Boy, Snow, Bird

Snow’s next letter is lengthy, and the topic she’s chosen is Clara. Clara is lively and works the night shift at the hospital; Snow recalls that she made Clara cry once when she was very little and told Clara that she shouldn’t tell Snow that she is a person of color. John, Clara’s husband, runs a home school in which the students discuss literature. John went to prison at one point, but Snow doesn’t know for what. While incarcerated, he spent his time reading; Clara was dating his cousin at the time of his release, but because he was able to discuss literature and history with her, she eventually left him for John. Olivia forbade it and disowned her as a result.

Clara had grown up in Biloxi with her aunt, Effie; Effie was a live-in cook for a white family, and Clara laundered their sheets and scrubbed their floors. Effie told Clara stories about the Whitmans’ passing; at first, the stories were just about their successes, but upon pressing, also about their failures. Many of the Whitmans’ lives ended in tragic, untimely deaths, typically due to complications because of race and marriage. Clara believes the family for whom they worked was lucky to have Effie, who was honest, as a less-honest cook would have fattened them up until they were too fat to run, then murder them one evening.

Snow tells Bird that she has “the Novaks to fall back on” but that “the Whitmans and the Millers are the product of generations of calculated breeding, whether they’ll admit it or not” (224). Snow is critical of this and even suggests that it is ultimately futile, as “they can’t stop a face like Clara’s or Effie’s rising up every now and again to confront them” (224). She has a similar critique of the Millers, who have convinced themselves that all they are doing is making sensible choices. She contrasts them with “people whose families have lived their lives without trying to invent advantages,” and instead fight for equality; however, she is “slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this” (224-25). She writes that she lets her grandparents believe she doesn’t visit because of Boy, but the truth is that she simply doesn’t like them.

Snow lives in an impoverished town called Twelve Bridges, where people are considered to be wealthy if they have enough money to get through the week. She finds the people there to be friendly and hospitable, and is convinced that if she is “ever in any other part of the world and [passes] a house that has white fairy lights strung across its porch,” she’ll likely “get along with the people who live there” (226).

Bird tells Snow that she shouldn’t continue to feel bad about the comment she made when she was young, that it’s okay because she learned from it. She believes Snow is lucky to have been homeschooled. She remarks that there was more in the last letter about other people and asks Snow to tell her one thing about herself. She also notes that she knows nothing about the Novaks, other than that they probably came from Hungary.

Bird is happy to hear that Snow likes Brer Anansi stories and tells Snow about an incident with the spiders in her room. She asked the spiders if they know of Anansi the Spider stories. The spiders had, and asked her what she knows of him. Bird tells them the stories she knows, but as it turns out, the president of the spiders was very upset that the stories had been leaked, and insisted that someone must be held responsible for the treachery.

In order to calm the spiders down, Bird offers to tell the story of La Belle Capuchine, which was told to her by one of Olivia’s maids, who was shortly thereafter fired for telling it. La Belle Capuchine was an unusually-beautiful house slave who stayed in favor by imitating her mistress, to the point that people frequently remarked upon the resemblance between the two. As a result, La Belle Capuchine considered herself to be better than the other slaves. At the same time, a bloody uprising was happening that was meant to bring back High John the Conqueror, in order to provide their freedom. Once High John returned, he confused La Belle Capuchine for her mistress, Miss Margaux, who took the opportunity to escape. La Belle Capuchine was left behind” “she was truly free. She loved no one and she was unloved […] in the end her beauty was worth nothing, since there wasn’t a soul around to see it” (235).

Bird tells Snow that Agnes and Gerald are good to her, but mentions nothing about Olivia, and asks Snow to tell her about her job.

Snow replies that she’s uncertain how much of Bird’s tales she is meant to believe and asks how she might go about conversing with spiders. She tells Bird that Bird’s version of La Belle Capuchine—which may be a code version of Snow—is different than the one she knows, about whose origin she is unsure. In Snow’s version, La Belle Capuchine is a beautiful woman who tends a garden filled with poisonous flowers; she, herself, is likewise poisonous. Her poisonous garden continually takes over and subsequently ends the world; each time, the world begins anew, and the same thing happens again, leading Snow to believe that “we’d better get used to La Belle Capuchine, since she’ll never be defeated” (238). This version resonates with Snow: as a child, she had always been told how beautiful she was, so when she was sent away, she began to believe that beauty was a bad thing.

The one true thing Snow tells Bird about herself is that she is a deceiver. She tells Bird about an incident at a bar recently when some of the other patrons used racial slurs against her friends; these patrons believed she was white, but instead of using that to cut them down, she chose to take her friends and leave. She then tells Bird that Clara and John believe she transcribes interviews for a newspaper, but, in fact, she left secretarial college because there were too many Whitmans. Later, at the unemployment agency, she tried not to disclose her race on the form, but when forced to do so, she ticked “colored”; she never heard about any jobs, then came across her current, secret job about a week later.

Bird tells Snow that people don’t actually expect much, that Agnes is thrilled just to get a little note showing that Snow has been thinking of her, and that perhaps Snow believes people expect more than they do. She tells Snow that there is no special trick for talking to spiders: one must simply keep one’s attention on the thing that catches it, and asks Snow to tell her if her job is dangerous.

Snow doesn’t reply for five weeks, so Bird writes to ask again if Snow’s job is dangerous and threatens to show Arturo her previous letters if she doesn’t reply. Snow writes back to reassure Bird and let her know that she, Clara, and John will be coming for Thanksgiving.