Ring Shout

by P. Djèlí Clark

  “Oww! What?”

  “We don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  Chef chuckles, watching Sarah walk away. “Them hips ain’t trouble at all.”

  We straighten as Molly turns to us. “What’s with the cotton?”

  Sadie, sitting on top of a bale, fishes out a bottle, wiggling it playfully.

  “Whiskey!” Molly laughs. “How did you come by that?” Her look goes serious again. “Sorry about my earlier rudeness. Just a little out of sorts—got three distilleries going, not to mention my other work.” She nods to the house. “Go on in and get some food. Call you when I’m ready for you.”

  She turns back to the barns, and we head to the house. Along the way we pass small trees with deep blue bottles on their branches, the hot summer wind making them whistle faintly. Like the door and porch ceiling, that blue’s meant to ward off haints. Gullah folk say them bottles catch bad spirits. Can’t see what that do to Ku Kluxes, but I ain’t one to question Nana Jean’s ways. From inside comes clapping and singing. The door is ajar and when we push it open, there’s sights enough to catch your breath.

  There’s a Shout going on. In the center of the room, five men and women—their hair peppered with white—move in a backward circle to the song. Them’s Shouters. Keeping time is the Stick Man, stooped and beating his cane on the floor. Behind him are three Basers—in overalls frayed by labor, and clapping hands just as worn. They cry out in answer to the Leader, a barrel-chested man named Uncle Will in a straw hat, bellowing out for the world to hear.

  “Blow, Gabriel!”

  “At the Judgment.”

  “Blow that trumpet!”

  “At the Judgment bar.”

  “My God call you!”

  “At the Judgment.”

  “Angels shouting!”

  “At the Judgment bar.”

  The Shout come from slavery times. Though hear Uncle Will tell it, maybe it older than that. Slaves would Shout when they get some rest on Sundays. Or go off to the woods in secret. They’d come together and carry on like this: the Leader, the Stick Man, and the Basers, singing, clapping, and stamping, while the Shouters move to the song. In the Shout, you got to move the way the spirit tell you and can’t stop until it let you go. And don’t call it no dance! Not unless you want Uncle Will to set you down and learn you proper. See, the Shout ain’t really the song, it’s the movement. He say the Shouts like this one got the most power: about surviving slavery times, praying for freedom, and calling on God to end that wickedness.

  I can feel my sword appear faint in my hand like a phantom thing—half in this world, half in another. The chanting in my head starts up, and chiefs and kings wail as those they sold flood to the leaf-shaped blade, and old gods stir awake to sway in time to the Shout. Whole room is flooded with light—rising up from the singers, crackling lightning bursting from the Stick Man’s cane, and leaving dazzling tracks where the Shouter’s feet shuffle without ever crossing. That brightness drowns out all else—even a frightened little girl whispering her fears before vanishing into smoke. My blade drinks in that magic, and the chanting in my head grows. But it don’t just come to me. Most of that light flows to a woman in the center of the room in a haint-blue dress.

  Nana Jean.

  Magic washes up against her, long arms that look made of packed dark earth soaking up light. It oozes in fat drops from her fingertips into bottles arranged about her—and the liquid inside turns honey gold, lighting up like a lantern. I seen this Gullah woman do this plenty, and my eyes still wide.

  When the Shout ends, the light vanishes. The Shouters, Basers, Stick Man, and Uncle Will covered in sweat, like they worked their spirits hard. Nana Jean drops down to plop heavy into a chair, her fleshy body creaking the wood as young boys cork the bottles and pack them into crates.

  This here Nana Jean’s secret recipe—parts corn, barley liquor, and Gullah root magic. For some it’s a drink—smooth as gin, strong as whiskey. Others use it to sanctify homes. Or to rub down babies. Folk call it all kinds of things: Mama’s Tears, Pure Water, Mami’s Wata. But each bottle got the name in plain letters: Mama’s Water.

  Nana Jean intend it as protection. A bit of magic to ward off evil in our times—Klans, lynching, mobs. And Ku Kluxes. Maybe it do, maybe it don’t. But this concoction one of the biggest moneymakers in the county. When me, Sadie, and Chef ain’t chasing Ku Kluxes, we running Mama’s Water across half of Georgia. Like I said, this monster-hunting business don’t pay for itself.

  The scent of food coming from a table makes my mouth water. People already about it, heaping up plates. I’m set to join them when I feel Nana Jean’s gaze calling. I sigh. Look like food gon’ have to wait. I turn, stepping through the crowd toward her.

  This old woman the reason I’m in Macon now. Was three years back I heard her call, way up in Memphis, a croon riding the wind like dandelion seeds in that Red Summer. Reached me when I was running through the Tennessee woods: half-mad, blade in hand, exacting what vengeance on Ku Kluxes I could for what they done. Sadie the same way, tearing red death through Alabama with Winnie after Ku Kluxes murdered her grandpappy. Cordy came back from the war to Harlem, then Chicago, running from nightmares, claiming she could see monsters. But Nana Jean bid us stop, to turn our ears to her and come. Recruited us as soldiers in this war.

  “Nana Jean,” I greet respectful.

  She stay seated in her big chair. Her crinkly white hair hangs to her shoulders, almost as bushy as mine when it ain’t tied down. The scent of tilled country earth fills the space between us as brown-gold eyes look me over. She stops at my right hand, frowning. My sword is gone, but I know them eyes can trace its ghostly residue. She don’t approve of the blade. Or where it come from. Say gifts from haints carry a price. But she got her magic. And I got mine.

  “Dem buckrah debbil gii hunnuh trouble?” she asks.

  Nana Jean was raised up Gullah though she been in Macon most her life. Say her people bound to them Carolina islands, and being away so long faded her a bit. Though her Gullah talk don’t sound faded none.

  I relate what happened and her bushy eyebrows jump like white caterpillars. “Hunnuh jook dat buckrah debbil fuh see if e been dead?”

  My turn to frown. “I know a dead Ku Klux from a living one. That silver and iron hit them, and they get right back up.”

  She sucks her teeth. “Ki! Buckrah debbil dem ain good fuh nuttin!” Then more sober: “If dat silva ain good fuh nuttin needuh, dat real trouble fuh true. Lawd hep wi.”

  “Nothing we can’t handle.” Brave words, but I share her uneasiness.

  “Hunnuh ain kill no fool buckrah?”

  Buckrah devils what she calls Ku Kluxes. Fool buckrah she reserves for Klans who ain’t turned. She very particular about us not killing them who still human. Say every sinner got a chance to get right. I suppose. Way I see it, one less Klan, one less chance of a Ku Klux. But I bides by her rules and shake my head.

  She nods back, eyes wandering to the Shouters. Uncle Will talking to a small woman in a plain dress brown as her tied-up hair—the German widow, Emma Krauss. Her husband owned a store in town but the flu took him in 1918. She still have the store and is mixed up in our bootlegging business. But in Germany she trained to study music and can’t get enough of the Shout. Spends time writing down their songs and asking on how they come about.

  “When this lot heading home?”

  Nana Jean grumbles. “Say dey da gwine Friday. Fraid dey biggity preacha. E say de root haffa do wit witchcraft.” She snorts. “Biggity down preacha.”

  That ain’t good. Shouters needed for brewing Mama’s Water. Only lots say it’s wrong mixing up roots with the Shout. Sure ain’t for the bootlegging. Nana Jean argue better to keep folk alive; worry on their souls later. She convinced Uncle Will, mostly because he sweet on her.

  “But mebbe dey stay fah nyam me bittle.” She winks. The mention of food whips up a hunger that must show on my face. “Go git uh plate fore dat po’ gyal nyam up a
ll me bittle!”

  Don’t need to look to know she’s talking about Sadie. Girl could eat a whole cow, and God only know where she puts it. I turn to go, but Nana Jean catches my arm. I look to find her face thundering, brown-gold eyes bright like the sun.

  “Las’ night, uh yeddy three rooster singing at de moon!” she whispers. “Dis morning uh see uh rat swalluh up uh snake big dey, big dey! Me dream dem full uh blood redhead buckrah man. Dem omen bad. Bad, bad, bad. Yo tittuh dem.” She jerks a wobbly chin at Sadie and Chef. “Mine one’nuddah. Dis time yuh a ebil time. Bad wedduh gwine come.”

  When she lets go and falls back, I realize I been holding my breath. What in the blazes was that about? But the Gullah woman already closed her eyes, humming soft. I shake off the cold gripping my bones and head to join the others.

  By the time I grab a plate and sit down, I’m famished! There’s oyster rice, spicy shrimp and grits, fried okra, roasted fish, and sweet salty corn cakes. Take all my home training not to lick my fingers clean. Beside me, Sadie moans, rubbing her belly as across from us, Chef and the German widow argue up a storm.

  “What they going on about?” I ask.

  “What they always going on about?” Sadie replies.

  She picks up a New York tabloid—Emma has them delivered to her store—with pictures recalling the 1920 Wall Street bombing, and hands me a small pamphlet. It got a drawing of three men—colored, white, maybe Chinese—swinging hammers at a chained globe. WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! it reads. One of Emma’s for sure. Chef don’t care much for it, what she call Bolshevik rantings.

  “And I don’t want to see colored folk as shock troops in your revolution,” she’s insisting. “This ain’t Moscow.”

  “Nein,” Emma responds. “But there exist all the inequities of the tsar’s Russia. Sharecroppers like serfs. The debasement of workers. Race prejudice. All which socialism would eradicate!”

  “Socialism going to solve white folk?”

  “Once the poor white worker sees his commonality with the colored—”

  Chef laughs. “Your poor white workers be the first ones at a lynching. Up in Chicago they chase colored folk from their unions.” She leans in. “When I was small, white folk rioted because Jack Johnson outboxed a white man on the Fourth of July. They hunted Negroes from New York to Omaha. Slit a colored man’s throat on a streetcar, just for saying who won the fight. You think Marx can fix that?”

  Emma frowns. She ten years older than me, though hard to tell with her small features behind those round spectacles. “We must strive to show them they too are exploited. And not by those they are taught to hate, from which they earn nothing.”

  “Oh see, I disagree,” Chef retorts. “White folk earn something from that hate. Might not be wages. But knowing we on the bottom and they set above us—just as good, maybe better.”

  “But can you not imagine a better society?” Emma pleads. “Where colored and white work for the greater good? Where women are the equal of men? I did not support the Great War—it being a capitalist venture. But you fought. Yet you had to do so playing the part of a man, to join these Harlem Hayfighters.”

  “Hellfighters,” Chef corrects.

  “Ach! My point remains, we must dare to imagine a more equal world.”

  Chef shakes her head. “Imagining a thing don’t make it so. Me, I say let Negroes hoard up money like white folk been doing; let us get a few Rockefellers and Carnegies. My people got enough troubles without getting tied up with Bolsheviks. Ever think maybe your people might fare better if you wasn’t going around touting communism?”

  Emma puts on a sad smile that pokes dimples in her cheeks. “My people make money and we are ‘greedy capitalists.’ We call for an equitable society, and we are ‘dirty Bolsheviks.’ Those who wish to hate Jews will always find justification. They hung poor Mr. Frank here in Georgia after all, despite reason or the law.”

  Chef grunts. “Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way.”

  I turn from their conversation, putting aside the pamphlet and pulling out my book. It’s bent up and creased, but the front still visible—NEGRO FOLKTALES. I flip it open and let the words drown out the world until Sadie nudges me.

  “How many times you read that thing already?”

  I shrug. “Never kept count.”

  “You ain’t got no new books?”

  “It was my brother’s.” First time I tell anybody that.

  “Oh. He write it?”

  “No. But he used to read it to me.”

  “Stories ’bout Bruh Rabbit and Bruh Bear?”

  “And Bruh Lion and Tar Baby…”

  A smile tugs my lips remembering his voice, all excited in the telling.

  “Grandpappy had stories,” Sadie says. “Not no talking animals. Stories of haint lights, river witches, and people who could fly. He say slaves from Africy had wings, but white folk cut them off so they couldn’t fly home. When I was little, he say my mama fly away like that. Took me a while to know he mean she run off.”

  Sadie’s mama used to clean some big white man’s house back in Alabama. One day he get to watching her close and he … well, he done a very bad thing. After her mama leave, her grandpappy raise her. He never say who her daddy was, on account of Sadie being good with a rifle and Sadie being … well, Sadie. She catch my look and shrug in them too-big overalls.

  “Maybe my mama did spread wings and fly like a bird. Gone where she can’t be hurt no more. I ain’t mad at her for that.”

  She says that as casual as relating the time. But there’s a hitch in her voice that tell me she carrying her hurt deep, the way we all do. In my head, I remember my own mama, her humming lulling me to sleep and filling up the morning. Me and my brother would just lie around listening, drinking her voice in.

  “What we doing tonight?” Sadie asks, switching topics.

  “Nana Jean got a run for us, maybe.”

  “Pfft! On the Fourth of July? Bet your man’s joint gon’ be jumping!”

  “Oh?” I return to my book.

  “Oh? Best you got is an Oh? We running Mama’s Water for two weeks. Come right back to hunt Ku Kluxes. And you ain’t thinking on him?”

  “Maybe I is, or I ain’t.”

  A long wicked Sadie chuckle follows. “I had a man fine like that, I wouldn’t be thinking on riding around running Mama’s Water. I’d be thinking about riding his—”

  “Sadie Watkins!” I exclaim, looking up in exasperation.

  “Don’t be no prude. What you think Nana Jean and Uncle Will doing up in here tonight—”

  “Sadie! I’m asking you to stop. Please!”

  She’s grinning like a cat with no such intentions, when her eyes move behind me. I turn to find Nana Jean herself coming our way, one of Molly Hogan’s apprentices in tow. We stand up when she reaches us, and even Chef breaks off her debate.

  “Molly dem ready fuh see we,” the Gullah woman says.

  * * *

  “You can see the epidermis has grown a second sheath.”

  We in one of the barns that serve as Molly’s laboratory, watching her cut open the arm of a Ku Klux. Her gloved fingers peel back pale skin, showing muscle that turns gray as one of her apprentices douses it in preserving fluid that drips down the wood table.

  “Notice also the hand, the claws becoming more prehensile, almost feline.”

  She wipes at her face, forgetting it’s under a metal helmet—only her eyes peeking behind smoky glass. Molly ain’t got the sight. Few do. So she built this contraption, which her apprentices charge by cranking a metal wheel. It allows her to see like us—or something close.

  “You saying this Ku Klux turning into a cat?” Chef asks.

  “I’m saying that the organism—the Ku Klux—is evolving.”

  “Evolving?” Sadie looks up, fiddling with the knobs of a microscope. “Like that monkey man’s book?”

  “Darwin,” Molly answers, pulling the microscope away.

  “He the
one. But you say that take a long time.”

  Molly looks impressed Sadie remembers. “It’s supposed to. But I’ve recorded these changes over months. They’re happening, and fast.”

  Molly been making a study of Ku Kluxes. She the one ask us to bring back specimens. Say she always had a head full of smart. Only, wasn’t no school for freed people in Choctaw country in Oklahoma, so she taught herself. Came to Macon at Nana Jean’s calling, and brung her apprentices too. They brew up Mama’s Water in the other barn, and use this one for experimenting.

  “But what does it mean?” Emma asks, eyeing the Ku Klux arm like it might bite.

  Molly swings up the helmet, mopping her forehead.

  “Choctaw that owned my parents were Baptists. But my mother learned the old religion from those that refused the missionaries. Said they believe in three worlds—where we live, an Above world, and a Below world, full of other beings.”

  Sadie smirks. “Thought you was a godless atheist.”

  “I am. But who’s to say our universe is alone? Maybe there’s others stacked beside us like sheets of paper. And these Ku Kluxes crossed over from somewhere else.”

  “They was conjured,” Chef reminds.

  “‘Conjuring’ is just a way to open a door. Explains why their anatomy is so different, and the extreme reactions to our elements.”

  “Why they like drinking water so,” Sadie adds.

  She right on that. Can tell a Ku Klux straight away by all the water they drink. Colored folk who lived through them first Klans say they’d empty whole buckets, claiming they was the ghosts of soldiers from Shiloh. More water, they’d demand. Just come from hell, and plenty dry.

  “That too,” Molly says. “But they’re changing, right down to their organs, adapting to our world.”

  “Like they planning to stay,” I finish.

  Molly nods, and the room goes quiet.

  “That’s how the government want it,” Sadie speaks into the silence. “Y’all can roll your eyes all you want! But I’m telling you the government know ’bout all this. Been experimenting on them Ku Kluxes just like Molly. Can’t say if they working with them or against, but they know!”