Ring Shout

Up until this point in the narrative, most of the death, especially death that is the result of anti-Black violence, has occurred off stage. With the raid on Frenchy’s, death becomes an immediate experience that forces characters to confront who they are. Maryse’s inability to come to terms with the death of her friends and family makes her a threat to everyone around her.

Like many of the notations, the one that opens this section anticipates events and themes, making it an epigraph. The Shout that Henrietta Davis describes is more somber in tone than the others because it deals more directly with the day-to-day existence of enslavement and the overwhelming nature of death in a system that treated Black lives as negligible. While Davis laments the thought that all these “grand thinkers” took their wisdom to the grave (93), the existence of the Shout is testimony to the enduring nature of what enslaved people thought about existence, albeit one that comes down to the members of the community at Nana Jean’s farm through the lens of Emma Krause’s Standard American English. Shouts and other Black cultural practices such as telling folktales ultimately serve as sources of understanding of hard realities, highlighting Clark’s continued exploration of the theme of The Use of Folklore and Cultural Heritage as Tools of Resistance.

This same use of folklore and cultural heritage occurs during Sadie’s death scene. Sadie references an important Black folktale, “All God’s Chillen Had Wings.” In the folktale, people from the African continent lose their wings because of sin, although a few who remember the secret of flight remain among the Gullah in the South Georgia Sea Islands. In the tale, enslaved people fly away from the whipping of a cruel master when they remember the original language they brought with them from the African continent. In flying away, they deprive the enslaver of people he sees as property. In this tale, flight and remembering culture are forms of resistance to the dehumanizing nature of enslavement.

Like the enslaved and formerly enslaved people who sang and danced “In This Field We Must Die?,” Sadie questions the nature of death and finds that imagining her death in this way, far away from the brutality of the Ku Kluxes, gives her some comfort, and so does contemplating a funeral with a big choir and a lover who misses her. As is the case with most cultures, a funeral is a rite of passage that reflects the values of the culture of the people who engage in the rite. Sadie’s imagined funeral is a celebration of the life of the deceased—a notion of death that is in keeping with the view of death that is present in tales like the one about the flying Africans. The grieving of the Shouters is yet another way of marking death, and their Shout is also built around an important piece of Black culture, the Black spiritual “Lay Dis Body Down.” These pieces of Black folklore and culture teach people how to mourn, an important stage in dealing with grief.

Although Sadie makes her peace with her death, Maryse is left behind and does not. Instead, she is finally overcome by her hate and unresolved trauma. Clark has her describe her body as burning as hot as fire, an indication that she, too, is a destructive force without boundaries. Her anger and hate have left her stuck in the moment of her family’s death, and the result is that she lacks the resilience to survive, a flaw that is symbolized by the shattering of the blade. She is brittle and fragile despite her ability to fight and kill, further highlighting Ring Shout’s exploration of The Role of Trauma and Healing in Resistance Narratives. Her unresolved trauma and the resulting anger play right into the hands of Butcher Clyde.

Much like Clyde, the aunties have also exploited her trauma. The aunties’ confession that they recruited her to neutralize her, not because she is a true champion, is a revelation that shows Maryse the true cost of not confronting her trauma—she is a danger to herself, the people she loves, and the world itself. The import of these chapters is that until Maryse comes to terms with her trauma, she cannot hope to muster the resilience she needs to save herself and her community, another key emphasis of the role of trauma and healing in resistance narratives in the novella.