A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  He swallowed again from the flask and pulled the tignon down with his walking stick. He moved my breasts with the tip of the stick. “How does he know you're untouched?”

  My eyes focused on the wall behind him, making him a blur before me. “Msieu checks me. With his fingers.”

  “Goddamn it. If Joseph takes you back, and you tell about that other nigger, and they come for him, he'll hang. You tell about me, I'll offer de la Rosière so much money he'll have to sell you. And I'll make you wish you had hung.” He drank again and stared at my breasts. “You'd be better off here. The men will pay you. They won't argue.”

  He dropped the empty flask and said loudly, far too loudly for our conversation, “I'm first. And then everyone else can pay.”

  He wanted the other men to hear.

  He put his head down to study the opening to his trousers, and the Indian woman named Sally came up behind him and pulled a sash around his neck. She tightened it quickly, and he fell to the floor.

  I put my arms around my chest. She lifted her chin, and I understood that she meant for me to wait. She pulled him to the bed, laid him on his side, and his mouth sagged open like a dead fish. She slid the sash from under his throat, and he drew in a huge shuddering breath and remained unconscious.

  But she backed herself into the wall near the bed and knocked against it, several times, grunting and moving against the wood, and I thought she had gone mad. Her face was as blank as if she were grinding corn. She screamed.

  Then one man laughed outside, and one spoke in a murmur low and long, and I knew what she was doing. The men thought they heard his pleasure. They thought their turn would come tomorrow.

  I hid my face in my arms until she unlocked the chain, careful not to clink the metal, and put my clothes before me. When I was dressed, she opened the door, holding the rifle, and motioned to the men at the dying fire. They breathed heavily, and one said, “Not time for sleep yet,” but she pointed the rifle at him, and the men filed into the other room. She followed them and then fastened the huge padlocks on the door.

  One man cursed inside, and another whispered like boiling water.

  Then she handed me my bundle. When we had walked silently, far into the ciprière on a narrow path, she took a candle from her pocket and lit it. Her eyes were so black that the small flame danced in her pupils when she leaned toward me. After what he'd said about her, maybe she would kill me herself now.

  Her throat worked and she spoke awkwardly in French, not English. “No one is free,” she said. We stood near pools of black water and huge cypress stumps, some so old their centers had collapsed into hollows like washpots. No one had been back here for a long time—the brush caught at my skirts, and she slashed at vines with her rifle.

  “Jamais,” she said. Never. “They are never free.” She pointed to the ground, and then held up eight fingers.

  In the trembling circle of candlelight, the earth was rucked up in places. Footsteps of a giant who'd traveled in the woods. A water god.

  I bent closer and saw an edge of cloth.

  Graves.

  The Irishman pretended to take the men to New Orleans when they'd worked long enough, but he killed them here. She saw my face and nodded. Her voice was flat and harsh. “Two years of work. Then he cuts with the knife.” She ran her fingernail across my throat. “No shot. The other men can't hear. My brother hunts for new ones.”

  The Indian man stepped out of the trees, and I screamed. She moved forward so quickly that the candle caught the edges of my hair, and she clapped her hand over my mouth.

  The smell of burned hair made me choke and pull against her. Now they would kill me and burn my muscles for meat.

  “No, no sounds,” she whispered. “No screams.” Her brother came closer to me, his mouth held tight as a sickle blade.

  She took her hand away. “You can't stay here. No other women. I know how to work him.” She put her finger on her own chest.

  I spat the burned-hair taste from my mouth. “Why do you stay?”

  She leaned close to me, breath of clear water, somehow sweet. “He is my husband. He has papers. Wife. My uncle sold my brother for a slave, but he sold me for a wife. We cannot go. Our names, the papers—we were in jail.”

  She said something in her language to her brother, and he came forward, holding a piece of cloth and a rope.

  To me, she said, “He takes you back for gold. And I say to my husband that you ran.” She pulled my wrist up. “I want money. Gold money. For me. For New Orleans.”

  He was tying my hands again, and I turned to her, the rope burning my skin. “I can—”

  “No,” she said again, and sliced the cloth into my open mouth, tying it tight behind my head, my hair wound into the knot until tears stung my eyes. “Don't run again. Money is you.”

  Her brother tied another piece of cloth around my eyes. The current of the bayou pushed gently under the boat. He took me back the way I had come. The water gods far underneath me were silent, curled at the bottom, only watching the wood slip past above them.

  The drivers, Mirande and Baillo, left both pieces of cloth tied. It was just daylight, because the sun was barely warm on my head and my shoulders where my dress was down.

  I couldn't see the doorways but heard people gathering. No one was cooking yet. The single fire I smelled was the one the drivers had built for me, behind us in the street.

  “The old man says she's valuable because of the looks, but what of her brain? He said she's been slow in the head since the day he bought her,” Baillo said behind me. I heard the ringing ache of iron in the coals. I made myself see Mamère's fireplace.

  “They do the face elsewhere. Like the old man. Look at his face.”

  “That's foolish, for financial reasons, and inhumane, for religious reasons,” Mirande said. “The old man said lightly. Don't hold it hard as for the African. Didn't teach him anything.”

  I heard it only as a falling away of ash. A sparkle.

  Then I tasted black, saw black, felt the sear on my shoulder. Blacksmith. Molten. Red in my throat.

  I lay in the dirt. A tiny sharp stone was embedded in my cheek. My dress was put up over my shoulders. I heard breathing in all the doorways. My blood was moving to my shoulder, to the burn, the blood surging forward and then pulled away, gathered again there, beating hard. Pulse. Pulse. Trying to find the problem.

  The blood tries to clean the wound, Doctor Tom said.

  Sophia's sharp fingers took my wrist.

  “If she runs again, you are responsible,” Baillo said, and she pulled me inside.

  “You run again, I find you and kill you, me,” she hissed, pouring cold water on the burn, then tying a piece of salt pork there with the cloth from my mouth. She studied the material for a moment. Red trade cloth. “Where this from?”

  My whole body felt hot now. How did the burn travel through my blood? Is that what blood did, take heat everywhere to disperse it?

  “Where?” she spat, wrapping the cloth under my arm, over my shoulder, around the meat.

  “The Indian found me. Same one found Athénaïse. Hunter.”

  “That was my meat,” she whispered in my ear. “On your shoulder now. Time to work. You run, I kill you.”

  In the field, my hoe took the small grass. Unwanted grass. No money grass. The hoe moved the earth in rows around the other grass. The India grass. The sugar grass. The money grass.

  The sweat dripped in my eyes. Salt. Seawater. My tears. My blood. Salt inside. Salt meat melting on my skin. Meat tied to meat.

  Flesh. Sophia wants flesh. The Indian didn't want my flesh. Wanted money. Gold flesh. Doctor Tom said the wound from a duel rotted in a man's leg once, and he cut it off. What did you do with the leg? Céphaline asked. They were in the parlor. She was supposed to play the piano. But she asked him about legs, skulls, eyes.

  His family took it, Doctor Tom said. I don't know what they did with it. Strange to bury somebody piece by piece, eh? His leg could hold the spot
until the rest of him was ready.

  My shoulder cooked. The passages. We eat the meat, sugar juice, dried corn. We move the earth around the good grass. We cut down the tree. We catch the chicken and burn the flesh.

  Someone had cut off the heads of the men I'd seen along the river when the boat took me from Azure. What did they do after they mounted the heads on poles? Why waste the body? The body was gold. Why not dry strips of leg and arm in the sun, with salt? Hardtack. Humantack.

  Pickle.

  The sun beat down on the rows. Salt. Water. Falling on the grass that waved chest-high, would grow over our heads until we cut it down, burned the leaves, and rolled the bones in the grinders.

  Fantine walked home beside me. She led me to the tub, untied the salt pork from my back, and threw it into the fire, where it hissed.

  She helped me step into the washtub. The water felt as if it etched ice on my burn. A flower. A flower of—of what?

  Fantine poured water onto my head and rubbed soap, then a few drops of sweet oil into my hair. She began to untangle the snarls with her fingers and a wooden comb.

  “Only way is get somebody love you,” she said softly.

  Outside, Sophia said loudly, “He give me a chain to lock up at night. So she don't run. She like a wild animal and who knew?”

  Fantine said, “The men look. But you won't look back.” She stretched a section of hair into a black web on my arm.

  “Get them love you, you get things. A place. Some oil for your hair. A dress.”

  I looked up at her. “I don't want love.”

  “Sophia don't want love. But she get what she want.”

  The little bones lay on the table. “I want to go home. If you love, you get a baby. I don't want a baby.”

  “She stand up when he love her,” Fantine whispered. “I stand up.”

  Fantine's mouth curved. Her cheeks rose dark and full like velvet pillows when she smiled.

  Basile kissed those cheeks until Fantine's head fell back. So he could have her neck. But no man had ever looked at me that way. I meant something different to them—Christophe, the men in New Orleans, the fingers, the boat, the white man in the shed while he flicked my breast with his stick. They wanted to clench their fists in my hair and pull my head back themselves.

  “You bright. You get anything you want.”

  Take but one candle to light a room, Mamère had said to Hera. I closed my eyes.

  I could wash my dress and start over and pray.

  Sophia came inside. “Get out there and finish.”

  Fantine said, “She look pretty now.” A new edge shone hard in her voice. She wanted me to use my brightness.

  “She look pretty at night when she chain up. She run again, Msieu blame me.” Sophia made her voice thin and low as roots along the floor. “You girls only here cause nobody want you. Nobody have room. I only feed you. You are little animals, and I lock the gate.”

  A bruise. A contusion, Doctor Tom had told Céphaline the name. The blood rushes to the site of injury, he said, then collects there and the ill humor of the place turns the blood black.

  Under the skin, she said.

  The skin merely holds the liquids inside and protects the organs.

  How would you know, she said, if someone black—like Marie-Thérèse—had a bruise?

  Doctor Tom shrugged. You could touch the skin, feel for swelling.

  But Moinette—you could see under her skin.

  Ah, yes. Half white. Maybe she would have half a contusion. Then he placed the leech on her temple, just at the hairline. Be still, my love. We bleed to restore the balance. Your poor blood is rushing to help your head, but there is too much. Your poor head aches. I know.

  My shoulder. I lay on my shelf, on my side with the branded part in the air, and blood rushed to the burn and then rushed away. Blood was hot. That wouldn't help. You can't have cool blood. Cool blood is a hard shell over a cut. Then I could chew it. Cool blood bread on my teeth.

  So hot. Dead skin. Burned like Mamère's from the fires and lye. Fire made a raised scar. Lye made a pink hole.

  A steam burn on Mamère's forearm, from a kettle—then, after a week, the whole piece of dried skin lifted off, thin and crackling.

  Leather.

  My body shivered around my burn, which took all the heat of my blood for a time, then gave it back.

  Underneath the burn, Mamère's skin had been pink as a puppy tongue, smooth as glass. I seized her arm each day to look at it. She let me. She said nothing. Every day, more etching appeared, the wrinkles of dryness, new skin tinted with smoke and dirt— with the very air—until that large oval was only a bit lighter than the rest of Mamère.

  I didn't know what my skin did, at the burn. I couldn't see it. Sophia dressed it with lard and cloth. Under my shift, it dried and the skin fell off, the fleur-de-lis crumpled into flakes of my body that disappeared into the canerows and yard dirt and washed into the cracks of the wooden floor.

  At night, Sophia locked the cuff around my ankle and bolted the chain to the ring Gervaise had put in the wall beside my shelf. He knew metalwork. He brought Sophia a new spider pot to hang over the coals. Tiny bones—wings and legs—floated on the broth.

  She unlocked me in the morning. I ate the boiled corn, remembering the hot liquid of my saliva working the stone kernel.

  I hoed the grass. I heard Fantine and Basile in the trees. I heard Sophia and Gervaise at the wall. The rain dripped into the chimney, and I heard Philippine next door speak to her husband, Firmin.

  His cheeks were scarred with V. Voleur. Thief. And the same flower that had healed to a scar my fingers could trace.

  By the fall, Gervaise was making cane knives with a small curving hook. And he forged the new brand Msieu de la Rosière instructed him to fashion—a rosebud shaped like a diamond, with a curving stem and two slanted lines for leaves. It would brand slaves, if necessary.

  Gervaise showed it to Sophia. She said the brand was my fault.

  Amanthe came from the house to tell us what Msieu told his wife about the brand. “Say he lost one and almost lost Moinette. Say he see run in people eyes. Say you show the horse the whip, sometime you don't have to beat him.”

  Sophia shouted at me, “Msieu say if one more run, he brand us all. Round up like cattle.” She caught my arm. “If Fronie get burn because of you, I hurt you worse than fire.”

  I jerked my arm from her. “There is nowhere to run,” I said. It was true. At the edges of the canefields, I imagined I saw the Indian, in the sudden wash of water at the bayou's edge or in a shiver of branches in the forest.

  I pulled each stalk toward me and hit the base with the knife. We cut it blade by blade, like cutting someone's beard by pulling each hair separate and clipping it. The horses pulled their grass from the ground near their stable, their teeth sharp as our knives.

  And it was clear to me, then, that every free person I met— Indian, white, African—would only sell me or use me as an animal. My skin. Hide. Pounds of money—my fat and fingers and breasts.

  Mamère was wrong.

  I belonged to anyone who could catch me or buy me.

  The cane stalks stripped of leaves, their joints like knuckles when we loaded them onto carts. All around me—the knocking cut, then the whisper-slash of trimming, the rough swipe of the sharpening stone. At the end of the row, glints of water beyond the piled-high banks.

  No one would ever love me but her. She wasn't wrong. I would be caught, sold, traded. I would never belong to anyone. I would never love anyone. Her fierce prayers rose each night and drifted into the water, the rivers and bayous and the rain, and stayed damp in my hair.

  No one ran. We were too tired to walk. We woke when the bell sounded in the dark, ate cold cornmush from the night before, and walked behind the cart. The cane blocked all the moonlight, rustling over our heads.

  The wall of grass was alive, moving in the wind as the sun rose. We lined ourselves before it, each with an entire row to cut.


  Again. Again. Again. Like a puppet Céphaline had made with her governess once. The legs moving at the knee, the arms lifting and falling, the strings of ropy muscle.

  Every day. Even Sunday. We stopped working at three on Sunday and went to the house for our food, with our clothes furred by dust clinging to cane juice, splinters in our hair.

  Madame couldn't see us anyway. She said a prayer over our bowed heads. “Let the harvest continue safely and prosperously for all.”

  At night, when the December wind blew cold, Philippine sat by our fire and said, “She don't pray for us next year.”

  Sophia frowned. “She going?”

  Philippine nodded. “Amanthe say she go to Paris for her eyes. In spring. She stay with the son. The Msieu sister come to run his house now. She order new furniture, new curtains. She can see. Amanthe washing all that dust Madame never see. At New Year, have a party. Show all them people in Opelousas and Washington the house.”

  In the morning, I stayed in the woods to relieve my stomach. The barrel water was sour. The sky was bitterly cold, as it had been when I first arrived. The air hung like glass in the branches above me.

  At the path, Baillo was waiting on his horse, his yellow eyes rimmed with red, his face unshaven. “I haven't forgotten you. Slow in the mind, but fast when you try to run.”

  I was silent, as always. The words that I kept in my throat and chest swirled now like silt on the bottom of the bayou when I'd walked there for a moment, before the Indian pulled me up.

  Baillo stared at me. “My father was a soldier when France came here. Seventeen sixty-nine. They never fed soldiers. He left one day to trap birds in the forest. When he came back, they said he had run. They tied him to a board and cut him in four pieces. The law.”

  He nudged me forward with his canestalk, pushing at my hip, pointing me back to the field.

  My words wouldn't stay inside. “What did they do with him?”

  “They threw the pieces of him in the river.” He sighed and rested the canestalk on my shoulder, without pushing me. “But you—you are safe in the field. And you are fed.”