Ring Shout

The major premise of Clark’s novella is speculation about what would happen in a world in which the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, was powered by magic. Clark combines reality and fiction to develop the world of the novella more fully. Founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the historical Ku Klux Klan (colloquially known as “the Klan”) used terror, murder, and lynchings to intimidate Black Americans during Reconstruction, a post-Civil-War period during which Black Americans gained legal rights as citizens. Inspired by the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation, Walter J. Simmons organized a cross burning near Atlanta, Georgia, at Stone Mountain in 1915 to drive up recruitment to the Klan. In the novella, Simmons is “a regular old witch” who initiated that second Klan era by conjuring up the Ku Kluxes (30).

Clark draws on other historical elements of the Klan in the novella. In reality, and in the novella, the white-hooded Klanspeople rampaged in the 1910s and 1920s, with their forces augmented by less organized white mobs. The killing of Maryse’s family reflects a small part of the reality of such attacks. The novella also includes mentions of Klan actions and white mob violence that destroyed Black communities in towns like Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) and Rosewood, Florida (1923), events that are the work of Ku Kluxes in the novella.