Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Revenge For What They Done

Slavery is the worst crime against humanity ever committed by a country now infamous for its successfully orchestrated coups around the world, its rather less successfully prosecuted wars, and its consistent support for oppressive regimes as long as they protected its business interests. So a bit of historical context for this novel is essential.

Many consider the abolition of slavery in America a virtuous act. It wasn’t. The Emancipation Proclamation was an expediency of war. The promise of “40 acres and a mule” made by the conquering General Sherman to freed slaves was rescinded by the slave-owning successor to Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson, leaving them with no economic resources. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1868 (essentially by force), was effectively nullified by the Jim Crow laws and did far more for the abstract person of the American corporation than for the well-being of black American citizens. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960’s were resented by almost half the white population of the country, had to be enforced through the military and federal prosecutors, and have been eroded continuously to the present day. “Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way,” as one of Djèli’s characters says.

White resentment in America has now transformed itself into a narrative of victimhood. Since an appreciation of irony is not a common (white) American trait, one might say that for the most part such victimhood is merely a matter of apathy, mis-education, casual self-interest, or stupidity. But there is a hard core that is passionately committed to violent racism. It is this kernel of hate that creates and sustains the victim narrative, continuously invents new threats for white people from black people, and routinely carries out crimes against black people ranging from police harassment to murder. These people are monsters.

These monsters are the focal point of Djèli Clark’s book. His monsters aren’t just produced by unfortunate environmental circumstances, that is, parental training and social emulation. Cultural racists are merely Kluxes. A sort of Lamarckian evolution has taken place in some, however, so that racial hatred is now embedded in their genes. They pass on their monsterhood, as it were, to their children, who now form a substantial gene-pool of rock solid , incorrigible hate. There is no re-education or re-habilitation that can alter their drive to destroy black people. They are also very difficult to kill. Like Zombies, they can loose limbs and organs while continuing to pose a threat. These are the Ku Kluxes who have even evolved pointy heads that fit nicely into Klan hoods.

In the early 1920’s, the period of the novel, there were probably at least 3 million former slaves alive in the United States. They, and their children and their children’s children, were disenfranchised, denied due process of law, physically isolated, and systematically oppressed by every agency of government. Their legal status had changed but their existential reality had not. There had recently been massacres of black people in Tulsa, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington DC, and in rural Arkansas, Texas, and Florida. The same Ku Kluxers were in charge as had been the half century before, and the two centuries before that under other titles but with the same monster genes. And they continue to evolve, getting cleverer all the time about the vulnerabilities of black folk, knowing more and more about “the places where we hurt.”

It is necessary to “have the sight” in order to spot the Ku Kluxes in a crowd. They are “the Lie running ‘round as the Truth.” Together they form the “Invisible Empire” of white supremacy. That empire is managed from elsewhere, by a force not of this world, by the devil himself. And so supernatural help is essential to combat them. This is a battle for the soul of the world, a spiritual war. And it not just one of many confrontations with evil, but rather the deciding war, equivalent to that recounted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, only with Satan leading his mob while waving a copy of the Bible. So forget your government help, your socialist heaven and your evangelical apocalypse. This here is the place to be. “They say God is good all the time. Seem he also likes irony.”

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