A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I went back to the kitchen. Mulâtresse. “You a mule, but mule don't breed,” Christophe said once. “You only work for pleasure.”

  Babies. I couldn't have babies? Félonise stood near the table eating a fig. Her skin was the pale gray of washed-too-many-times shirts. Her eyes were the same. She took her fig and disappeared into the parlor, and Tretite came inside.

  “Tretite,” I whispered, knowing that this was something my mother didn't want to teach me yet when we were alone in the clearing. Maybe my mother didn't know. “Tell me the name for Félonise.”

  “Comprends pas,” she said, shrugging, sorting the purplish figs.

  “Mulâtresse, c'est moi,” I said. “Me. And Félonise?”

  Tretite looked up sharply, her tiny mouth pursed to disappearing under her draped-down cheeks. “Pourquoi?”

  I lifted my chin and felt my mother inside my skull. Then I lifted my chin higher and said, “Grandmère Bordelon said mulâtresse must learn to do hair.”

  Tretite put the figs in a blue bowl and then rested her fingers in a fan on the table's edge. “Oui. Mulâtresse. So. Félonise, c'est quadroon. The mother, like you, the father, c'est blanc. Eh là, Félonise had a girl, and the father blanc. In New Orleans. C'est octoroon, that baby. They take her away when she is two, and Félonise is sold down here. That baby—so white, like Céphaline, but black, black hair and black, black eye.”

  Félonise's fingers were tight on mine, that day, the lemon oil glossing our palms.

  Tretite said, “And other way—that is Eveline. Griffe. The mother mulâtresse, the father nègre. Eveline's enfants call sacatra—griffe mix with nègre. So.”

  I heard Mamère with the cart, bringing up Céphaline's new mattress, and I stepped outside. My mother was African, Sin-galee, but her forehead shone not pure black under her tignon— brown and red, too. Her palms always wrinkled white from washing. Her tongue pink when she stirred. Her eyes nearly purple when she looked into mine. And a stripe of golden dust on her cheek, where she'd rubbed.

  How could you do numbers as on Céphaline's lessons, but inside someone's blood? Félonise came behind me to help lift the next mattress into Céphaline's room.

  Céphaline sat at her desk writing. Her hair was lank and tied with a dirty ribbon. She did not look up at me. The letters and numbers were so small and close together, the page seemed covered with black lace. I had been learning to read her words since I was small. I could make out only a few of these—coeur, cheval, écrire, ordinaire—when I walked past slowly, to get down the rolling pin from her headboard. Heart, horse, write, ordinary.

  I wouldn't tell my mother yet that I would leave her for the house. It was still early. I shook the bottles of our cleaning solutions, to see if any had gone bad.

  The tablecloth was stained with many colors, spread out on the worktable in our clearing. Wine spill like a red tongue. That must have come from Msieu Lemoyne, the very old man who lived alone next door at Petit Clair. His hands always shook at Sunday dinner.

  The Bordelons had entertained two families from down the river yesterday. That meant Céphaline would have had to smile and speak to sons, and today she would be as bitter as the smell from this bottle for oil stains.

  Mamère tied different colors of thread around the neck of each bottle to show what they were.

  The grease from the ham made windows of clear in the linen, made the cloth shimmer so the table's wood was visible underneath, and I pressed my fingertip to the fat. How did the pig's fat enter the threads? The same fat we boiled for soap, how did the ashes change the grease to the—what did Céphaline call it, in her lessons with Mademoiselle, when the Auzenne girls were laughing at her concentration, the way her forehead wrinkled? The agent. The agent to erase the grease?

  And how much fat and grease was under my own skin? I wondered, pinching my arm. Mamère caught my fingers.

  “Get the grease out, you use green one.”

  “I know.”

  I shook the bottle gently. White soap shaved very fine, soft rainwater and salt, two yolks of fresh eggs, cabbage juice and bullock's gall, and salt of tartar from Tretite's kitchen.

  I rubbed the liquid onto the golden spots.

  “What?” She knew a question circled in me.

  She saw me looking at her forearms and wrists, wider than the part above her elbow, and she said, “Wash toujours, every day, the arm so.”

  “No. Not your arm.”

  “What?”

  I couldn't ask her. She hated the questions I brought from Céphaline's room with dirty clothes, when I'd heard her reading or arguing with her governess. How do you measure the grease in a person? I pushed in my own cheek. Was that fat under the cheek? Not muscle?

  She never wanted to discuss the lessons about brains and bones and books, so she began her own teaching quickly with one word when we were alone.

  “Blood.” She pushed Eveline's black clothes into a pot of water that did not steam. But then she handed me a white pillowcase with brown freckles. Céphaline's pillowcase. She had scratched her boutons again, the bumps on her cheeks.

  “White thread.”

  White soap shaved fine, a pound of alum, tartar, and rainwater. Mamère soaked a white flannel rag with the liquid and rubbed it onto the dried blood.

  Since I was small, she had always begun with one word. “Blood. Cold water and be careful. Blood stay forever, like it grow in the cloth.”

  “Gravy. Get it out, you use that bottle with the brown thread.”

  “Mud. The bottle with the black thread.”

  “Wine. Red thread.”

  Soap for the perspiration stains under the arms of Madame's chemise and Céphaline's, which smelled of salt and worry, Msieu's white shirts, which smelled of smoke and grass, and the huge pantalettes Grandmère wore under her dresses—rancid meat and rosewater.

  How did yellow egg yolks and sour cabbage juice take the fat from the threads? The bottles held their murky fluids. Blood and saliva and tears were inside us. What made the tears?

  We boiled the white clothes and rinsed them in bluing. Before noon, I hung them on the lines strung from the pecan branches, with the wooden pins Eveline's husband, Michel, carved for Mamère long ago. Flared out at the ends like dancing ladies, I thought when I was small, only playing with the pins. Now they looked like faceless men straddling the clothes.

  It was so warm, the white clothes dried quickly, and they seemed alive against me. The air was inside them. I took down Céphaline's first, the same size as me, and it was as if we were walking together down the line. Her chemise was full with the wind, leaning into me. And Msieu's shirt twisted away.

  Madame Bordelon came out onto the back gallery and put her hand over her eyes, like she did all day. Her fingers a goose beak, her wrist and forearm a long curved goose neck. Like a secret signal to someone, even though she couldn't actually see any slaves except us. She could almost always see us.

  “White?” she called loudly to Mamère. “You washed all that white and not Grandmère's dress yet?”

  Mamère didn't look nervous. Madame came halfway down the gallery stairs that led to the yard. The kitchen and clearing were her charge—not the fields. Madame's eyes were a dark stripe of shade, but her mouth was a glittering stripe of teeth when she lifted her lip to help her squint. To see.

  Mamère wasn't supposed to wash clothes for field people. They had to do their own laundry. We washed only for the Bor-delons and their guests and Tretite. Eveline's black skirt floated in the pot.

  “Madame dress next.” Mamère raised her voice but not her face. She never seemed nervous that Madame might come down into the clearing.

  But Madame didn't turn yet, as she usually did. “Moinette.”

  “Madame?” I called back. My mother stopped rubbing clothes on the washboard, the sluff sluff ceasing.

  “You'll come at noon bell, Moinette.” Then Madame turned on the stairs. “Marie-Thérèse,” she shouted. “Don't forget to take off the buttons …”


  “They jet buttons from Paris,” Mamère finished softly.

  Fig leaves boiled in water—what we used to take the stains from Grandmère's black crepe dresses. She had worn black for ten years, since her husband died and left Azure and all the land to her. Since that day, everyone else had worn black as well.

  She liked to say, Easy to see black crows in the cane. See if they steal. See if they sleep.

  Sleeping was stealing. Stealing time. I cut the button threads.

  My mother looked up at me now. “Noon bell?” she asked. “Today?”

  She held up the pile of cloth, black as charred paper, but the wash water ran dark red. Eveline's blood. Under her dress. “You going up there just for today?” she asked.

  The jet buttons glittered on the table like bird eyes. I said, “Don't know.” My mother was afraid. She was afraid I was going to have to sleep inside the house, away from her.

  Then horses’ hooves rasped on the shell road. Madame Auzenne was here with her daughters. They came every week for lessons, but today they brought their hairdresser from New Orleans to prepare Céphaline for winter season—dinners and dances and men.

  Mamère listened to the carriage wheels. “Céphaline feel about her lesson for marry like you feel about sewing?” she asked.

  She knew I hated making my stitches smaller and smaller, like they were supposed to be. I smelled the always-wet place at the edge of the cane where we poured off the dirty wash water, the mossy smell of bluing and damp, and suddenly our clearing felt crowded, like Tretite's armoire when I hid in it as a child. My head felt much too large under the black scarf. The Auzennes’ voices came through the leaves like tiny hammers on iron. Laughter high and chattering. My mother's face so small and dark under her tignon.

  The clothes wrapped damp sleeves around me. I couldn't go into the cane and find a stalk to chew, couldn't wander along the riverbank looking for what the current brought. I had to stay here, so close to the washpots their heated iron breathed on my arm.

  “Not her lessons,” I said. “Not the lessons you think about.”

  I thought I knew what would happen, I wanted to say. I knew the cleaning liquids, the way clothes had to be ironed and sewn and folded, the places to get moss, the way the tallow smelled when we made soap. I thought I knew where I belonged. To Mamère.

  But I wanted to see Céphaline's room again, to glimpse her words on the paper and the words in the books, to hear the words she spoke for her own lessons. Last year, when Madame argued with Céphaline over the corset and my fingers tightened the laces, my eyes kept moving over Céphaline's papers. Pages covered with fine writing, numbers, drawings, and poems. I learned to read some words from listening to her lessons and seeing her children's books. I knew my numbers because I loved them as a child, arranging pecans in circles and multiplying them the way Céphaline did her ink dots on the page.

  “My lessons from you I understand,” I said now to Mamère, because Madame Bordelon came out onto the gallery and put her hand to her brows. She was looking for me. “Céphaline's lessons from books she understands. But her other lessons, to become wed to someone with money, she refuses to hear.”

  Then I left Mamère amid the clothes, and she turned away without a word.

  I waited in the yard. The carriage had been put away. The governess's voice was steady as a trail of ants while she read. Lines of words with no object to avoid.

  Mademoiselle Lorcey was the second governess to live in the room beside Céphaline's. The first one lasted a long time, with her thick spectacles like tiny ponds of clean water over her eyes. Céphaline loved her. She taught Céphaline about the numbers and how they could be multiplied and divided forever.

  I entered the house like a fly, back then, when I was eight and ten and twelve. I landed in each room long enough to deliver clothes, to clean shoes with blacking, to touch a few tables and the closets with my fingers while I put away linens.

  I heard the lessons. That governess, Madame Lustgarten, was a widow from New Orleans who had never had children. “You are nearly like my own,” she said once to Céphaline. “Your mind is so quick. And girls—they never love numbers as you do. They are afraid of science. But not you. I have never had a pupil like you.”

  I listened while lost to everyone's sight in the long hallway where the floor gleamed like a molasses river and the portraits on the wall stared at one another and not down at me.

  “Rust. Iron oxide. Look at the elements.”

  Mamère knew the mixture to take rust away from the white shirts of Msieu, if he'd been inspecting machinery from the sugar mill.

  “Look at how the elements must react if we put this nail inside a jar with a few drops of water.”

  Now, on the back stairs, I remembered listening to them both. Mamère and Madame Lustgarten. Varnish and lemon oil. Rust and metal. Soap made of tallow and ashes.

  But Msieu sent that governess away after three years, because Céphaline spent all her time in her room, with her papers. She would not sew or play the piano or dance. She would not speak to Grandmère Bordelon at all, only stared—not even at a person or wall or window. When I saw her eyes focused on the very air in front of her, I knew she was doing sums and experiments inside her brain.

  After Madame Lustgarten, no one came for a long time. We were thirty miles south of New Orleans, Madame Bordelon used to fret. “No one of any stature wants to live in Plaquemines Parish now.”

  I remembered when Céphaline learned the names of the bones.

  Under my dress was nothing but my ribs and skin and stomach. Céphaline had told me about the body while I hung up her clothes. Last year, in winter. It was as if she had to tell someone of the lessons, after Madame Lustgarten had been sent away.

  She said we were bones and ligaments and tendons and fat and muscle and organs. She said to look at the pig's body when it was killed; we were the same except for measurement.

  “Of what?” I asked, setting down her shoes.

  “Of those things. Of brains, bones, stomachs. Mammals have almost everything in common. Look—” She was at her desk. “Mammals give birth to live young. Reptiles lay eggs. Fowl, too. Look at the classifications.” Her book had gold-edged pages.

  She knew I couldn't read all those words. But from her child's picture books, I learned other words quickly. Chat, cheval, chien. Cat, horse, dog.

  That day, she was putting animals into columns. Cow. Pig. Horse. Snake. Turkey. Chicken. “Where is mule?” I asked.

  She frowned, and pushed her finger across the columns. “A mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey. It's a hybrid.”

  Madame called me now. I carried the pressed table linens, wrapped with red ribbon. Mamère always tied the clean clothes in square bundles with ribbons, at first so I knew whose were whose, but then because Madame liked it.

  Madame and Msieu were leaving the table. The small splinter of wood between his teeth.

  “That's why she is valuable,” Madame said, glancing at the linens in my arms. I was thinking of the words. Mammal. Hybrid.

  “That one?” He stared at me.

  Cold trickled across my back. Your shoulder blades, Cépha-line had told me. Not angel wings. That is foolish. They are bones. We are humans, not angels.

  “No,” Madame said, taking the bundles. “The mother. Marie-Thérèse. She does the laundry perfectly and sends it back tied up beautifully like that.”

  He looked not at me but at the ribbon. He said, “It is clean. How laundry is delivered is not important.”

  Madame sounded impatient. “It is the presentation of beauty,” she said. “It is more important than you know.”

  “For who?” His voice was louder now. “For you?”

  Her voice was soft as steam. “For the women who come here and see tablecloths and napkins and judge us. The women who have sons. Unless we can spend weeks in New Orleans this winter, we have only the Desjardins and Auzennes to think about for husbands. Don't you see them looking at this house? A
t her?”

  Her was Céphaline. I had to learn to make her beautiful.

  “Moinette,” Madame Bordelon called from the dining room. “Take the gingercake and tell them I'll be in shortly. I don't know where Félonise has gone. She's getting so old she can't move.” Madame Auzenne, her curls like caterpillars along her cheeks, her dress maroon silk, studied something on the buffet.

  I carried the platter into the parlor, where the girls had to play piano for an hour after lunch.

  The Auzenne girls were on the settee. They were twelve and fourteen and sixteen. Their hair was black and curled at their temples, their cheeks white and smooth as the curve of eggshells. They sat like the dolls on Céphaline's shelf, heads erect, hands still during history lessons, and when Mademoiselle Lorcey asked them for the name of a governor in New Orleans or a king in France, they didn't move anything but their eyebrows and shoulders to say they didn't know and didn't care.

  Céphaline took a piece of gingercake right away. “Ginger is a root, not a bean like vanilla,” she said, and the Auzenne girls smiled politely as if she'd stumbled on the grass.

  Céphaline's boutons glowed on her cheeks and jaw like tiny berries inserted under her skin. I waited near the door, thinking of the cloves Tretite slid under the collar of the ham.

  “Lessons are finished for today,” Mademoiselle Lorcey said, and the Auzenne girls smiled faintly. But they didn't reach for the gingercake until their mother came in and said, “Yes, petites.”

  Mademoiselle Lorcey sighed. “At least the names of royalty would help you make conversation with someone at a dinner.”

  The oldest Auzenne girl raised her brows again. “Must Céphaline play the piano today? Perhaps the hairdresser could help her now. With her—toilette. Then we wouldn't get home so late.”