“When will he come?”
“The price of his passage is high. The highest: blood. First seven white men must die. Then High John the Conqueror will come.”
When the men of the plantation heard what the woman’s cowrie shells had told her, most of them said they didn’t believe it. “The prince you’re speaking of left these lands long ago, and there’s no calling him back,” they said. But there were seven whose hearts were heavy because they did believe what the cowrie shells had said, and they knew that their belief meant they wouldn’t live to see freedom. Even so those seven drew straws to decide which of them would attack first. And so six overseers were killed, and there was such punishment for these killings that the plantation got the reputation of being a place of horror.
The morning after Michael called La Belle Capuchine a traitor, the blood of the seventh white man was spilled, and High John the Conqueror strode through the plantation gates, shining with a terrifying splendor; he did no harm to anybody (though some cried out that he should take revenge); he healed the broken bodies of those who had awaited him and those who’d said he was dead and gone. He wept to see what had been done in that place, and where he walked, he ruined the earth so that nothing that could bring profit would ever grow there again. Then High John the Conqueror came to the Big House, where La Belle Capuchine and the other house Negroes lived with Miss Margaux and Master and Mistress. Master and Mistress had tried to flee when they saw what was happening, but the house Negroes had locked them into a bathroom, along with their daughter and La Belle Capuchine. Miss Margaux was screaming and La Belle Capuchine was screaming louder. Master was yelling, “Shut up or I’ll kill you both myself!” and Mistress had fainted dead away in the bathtub.
High John the Conqueror opened the bathroom door and stretched out a hand. “I go now,” he said, “and all my people go with me.”
Weeping tears of gratitude, La Belle Capuchine stepped forward, but much to everyone’s surprise, High John the Conqueror pushed La Belle Capuchine away and took Miss Margaux by the hand.
“La Belle Capuchine,” he said to her. “Your beauty is famous, and will become yet more so by my side.”
Miss Margaux batted her eyelashes and didn’t argue with him.
Miss Margaux’s father and mother had fled as soon as the door opened, so La Belle Capuchine was the one who had to protest: “She is not me! She’s Miss Margaux! I am La Belle Capuchine! Don’t you see that she’s white?”
High John the Conqueror looked at La Belle Capuchine and he looked at Miss Margaux. He looked each one of them over very carefully, from head to toe. “I think it’s only fair to tell you that I see with more than just my eyes, and I cannot tell the difference between you,” he said, finally. Miss Margaux wasn’t about to give up her chance to go adventuring with a Negro prince, so she loudly dismissed La Belle Capuchine’s desperate cries. “No, no. I am La Belle Capuchine. This is just a game we play sometimes, with chalk and boot polish.”
“No chalk can have that effect,” La Belle Capuchine argued, and, seeing Michael in the doorway behind High John the Conqueror, she called out: “Michael—you know! Tell him!” Michael turned away.
And so High John the Conqueror took his people away with him. Miss Margaux too, though that one didn’t stay with him for long. What about La Belle Capuchine? Well, she was truly free. She loved no one and she was unloved. She lived out the rest of her brief days on the deserted plantation, and in the end her beauty was worth nothing, since there wasn’t a soul around to see it and there was no comfort she could buy with it, not even a scrap of food, not even an extra half second of life.
The End.
I’m pleased to report that the president of the spiders is back on friendly terms with her citizens.
And yes, Gee-Ma Agnes and Gee-Pa Gerald are good to me and always came to my elementary school Nativity play when I had a part in it.
No fairy lights or riddles here, but I like Flax Hill best when the sky’s stormy gray and the clouds get little bits of sun and lightning tangled up in them. There’s a church up on the second hill, the less popular hill, and when you look through the tinted windowpanes, everyone in town looks like stained-glass angels, walking and cycling, moving in and out of small brick palaces, eating glittering rolls of sapphire bread.
What’s this job you’ve got? I’ve got a paper route and dogs are always barking at me.
Your little sis,
Bird
Dear Bird,
I can’t tell if you want me to believe everything you say or only some of it. You talk to spiders and they answer you. All right, fine. Suppose I wish to converse with spiders too—how do I do it?
La Belle Capuchine: I don’t know how much of it you forgot/added yourself, but Leah must have told you that story because she wanted to be fired. I mean, even I got paranoid reading it. I kept wondering if La Belle Capuchine was a code version of me. Take my paranoia and multiply it by a million and that’s how Olivia must have felt about La Belle Capuchine. Also—believe it or not (and this may remind you of another matter you’ve banned me from mentioning)—I have a story about someone named La Belle Capuchine too. I thought Aunt Clara told it to me, but when I retold it to her yesterday, she said she hadn’t heard it before.
La Belle Capuchine has a wonderful garden filled with sweet-smelling flowers of every color. She plants all the flowers herself, and she tends them herself, and every single one of those flowers is poisonous enough to kill anyone who comes close to them, let alone picks one. La Belle Capuchine is beautiful like her flowers, but she’s a poison damsel. She eats and drinks poison all day long and she can rot a person’s insides just by looking them in the eye. I don’t think Mother Nature likes us much. If she did, she wouldn’t make the things that are deadliest so beautiful. For instance, why does fire dance so bright and so wild? It isn’t fair.
So far La Belle Capuchine has ended the world seventeen times. She does it by making her poison garden bigger and bigger until it’s the only thing in the world. After that she takes a nap. But the world starts again from the beginning. And every time a few days after the new beginning somebody comes across a beautiful flower and picks it. That wakes La Belle Capuchine up, and then there’s hell to pay. I think we’d better get used to La Belle Capuchine, since she’ll never be defeated.
The End.
Writing it down like that makes me see that there’s no way this could have come from Aunt Clara. Of course this came from me. Of course it does. I felt abandoned for a while. By “a while” I mean years, not months or weeks. I’d be able to push Flax Hill and you and Dad and your mom to the back of my mind for a few days, but then there’d be nights when that turned me over and lay me on my side like a doll that had been dropped on the floor. I began to know what dolls know. It felt like I’d been discarded for another toy that was better, more lifelike (you). People sometimes said, “What a beautiful little girl,” but I thought that beautiful was bad. I must have come up with my Belle Capuchine around that time.
I sprained my arm out here in Twelve Bridges when I was about twelve; we were ice-skating and I tried to break my fall with my hand, which is what Uncle John might call “unintelligent” . . . one hand against the weight of an entire body. The arm hurt for so long I began to be afraid that it would never get done hurting. Until the day Aunt Clara came and hugged me and I put both my arms up and around her without even thinking about it. The arm had healed. More important, it hadn’t come off. So I reasoned I couldn’t be a doll, and neither could you.
The one thing I’d tell you about me is that I’m a deceiver. In another draft of this letter I wrote that I wasn’t always like this, but let’s try the truth and see what it does. It’s probably been official since the night Ephraim, Laura, and I were waiting in line for drinks at a bar over in the next town. We had brand-new fake IDs in our wallets; they’d been expensive and they were convincing and we were excited.
Ephraim thought the line was moving faster than it really was and he ended up stomping on someone’s heel. The guy Ephraim had bumped into was a nice guy, I think. He accepted Ephraim’s apology at first. But everybody was a little drunk and a little tired of standing in line, so maybe, just maybe, it was to pass the time that one of the guy’s friends started wondering aloud who “that nigger” thought he was, and the guy began to feel like he had to act a certain way in front of his friends—I could see him begin to feel it, saw the feeling growing on him, like a fur, only faster than anything natural can grow. He said: “Yeah . . .” and he called Ephraim the same name his friend had, only I think he was ashamed to say it, because he stuttered.
Ephraim said: “Cool out, man. Nothing really happened. So why use that kind of language?” He’s got a way about him, my friend Ephraim. Another guy might have sounded like a weakling, another guy might have sounded like he was backing down. But Ephraim was stepping up and giving the other guy a chance for everything to be okay. The other guy got braver once he’d called Ephraim a name, though, and he looked right at me and said that classy-looking girls should choose better friends. I was confused that he felt he could speak to me like that—I used to assume that when I’m with colored people the similarities become obvious, but I guess it’s something people don’t see unless they’re looking to see it. I felt as if I’d left my body, felt as if I were standing over on the other side of a room, watching as a big lie was being told about me. I should have told that guy that when he called anybody that name in my hearing he was saying it directly to me. I should have told him never to dare call anybody that name again. All I did was turn to Ephraim and whisper: “Ephraim, let’s go.”
Laura shook her head and called me “un-bee-leeve-able.” I was afraid that those boys would follow us out onto the street, maybe with broken bottles in their hands. I’ve heard how one thing leads to another, it’s not only in the South that an evening gets that way . . . but they preferred to keep their place in the line. We looked for another bar to go to, but Ephraim and Laura kept rejecting each one we came across, kept saying it’d be just like the bar we’d left. Then they said they were tired and wanted to go home. I went with them. I’m wondering if that’s all I can do for them. I can’t seem to speak up, but I can go with them, silently. That was a little more than three years ago, so I don’t think I can honestly say that it was only this year I became deceptive.
Aunt Clara thinks I transcribe interviews at a newsroom in the city. Uncle John thinks the same, and so does almost everybody else except Mouse. Mouse knows I didn’t even make it past the first day of secretarial college and so efficiently transcribing a series of interviews would actually be a little beyond me. I told Mouse because I had to tell somebody, and also because I know a couple of things about her that she doesn’t want me to tell anybody, so that makes her less likely to spill.
Bird, here’s what happened on the first day of secretarial college:
I got there half an hour early. Near the entrance I was given a clipboard and a square tag with MISS S. WHITMAN printed on it. I went up a staircase and into a sky-lighted auditorium—it was as big as an auditorium, anyhow—filled with row after row of desk-and-chair sets, each chair attached to each desk with a gray bar. There was a black typewriter set on each desktop; more typewriters and desks than I could count. Seven or eight other girls had already taken their seats, looking straight ahead of them as if they’d already begun the march into infinity. I remember feeling doubtful about the bun I’d twisted my hair into just an hour before. I patted it, and it was more or less the same as theirs, not too high, not too low. The desks at the back were designated for Adamses and Allens, so I walked and walked until I found the Walkers and Williamses. There was a blackboard at the front of the room, hung on the wall like a picture frame. I found MISS A. WHITMAN and thought, Almost there. It felt as if my legs would buckle under me from all the walking I’d done.
MISS B. WHITMAN was next. Then MISS C. WHITMAN and MISS D. WHITMAN. Immediately followed by Misses E., F., G., and H. Whitman. None of them had taken their seats yet. “Who are all these girls?” I asked aloud. “Who the hell are they?”
MISS K. WHITMAN was the last straw, she was the moment I realized the secretarial college had an alphabet’s worth of us. Mouse says I was surely hallucinating, but I know what I saw. I removed my name tag, left my clipboard on K. Whitman’s seat, and went shopping with the money I’d saved to pay for the next month’s classes. I bought lipstick and peaches and cigarettes and a ticket to a theater matinee. After the matinee I went home and was asked how college had been and I said: “It was fine.”
I left the peaches in a bowl on my bedside table, and spent the next day filling out forms at an employment agency. There was an additional cover sheet that asked you to declare your race. The woman at the front desk said that it was just for the agency records, that it wasn’t information they passed on to employers, but the girl next to me said to her: “You people need to think about what you’re doing to us. You’re bad people . . . you’re making us paranoid. You’re driving us crazy. Every time I don’t make it through to interviews I’ll be wondering whether it’s because there are better candidates or because of color. Color, color, color; what you’re doing is illegal and you know it. I should find myself a lawyer who’s ready to make an example of you.”
The woman at the front desk had heard it all before and she recited something about it being impossible to obtain any proof that employers were shown the information agency clients provided on the additional cover sheet. The girl who’d talked about suing the agency couldn’t make up her mind. First she crumpled the cover sheet up in her hand, then she smoothed it out again and ticked her box. I left mine blank; I knew that I was within my legal rights not to say. Ms. Front Desk pushed my forms back across the table to me and said I had to fulfill all of the requirements. I told her, “None of these options say what I am,” and she rolled her eyes. “Every day. Every day a philosopher walks in off the street and makes my job that little bit harder to do.”
Then she said: “Why won’t you say? Hmmm?” and I had to tick “colored” to show Aunt Clara I wasn’t ashamed, even though Aunt Clara wasn’t there and would never know what box I ticked. When I got home, I said college had been fine, and I counted up the remainder of my money and wolfed down the peaches. If I hid them and saved them for later, they’d only have rotted away. They were already getting too soft and my fingers sank through their flesh and closed around their stony hearts. The agency couldn’t seem to find anything for me to do and I kept back from the brink of paranoia by reminding myself that I had no experience. I sort of happened upon my real job about a week later. The details of it don’t matter, but it involves a hell of a lot more deceiving, with and without words.
You just hang on to that paper route.
Snow
Snow,
You don’t have to tell me anything about your job if you don’t want to, but can you please just answer me this—is it dangerous? I mean, is there a chance you could get hurt? Yes or no?
I’ve been trying to see things from your point of view. Maybe it looks to you as if a whole bunch of things are expected of you. Maybe you’re trying to live up to what you think people expect. But people really don’t expect all that much. You should see how happy it makes Gee-Ma Agnes to get a note from you, just a little sign that you’ve been thinking of her. I’m guessing you’d go pretty far to make sure you don’t disappoint anyone. But look . . . you don’t have to prove anything.
I’m also guessing you might not like to be hearing all this from your younger sister. Well, I read about fifty pages of advice columns before sitting down to write to you, so really this is the wisdom of Dear Abby.
Bird
PS—Speaking with spiders and other things you call unusual . . . there’s no special trick to it. When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it ’til th
e end, and somewhere along the line there’ll be weirdness. I’ve never tried to explain it to anyone before, but what I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen. Let me know how it goes if you try it. And if you’re thinking I’m going to grow out of this, you’re wrong.
Hi, Snow,
I’m in detention again. It’s been five weeks since I last heard from you. According to Dad, you’re not only alive but getting prettier and more gracious every day, et cetera, but what I want is an answer to the question in my previous letter. One word: yes or no?
A thing you should understand about me is that I won’t keep a secret just because it’s a secret. I’ve been told that this makes me a bad friend, but I actually think it makes me a better friend than the secret-keepers. (Time will tell.)
If you don’t answer within the week, I’ll show your previous letter to Dad.
I’m sorry to have to threaten you like this. Really, I am.
Bird
Stop fretting, Bird. I’m in no more danger than you are. And right now I’m feeling embarrassed for both of us. I was a fool to write that other letter. It was too much for you—don’t try to tell me it wasn’t—and I’m sorry. Get ready for Thanksgiving . . . I’m coming with Aunt Clara and Uncle John and an assortment of baked goods and trinkets, and the first thing I’m going to do when I arrive is give you the biggest squeeze you ever had in your life.
Snow
—
over at the bookstore I asked Mom if she was really going to let Snow come home for Thanksgiving. That’s exactly how I asked it: “Are you gonna let her?”
Mom was deciding on prices for some books that had just come in the day before. Mrs. Fletcher had taught her to do this by smelling the paper and rubbing the corners of the pages between her fingertips.
Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel Page 19