Ring Shout(10)

“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!”

Sadie got it in her head the Warren G. Harding government knows about Ku Kluxes. Say she pieced it together from the tabloids. That Woodrow Wilson was in on Griffith’s plan, but it got out of hand. And now there’s secret departments come about since the war, who go around studying Ku Kluxes. Girl got some imagination.

“Wherever these things from,” Chef grumbles, “they mighty active of late.”

She turns to a map pinned to a barn wall. Red dots mark it, indicating Klan activity. Two years back was only a few dots, most here in Georgia. Now there’s red everywhere—through the South, swallowing the Midwest, going far up as Oregon.

“Mrs. Wells-Barnett’s intel say Klan chapters on the rise,” Chef notes.

“And how many are Ku Kluxes?” Emma asks, eyeing the sea of red.