Ring Shout

In the concluding chapters of the novella, Clark highlights the continued thematic exploration of The Role of Trauma and Healing in Resistance Narratives, The Exploration of Racism and White Supremacy Through Speculative Fiction, and The Use of Folklore and Cultural Heritage as Tools of Resistance. Notably, Maryse finds new strength as she confronts her trauma. She is also able to tap into important resources—Black folklore, cultural heritage, and community—that help her best Butcher Clyde and the Grand Cyclops. These forces for good prove more than enough to overcome the power of white supremacy and hatred.

One of Maryse’s vulnerabilities throughout the novella is her inability to come to terms with the traumatic experience of her family’s murder by lynching. Her refusal to face the truth keeps her stuck, which Clark shows by having the Maryse of the visions be smaller and younger than Maryse was during the time of her family’s murder. Butcher Clyde knows that this trauma is a vulnerability, so he constantly taunts Maryse not only about killing her family but also about her unwillingness to revisit what was in the barn. He uses her refusal to face the past to weaken her will and throw her off balance. Maryse is so caught up in that trauma that she believes for a time that Butcher Clyde’s offer is to revive her family—demonstrating the role of trauma and healing in resistance narratives. Even if briefly, she considers going over to his side.

What saves her is her connection to Black folk culture, a key thematic element throughout Clark’s novella, which gives her a basis for resistance against the powerful lure of revenge. Her allies, the Night Doctors, are figures out of Black folklore. Although her experience with the Night Doctors is harrowing, they do her the favor of making her examine her trauma, albeit for their own purposes. Confronting what was in the barn gets her unstuck, a development that Clark symbolizes with the reappearance of the repaired leaf-shaped sword. By leaning on Black folklore and cultural heritage as tools for resistance, Maryse can process and heal from her trauma.

The Night Doctors aren’t altruistic, but a hallmark of trickster figures and the Black culture that they reflect is that people can derive good from people who mean them no good. That is the lesson of “Read ’em, John, Read ’em,” the Shout referenced in Notation 9. Black folktales and Black American culture more broadly contain other truths that ultimately inoculate Maryse against Butcher Clyde’s manipulations. When Maryse considers Butcher Clyde’s offer, the Martin ghost reminds her that she comes from a people who are more like Brer Rabbit than the stronger figures such as the fox and the bear. Those stories emphasize values such as resilience and cleverness, not hatred, as forms of resistance. Once Maryse recalls those values, she can turn down Butcher Clyde’s offer—further underscoring the use of folklore and cultural heritage as tools of resistance.

Another reason why Maryse can survive the night is that she comes to rely on other members of her community. Before the battle, she believes that she alone can bargain with Butcher Clyde and stop his plans. Going it alone is an old habit that began when she first got the sword and hunted Ku Kluxes as revenge for their killing of her family. Despite her belief that she can fight and win by herself, Maryse finds that members of her community won’t let her face Butcher Clyde alone. Strength through community isn’t just a question of relying on the living. Listening to the ancestors is important in cultures of the African diaspora, and ancestors in the form of the many people killed because of racism and white supremacy arrive to bolster Maryse’s defense of humanity. Through community, Maryse and the resistance fighters live to fight another day.

Ring Shout is speculative fiction, and Clark’s engagement with the multiple genres that influence speculative fiction is most apparent in the final chapters of the book. Swords, visions, and books of power are all conventions of fantasy that appear in the end, but in these chapters, the author also utilizes horror/science fiction tropes like aliens from another dimension and zombie-like Klanspeople who are rapidly transforming into Ku Kluxes after eating Grand Cyclops flesh.

Clark chooses to make the great final battle, so often found in works of science fiction and fantasy, one fought against the backdrop of a screening of Birth of a Nation. Clark’s literary choices in the final chapters highlight that in the world of the novella, white supremacy and racism are something “like an infection, or a parasite” (49)—they are contagious. The language of contagion shows that the real power of racism and white supremacy isn’t just in individuals—it is in groups of people, those who harness it for bad ends, and those who are infected with it, especially when they coalesce as mobs. Clark can articulate this message through a thematic exploration of the exploration of racism and white supremacy through speculative fiction.

One of the reasons Birth of a Nation is so dangerous in reality and in the novella’s world is that it helps racist and white supremacist ideas reach masses of people. The germs that cause infections and parasites that cause illness have no will and no mind; their only purpose is to replicate. The rapidly turning Klanspeople in the audience watching the film are examples of the virulent mindlessness and lack of critical thinking that are hallmarks of racism and white supremacist ideas. In-world, Clark doesn’t let individuals who endorse such ideas after exposure to the virus off the ethical hook. Maryse and Chef give short shrift to the Klanswoman who finally realizes that she is in the company of monsters because they believe she should have noticed this before.

The Klanswoman gaining the sight to see that she is among monsters represents the belief that individual white people can learn to recognize racism and their complicity in it. The existence of a second sword, one that is made up of the suffering of white people who participated in the system of slavery and inflicted violence on Black people, is Clark’s way of indicating that individuals and groups propagating racism and white supremacist ideas will eventually face a reckoning if they do not come to such knowledge.

At the end of the novella, Maryse decides to hold on to the sword, and the aunties warn that another powerful figure like Butcher Clyde is coming to continue the war. This ending helps Clark make the point that racism and white supremacy must be opposed in a battle that may have no clear end in sight. They constitute enduring threats to the lives of Black people.