“Darwin,” Molly answers, pulling the microscope away.
“He the one. But you say that take a long time.”
Molly looks impressed Sadie remembers. “It’s supposed to. But I’ve recorded these changes over months. They’re happening, and fast.”
Molly been making a study of Ku Kluxes. She the one ask us to bring back specimens. Say she always had a head full of smart. Only, wasn’t no school for freed people in Choctaw country in Oklahoma, so she taught herself. Came to Macon at Nana Jean’s calling, and brung her apprentices too. They brew up Mama’s Water in the other barn, and use this one for experimenting.
“But what does it mean?” Emma asks, eyeing the Ku Klux arm like it might bite.
Molly swings up the helmet, mopping her forehead.
“Choctaw that owned my parents were Baptists. But my mother learned the old religion from those that refused the missionaries. Said they believe in three worlds—where we live, an Above world, and a Below world, full of other beings.”
Sadie smirks. “Thought you was a godless atheist.”
“I am. But who’s to say our universe is alone? Maybe there’s others stacked beside us like sheets of paper. And these Ku Kluxes crossed over from somewhere else.”
“They was conjured,” Chef reminds.
“‘Conjuring’ is just a way to open a door. Explains why their anatomy is so different, and the extreme reactions to our elements.”
“Why they like drinking water so,” Sadie adds.
She right on that. Can tell a Ku Klux straight away by all the water they drink. Colored folk who lived through them first Klans say they’d empty whole buckets, claiming they was the ghosts of soldiers from Shiloh. More water, they’d demand. Just come from hell, and plenty dry.
“That too,” Molly says. “But they’re changing, right down to their organs, adapting to our world.”
“Like they planning to stay,” I finish.
Molly nods, and the room goes quiet.
“That’s how the government want it,” Sadie speaks into the silence. “Y’all can roll your eyes all you want! But I’m telling you the government know ’bout all this. Been experimenting on them Ku Kluxes just like Molly. Can’t say if they working with them or against, but they know!”
Sadie got it in her head the Warren G. Harding government knows about Ku Kluxes. Say she pieced it together from the tabloids. That Woodrow Wilson was in on Griffith’s plan, but it got out of hand. And now there’s secret departments come about since the war, who go around studying Ku Kluxes. Girl got some imagination.
“Wherever these things from,” Chef grumbles, “they mighty active of late.”
She turns to a map pinned to a barn wall. Red dots mark it, indicating Klan activity. Two years back was only a few dots, most here in Georgia. Now there’s red everywhere—through the South, swallowing the Midwest, going far up as Oregon.
“Mrs. Wells-Barnett’s intel say Klan chapters on the rise,” Chef notes.
“And how many are Ku Kluxes?” Emma asks, eyeing the sea of red.
Molly shakes her head. “We haven’t been able to gauge that. Once infected, morphological transformation seems dependent on the individual.”
That’s science talk for how Klan folk turn Ku Klux. Molly says it’s like an infection, or a parasite. And it feed on hate. She says chemicals in the body change up when you hate strong. When the infection meets that hate, it starts growing until it’s powerful enough to turn the person Ku Klux. Ask me, it’s plain evil them Klans let in, eating them up until they hollow inside. Leave behind bone-white demons who don’t remember they was men.
“Not to mention,” Molly continues, “they’re rereleasing that movie.”
We all go sour at that. Seven years since The Birth of a Nation first come out—raising up hate enough to make these Ku Kluxes. Now that wicked D. W. Griffith set to release it again. Suddenly, I remember the poster.
“They’re showing it Sunday, at Stone Mountain.”
Everybody looks at me and I explain.
“Stone Mountain,” Emma murmurs. “Where Simmons did his conjuring.”
“That movie, what you call a spell, I believe, works to induce hate on a mass scale,” Molly says. “Like how a lynching riles individuals into a mob.”
Sadie scoffs. “Then why come it only riles white folk?”
“Whatever the case,” Molly continues, “these Ku Kluxes are born from that hate. If the rerelease of Griffith’s film has the same effect as before, we could be looking at an epidemic. Possibly worse than 1919.”
Chef whispers a curse before I can get one out; 1919 was a hard year for all of us.
“You think them Klans dress up to look like Ku Kluxes?” Sadie asks. She’s bent down now, eyeballing the head stuffed into glass. “It white like they hoods, and got a pointy end. Anyway, I say we just blow up some theater houses where the movie’s showing. Like Trotter did in Boston back in ’15.”
“Mr. Trotter did not blow up a movie house,” Emma corrects. “He only set off a smoke bomb to clear the theater. The riot started after.”
“Well, let’s blow one up for real,” Sadie insists. “For white folks’ own good, and ours, since they can’t see what’s right under they noses. Monsters all up between them and not a one got the sight!”
“I can see,” Emma reminds.
Sadie stands up, frowning. “Jews is white folk?”
Emma fumbles for words, but Nana Jean cuts in. “Buckrah dem done been waak ’longside de debbil long nuf fuh know’um. Dey jes ain wahn fuh see.”
Molly clears her throat. “Why some can see the creatures and others can’t is a question for science. More important, we should consider my other theory.”
“Your notion there is an intelligence guiding these dämonen?” Emma asks.
Molly nods. “The Ku Kluxes behave like worker ants—spreading the colony. So who’s directing them? There must be some hierarchy we don’t yet understand.”
“We only ever seen Ku Kluxes,” Chef says. “And they ain’t got much sense.”
“Sense enough to spread all over,” Sadie mutters.
My eyes are pulled back to the map. I ain’t put much into Molly’s talk of some brain controlling Ku Kluxes. But all that red reminds me of a chessboard, and the other pieces closing in.
“If as we believe East St. Louis in 1917 was a prelude to 1919,” Molly presses, “then what do we make of Tulsa? A massive coordinated attack. Our defenses overrun in days—”
“We remember,” Chef interrupts. The whole barn feel colder at the mention. We ain’t the only ones fighting this war. There’s pockets of resistance all over—Eatonsville, Charleston, Houston. But losing Tulsa last year was a hard blow. I can still see Ku Kluxes marching, clawing through all the fire and smoke.
“What are you saying?” Emma asks, brown eyes full of worry.
Molly draws a breath. “The growth of Klan chapters, the creatures’ adaptations, the organized attacks, now the rerelease of that film. If there’s an intelligence behind this—and I believe there is—we’re on the verge of something big. Be ready.”