Dear Snow,
First of all I don’t think you should continue to feel bad about making Aunt Clara cry that time. You learned something from it and it sounds like she’s completely forgiven you. Also . . . you know when something is so incredibly depressing that it’s actually kind of funny? I laughed when I read what you said to her.
So you were left alone with Uncle John while Aunt Clara was working her porcupine hours? That’s a Flax Hill kind of question, I’m afraid. If that had happened around here, people would talk. And having all your classes at home . . . I wish I was allowed to do that. I’ve been thinking a lot about those other Whitmans you wrote me about. There’s that blood tie, and it’s troublesome, and we don’t know what we would have done if we’d been in their place. They’re family and I still love them . . . can’t think of any other way to turn a chain into flowers . . . but I maybe wouldn’t ask Addie, Cass, or Vince Whitman for advice about anything.
There was more about them and Clara and Effie in that letter than there was about you. I’d like to know one thing about you—you choose which thing it is.
I wish I could tell you stuff about the Novaks, but they’re a mystery. What I do know is that they most probably came to Ellis Island from Hungary, which is another world (along with Russia, as you said).
I’m glad you know Brer Anansi stories. I know some too. There are quite a few spiders in my room, possibly most of the spiders in the house. Here’s something that happened a few months ago: I got curious about what the spiders in my room thought of Brer Anansi, or whether they’d even heard of him. I just wanted to know if he was a real spider to them. So one night when the house was as dark and as silent as could be, I sat up in my bed and whispered: Who speaks for the spiders?
And the president of the spiders came forward: I do.
(She didn’t speak aloud, she sort of mimed. That’s the only way I can explain it.)
I asked her if she’d heard of Anansi the Spider and she got cagey. She said: Have you yourself heard of Anansi the Spider?
I answered: Sure, sure. I can tell you a story about him if you want.
She said: Please do.
Halfway through the story about Anansi and the magic cooking pot, I got this feeling that the spiders didn’t like what I was saying. Their expressions aren’t easy to read, but they just didn’t seem very happy with me. I said: Hey, should I stop?
No, said the president of the spiders. Don’t stop now, we’re all very interested.
But have you heard this story?
Yes we have. Anansi is very dear to us.
I finished telling that story and the president of the spiders asked me how many more Anansi stories I knew. I said I knew at least fifteen, and she got openly upset.
Do a lot of people know these stories?
Uh . . . yeah. Sorry.
How? How did this happen? The president of the spiders started gliding around the walls of my room, glaring suspiciously at the poor spiders she found in the corners of each web.
This is deep treachery, she said. Since when do spiders tell tales? Since when do we talk to outsiders?
Only one spider answered her—he was gray and hairy and an elder, I think—he said: Don’t even worry about it, Chief! Let them think they know, but they don’t know! They don’t know!
Be that as it may, the president of the spiders said, someone must pay for this.
Her citizens began to beg. They swore on the lives of their mothers and grandmothers and children that the Anansi leak was nothing to do with them. I could see I’d stirred up some real trouble, and it was up to me to distract the president of the spiders while I still could.
Wait, WAIT, I said. I have another story—there are no spiders in it, but if you like it, can we forget the other one I told?
The president of the spiders folded her many arms. Very well. IF I like it, she said.
I told the spiders the story of La Belle Capuchine. The woman who told me this story was a maid employed by Grammy Olivia, and soon after she told me this story Grammy Olivia fired her. The official reason for this was that Leah wasn’t doing her job properly, but I think the real reason is because Grammy Olivia overheard parts of this story. I really liked it when Leah told me stories. She wanted to be an actress. She did voices pretty well. I hope she’s onstage somewhere right now. I’ve forgotten her exact words, but here it is as I remember it, except for the parts I’ve added because she told me that each time a story like this one gets retold the new teller should add a little something of their own:
If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one. But of course if you take that path you may also find that in the end you’re unloved. La Belle Capuchine loved no one; she was a house slave, an unusually dark one, but unusually comely. All the house Negroes were good-looking and talked nicely and some of them played the violin and could chart the movements of the planets because the master and the mistress of the house got more fun out of their hobbies when they taught them to others. But La Belle Capuchine had seen other house Negroes come and go. Some of them made the mistake of getting too good at astronomy or musicianship. It didn’t do to outstrip the master or the mistress. You weren’t supposed to take an interest in the subject for its own sake, you had to remember you were learning it to keep someone else company. You had to remember to ask anxiously whether your attempt was correct, and you had to make mistakes, but not jarring ones. Other house Negroes had been taken ill—not always physically ill, but often by sorrows of the spirit. Very few people can feel well having to make marionettes of themselves, prancing and preening and accepting affection and abuse alike as the mood of their masters and mistresses take them. Very few people can watch others endure humiliation without recognizing the part they play in increasing it. But La Belle Capuchine was a practical person. She knew that the best way to get by was to be amusing and to flatter through imitation. Save her coloring and her overabundant head of hair, she looked just like her mistress, Miss Margaux, and that worked very much in La Belle Capuchine’s favor. A visitor to the plantation caught sight of La Belle Capuchine, exclaimed that she looked exactly as Miss Margaux would if she were dipped in cocoa, and from then on everybody said it. La Belle Capuchine and Miss Margaux had the same dainty wrists and ankles, the same dazzling eyes; they even smiled in the same carefree way, though admittedly the smiling was something that La Belle Capuchine had taught herself to do. The two women had the same father, which explains some of the uncanny resemblance between them. The rest was down to La Belle Capuchine’s hard work. Miss Margaux’s tastes were La Belle Capuchine’s tastes, Miss Margaux’s opinions were La Belle Capuchine’s opinions, every now and again Miss Margaux found it entertaining to ask La Belle Capuchine, “What am I thinking right now?” and have La Belle Capuchine give her the correct answer without hesitation.
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.