Ring Shout(31)

When I can see again I’m back. In the dissecting hall. There’s a new sound in my head—shrieking, from a dozen voices.

Too much! Too great! It is too much!

The Night Doctors. They bent over, hands to their heads, like they trying to block something out. Their power over me seems broken, and I can move and sit up. My shirt is open so I can see my belly. Everything is how it’s supposed to be. Only sign my insides was ever spilled out is the tiniest scar I feel under one finger. In my other hand is something even more amazing. My sword!

It’s as bright as it was in the dream place, and whole. The blade hums, vibrating as the souls drawn to it sing out their lives. These Night Doctors, who would snatch away slaves in their ones or twos, got more misery and pain coming from those songs than they ever know. And it’s too much. I take some pleasure in seeing them squirm.

Then Dr. Bisset is there.

“Enough!” he snarls.

Suddenly I’m lifted up from the dissecting table and moving in that odd way he do down corridors. When we stop my back slams against a wall, the one I came through.

“You have overstayed your visit,” he says. “Time to return.”

“What about your lords? Will they help?”

“You are fortunate you still live after what you’ve done.”

“We had a bargain! That you would talk to them for me!”

He leans forward, looking at me through the white blindfold he got back on. “Were I you, I would take what I have gained and never come back here again.”

He gives a hard shove, and I fall into stone, passing through darkness, soft and fleshy, before tumbling onto earthen ground. I lift up to see I’m a ways behind Nana Jean’s farmhouse. The forest of giant bottle trees is gone. And looming up before me, the dead Angel Oak tree is fading. I watch it go, before lying down to stare up into the night, clutching my mended sword to my chest.





EIGHT

It’s raining the Sunday night we make our way up Stone Mountain.

Not no Presbyterian rain neither. I’m talking a shaking and hollerin’ Baptist downpour.

We an odd bunch. Me and Chef. Emma and three of her “comrades,” including two dark fellas she say Sicilians. Molly’s apprentices, Sethe and Sarah, in wide-brimmed hats and rifles over their shoulders. Nana Jean here too, with Uncle Will and the Shouters. I tell that Gullah woman this no place for old folk, but she say they fixing to do some big root magic. And when she set her mind, no changing it.

Ain’t easy going neither. Stone Mountain just as it’s named: a dome of gray touching the sky. The bottom is surrounded by trees and shrubs. But the top is mostly bare stone and the trail we taking been turned into a mess of water and sediment. Flashlights help, but even then it’s hard going. Traded my Oxfords for boots and gaiters, some moss-green knickers, a dark shirt, and a navy-blue poncho Molly stitched from rubbery cloth that hard to stay wet. Nana Jean sensed rain was coming, and had us pack proper. Seems her premonition more literal than I thought. Still envy Chef’s soldiering outfit. Not to mention that hat what water just slide off of. I got my own brown cap pulled tight. Make it hard to see, but keeps the rain out my face.

About a half hour past we met with other bands who answered our call. Most from nearby Atlanta, veterans easy to pick out in their rain slickers and rifles with silver bayonets. Smaller groups come from Marietta and Athens. Even so, only about thirty of us can fight. Which ain’t much.

I wonder about Dr. Bisset keeping our bargain. Though remembering his face when last I seen him, wouldn’t bet on it. Memories of my insides being pulled out sends a hand to my stomach. Was that just a night ago? Took shifts with Chef in the six-hour drive from Macon. But what sleep I got was fitful, full of things I’d like forgetting. Now a dull ache weighs on my limbs. Not sure what keeping me going. Maybe just anger.

Sometimes I forget, and glance over to check on Sadie. I imagine the complaints she’d be making over this rain. Or the nonsense she’d be going on about—some story from her tabloids. Feels like them Ku Kluxes cut her right out this world, leaving behind a hole where she supposed to be. Now they got Michael George. It all set a fire burning hot enough in me I think the rain might sizzle on my skin.

Trees start getting sparse, leaving only steep wet rock ahead. That finally convinces Nana Jean to stop. Say she, Uncle Will, and the Shouters to rest here and join us later. Chances of that is next to none. But fine by me. She puts a blessing on us before we go, leaving them sheltered under a crop of trees to make our way to the mountaintop.

Slippery don’t begin to describe this climb. The bare rock feels smooth beneath me, and I fight to keep my footing. As we get closer, I can hear noise like someone talking as light reflects off the sky. It gets louder, blaring by the time we reach near the top. A man’s voice booms into the night, competing with the rain. The anger in me boils as I recognize it. We gather everybody under a last patch of brush and trees, allowing them to catch their breath, while me and Chef creep forward to see what we arrived to.

The sight that greets us is out of a nightmare. A broad stretch of gray stone full of Klans. Never seen so many. Must be hundreds. They stand in rows, seeming unconcerned their robes getting soaked to the skin. Their hoods are pulled back, and wide, staring eyes are fixed straight ahead, at a movie playing on Stone Mountain.

The Birth of a Nation.

I asked Molly how they’d show a movie outside. She said all they needed was a projector that generated its own power and something to bounce the picture off of. Seems they built a screen. Thing must be fifty feet tall and twice as wide. Don’t know where the projector is, but it’s beaming moving pictures big as ever. At the bottom of the screen, a wooden platform been built. On it stand six men and women, with arms tied in front and sacks over their heads. My heart catches at seeing their dark limbs in the light coming off the screen. One got to be Michael George.