Boy, Snow, Bird (25 page)

The other house Negroes had learned not to bother speaking to La Belle Capuchine. She didn’t consider herself one of them and addressed them as if she owned them—this was another way in which she amused her master and mistress and their family. But there was a footman named Michael who was pining away because of her beauty and, like dozens before him, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to win La Belle Capuchine’s heart. His words and serenades did nothing; she returned his gifts and letters unopened, or she showed them to Miss Margaux and together the two women laughed at the inexpensive trinkets and the spelling mistakes he’d made. The man ran out of hope and confronted La Belle Capuchine. He said that he could never blame anybody for trying their best to survive, but that she was the kind of traitor he’d never known before and hoped never to see again. La Belle Capuchine simply looked over her shoulder and asked, “Is someone speaking? For a moment I thought I heard somebody speak.”

Now something had been happening on the plantation. The other house Negroes had been keeping track of what happened among the field Negroes as best they could. So far six of the field hands had killed a white man each. The punishment for this was very heavy for everybody who was even associated with any Negro who killed a white man; the master was trying to make sure everybody was too scared to try it again. But the field hands on that plantation continued to take the lives of their overseers even as the harshness of the punishments increased. There was a woman there who was a skilled fortune-teller. She’d asked her cowrie shells, “Who will set us free?” And the cowrie shells told her: “High John the Conqueror.”

“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.