Ring Shout

In Notation 21, interviewee Henrietta Davis interprets the Shout “In This Field We Must Die?” as one about enslaved people working away their lives in the field. Davis believes that the Shout isn’t just about the endless nature of physical labor that enslaved people endured. It is also about how enslaved people “[got] to thinking on life, death, and God’s purpose? All them grand thinkers lost to the whip. Gone and took they secrets with ’em to the grave” (93). She tells the original tale in Gullah, which Emma Krause then interprets and writes down using Standard American English conventions.

Frenchy’s juke joint is on fire and under attack by Ku Kluxes who have trapped people inside. The resistance fighters rush in to rescue people. The Ku Kluxes mortally wound Sadie while she is protecting Maryse and others. Before Sadie dies in Maryse’s arms, she tells Maryse what she wants her funeral to be like. She wants it to be a spectacle. She also wishes that she could fly to Africa like in the Gullah story of Igbo Landing, one in which enslaved people escape by flying away to Africa and freedom.

Butcher Clyde and several of his servants capture Maryse, who is so filled with anger that she feels as if her body is burning up.