A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

“I am not running now.” Were those faint baby cries? No—only the horse breathing and the first bird calling.

  He moved my sleeve up over my forearm again. “But look— you brand with M. This Rosière.”

  “That is not a brand.”

  Hervé Richard stepped back and lifted his hands. “My mistake.” Drops of water fell onto his shoes. “But you walk alone now. Toute seule. You free to come and go.”

  My breasts pulsed with milk. “I have to see someone in le quartier.”

  “A man?”

  “No.” His hand landed again on the bone of my arm, careful as a moth.

  “Then you talk to me awhile.”

  “No.” I dropped my arm from under his fingers and walked down the road. Ahead of me, Philippine carried her night jar to the privy, and Jean-Paul whimpered fast and hard. My dressfront was wet in spreading warm circles that turned cold as I ran.

  At noon, Hervé Richard sat on a stump near the barn, working a rag over a harness. Pélagie still had not examined the chest; she slept very late. Hervé Richard said only, “Fantôme moves fast in the day, no?” He smiled on the one side again, a dent appearing in one cheek.

  Inside Philippine's cabin, we held the babies to our breasts. Fantine said, “That man? He speak to you?”

  I nodded. She said, “Skin like cornbread and syrup. Like you could taste it.”

  “Hush, Fantine,” Sophia said, frowning. “Free nègre like that. He sit in the road cause mulatto not good enough for the house and think he too good for the barn.”

  I put my finger into the corner of Jean-Paul's mouth to pull him away from my breast, and he jerked awake as if burned. “He is not free,” I said. “He is like us.”

  “He's prettier than me,” Fantine said. “I see him talk to you before.”

  “Before?” Sophia said. “When?”

  “He brought the coffins last year,” I said. In the dim light from the doorway, my son's eyes were purple, blue, black.

  “I look at dead men that night. Not no yellow nègre.” Sophia stood up and went outside.

  Fantine shrugged and said, “Not yellow. Just pretty.”

  On the road to the house, he was waiting. He began to walk beside me. I glanced sideways—his shoulder was level with my eyes. His shirt was mended clumsily, with wide stitches like a caterpillar crawled up his arm.

  He said nothing until we reached the clearing where my laundry hung. Then he turned to me. “If I come back, you meet me somewhere?”

  His eyes were very black. Darker even than my mother's. I said, “Meet you in the woods? For what? For you to touch my skin?”

  He didn't smile. He said, “To talk.”

  The shutters were still closed over Pélagie's window. This was not a dance. “Talk about music? Talk about flowers? About painting?”

  “Talk about New Orleans.”

  If anyone heard us, we could be whipped. I moved away quickly and said, “I have work.”

  I sat outside Pélagie's door, not sewing, waiting for her to awaken, for the sound of her voice, calling my name.

  In the morning, he was there in the cart. I spoke first. “I am not a fantôme. My madame will look at the chest today, she says.”

  He got down off the cart and stood before me. “In New Orleans, so many people no one knows who is owned and who is free.”

  “I cannot run again.”

  “You don't run. You ride.”

  “I cannot ride a horse.” The mist hid the trees like rain on a window. Hervé Richard smelled of tobacco smoke; while he waited for me, he added his gray breath to the fog.

  “If you meet me in the woods, I will bring an armoire.”

  “For Madame?”

  “For you. Put you in the armoire and lock it. Drive the cart to New Orleans for delivery. No one find us there. Too many slaves.”

  “Someone would stop you on the road.”

  He shook his head, and again, drops of water fell from his hair. “I have a pass from a friend.”

  The horse moved forward and the cart wheels rubbed and creaked. “They say the wheels cannot be greased in New Orleans. So the guard will know if you steal. You would be stealing me. They might—”

  I put my hands warm over my ears. Hamstrung. Fleur-de-lis. A crime against God.

  “You cannot steal yourself,” he said, and as if he had seen inside my skull, “God doesn't believe that is stealing.” His forehead was calm. His smile was only a fingernail mark in his left cheek. “I don't care about les blancs,” he said. “Every man need a treasure. Gold. Your face is gold. You are the same as me.”

  “You only know my face. Nothing else.” The tips of my breasts began to ache, as if pinched. The milk would flood my dress.

  “You know yourself. You know my face. Now you know your chance.”

  He took the reins of the horse. The shoulder muscles rippled. Not angel wings. A brand. A triangle containing an L.

  “I will sand wood for the armoire. You think where to meet me.”

  Pélagie refused the chest. She did not approve of the grain of the wood on one side. She said to Lise, “The carpenter will bring a new one in a month. He will check the pattern on all sides. I won't tolerate Louisiana standards.”

  Hervé Richard or his owner would come. The woods. Who would know if I met him there? Who besides Pélagie would care if I disappeared? Sophia would still have her meat—it wouldn't be her fault this time.

  Only my fault. No one was in charge of me. I was not in charge of Jean-Paul. Would he know? Would he taste my milk different from Fantine's?

  But Pélagie would notice my absence if it was more than a minute. She did not mention an armoire or more trunks but talked of the wedding guests, plates, the food, lights in the garden.

  Did she remember what she had said about quadroon boys? Drowned like kittens? She never saw my son.

  The overseers didn't even look at me on the road so late at night, after Pélagie had gone to sleep. I fed Jean-Paul, cleaned him, and then gave him back to Philippine. After a time, his eyes opened wide. He studied my face as intent and uncomprehending as an old man. He wanted something from me. Milk? The sight of my face? What was his besoin? What did he need?

  He was no one yet. His cheeks were red when he was born, then so pale it was as if no blood moved through his body.

  “The father?” Philippine asked one evening.

  I shrugged. “Sais pas.”

  Gervaise had come to take his son, Amadou, who was already stumble-walking, holding on to knees and chairs and tree stumps.

  “Sais pas?” Philippine said. “The eyes. The chin. They don't tell?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Sometime a mark tell you.” Fantine already knew everything, with her smooth, satisfied cheeks.

  “Like what?”

  “Mark on the face or the body,” Fantine said.

  Gervaise spoke suddenly, staring at Jean-Paul's hand dangling outside his blanket. “Non—ces enfants, too much mix the blood. Them baby all new people.”

  He didn't say it with hate. He looked again at Jean-Paul, with interest as he'd give a tree or an unusual stone. He had been here, in Louisiana, for the same time as I'd been here, on Rosière.

  This life, on Rosière, was my second life. It was Gervaise's second life, too.

  “Look his fingers,” Philippine said. “Around the nails.”

  A rim of gold clung to the skin around his nails, where I used to chew tatters from my own fingers.

  He scratched himself near the eye, and blood nestled into the cut. I used my teeth to trim his useless claws, which hurt only himself.

  All new people. My mother could believe in dya, in the transference of one soul to the next soul born. But if she knew nothing of my father, and I knew not even who this baby's father was— Etienne or Ebrard—how could the right soul, any soul, hover and find the place to enter this child? And enter where—the skull? The open mouth, crying and crying for me while I moved clothes up and down the wooden ripples of washb
oard?

  If Hervé Richard came for me, would he believe my son was the same as him? His people? Would he ever love Jean-Paul? He thought he loved me, but he only knew my face and hair. He imagined me, like the other men imagined me.

  If I came late, Jean-Paul's mouth fastened onto me like the pinching of the white man in the boat. But baby fingers held tight to my thumb.

  In the mornings, I washed. In the afternoons, I sewed in the hallway, while Pélagie and Lise sewed in the parlor. Dresses and napkins and lace. All so she could marry Msieu Prudhomme, and he could lie on top of her, and she could hope he died. Or maybe she hoped to have a son. But she didn't want to share the window. She wanted me to arrange the dresses and hats and stockings there, and she wanted to present them to the women.

  And Jean-Paul? Wherever her window was, he would not fit into her display.

  What would Hervé Richard bring? I pricked my finger with the needle so I could taste one drop of my blood. A crying baby, inside an armoire?

  A few weeks before the wedding, Etienne read his mother's latest letter to his father while they smoked at the table.

  I have decided to return home, for Louisiana is my home now that you are both there. My sight has faded altogether, and the doctors say there is no further treatment. I have received your letters of Pélagie's impending wedding, and I would like to hear and smell and taste what she has undoubtedly worked so hard to prepare. I am bringing company—our cousins Gaston and Amélie Valmy, and a relative of Pélagie's late husband, who I only met recently. His voice was very refined, and his hand soft, and he said, “You must be the sister-in-law of someone I haven't seen in three years.” He was quite happy to hear of her successes.

  The letter ended with,

  Last month, my beloved Amanthe died due to the cold here in Paris, which must have settled in her lungs and become pneumonia. I have engaged a servant here who will travel with us.

  Philippine cried silently when I told her. The tears could not run down her cheeks. They were caught in the etchings below her eyes and disappeared.

  Firmin went outside, to the edge of the woods. His ragged shirt floated like paper against the trees where he whirled in sorrow.

  They didn't speak to anyone for days. At dusk, when I arrived, the babies all cried and stared at me. They weren't wet or hurt. But no one had spoken to them or held them.

  Philippine's face was vacant. Just like Madame Bordelon's had been after Céphaline died—a way of mothers holding the skin over the skull so that it matched the unmoving child. Madame had never left her room after Céphaline died. But no one left other babies with her, and her door didn't open onto a dirt lane crowded with laughing, running children whose feet made clouds.

  Philippine lay in her bed as if held inside a casket, staring at the ceiling.

  No one knew what Madame de la Rosière said to Philippine and Firmin after she called for them. In the bustle of unpacking the trunks, we became sure that she was blind now, Etienne leading her carefully around the house with four fingers draped over her sleeve. It was from the upstairs window that I saw Philippine and Firmin, their small backs floating in the dust halfway down the road heading back to le quartier.

  My forehead rested against the wooden shutters. The Borde-lons had once brought a relative's body from France for burial, but of course Amanthe would have been buried in Paris, in a paupers’ cemetery. She owned nothing. She was owned.

  But no. Slavery was illegal in France. She was free now, her box disintegrating, her bones sliding into the earth.

  That night, Firmin met me near the barn, carrying Jean-Paul's box. Fear leaped under my breastbone.

  Was the baby dead?

  Firmin handed me the box where Jean-Paul slept, his face turned to the side, his fist small as a candle nub. “We don't keep him. Rosières do not keep us. They do not keep our bones. I am not a crime against God.”

  He was going to run again. I was afraid to say anything; then I could be an accomplice. Carrying Jean-Paul, I rehearsed the words for Pélagie: The baby was sick, so I brought him here.

  In the morning, near their cold fireplace with heaped, silent ashes, I let myself cry. They were gone. Philippine's fingers like twigs in my grip when the pains came. Firmin's fingers carving clothespins.

  Gervaise said, “They go to the next world. If they don't die, Firmin know to live out there. With cimarrons.”

  Cimarrons—the maroon runaways who made camps. But in the ciprière somewhere was the logging camp and the Indian hunter and the Irishman—what would he do with two old slaves?

  Philippine's grief might kill her in the trees. Firmin's father had taken his life, and his body had been punished. But the de la Rosières had nothing now of Firmin's blood or Philippine's hands.

  Pélagie stayed late in the parlor and didn't notice the sleeping baby. Many boxes had arrived for the wedding, with silks and haircombs and glasses, and his box was merely another.

  In the morning, I carried him out before anyone awoke and fed him in the kitchen, where Léonide sat staring at the coals she knew like her own heart.

  He stared at my face the same way. I moved his fingers, hands, feet. He still had no bones. Those soft, pliable things inside him couldn't be bones. He was only meat. He was not mine. But then I touched his head, to move him to my other breast, and felt the skull. Bone. Shield for the passages and folds of his brain.

  He knew me. I didn't want to know him yet.

  “They run?” Léonide said finally. When I nodded, she sighed.

  The babies had to go to Emilia, a woman who had been hurt in the fields and couldn't work. Her leg, gashed with a cane knife during harvest, was swollen and infected. She sat on a chair with her leg on a box, the babies beside her.

  Léonide and I cooked oysters brought by a boat peddler. My fingers were numb from shucking, but the shells inside were patched with pieces of pearl, and I kept the best one, with the most shine, to show Jean-Paul someday when he was a person. Not a baby.

  The company from France arrived in the carriage just before dinner, and so when Pélagie came downstairs to the dining room, she made her false greeting smile as she looked around the table.

  When she saw the man, with his sharp-waisted Paris coat and his black hair curling over his ears, she dropped her gloves.

  She didn't speak first, as she always did. She was not charming. Her face was white as rice powder, with two spots of dull red at her cheeks as though someone had knuckled her hard.

  “Madame Vincent!” the man said. “So good to see you after all this time.” He turned to the others. “She was married to my brother Micael.”

  “Your brother!” Madame de la Rosière said. “I knew only that you were a relative. Why, you must have been so sad when he died.” She inclined her head toward each exhaled breath, trying hard to listen to who would speak. Her eyes were rimmed with ice now, pools of water clouded and cold.

  “It was tragic,” the man said. “A fever.”

  “He was a good husband,” Pélagie said carefully.

  “Madame says you plan to marry again soon,” the man said, tilting his head to the side to study her.

  Msieu Laurent didn't like him. He said sharply, “An old Louisiana name, Oscar Prudhomme. He is a widower, and a good match. Often, those who have lost loved ones make a quiet triumph.”

  I removed his plate. The cousins talked about the sea voyage, but the man watched Pélagie, who ate nothing.

  He slept in the garçonnière with Etienne. When I brought their hot water for washing, he said in his precise French, words stinging separate, “Your dressfront is wet.”

  “Oui, msieu.”

  “Are you burned by the water?”

  “Non, msieu.”

  He stared at me again. “You have a child.”

  I nodded.

  “And you belong to Madame Vincent?”

  “Oui, msieu.”

  Etienne came inside and frowned at me. “My mother needs you in the house now. Her new servant
is incapable.”

  The new woman was French and twenty-five. She would not speak to me. I showed her silently where the cistern held our water, where the bed warmers were, and where I collected the soiled clothing.

  For a week, the brother-in-law smiled and watched, and Péla-gie moved about the house like a cautious pheasant, her dress trailing behind her slowly rather than flicking sharply around corners as it usually did. Lise left one morning for New Orleans. Pélagie's face was drawn as if she hadn't slept, the hollows of her cheeks holding nothing. Not even air. Purple dusk collected under her eyes.

  Msieu Vincent spoke little when Msieu Prudhomme called on his way to Opelousas. Both men watched each other, like hunters watched everything—branches, grass, vines—waiting for movements.

  On Sunday, when the cousins would be taken to Grand Coteau, Pélagie said softly, “Monsieur Vincent and I will remain here. My brother-in-law and I have much to discuss. Please tell the others we will miss their company.”

  She was afraid, the way she had been when she first came to Rosière. This must be the man Pélagie mentioned, the one she thought wouldn't find her. Did she have something that belonged to him?

  “Moinette, do you have that tablecloth?” Pélagie called, voice high. “Bring it to me in the parlor, so I may see the hem.”

  When I brought it, the afternoon light was like syrup in the windows and on the parlor floor. Two empty wine bottles and remnants of cold meat stood on a platter. Pélagie motioned for me to wait while she looked at the hem, and he began speaking fiercely to her.

  “Are you prepared for me to tell them now? To show them the marriage contract?” He sat in Madame de la Rosière's chair, his legs crossed.

  “This is not France. That contract—”

  “You are now married to me. There is no divorce in France, and you are still a French subject.”

  He spoke to her as if she were a slave. She raised her eyes to mine and handed me the tablecloth, straightening her back. She said, “When I marry Prudhomme, I will be a citizen of Louisiana.”

  He walked over to bend close to her. I could smell his pomade. “You will not insult my family further with this transgression. You insulted my brother with your dowry. We had been led to believe it would be substantial, and you brought only that bit of cash and those damned jewels no one could touch or sell.”