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.
“You have it?” she pants, pulling up tinted goggles.
“And good day to you too, Molly,” Chef greets, jumping out.
“Do you have it?” she asks again, round face frowning and all five feet of her drawing up. A gloved hand pushes strands of gray into a bonnet holding her hair. Molly Hogan is something of a scientist. And if she’s anything to go on, they can be a one-minded lot.
“In the back,” I answer. She follows me to where Chef is lifting up the canopy. In the bed, between two bales of cotton, sit big glass canisters full of murky liquid. One holds the head of a Ku Klux, its face smashed up against the inside. Another a hand, long claws and all. A third, much of a foot.
“I was hoping for an intact body,” Molly says, inspecting the canisters like she at a meat shop.
“You ain’t got nothing to fit a whole body,” I remark.
“Are they at least still in their dormant phase?” Dormant. That what she call when a Ku Klux pretending to be human. Molly ain’t got the sight. To her, what’s preserved in that fluid is a man’s severed head, hands, and feet—not a monster. Don’t seem to bother her none. Scientists are strange.
“Didn’t happen that way,” I say. “And you welcome! Almost got killed getting these. We thought they was down but they got back up and sure wasn’t dormant no more. Turned into a real fight!”
She looks up at me as if just noticing the mess I’m in. The edges of her eyes squint into tiny crow’s feet. “Cordy’s bomb didn’t work?”
“My munitions was fine,” Chef huffs.
Molly looks skeptical. “Should have been enough iron and silver in there—”
“Should’ve,” Chef cuts in, “don’t make it so.”
Molly frowns up, then calls to the barn. Four women come running, all dressed like her but younger: one my age, one around Sadie’s, and another just turned eighteen. Under Molly’s instructions, they start gathering the canisters. It takes two to lift each. The oldest, her name Sarah, almost drops her end. Chef catches it quick and she blushes with thanks. Chef flashes a grin and she only blushes more. I elbow her right in the ribs.
“Oww! What?”
“We don’t need that kind of trouble.”
Chef chuckles, watching Sarah walk away. “Them hips ain’t trouble at all.”
We straighten as Molly turns to us. “What’s with the cotton?”
Sadie, sitting on top of a bale, fishes out a bottle, wiggling it playfully.
“Whiskey!” Molly laughs. “How did you come by that?” Her look goes serious again. “Sorry about my earlier rudeness. Just a little out of sorts—got three distilleries going, not to mention my other work.” She nods to the house. “Go on in and get some food. Call you when I’m ready for you.”
She turns back to the barns, and we head to the house. Along the way we pass small trees with deep blue bottles on their branches, the hot summer wind making them whistle faintly. Like the door and porch ceiling, that blue’s meant to ward off haints. Gullah folk say them bottles catch bad spirits. Can’t see what that do to Ku Kluxes, but I ain’t one to question Nana Jean’s ways. From inside comes clapping and singing. The door is ajar and when we push it open, there’s sights enough to catch your breath.
There’s a Shout going on. In the center of the room, five men and women—their hair peppered with white—move in a backward circle to the song. Them’s Shouters. Keeping time is the Stick Man, stooped and beating his cane on the floor. Behind him are three Basers—in overalls frayed by labor, and clapping hands just as worn. They cry out in answer to the Leader, a barrel-chested man named Uncle Will in a straw hat, bellowing out for the world to hear.
“Blow, Gabriel!”
“At the Judgment.”