thing’s back and pull the blade free. Dark blood sizzles off the black iron like water on a hot skillet.

  Catching movement out the corner of my eye I spin about. But it’s Chef and Sadie. Relief forces my muscles to relax and the chanting in my head lowers to a murmur. Chef lets out a low whistle seeing the two dead Ku Kluxes. Sadie just grunts—closest she comes to a compliment. I must look a sight. Somewhere along the way I lost my cap, and my undone hair is framing my coffee-brown face in a tangled black cloud.

  “Called up your little pig sticker?” Sadie asks, eyeing my sword.

  “The one up top?” I ask, ignoring her and breathing hard.

  Sadie pats Winnie in answer. “Took a mess of bullets too.”

  “And this knife when things got close,” Chef adds, patting her war souvenir.

  Outside the parade’s moved on. But I can still hear the brass band and fireworks. As if a whole lot of monster battling ain’t happened just some streets over. Still, somebody over there bound to know the difference between firecrackers and a rifle.

  “Let’s get moving,” I say. “Last thing we need is police.”

  Macon’s constables and the Klan not on good terms. Surprising, ain’t it? Seems the police don’t take well to them threatening to run one of their own for sheriff. That don’t mean the police friendly with colored folk, though. So we try not to cross them.

  When Bruh Bear and Bruh Lion get to fighting, I remember my brother saying, Bruh Rabbit best steer clear!

  Chef nods. “C’mon, yella gal—say, what you doing there?”

  I turn to find Sadie poking at a cotton bale with her rifle.

  “Y’all ain’t ever worked a field,” she’s muttering, “so don’t expect you to know better. But July is when the harvest just starting. Warehouse like this should be empty.”

  “So?” I glance nervous at the alley. Don’t got time for this.

  “So,” she throws back at me, reaching inside a bale. “I want to see what they hiding.” Her arm comes back, holding a dark glass bottle. Grinning, she pulls out the cork and takes a swig that sets her shivering.

  “Tennessee whiskey!” she hoots.

  Chef dives for another bale, digging with her knife to pull out two more bottles.

  I give Sadie my own grunt. Tennessee whiskey worth a pretty penny, wha
t with the Prohibition still on. And this little monster-hunting operation costs money.

  “We’ll take what we can, but we need to hurry!”

  I look down at the dead Ku Klux. The monster’s bone-white skin is already turned gray, scraps peeling and floating into the air like ashes of paper, turning to dust before our eyes. That’s what happens to a Ku Klux when its killed. Body just crumbles away, as if it don’t belong here—which I assure you it does not. In about twenty minutes won’t be no blood or bones or nothing—just dust. Make it feel like you fighting shadows.

  “You need help with—?” Chef gestures at the dead Ku Klux.

  I shake my head, hefting my sword. “Y’all bring the truck. Nana Jean been expecting us. I got this.”

  Sadie huffs. “All that fuss over a dog, and this don’t make you blink.”

  I watch them go before fixing my eyes back to the dead Ku Klux. Sadie should know better. That dog didn’t hurt nobody. These haints evil and need putting down. I ain’t got a bit of compunction about that. Lifting my sword, I bring it down with a firm swing, severing the Ku Klux’s forearm at the elbow. Blood and gore splatters me, turning at once to motes of dust. In my head the chanting of long-dead slaves and bound-up chiefs starts up again. I find myself humming along, lost to the rhythm of my singing blade, as I set about my grisly work.

  TWO

  The parade dies away as we leave downtown Macon in our beat-up old Packard, with its faded green doors, rattling engine, and patched-up wheels. But it runs good as the newer motor trucks, Chef insists. She at the wheel, filling up the cab with thick oaky cigarette smoke.

  “Why come I always got to sit in the middle?” Sadie complains, scrunched tight against us with the Winchester between her knees. “And why Cordy always get to drive?”

  “Because I’m oldest,” Chef answers around her Chesterfield.

  “So? I made twenty-one last month. Six years more don’t make much.”

  “How about this. I’m the one who drove these back in France. And if I can dodge German mines I can avoid Macon’s potholes.” She swerves as if to prove her point.

  “Well, why Maryse get the door? She ain’t but four years older than me.”

  “Because I don’t hang out the window trying to shoot rabbits?”

  Sadie rolls her eyes. “First you sweet on dogs, now rabbits.”

  “If you like, could ride in the back.” Chef jerks a thumb to the truck’s bed covered by a bulging tan canopy. Sadie grumbles and hunches down with a miserable look. Nobody wants to sit with what we hauling.

  I take to gazing out the window, reading advertisements plastering the walls of downtown Macon. One is for Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum. There’s another with the Uneeda Biscuit boy in his yellow raincoat, carrying a box of crackers. But what my eyes fix on is a poster taking up the whole side of a building. It shows two Civil War soldiers—one in blue, the other gray—shaking hands under a gaudy American flag. D. W. Griffith presents is printed in red, then in big white letters, THE BIRTH OF A NATION. “Come see the rerelease of the film that thrilled the country!” a caption reads. “Sunday, at Stone Mountain!”

  Sadie leans over me, stretching out the window to hurl curses at the poster.

  Can’t say I blame her.

  * * *

  You see, the Second Klan was birthed on November 25 back in 1915. What we call D-Day, or Devil’s Night—when William Joseph Simmons, a regular old witch, and fifteen others met up on Stone Mountain east of Atlanta. Stories say they read from a conjuring book inked in blood on human skin. Can’t vouch for that. But it was them that called up the monsters we call Ku Kluxes. And it all started with this damned movie.

  The Birth of a Nation comes from a book. Two books really—The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, by a man named Thomas Dixon. Dixon’s father was a South Carolina slaveowner in the Confederacy. And a sorcerer. Way I hear it, a heap of the big ups in the Confederacy was into sorcery. Dark stuff too. Jeff Davis, Bobby Lee, Stonewall Jackson—all in league with worse than the devil.

  The first Klan started after the war. Nathan Bedford Forrest—another wicked conjurer—and some spiteful rebels sold their souls to the evil powers. Started calling themselves Night Riders. Witches is what the freed people named them. They talk about them first Klans having horns and looking like beasts! People think it’s just Negro superstition. But some of them ex-slaves could see what Forrest and those hateful rebels had become. Monsters, like these Ku Kluxes.

  Was freed people helped end that first Klan—Robert Smalls and his band. The Klans died out, but the evil they loosed lived on—whipping and killing colored people for voting, driving them from government, whole massacres that established this Jim Crow what still choking us now. Hard to tell who won the war and who lost.

  For some, though, that wasn’t enough.

  Thomas Dixon’s father was in the first Klan and taught him that dark sorcery. Dixon Jr. wrote his books as a conjuring: meant to deliver up the souls of readers to the evil powers, to bring the Klans back. But books could only reach so many. That’s when D. W. Griffith took ahold of it. He and Dixon got to scheming and made over them books with a new kind of magic—the movie picture.

  When The Birth of a Nation came out in 1915, papers carried on about how lifelike it was, like nothing nobody ever seen. It sold out week after week, month after month. Got shown to the Supreme Court, Congress, even at the White House. White folk ate up pictures of white men in black shoe polish chasing after white girls. Had white women swooning in their seats. Heard one time a white man pulled a pistol and shot up the screen—saying he trying to “rescue the fair damsel from that damned Negro brute.” When the Klans ride in all gallant on their horses to save the day, white folk go wild—“like a people possessed,” newspapers say, which ain’t too far from the truth. Dixon and Griffith had made a conjuring that reached more people than any book could.

  That same year, Simmons and his cabal met on Stone Mountain. The Birth of a Nation had delivered all the souls they needed to stir up them old evil powers. Across the country, white folk who ain’t even heard of the Klan surrendered to the spell of them moving pictures. Got them believing the Klans the true heroes of the South, and colored people the monsters.

  They say God is good all the time. Seem he also likes irony.

  * * *

  We leave downtown, driving past well-tended mansions on College Street and cross into Pleasant Hill—with its one-story farms, small bright-painted shotgun houses, and homes of well-to-do Negroes. Freed people settled Pleasant Hill close to College Street, so white folk could keep their cooks and maids near. Got its own lawyers, doctors, grocers, whatever you please—like a separate Macon.

  Still, no telegraph lines though. The streets are unpaved, and the Packard kicks up dust in the dry July heat. Two years back, Pleasant Hill ran plumb out of water. Couldn’t bathe babies, cook, clean. City moved slow as molasses in January to fix it. Only time they come here is when some Negro escapes a chain gang. Then Macon police ride in on motorbikes hemming everybody up.

  We pass up a colored cemetery onto a long bend and down a bumpy stretch of road that make Sadie loose a string of complaints. Nana Jean’s farm looks almost abandoned: with fields of bushes and potted plants. It ain’t large: one story and a sloping roof supported by four posts, with a redbrick chimney and brown wood faded by sun and marked by rain. Only the front door stands out—a pale blue, like the porch ceiling and window frames.

  Chef stops the Packard, and Sadie’s already fussing for me to get moving. I don’t even open the door before a face pokes out from a barn in the back, staring from behind welder’s goggles. A body follows: a woman wearing a soot-stained gray welding apron over a white dress. She hikes up the hem and breaks into a stride in her laced-up black boots. Lord, that Choctaw woman can run! She’s before us in the time it takes me to step down.

  “You have it?” she pants, pulling up tinted goggles.

  “And good day to you too, Molly,” Che
f greets, jumping out.

  “Do you have it?” she asks again, round face frowning and all five feet of her drawing up. A gloved hand pushes strands of gray into a bonnet holding her hair. Molly Hogan is something of a scientist. And if she’s anything to go on, they can be a one-minded lot.

  “In the back,” I answer. She follows me to where Chef is lifting up the canopy. In the bed, between two bales of cotton, sit big glass canisters full of murky liquid. One holds the head of a Ku Klux, its face smashed up against the inside. Another a hand, long claws and all. A third, much of a foot.

  “I was hoping for an intact body,” Molly says, inspecting the canisters like she at a meat shop.

  “You ain’t got nothing to fit a whole body,” I remark.

  “Are they at least still in their dormant phase?” Dormant. That what she call when a Ku Klux pretending to be human. Molly ain’t got the sight. To her, what’s preserved in that fluid is a man’s severed head, hands, and feet—not a monster. Don’t seem to bother her none. Scientists are strange.

  “Didn’t happen that way,” I say. “And you welcome! Almost got killed getting these. We thought they was down but they got back up and sure wasn’t dormant no more. Turned into a real fight!”

  She looks up at me as if just noticing the mess I’m in. The edges of her eyes squint into tiny crow’s feet. “Cordy’s bomb didn’t work?”

  “My munitions was fine,” Chef huffs.

  Molly looks skeptical. “Should have been enough iron and silver in there—”

  “Should’ve,” Chef cuts in, “don’t make it so.”

  Molly frowns up, then calls to the barn. Four women come running, all dressed like her but younger: one my age, one around Sadie’s, and another just turned eighteen. Under Molly’s instructions, they start gathering the canisters. It takes two to lift each. The oldest, her name Sarah, almost drops her end. Chef catches it quick and she blushes with thanks. Chef flashes a grin and she only blushes more. I elbow her right in the ribs.