Ring Shout

by P. Djèlí Clark

With all the flag-waving and cavorting, you might forget they was monsters. But I hunt monsters. And I know them when I see them.

We up on one of the old cotton warehouses off Poplar Street. Way back, this whole area housed cotton coming in from countryside plantations to send down the Ocmulgee by steamboat. That fluffy white soaked in slave sweat and blood what made this city. Nowadays Macon warehouses still hold cotton, but for local factory mills and railroads. Watching these Klans shamble down the street, I’m reminded of bales of white, still soaked in colored folk sweat and blood, moving for the river.

I look down at the dead Ku Klux. The monster’s bone-white skin is already turned gray, scraps peeling and floating into the air like ashes of paper, turning to dust before our eyes. That’s what happens to a Ku Klux when its killed.