A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Céphaline's mouth was set in a thin line like a nail scratch of blood. She had rubbed scarlet geranium petals on her lips, as her mother had told her. “You cannot be helped,” she hissed, and moved her skirts around me when she left.

  Madame Bordelon watched, her own face unmoving. “Moi-nette, come upstairs,” she said. The hem of her dress collected cake morsels Céphaline had dropped.

  Last winter, to prepare her for the winter season of dinners and dances in New Orleans, Madame showed me how to dress Céphaline and style her hair. Céphaline should have had a maid before, but she wouldn't let Félonise touch her. She refused to wear her corset and pulled her hair into a ball at the back of her head.

  She was always hunched over her desk. Back then, I practiced putting on her corset and pulling the stays, and her curved back would lift. But her hair began to fall out—a bird nest of dull brown in the brush, strands on her pillowcase—and Doctor Tom came from New Orleans on his horse. He brought tonics and medicines, as he always had for Grandmère.

  Msieu told Madame, “I don't trust him—an English doctor. No one wants the English here. Maybe we should take Céphaline to Paris.”

  Msieu had looked anxiously into the bedroom where she lay. He loved Céphaline, even though he never smiled. His face was dry and chapped under his black hat, from riding the canerows.

  I curled up on a pallet in the corner, but she wouldn't sleep, her head down in the dandelion-ball of light from her candle while she read. “I can't study while you breathe,” she said at last. I let my air in and out, only my own air, my cheeks pressed against the plaster where the walls met. But she had sent me to the kitchen for milk and then locked the door and refused to let me or anyone else in. No one could touch her anymore, she'd said. No poking and lacing.

  Now she read at her desk, her back bent like a heavy shawl weighed on her shoulders. She turned when I came inside the bedroom.

  Céphaline's eyes were glowing blue as the lowest flames, the cooking fire under Tretite's pine knots, and inside the blue were bars of black like wagon-wheel spokes. Her eyes were like nothing anyone had seen.

  But the skin around her mouth and the edges of her hairline was red and swollen with boutons. Her hair was thin at the temples and dull brown as faded pecan shells. Not Creole black like the Auzenne girls, thick and lustrous down her spine so we could gather and pin and curl it—so that a man could unpin it.

  The hairdresser from New Orleans was named Zerline. She carried two bottles, cut glass decanters as if for brandy and cognac, but smaller, with wider mouths.

  She was paler than me. Which of Tretite's words fit her? Quadroon? Hair straight and shiny black as bootleather, pulled so tightly into a knot it was as if she had no hair at all.

  “The smell goes into my brain,” Céphaline said without looking up. Then she lowered her head onto the pages, and when her mother lifted her, smudges of oil were left on the paper.

  “The price of beauty,” her mother said softly. “In France, our hair was so heavy and high, we knelt in our carriage. Be grateful you have only the curls on the sides to arrange.”

  The curling tongs sat next to the lamp, sharp as black scissors.

  “This comes from New Orleans, madame,” Zerline said in her soft, pinched voice. “Made special for the ladies there, for the balls and parties. I will send it on the boat, if you approve.”

  She dipped a silver comb into the bottle, and the black liquid clung to the teeth until she pulled the comb slowly through Céphaline's hair. The strands stood alone, tiny black canerows, until she smoothed her palms over the hair, pushing the color into a glossy helmet.

  “So, là, wait some time. The skin is next.” From the other bottle, she poured liquid into a bowl and made a paste with alum from the kitchen. The smell of camphor rose from Céphaline's hair, and her cheeks and forehead were covered in the white mask.

  She stared at me, her eyes fierce. I turned away. Someone was supposed to pull our hair from the pins, put his mouth on ours, and then reach to move our dresses.

  What was supposed to happen then, I didn't want to know.

  “Nothing Céphaline say help you. When you were nine, she say cane is a grass, and you cut the little grass near the house and mash up and boil. Then you throw up.”

  My mother was angry. I had no words for her. I had said the word patella aloud to myself, while sewing.

  Who first ate the grass, in India? Céphaline said the sugarcane had come from there. Who saw a tall, waving stalk and thought to grind it green in his own teeth, to find the juice sweet?

  What if he had died?

  “She say the names of the bones. How that help you?”

  Clavicle. Femur. Cranium. The bone around the brain.

  “I like to know the words.”

  “You know nothing yet.” She moved the needle into the sleeve. Now that the mattresses were done, we had to sew new coats for the men, for Christmas. The coarse cottonade was already dyed black.

  “Doctor Tom said fingernails and hair grow but they are dead. They are not living. That's why it doesn't hurt when you cut them or burn them. The curling tongs are hotter than your iron.” I had to make Céphaline's hair into black spiraled curls. Curls just larger than mine.

  “You don't be in the room with that doctor,” she said. “Nobody trust Englishman with voice like that. Old and no house. Just a white horse and all them bottles. You don't listen to him.”

  Doctor Tom had two eyes in a jar. When I hung his clothes in the armoire of the guest room, and he was gone to help old Msieu Lemoyne, whose breath was not working, I lingered to see the jars and books.

  What made the disk of color on the edge of the white ball? I didn't touch the glass. Whose eye, this murky green? Whose brain? What was the pale fist in another jar?

  In a dish lay teeth, their whitish roots like thorns, which he kept to show slaves who didn't believe teeth should be so hard to pull.

  “You wouldn't believe those were from a child,” he said behind me, and I dropped the packet of white shirts.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, but he laughed.

  “I need a clean shirt,” he said, pulling salve-stained fabric away from his body. “It took me all night to calm Lemoyne's lungs.”

  I untied Mamère's ribbon around the shirts. “Are the lungs white, like that?” I pointed to the jar with the pale fist, hoping he would say what that was.

  Doctor Tom spread his hands on his own chest. “Lungs are large and grayish pink, guarded under the ribs,” he said. “Lemoyne is old-fashioned like all the French. He believes that when the grinding begins, the vapors from the sugarhouse will clear his lungs. A lovely Creole superstition—when the first cane is cut, all will be well.”

  “Maybe if he believes it will cure him, he will be correct,” Madame Bordelon said coldly from the doorway, tilting her head to study me. My fingers raked up the dirty laundry from the floor.

  Doctor Tom rode his white horse between New Orleans and the houses south along the river, the only doctor willing to come this far down the Mississippi. Msieu paid him to take care of Grandmère and Céphaline and any slaves who were sick or hurt, and as Azure was large, he stayed here while he worked. At the next place south, Bontemps, Msieu LeBrun raised hunting dogs: some for deer and fox, some for slaves. At LeBrun's hunting parties, men would get shot accidentally or fall off their horses and break a leg. “I am the stolid, dull repairer of drunken French-Creole carelessness,” Doctor Tom would say, showing me the blood on his pants leg from a hunter's bullet wound.

  Mamère hated his balding head and dirty blond sideburns, his jars, and especially the things he told me. Every day now, I worked at the house, and at night, I tried to explain the body to my mother.

  “Lungs?” She gripped the needle. “He show you a chest? I tell you the other words.” When I turned away from her rasping tone, so tired from the way I held myself at the house, the constant listening, she said, “No! My work is I tell you. Your work is be careful.

 
; “Skin? He say the skin protect the body?” She slammed the heavy iron onto his shirts as rain swirled in the pecan branches outside. My fingers hurt from the pastes and the washing and the needle. My mother asked angrily, “Why the skin soft so? Why les blancs have boutons? And fur on the face and arms?”

  I put my head down over the stitches in the coat. How could the red bumps only appear on Céphaline's face, not her feet or hands or her stomach? Not a pox.

  Then, for the first time, I saw my mother not sure. “Hair,” I said. “You taught me how to hide my hair under the tignon. They teach me how to put Céphaline's hair into curls. All for nothing. Hair is dead. Like the wreath in Madame's room, the wreath with her mother's hair.”

  “Moinette,” Mamère said, hard as if she spat out broken pecan shells.

  “All the hair is dead. That is what Doctor Tom talks to me about. He says hair and fingernails are like fur and claws. We use them the wrong way. He doesn't look at me as—under my dress. He looks at me as—a body. A brain. Men or women. Animals.” The ants of my stitches walked around the sleeve. “Why should we try anything if we are just going to be like animals in the end?”

  My mother said, “Don't ask me that. Don't ask.” She turned away and lifted the next coat, heavy and shapeless without arms.

  The woman named Hera slid her voice through the closed shutters, and my mother let her in.

  I had been asleep, my mother sewing in her chair. She had hung an old tablecloth from two nails to shield the bed from the fire, so the light wouldn't keep me awake. The grease spots were like islands of gold water in the light, and I could see Hera near the door.

  My mother said softly, “Where you get that name? Don't hear that, jamais. Never before. Hera.”

  I had never heard her ask questions of anyone.

  “Name of a queen. He tell me something like that. Name us all from a book. My girl Phrodite.”

  “Where?”

  “South Carolina. Come here last year to grow sugar. Should stayed in the rice like before. He got fever. Die in one week.” She held her arms out for a moment, her neck bent while she studied them. “Sugar more dry than rice. But smoke and sharp. People get cut.”

  My mother nodded. “Toujours. All the days.” She picked up her sewing again, dismissing the woman. Dismiss—that was the word Céphaline used on her mother, who hated it. You can go now. You are dismissed.

  Hera slid down the wall, so slow it was as if she were drying a line of liquid with her back. She squatted on the floor, leaning her head back, and then her hands went to her cheeks, fingers spread out like a fan. Between her fingers, I imagined her sparkling scars.

  “Him up there, he buy us at the death sale. Buy for the harvest. He sell fast?” she whispered.

  “No,” Mamère said, gently now, to my surprise. “He keep.”

  Hera dug her fingertips into her cheeks so hard she lifted the skin toward her eyes. “Phrodite. They tell her only black clothes on this place, but on Sunday wear what you want.” She nodded toward the black coat in Mamère's lap. “That all they give here. But she need a dress. Something pretty, so she can find her own man. A place. If I go, she can take care my three little ones.”

  “Go?” Mamère said.

  “What I see here—Louisiana—how easy to go.”

  “Parti?” My mother was confused. “Leave?”

  “Go die.”

  Now my mother stood up and held out her hand so Hera would sit in my chair. This woman thought a dress could solve everything, that beauty and cloth could make her daughter safe.

  “Them scar,” my mother said.

  Hera put her feet apart and rested her hands on her knees. “Here they say them scar Singalee. My mama say Bambara. She pass when I was nine. You don't get the marks until you get the blood. When I was fourteen, an old woman do them.”

  Then my mother said something in the same African words with which she prayed. I recognized a few words. Ni. Dya. Faro.

  Hera drew in her breath.

  My mother said, “Mine pass when I eight. But no one to do the mark on me. Like on her.”

  Hera said, “I can't mark Phrodite. They don't like the Africans here. Want Creole nègre. Ask me always am I Creole nègre. Can't do nothing for Phrodite.” She breathed hard, close to crying, and her breasts fell and shook. “You can't mark your bright light.”

  My mother said, “No. No mark for Moinette.”

  My eyes were closed because I knew they would study my sleeping form and lower their voices. Hera said, “Not him up there?”

  She was asking again about my father. But my mother wasn't angry. She said, “Sugar buyer come to see the crop. Tretite the cook say he see me in the field, he like my face. Call me petit visage when he come here.” My mother cupped her hands around her cheeks.

  Small face. The man who was my father. But what he wanted—

  “And her,” Hera said. “Small face, them eyes like honey. All that hair. And so bright—”

  My mother shook her head. “No. Don't say it.”

  “Who look?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “Nobody see her. But now she up there.” My mother lifted her chin toward the house.

  “Bright girl—” Hera began to speak again, but my mother interrupted her.

  “Say you trade hair.”

  Hera said, “Do her hair?”

  “Mine.”

  Neither of them moved. Then my mother said, “I make a dress. Blue. For Sunday nights.”

  She was already outside when I woke in the morning.

  She was cutting up one of Céphaline's old linen pillowcases. The rectangles of cloth were sleeve size. She was going to make a dress for a girl she didn't know, for a woman she had only met twice.

  A woman with marks like my mother's mother. Their voices soft and braided as woven grass.

  The blacking was a raincloud on Céphaline's pillowcase every morning. Madame had given me white linen to make seven new pillowcases, one for each day.

  We soaked the black stains in the white solution. Then my mother said, “Go on to the house now. Madame call for you.”

  I was dismissed.

  I applied the white paste with the back of a spoon.

  “My face is so cold,” Céphaline said. “And the iron is so hot.”

  Zerline had shown me everything. I made the paste with egg whites and rosewater and alum, made the blacking with lead and camphor and a drop of almond oil. Zerline had told me if we ran out of lead to use lampblack, but lead was what they used in Paris.

  I understood how Mamère felt when I sat in her chair. I didn't want to lie down. My arms ached from all the wash, from the combing and holding the irons over the fire, from keeping myself so careful not to hurt Céphaline that my shoulders burned.

  Then Hera stood behind my mother's chair and took off her tignon. My mother's hair was newly washed. Hera took the comb and began to section off the long shoals of hair that sprang from around my mother's forehead.

  She always washed her hair at night and combed it herself, after I was sleeping. She kept it in a rough bun under her cloth.

  But Hera made it into patterns of braids that swirled away from my mother's face as if a strong wind blew her hair into rows.

  “Because you don't know how,” she said. “You comb Céphaline hair. Not mine.”

  “Why are you angry? Where are we going so late?” The night bell had rung.

  “Angry?” My mother walked quickly. She carried a small bag with a knife and a rag. Her words were ragged. “I am nothing. Qu'est-ce—the word?” She looked down the street toward le quartier, where the shutters were closed and houses dark. “Useless. Like fingernail. Pas animal to kill with a claw.”

  She had been crying while I had come back late from Cépha-line's room. The edges of black in her eyes were blurred into red.

  We hurried down a path toward the side land. Franz the overseer would see us on his rounds. “Are we running?” I whispered, and when my mother didn't stop walking, I pulled a
t her arm, as I had when I was a child.

  We were just near the edge of the canefields. The blackened outline of the small house, where Grandmère Bordelon used to live, was beneath our feet. Then Franz rode toward us on his horse, and a small figure appeared from the low fence surrounding the family gravestones.

  Marie-Claire. Grandmère Bordelon's old slave—her cheeks marred with pink rosettes from the rats, the only thing I saw for a moment in the darkness. Like fistfuls of flowers approaching. Then the rest of her, mouth surrounded by wrinkles that danced when she smiled. “Marie-Thérèse,” she whispered to us. “And her girl.”

  She held up a gourd. “I make my water every night, me, and carry over here. I pour little on his gravestone. Pee on his name. The rest where they bury her when she time. Old and fat. I make the ground soft for her. When she gone là-bas—” Marie-Claire flicked her fingers like sprinkling water on cloth for ironing. “Moi, I still here. Then I pee on her head every night.”

  She turned as Franz rode up to us. She said, “I finish stretch my old bones, Msieu. Merci.”

  She walked toward le quartier. Franz said to us, “You ain't old. Where you going?”

  My mother, as always, didn't look nervous. “Gather herb for take out stain from Mademoiselle pillowcase. Her medicine.”

  “Thirty minutes I be back,” he said. “Stand here and wait until I see you. Or I get the dogs.”

  We slipped into the canerows. The rustling stalks were high above us, lit by the moon into silver ribbons. Ribbons for dresses. Mamère swung the cloth sack and said, “Thirty minutes. And I finish.”

  Her narrow back and tignon were like black smoke ahead of me in the light. The canestalks brushed sharp against my face until I covered my cheeks with my sleeves. My new dress—an old dress from Céphaline's rag pile. Calico print of yellow and pink.

  We came out at the headland road that separated Azure from Petit Clair, and my mother headed toward the ciprière, the swampy backland that was not cultivated. Somewhere deep in the ciprière was a bayou where the privateers and river traders met. Christophe said he'd watched them in secret. My peacock plate had come from that water.