#ringshout

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

📚 Finished Reading: Ring Shout

✍🏾 Author: P Djèlí Clark

📏 Length: 172 pages

Genre: Historical Horror, Southern Gothic

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Happy Juneteenth!!! 🖤✊🏾I’m hella excited about this book review and waited until Juneteenth to post about this book. Also, I am so glad I waited to read Ring Shout until after watching Sinners not once, not twice, but THREE times (yessss you read that correctly, three times, don’t judge me 😂😂)

because listen. These two? They go together like grits and fried fish. 😍 The vibes between these two scream rage and liberation, ancestors and prophecy. Straight up 🔥🔥🔥

Unmatched Energy ✨

This read was sooooo good! I can’t believe I had this on my bookshelf for so long, waiting to be read and devoured in one reading.

Ring Shout hits that sweet spot of Southern Black horror that gets under your skin but fills you with pride and power. You’ve got Maryse, our monster slayer, with her singing blade given to her by the ancestors to defeat monsters.

You’ve got Sadie, wild and loyal, rolling up with her shotgun, Winnie, and the most ride or die energy I’ve read in a minute.

“One little Ku Klux deaaaad,” a voice hums near my ear. “Two little Kluxes deaaaad, Three little Kluxes, Four little Kluxes, Five little Kluxes deaaaad.”

You’ve got Chef, holding it down with steady big brother vibes; she lowkey gave me Smoke energy from Sinners. Calm but dangerous, steady but ready to turn up when it’s time, as the driver, or providing weapons and giving a distraction to get out of hazardous situations. 🔫😏

“Back in the war, Cordy picked up the nickname Chef. Not for cooking—at least not food. Frenchie soldiers learned her to make things for blowing up Germans and collapsing trenches.”

And then there’s Molly, Choctaw, and brilliant, bringing her scientific knowledge of the Ku Kluxes to the fight.

“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.“

Her moments always resonated with me because our Indigenous communities always carry deep wisdom, just like in Sinners. They've a grounded connection to the earth, and they’ve always stood right alongside Black people in resistance. Molly’s power felt ancestral, too.

Every chapter had me pausing, like, "This is it." The rage, the grief, the righteous fury, the survival, the joy, the magic, the community; the weight of history is carried with brutal truth and determination. It’s Southern Black horror that refuses to be soft for anybody.

The Monsters Are Real.

“When the Klans ride in all gallant on their horses to save the day, white folk go wild—“like a people possessed,” newspapers say, which ain’t too far from the truth.”

What Ring Shout does that hits me deep is turn the Klan into literal monsters: the Ku Kluxes: ugly creatures feeding off hatred, making pacts with dark forces, thriving on America’s racist sins. Reading about these monsters was horrific,

“The thing standing in his place now can’t rightly be called a man. It’s easily nine feet tall, with legs that bend back like the hindquarters of a beast, joined to a long torso twice as wide as most men… It’s the head that stands out — long and curved to the end in a sharp bony point.

This is a Ku Klux… Every bit of the thing is a pale bone white, down to claws like carved blades of ivory. The only part not white are the eyes. Should be six in all: beads of red on black in rows of threes on either side of that curving head… And what passes for lips on a long muzzle peel back, revealing a nest of teeth like spiky icicles.”

Could you imagine seeing one in real life? But let’s be real. Even without the claws and teeth, those monsters exist. P Djèlí Clark knows how to take our history, twist it just enough, and reflect the absolute horror we’re still facing now in 2025 with police brutality, the Trump administration, and racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, sexist laws and policies that are implemented in our society.

“White folk earn something from that hate. Might not be wages. But knowing we on the bottom and they set above us—just as good, maybe better.”

That scene at Frenchy’s juke joint?? 👏🏾😍🥹👏🏾 The way music, resistance, and community come together in that space had me thinking directly about Sinners. You already know which scene I’m talking about, when Sammie sang and my body erupted in goosebumps all over.

Ryan Coogler did something similar, giving us Southern Black spaces in Sinners in the deep Mississippi South filled with Black joy, but not erasing the weight of what our people carry. Both works understand that Black joy and Black rage aren’t opposites. They exist together, side by side.

The Sinner's Energy Is Strong.

Y’all already know how much I loved Sinners this year. The Southern gothic atmosphere. The myth. The rage. The layered storytelling. The unflinching look at what it means to be Black and Southern and still haunted by systems that want to consume us.

Ring Shout feels like it lives in the same cinematic universe. That mix of horror, folklore, ancestral power, and rage that refuses to simmer down is what I’m here for. It feels hella addictive.

Other favorite highlights:

When Maryse’s blade sang?

When Nana Jean whispered truths that only grandmothers know?

When Sadie went full unhinged loyal bestie?

When the monsters came crawling out like demons fed off white supremacy?

The whole book was all giving Sinners energy. ALL DAY!

Sadie Broke Me. 😭😭

I need a moment to talk about Sadie.

The way she loved Maryse? The loyalty. The ride or die. The “I got you even when you don’t got yourself” kind of love, even when she sacrificed herself in a full-on gun battle with the Ku Kluxes.

“My grandpappy say when we die, we get our wings back, the ones white folk cut off when we come here. Maybe I’ll fly and meet my mama. Or all the way back to Africy.”

That final scene when Sadie speaks to Maryse again at the end in spiritual form and revealed her butterfly wings? 🦋Yeah. I ugly cried. Full-on snot cry, no lie.

“My grandpappy was right.” She winks. “We do get them back.” Two wings unfurl from her behind her: beautiful gold feathers with streaks of black. She spreads them wide, lifting and shooting into the air like an arrow, gone.”

That moment wrecked me and healed me at the same time. Her transformation, her freedom; it was beautiful, painful, soft, and everything all at once. She was wild, but she was always love. Always.

The Audiobook? A Whole Experience.

I have to give the audiobook its flowers, too.💐🌺🌸 🌼The narration was flawless, and the sound effects made me feel like I was sitting at somebody’s grandma’s table, hearing this story unfold. It was part horror, part prophecy, part survival song. The rhythm was intensely Black, deep Southern, and deeply ancestral.

This Book Gave Me:

🩸 Generational rage and survival

🔥 Black women with blades, shotguns, sacred power, and unbreakable friendship

🎶 Juke joints as sacred resistance

🐍 Hoodoo, root work, conjure, and ancestral knowing

🫰🏾 Indigenous wisdom alongside Black resistance

This Book Felt Like:

🌪️ A storm rolling in over Southern farmland

🪶 Ancestors humming in your ear while you sharpen your blade

🎙️ Sitting at Nana’s table while she tells you the real story

🎞️ A Black Southern horror film that refuses to soften its edges

Final Thoughts:

Ring Shout was everything I wanted it to be. It gave me rage but also healing. It gave me monsters but also the power to fight them. It’s one of those books where you close the last page and feel your ancestors nodding, "Yeah, baby, you get it."

For this Juneteenth? This is the energy. Stories that refuse to flinch. Stories that honor our survival while letting us scream, fight, laugh, grieve, and reclaim.

Ring Shout should be next on your list if you loved Sinners like I did.

“The preceding discussion, while offering a chronology of black conversion to Christianity at some variance with perceptions both popular and scholarly, really begs two fundamental questions: How and why did Africans convert to Christianity, especially in the absence of any measurable pressure to do so well into the nineteenth century? In response, it will be necessary to revisit the ring shout. Other areas of exploration include the relationship of water baptism to conversion, as well as the role of funerary rites in both conversion and the movement toward a collective identity based upon race. Why Africans converted is obviously related to how they did so, and a reexamination of Howard Thurman’s work will shed further light on this query. In addition, a recontextualization of the concept and practice of hoodoo in the colonial and antebellum South will not only help answer the basic questions but also assist in making the connection to the African antecedent more viable. Related to an examination of all these phenomena, of course, is the unfolding of social strata within the black community. What follows attempts to uncover the general contours of this relationship.” “Stuckey effectively makes the case for cultural continuity and attendant transformation within the African-based community in his Slave Culture. Drawing upon folklore and contemporary accounts, he argues that the ring shout was one of the most important vehicles for the perpetuation of West and West Central African religious beliefs. In these regions, ‘an integral part of religion and culture was movement in a ring during ceremonies honoring the ancestors.’ Although the circle’s ‘ancestral function’ was important in West Africa, it was even more so in West Central Africa, where it was ‘so powerful in its elaboration of a religion vision that it contributed disproportionately to the centrality of the circle in slavery.’ In fact, the ring shout was of significance that it is possible to posit that ‘it was what gave form and meaning to black religion and art.’ The ring shout was observed in the 1940s and 1950s in places as widespread as Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia, and can still be observed.” “For all of its significance as a principal medium of cultural transfer, Stuckey is saying something more about the ring shout, something that goes to the core of the present inquiry. For when he writes that the ‘ring in which Africans danced and sang is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in America,’ he is addressing directly the question of the transition from ethnicity to race and the transformation of the African American identity. That the ring shout could have been so instrumental in the process is intriguing and demanding of further investigation. In addition to the sources employed by Stuckey, the present effort is informed by a reexamination of the WPA interviews, especially those collected along the coast of Georgia.”

“Ring ceremonies associated with religion are commonplace wherever people of African descent are found in the Western Hemisphere. In a study of Haitian religion, for example, Deren points out that it is a composite of West and West Central African influences. Deren then goes on to make a subtle yet crucial comment: ‘At dances for the divinities… there is, to be sure, no ritual choreography apart from the general counterclockwise direction of the floor-movement around the center-post. This reference to a counterclockwise ring ceremony in Haiti recalls Puckett’s earlier discussion of the ‘slavery time ‘shout’’ of southern black culture, which ‘consisted of moving about in a ring, shuffling the feet along inch by inch, sometimes dancing silently, but more frequently singing spirituals.’ Puckett went on to make a conjecture consistent with Deren’s findings: ‘It is possible that the whole ceremony is a relic of some native African dance.’ The comments of these two independent investigations are so similar that it is possible to apply Deren’s analysis to the American South and Puckett’s to Haiti absent significant alterations. That is, the ceremonies were clearly derivative of the same origins.”

“Stuckey has cited numerous examples of how the ring shout functioned in the South. One of the most vivid illustrations was provided in 1862 along the South Carolina coast, where and when Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed what he called ‘the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half pow-wow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a ‘shout.’’ Before actually describing the shout, Higginson re-creates the context by employing evocative language to refer to the place of meeting: ‘These fires are usually enclosed in a little booth, made neatly of palm leaves and covered in at top, a regular native African hut, in short, such as is pictured in books.’ Having established, wittingly or unwittingly, Africa as the source of the ceremony, Higginson proceeds to describe how black men filled the ‘tent’ and sang ‘at the top of their voices, in one of their quaint, monotonous, endless, negro-Methodist chants… all accompanied with a regular drumming of the feet and clapping of the hands, like castanets.’ With this accomplished, the shout takes flight: ‘Then the excitement spreads: inside and outside the enclosure men begin to quiver and dance, other join, a circle forms, winding monotonously round someone in the centre; some ‘heel and toe’ simultaneously, others merely tremble and stagger on, others stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes, spectators applaud special strokes of skill; my approach only enlivens the scene; the circle enlarges, louder grows the singing, rousing shouts of encouragement come in, half bacchanalian, half devout, ‘Wake’em, brudder!’ ‘Stan up to’em, brudder!’ and still the ceaseless drumming and clapping, in perfect cadence, goes steadily on. Suddenly there comes a sort of snap, and the spell breaks, amid general sighing and laughter. And this not rarely and occasionally, but night after night.’

Hoje venho de indicação de leitura. Esse livro aqui foi uma total e excelente surpresa. Não conhecia o autor P. Djèlí Clark e curti muito o estilo dele de construir diálogos e principalmente como desenvolveu as personagens femininas da história. É tudo muito fluido e tem uma força que, mesmo sendo um tema amargoso, te atrai cada vez mais na medida em que a leitura avança. Ring Shout ou Grito de Liberdade traduzido por Bruno Ribeiro e lançado aqui pela Macabra e Darkside, gira em torno de eventos reais, mas com a liberdade que a ficção especulativa permite, misturando monstros lovecraftianos com o terror real e racial estadunidense da era sangrenta com a KKK e as leis de Jim Crow. Tudo começou em 1915 a partir do lançamento do filme O Nascimento de uma Nação o qual desencadeou um feitiço que atingiu toda a América do Norte e os KKKs que outrora eram ainda humanos, alguns evoluíram para uma espécie de monstro saído diretamente do inferno para se misturarem com os humanos integrantes da Klan. Sim, isso mesmo, monstros. Em 1922 eles querem repetir o ritual a partir do relançamento do filme e é aí que entra Maryse e seus companheiros de resistência. Achei bem bacana a explicação de como se dá a transformação ou infecção dos Ku Kluxes. Diante de todo esse cenário, Maryse, que por sinal narra toda a história, e seus amigos não abaixam a cabeça e lutam bravamente contra esses seres monstruosos. É como diz o famoso ditado: um dia da caça, outro do caçador. A caça, os afro-americanos, cansados de tanta hostilidade e assassinatos, se armam. Mas, a maior arma deles aqui é o ódio e a raiva. O ódio que move, o ódio que alimenta a vingança.

“Uma raiva justa e um clamor por justiça”.

The West Oakland Library Book Club is diving into Ring Shout by @pdjeliclark

Monsters, resistance, and magical realism meet Jim Crow in this brilliant novella that remixes history with horror. 🌀🗡️

If you’re in the Bay, swing by the next session, or grab a copy and read along with us.

Shout-out to @torbooks for publishing this powerful tale.

Sistah Scifi will be at #Seattle2025worldcon & #Books&BART.

Coffin Point Praise House-

“Originally built around 1900 and rebuilt following a fire in the 1950s, the Coffin Point Community Praise House differs slightly in construction from other local praise houses in that it has two windows framing the entrance along with three steps leading to the front door.” To read more click here Coffin Point Praise House Beaufort County 1900 Praise house Praise house or Prays…