Boy, Snow, Bird(56)
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.