A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  She prayed in French, and African words crept in. Words I knew she had learned from her mother, but words she never said to me. She prayed to all the gods, of water and earth, and to God above, mon Dieu, that I would be healthy in the morning, alive all day, protected until the next night, when she would ask again.

  When she was finished, she blew out the candles and laid them on their sides next to our wooden plates, and they looked cold and small. Then she put them with the cloth scrap, the bracelet of hair, and the piastre in a pouch inside the kitchen safe, where we kept our spoons and cups. If anyone ever came looking, they wouldn't think that collection of things was special to anyone. They might take the piastre, but they wouldn't know the rest was her church.

  She slept in her chair for much of the night. I would wake to see her slumped against the rush backing, her right cheek propped on her bent hand. The night was far gone, the fire lessened to ruby chunks.

  Toward morning, she would be beside me in the bed, her breathing rough like the file rasp the men used to sharpen their cane knives. She woke me before dawn, when she stirred the fire. She roasted her coffee beans in the black pan and then ground them in the metal grinder she clamped to the table's edge. She poured boiling water on the coffee, in the dented pot, which was one of the first things I ever remembered seeing as a baby. Then she reached into her basket of rags for the tin cigar box. From inside, nested in brown paper, she took out the hard cone of white sugar, which glittered in the firelight.

  Green cane crushed and boiled and brown molasses drained out and then the sugar bleached white and formed into a cone hard as a cowhorn by some magic in some faraway place. Slaves had molasses, measured out in pails during the week. Tretite, the cook, had stolen the sugar for my mother weeks ago, in exchange for a white wedding dress. Only the Bordelons had sugar.

  My mother cut two large pinches with the ancient sugar scissors. She stirred the hardness into her coffee and opened the wooden shutters. She stared out the window at the pink or gray of day, and her throat worked as she swallowed the black.

  The smell rose like bitter strong dirt. I didn't understand how she could drink that liquid, how she could chew the beans during the day. And once when I said that, she told me her own mother used to chew something that made her teeth orange. A nut or seed.

  “In Africa.”

  “Did the nut taste good?”

  She shrugged. “Never taste it.”

  “You were in Africa?”

  “I was little child on the boat. Only remember the boat.”

  “But how did she die? Your mother?”

  My mother lifted her chin at me, exactly as she did to Madame and everyone else, and for a moment, she didn't even see me before her. Her lips were pressed together so tight they disappeared, and her face was like something floating in Doctor Tom's room, like the air was a silvery sharp liquid.

  But then her eyes dropped back down to me, and without a sound of breath, her bosom rose high and then fell.

  “She die from the smell. Soldier blue. That indigo.”

  Today when she turned from the shutter, the sky was still dark. She put her cup on the table and tightened her tignon. From the tin, she took out my peacock plate.

  My mother had exchanged fine soap and cloth to a bayou trader for the small plate. I was seven. She told me if I ate my biscuit or cornmush, a whole world would appear underneath.

  A tree with dangling branches. A gate, and past it a river with a small boat. And on the gate a peacock, his head crowned, his tail a dragged flourish.

  Faint voices rose all the way from the street. The work bell would ring soon. She wrapped the cone of sugar in paper and closed the tin, against ants and rats. Just then, someone tapped at the shutter, and my mother whirled around with a look on her face as if she'd seen a snake.

  Nobody came unannounced to visit my mother. She went to see women in le quartier, sometimes bringing favors for trade, but even Tretite the cook always let my mother know beforehand that she was coming.

  “Marie-Thérèse,” an urgent voice whispered near the opened shutters. “C'est moi.”

  Eveline. I propped myself on the bed. The sunrise was only a silver breath over the trees. Two women stood at the door.

  Eveline came inside, but the other woman, a stranger with scars high on her cheeks, stayed in the doorway. “That monthly visitor come when I was out in the field by Petit Clair,” Eveline said. “So far to walk my whole dress gone.”

  My mother opened the bundle, and I smelled the blood.

  Eveline sighed and looked over at me braiding my hair. “I know Moinette get her monthly now, too. I know you have so much wash, Marie-Thérèse. I bring you something from Michel for thanks.”

  She opened a cloth bag at her feet and showed the gleaming head of a duck, its bill yellow green. Bone? Was a bill made of bone?

  Her husband, Michel, trapped on the weekends and traded the rabbits and birds. Eveline and Michel cut more cane than anyone else on Azure. Eveline straightened again. She was round in the arms and face and stomach, from all five children, she said, leaving behind their baby fat on her. But Eveline's neck was the most beautiful part of her, when she lifted her head. Her throat was long and perfect as a vase with three etched lines of decoration, three lines of paler brown skin from where she bent at the cane all day and at her cooking all night.

  “We come in so late. Say maybe a freeze coming. Can't wash, and can't leave the dress in the house. That smell bring rats.”

  My mother winced. “I do it today,” she said. Then she lifted her chin toward the doorway at the strange tall woman.

  Eveline said, “She new. Buy for the grinding. Want to see you.”

  When Eveline left, the new woman stepped inside and stopped politely. My mother lifted her chin again, like she did to everyone. Her jaw and chin were most of my mother's language, how she slanted her face to indicate anger or curiosity, how she raised that shelf of bone directly toward someone to show she was listening.

  The new woman's face was narrow and dark, like Mamère's, but her eyes were surrounded by more lines. The two scars on each cheek were raised and shiny as oval inserts of satin. She leaned against the wall.

  “Just get here,” she said in English. “Me and my children.” She held up four fingers.

  My mother nodded. “Speak little English, me. But she speak some.” She moved her chin toward me.

  “M'appelle Hera,” the woman said.

  “Marie-Thérèse.”

  Hera's eyes moved quickly from the bed to the chairs, from the washboards hanging on the wall to the three mattress tickings we had finished sewing last night, to me.

  “Someone leave you a bright hardship.” She studied the hair I hadn't finished braiding.

  Mamère didn't answer. She moved the mattresses toward the door. We had to take them to the house.

  “Him up there?”

  I bit my lips. Mamère hated this part, and so did I. When people saw us for the first time, traders or new slaves or visitors to Azure, they tried to establish who we were, where I had come from.

  “Non.”

  Hera was quiet, having heard the anger in Mamère's answer. She rubbed her arms and glanced at my sewing. A sleeve of Céphaline's.

  Hera was staring at us. Seeing what we had. Measuring, the way humans measure one another all the time, every minute. She wanted to see what we looked like, what we owned, compare it to hers, think of how to get us to give some, or take some, or trade something for her own room, on the other side of Eveline's. She had nothing, maybe. Or more than we did. No. Look at her eyes. Like Madame Bordelon's when she evaluated the carriages and coats and china of other women.

  Then Hera looked at me again. “Your only?”

  My mother glanced up. “Take but one candle to light a room,” she said.

  Hera nodded and rubbed her arms again. I could smell the blood from Eveline's clothes.

  Mamère put down the washbasket with the black clothes and said, “Quoi be
soin?” She frowned at me. She wanted the English words.

  “What do you need?” I whispered, to both of them.

  “Not me,” Hera said.

  “What they need?” My mother meant Hera's children.

  “Say you sew.”

  My mother moved her chin up an inch.

  “Say you trade.”

  She lifted her brows.

  Hera said, “My girl fifteen. She need a dress for the New Year. I hear he only give black dress. She need pretty dress, to find someone and set up.” She nodded toward me. “Mine ain't bright, like that one. How old?”

  Her tribal scars shone—she was from Africa, I knew. How old had she been when someone cut her? Had her own mother done it? Cut open her daughter's skin?

  “Just turn fourteen,” I said.

  “Not long,” Hera said. “Bright one like that, someone come for her soon.”

  “Long enough,” my mother said, her eyes slitting to nothing. She opened the door. The sky was silver now, and Hera shouldn't be walking outside the quartier unless she walked in a line toward the canefields. “That bell ring soon.”

  But Hera paused. “You think on a trade?”

  My mother inclined her head to the left, and I hoped Hera saw that meant possibility.

  ———

  My mother put the duck in a basket hung from the ceiling. She put a piece of yesterday's cornbread on the plate. Inside the yellow, she had placed a sliver of sugar. It melted on my tongue.

  When we got to the kitchen, Tretite would slip us meat and biscuits with the bundle of laundry. And coffee beans. Mamère never ate anything but meat and biscuits, and all day, she chewed coffee beans.

  She stretched the blanket tightly over our mattress, though she had lain there only a few hours. The moss had sunk to fit my shape on one side, by the window.

  “Why don't you come to sleep early?” I asked her when I was small.

  “Because the bed is too soft.”

  Today I said, “Will you sew for her?”

  She shrugged.

  “Aren't you tired? Why sleep in the chair? Not the bed?”

  This time Mamère's face was different. She said, “Because then I would be comfortable. Lying down on the bed is like flying. I couldn't get up if I felt like that all night.”

  I looked at the wool blanket over the empty place that was mine. “Comprends?” she whispered, staring at me. “It is frightening to be so rested.”

  I nodded, but I didn't understand.

  The wooden wheels of the small cart creaked. Mamère kept one more pinch of sugar in her apron pocket. But the sugar was all around us, canestalks that made a wall along our clearing. Nine feet high. I measured it with my palm up. Once Doctor Tom had said to Msieu, “Your biggest slave Michel must be an impressive six feet tall,” and I had backed away until my stiff hand was equal to Michel's height.

  The cane was Michel plus half of his body.

  “Stop,” Mamère whispered. “You look like you are waving.”

  “To who?”

  She pushed my hand down to my side.

  “To anyone.”

  ———

  We waited at the back gallery for Tretite to bring us the bundle. Her face was a fallen cake under her red tignon, her cheeks flat and wide and shiny with sweat, her eyes and nose and lips all gathered tightly in the center.

  When I was six, she saw me staring and whispered, “I sleep on my face when I petite like you. I mash tout.” Then she put my fingers on her tiny chin, the glossy red brown of dripped molasses.

  She nodded this morning and said, “Dorm bien?”

  Mamère shook her head. It was what they said. Sleep well?

  Behind Tretite in the pantry were large jars of olive oil lined against the wall, and candles to be trimmed.

  “Tête bien?” Mamère held the bundle and looked up at Tretite, who shrugged. Tretite had headaches every day. She pointed a stubby finger toward the roll of dirty napkins.

  “Merci,” my mother said. Inside the initialed squares would be our breakfast, and ten coffee beans. Tretite would steal for Mamère forever, because of the white muslin dress Mamère sewed for her from an old mosquito barre.

  Tretite was forty, had no husband, but loved wedding dresses.

  She had belonged to Madame Bordelon since she was twenty, she told me, and was never allowed to marry. “She don't want me distract by no man or no baby. Then I couldn't cook so perfect. I don't want the man, me—just the white dress. I had the man once when I was sixteen, and too much trouble. My house is my house. My fire is my fire.”

  She witnessed Madame Bordelon's wedding to Msieu, and cooked the elaborate feast, and all these years, she had wanted a white dress. She wore it on Sundays to visit in le quartier. “A dove and you starlings,” she said, but the people only laughed because she laughed, too, and they could leave their black clothes behind on Sundays.

  I picked up the laundry basket and turned back toward our place.

  From the back gallery, you could see the stables and barns, Tretite's kitchen off to the side and her room attached. Then down the road, our three pecan trees, our clearing like a cave, almost, though Madame had the branches trimmed so she could see us.

  They could see everything.

  Farther down the road, the slave street lined with houses and catalpa trees. The chimneys each with smoke thin as threads now rising into the sky, like God pulled up the dark skeins for himself.

  Now that I had turned fourteen, I had to stay in our one room or in the clearing. I couldn't even walk in the cane, or at the edge of the ciprière swamp, where the ancient cypress trees rested their roots in the black-glass water. I couldn't linger by the river because someone might steal me. Tretite said, “We too far south from New Orleans, and Lafitte men come up the river or the bayou. Look for someone to sell. They see you, they take you that fast.”

  “Lafitte's men won't come in the cane,” I said, angry. “Privateers don't want grass.”

  “Slave stealers take anyone. Took that little boy from Petit Clair while he fishing. His mother lost two now. She scream so loud, I hear from our yard. Lafitte men sell a girl like you for—”

  My mother said, “You stay where I see you. All the time.”

  “There's good moss in the ciprière,” I began, and my mother said, “Lafitte men know every bayou, every ciprière.”

  “Lafitte men know under your dress,” Tretite said. “They keep girls look like you down there in Barataria, where they stay.” She pulled my tignon down tighter over my forehead.

  My hair was hot under the tignon. Under my dress, and on top of my head. I was tired of hearing the words. What would they do with my hair? Pull it out of my head? Turn it into a rope to strangle me? Simply stare at it?

  My hair was soft as the gray moss when it hung from the branches. But we boiled the moss in the washpots, then hung the dripping curtains of black along the fence palings and low bushes. After a time in the sun, the moss was black wire, tangled and stiff. Mamère and I pushed the dried moss into the new cotton tickings we had sewn for the Bordelons.

  I took one new mattress at a time on the cart, and Félonise, the housemaid, helped me lift it upstairs to the bedrooms. She smiled dreamily at me.

  Félonise rarely said anything, to anyone. She stared only at the thing just in front of her—the table she polished, the vase she dusted, the floor she washed.

  One day when I was ten, she took me into Msieu Bordelon's room to clean the furniture. Félonise gave me a small rag sprinkled with lemon oil, and my hand followed hers circling steady on the armoire. She hummed above me, the hum vibrating in her throat, falling down to my scalp and entering my skull as a shivering. The lemon oil disappeared into the wood, leaving behind a sheen. It turned my cloth translucent, and when we were finished, Félonise had still not said a word, only hummed so long that my ears felt tender. She took my hand in hers, our fingers shells of glaze, Félonise's hand sealed to my own when we left the bedroom.

  N
ow we carried a new mattress to Grandmère Bordelon's room, on the women's side of the house. Grandmère was very fat, and she sat in her chair before the doors that led to the gallery. She had a spyglass, and she watched the river. She turned to us and said, “You—don't forget to roll it well. Always roll a new bed.”

  The rolling pin rested in notches atop the mahogany headboard. We put the mattress on the ropes and lifted down the rolling pin, polished and heavy. Back and forth, smoothing the stubborn lumps of moss, and while we worked, Félonise's eyes crossed until I knew she saw nothing, not the cotton ticking or my own fingers on the other side.

  All day and night, Grandmère Bordelon spoke to her and moved her about the house to bring and take and hover. I was afraid of Grandmère Bordelon's huge trembling cheeks, which hung below her chin as if her face had melted; fat was under our skin, fat like the waxy white smudges under the rough skin of ham.

  Grandmère was Msieu's mother. She had lived in the first small house, amid the oaks on the side land, and after her husband died, she could not be alone. Her slave Marie-Claire was told never to leave her side, even when she slept. But once Grandmère awakened alone. She screamed, but Marie-Claire was in le quartier with a fevered child.

  Grandmère had Marie-Claire tied down. Two days she was staked in the side yard. Tretite said that from the gallery, Marie-Claire looked like a doll forgotten on the ground, and no one could go near her.

  When she was released from the stakes, Tretite saw bleeding holes in her cheeks. “Rats,” Marie-Claire said, and didn't speak again for weeks. The rats came every night to Grandmère's house, where she kept a store of sweets and nuts.

  That first old house burned down from a cooking fire, and now nothing was there amid the oaks.

  I could smell Grandmère's breath. When we had made the bed with the white coverlet I had bleached so many times to take out the stains, Grandmère held my skirt with her finger and thumb.

  “Sang mêlé,” she said, lifting my pale wrist—mixed blood— and letting it fall. “I forgot about you.”

  Her black crepe dress smelled of sour wine and onions and smoke.

  “And you are old enough now. In New Orleans, les mulâ-tresses are the best for dressing the hair.” How could mules be good with hair? She nodded decisively. “Today. Today you will learn about the hair. Whether she is forced or not, Céphaline needs a maid now to dress properly.” She peered up at my face, her eyes blue like Céphaline's but murky around the edges, as if someone had stirred cornstarch inside.