Ring Shout(6)

“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.