Ring Shout(27)

Emma gasps. “That’s ghastly!”

Chef shrugs. “All of it was. But like I say, just old stories. No such thing as Night Doctors. They not real.” Her eyes turn to me, then Nana Jean. “They not real, right?”

The Gullah woman twists up her lips. “Night Doctors, dem ain a story. Disya tale true.” Her brown-gold gaze bores into me. “Hunnuh fuh go ta de ebil place t’night?”

I nod. “Need all the help we can get. I ain’t asking permission.” I try to sound defiant, but feel more like a little girl sassing off.

“Haint ooman dem tell hunnuh de way?”

I lift up my book of folktales. “Everything I need in here.”

“Ain hab no sode ’do.”

“It broke,” is all I manage.

Old woman never liked that blade, but her face now say she don’t like me going off without it neither. Still, she gives a nod—not permission, but at least understanding. Don’t realize how much I want that, till she done it.

“Mine yo self,” she warns low. “Dat ebil place ain like yuh. Hunnuh don’ tek cyare hunnuh git turn ’bout een dey hall. Wensoneba people dem da gwine dey, dey da gii up sump’n. Leabe sump’n b’hin. Sway hunnuh gwine come back yuh whole?”

“Whole as I can,” I say, remembering I don’t make promises.





Notation 25:

The Shout Eve and Adam tell ’bout them two listening to that wicked snake and eating the fruit from the forbidden tree. When God call out, Adam don’t answer. So He get to asking Eve. She say Adam going ’round picking up leaves to hide his nakedness, now that he know shame. When we do that Shout, we go ’round pretending to gather up leaves like Adam, hiding from the Lord. Suppose we making fun but it’s a warning too—be mindful of getting mixed up with old wicked snakes.

—Interview with Ms. Susyanna “Susy” Woodberry, age sixty-six, transliterated from the Gullah by EK





SEVEN

It’s still hours before dawn when I set out. Chef tries to come too, but Auntie Ondine and them make it plain this got to be done alone. Story they write in my book, say I got to go into the woods and find the dead Angel Oak tree—whatever that be.

Not much woods in Macon. Most got cut down to plant cotton. But Nana Jean say she’ll help. Tell me to walk out past Molly’s barns. When I do, the ground under me feel like it’s changing. And before I know it, I’m thick in woods I know wasn’t here before. Only these the strangest trees I ever seen: with branches growing blue bottles instead of leaves. I stare up at them and make out the trapped haints. When we was small, my brother showed me how to catch lightning bugs in jars. That’s what they remind me of, twinkling so.

I pick my way through the strange woods, touching the rough bark and wondering if it’s real. In my head, I recite the story Auntie Ondine wrote in my book: To find the dead Angel Oak tree, you have to want to badly enough. So I’m thinking up all the reasons I’m hunting it. This Grand Cyclops we have to stop. Butcher Clyde and the Ku Kluxes. Rescuing Michael George. The offer Auntie Jadine sees me taking, betraying everything. Mostly, I think of Sadie. Remembering the light dying in her eyes like a blowed-out candle. It fires an anger in me like an animal clawing to get free.

It’s as I blink away fresh tears that the dead Angel Oak tree appears. And I do mean appear, because one moment it’s not there and the next, it is.

Whoever named it, named it proper. The tree bone white, glowing against the black night. Long knotted branches grow out from a thick trunk, going every which way like the twisted legs of a spider—some up or to the side, others sweeping across the ground. There’s no leaves on them gnarled-up things neither. Instead there’s bones. Skulls, rib cages, horns, all kinds, from different animals, hanging and swaying in the night breeze.

I have to drag my feet to keep going, walking between branches I feel might snatch me up. When I reach the trunk, I pull out Chef’s trench knife, the only weapon I brung. I plunge it straight into the white wood, and thick sap the color and smell of blood oozes out. Tightening up my jaw and my belly, I stab again, and again, into wood that spatters me in soft flesh. When I get a good hole formed, I reach in hands to pry it apart. It look like raw muscle in there, moving about and alive. Trying not to gag, I push an arm in up to my shoulder, forcing the hole to grow until the side of my body can get in, then part of my leg. I gasp when the tree takes hold of me and gives a strong tug, sucking me halfway into its flesh. I fight, panicking. But that tree pulls again. Once, twice, swallowing me up.

I’m falling. Tumbling through darkness before landing on something hard—cheek-first. I cough, spitting out bits of what I don’t want to imagine, a metallic taste coating my tongue and the scent of a butchery in my nose. My clothes and hair are soaked to my skin like I been swimming in a river of gore. I almost slip under the slickness of my Oxfords before rising to my feet and looking about.

Sure ain’t Bruh Rabbit’s laughing place, my brother whispers.

I’m standing in an empty corridor so white it looks bleached. It stretches far as I can see. I make out other corridors branching from it, and wonder if they endless too. There’s an unnatural quiet, so all I can hear is my own breathing. Turning, I see I’m against a wall. It got a bloody gash on it like a wound—the hole I cut into this world.