The Shape of Snakes
by Minette Walters
Only pure White Christian people of non-jewish, non-negro, non-asian descent ... can enter the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
...The name Ku Klux Klan comes from the Greek word
...The Klan symbol of the Blood Drop denotes: 'the blood of Jesus Christ was shed for the White Aryan Race'...
...The Fiery Cross 'is used to rally the forces of Christianity against the ever increasing hordes of the anti-Christ and enemies of... the White Race'...
...'The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan does not consider itself the enemy of non-Whites ... (but)... will oppose integration in all its manifestations'...
UNRESTRICTED KKK PROPAGANDA ON THE INTERNET
Tics are categorized as Motor or Vocal, Simple or Complex ... Complex symptoms include: Body jerking, Skipping, Hitting, Walking on toes, Talking to oneself, Yelling, Coprolalia-vocalizing obscene or other socially unacceptable words or phrases ... Tics increase as a result of tension or stress.
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Unhappiness has a habit of being passed around.
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I could never decide whether 'Mad Annie' was murdered because she was mad or because she was black. We were living in southwest London at the time and I remember my shock when I came home from work one wet November evening to find her collapsed in the gutter outside our house. It was 1978-the winter of discontent-when the government lost control of the trade unions, strikes were an everyday occurrence, hospitals ceased to cater to the sick and uncollected rubbish lay in heaps along the pavement. If I hadn't recognized her old plaid coat I might have ignored her, thinking the bundle in the gutter was a heap of discarded clothes.
Her real name was Ann Butts and she was the only black person in our road. She was a well-built woman with a closed expression and a strong aversion to social contact, who was known to enjoy a drink, particularly Caribbean rum, and was often to be found sitting on the pavement in the summer singing gospel hymns. She had acquired the 'Mad' label because she made strange faces and muttered to herself as she scurried along in a bizarre dot-and- carry trot that suggested a child playing 'Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.'
Little was known about her circumstances except that she had inherited her house and a small independent income upon her mother's death and, apart from a menagerie of stray cats that had taken up residence with her, she lived alone. It was said that her mother had been madder than she was and that her father had abandoned them both because of it. One of the long-term residents of Graham Road swore blind that Mrs. Butts senior used to shout obscenities at passersby and twirl like a dervish when the mood was on her, but as Mrs. Butts had been dead some time the story had undoubtedly grown in the telling.
I didn't believe it any more than I believed the rumors that Annie kept live chickens inside her house, which she killed by boiling, feathers and all, for her own and her cats' supper. It was nonsense-she bought her meat, dead, at the local supermarket like everyone else-but her close neighbors talked about rats in her garden and a terrible smell coming from her kitchen, and the story of live chickens was born. I always said she couldn't have rats
The same neighbors made life difficult for her by reporting her regularly to the local council, the RSPCA and the police, but nothing came of their complaints because the council couldn't force her out of her own house, the cats were not ill-treated and she wasn't mad enough to be committed to an institution. Had there been family and friends to support her, she might have taken her harassers to court, but she was a solitary person who guarded her privacy jealously. At various times health visitors and social workers made unsuccessful attempts to persuade her into sheltered accommodations, and once a week the local vicar knocked on her door to make sure she was still alive. He was always cursed loudly for his trouble from an upstairs window, but he took it in stride, despite Annie's refusal to go anywhere near his church.
I knew her only by sight because we lived at the other end of the road but I never understood why the street took against her so strongly. My husband said it had to do with property values, but I couldn't agree with him. When we moved onto Graham Road in 1976 we had no illusions about why we could afford it. It had a Richmond postcode, but it was very definitely 'on the wrong side of the tracks.' Built for laborers in the 1880s, it was a double row of two-up, two-down terraced housing off the A316 between Richmond and Mortlake, and no one who bought a house there expected to make a fortune overnight, particularly as council-owned properties were seeded among the privately owned ones. They were easily identified by their uniform yellow doors and were looked down on by those of us who'd bought our houses because at least two of them held problem families.
Personally, I thought the way the children treated Annie was a better barometer of the adults' feelings. They teased her mercilessly, calling her names and aping her dot-and-carry trot in a cruel demonstration of their right to feel superior, then ran away with squeals of fear if their pestering irritated her enough to make her raise her head and glare at them. It was a form of bearbaiting. They goaded her because they despised her, but they were also afraid of her.
In retrospect, of course, I wish I'd taken up cudgels on her behalf but, like everyone else who stayed silent, I assumed she could take care of herself. Certainly the children weren't alone in finding her intimidating. On the one occasion when I made an attempt to speak to her, she rounded on me angrily, calling me 'honky,' and I didn't have the courage to try again. Once in a while afterward I would come out of my front door to find her staring up at our
