A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Preparing for Mass, I said, “Msieu, you said the first boarders arrive in January. Could I travel to Rosière to see my son?”

  “You cannot travel to Rosière alone.” He frowned, not angrily, more as if he studied a puzzle. “It is more than twelve miles.”

  “You will never have a chance to visit Rosière? Was there business brought last week?”

  “No. That was Etienne's first outing to Opelousas in some time. The family has been isolated.” He waited for the shirt I was ironing.

  I'd overheard men speak of Etienne: “The son seeks a wife in New Orleans this winter. I wouldn't marry my Amélie to him— he killed a man from Bordeaux last year. You don't recall? To protect a slave, it was said. A groom who'd had a dispute.”

  “Something about a duel.”

  “So far out in the country, hard to say what went on. But people talk. They talk about a Frenchman's blood spilled for a slave. No honor in that.”

  The iron was heavy. “I could walk to Rosière,” I said, pressing the cuffs, clean stiffness at the wrists that meant he was who he was.

  He addressed an envelope at the dining room table. “You cannot walk. It is too dangerous. And I cannot hire you a carriage. It is against the law. The Americans have revised the code, to make it much more harsh for slaves and free people of color. Les mes-dames in New Orleans have become angry about women who look like you. You may not ride in a carriage. You may not wear jewels in public.”

  I didn't want to wear jewels. The iron moved over his sleeves. They were not lavender from ink stains now. They were white.

  I could not ride behind him on a horse or across from him in a carriage. It was acceptable that men in Opelousas thought Msieu lay on top of me, so that they could imagine us joined, my hair uncovered for his pleasure. But it was not acceptable for me to ride with him in public, my legs covered with cloth, near his.

  Msieu Antoine did what he did when he was tired. His fingers raked through his sideburns and then rested there, white bones in fur.

  “You are an investment,” he said. “You cannot walk. Even with a pass, some men in this district may harm you. You will have to wait until we have reason to visit Rosière.”

  I had reason every day but could say nothing. To hire a cart would mean I had money, and my coins truly belonged to Msieu Antoine. I could not even own a visit.

  When he took the shirt, my tears fell as fast as the water from a window.

  His palms pulled the skin at the corners of his eyes, making them slanted and small as melon seeds. “Moinette,” he said. “You will have to wear a black veil in the carriage, so that people think you are a widow. A client who lost her husband, who has inquiries at Rosière.”

  “Thank you, msieu,” I said. In the kitchen, and when my eyes had cooled from the heat of tears, I made a fresh pot of coffee and a roasted chicken, sprinkling herbs on the skin, as Tretite taught me so long ago to do.

  The livery driver said nothing to me. He was old, hair like white wire along his black cheeks. My face and shoulders were covered with a black veil.

  Twelve miles. Dust sifted onto the carriage like dirty flour. Msieu Antoine's papers, quills, ink, and brandy were in a leather satchel at his feet. I had nothing. Not even milk.

  The garden was not white now. The crepe myrtle trees were bare, their seedpods black. Msieu Antoine nodded toward me and went inside. I hurried down the road to le quartier. Permission to walk here, my answer would be if questioned. I was someone else's animal.

  The road was shrouded in dust. The fences and pigs’ backs and catalpa trees and then, the bell that had called us every morning. But the voices calling and laughing and scolding were clean.

  I couldn't run. They all stared at me, and then Fantine, with her cheeks even broader and fuller, rising to hide her eyes, ran toward me with her arms out. Sophia and the others smiled and lifted their chins to recognize me, and Fantine took me inside.

  Our cheeks hold nothing. Mamère's a dark ledge of bone under her eyes. Madame de la Rosière's broad and soft as slabs of pork fat. Céphaline's stitched with red holes. Firmin's shriveled into caves that held burned birdwings.

  Jean-Paul's cheeks, against my lips, were fat and silver. My face was only another in the circle of faces above his, as he was passed from smile to smile, from shoulder to shoulder.

  Whose dya did he have? He was the color of water, his eyes twilight. He looked nothing like me or anyone else. He couldn't speak yet, only made the sounds of babies—bird squawks, cat sputters, and the sneeze of everyone.

  I lifted his hands, and saw the scar on his forearm. The brand. A diamond for a rosebud, one stem and two thorns.

  Smaller than the flower on my shoulder. I touched the burn, which had healed to a smooth lavender scar on his tiny arm.

  Fantine said, “After you sold. Mark everyone, so they can find who run.”

  She held out her arm. The same place. The flower raised pink satin. Like Mamère's sequins of pink, from the spitting fire.

  Jean-Paul pulled his arm away and reached for her wooden spoon. Fantine said, “One scar don't matter. Look. He is perfect.” Then she twirled around. “And look at me! Scars, oui, but now my shape back, and I wear your blouse.”

  While she put it on, I lifted Jean-Paul's arm and touched my tongue to the scar. Flat. Not raised. How did the African blood thin to French, to sunken scars rather than tribal marks?

  We sat near the fire. Fantine wore the blouse I'd sewn for her, the circles of white cloth that had been a cravat torn to puddles.

  She pulled off my tignon. “Show him your hair. Let him feel.”

  Jean-Paul pulled at one braid. He put the end into his mouth with a sudden ferocity, and everyone laughed. Everything in the mouth.

  He pulled out the wet hair and stared at it.

  “Your msieu—you not—” Her own hands went to her belly.

  I shook my head.

  Sophia said, “Safer in the cane. Do your work, nobody look. Dangerous in the house.”

  I would rather be in the cane all day, too, and then come here at night for Jean-Paul. His brand so big on his tiny arm. All Msieu's pages, descriptions of slaves bought and sold: missing left eye, guaranteed against drink, branded on left cheek V—voleur, thief. Infant nègre. Infant quadroon.

  Francine moved pecan shells on the floor, and Jean-Paul threw himself from my arms, toward the shells. Francine hid them in her chubby fists. “He always want what she have,” Sophia said.

  “Babies always want babies. Children always want children. They want someone the same size to be with,” I said. Then I added, “We are all the same size now, too.”

  Fantine smiled. But she didn't know the words. All those pages from court. Slaves sold with the horses and tables and knives. Dahlia plates and peacock plates.

  This msieu don't sell, Mamère said to Hera, so long ago, that first night she came to our house on Azure. But who knew when Msieu de la Rosière would see Jean-Paul and decide he knew who he was? He didn't have Ebrard's pink fatness or his sparse brows. Jean-Paul had tiny points of hair beside his ears already, and I brushed them sideways. His eyes were the same soldier blue as Etienne's, but washed over with smoke. I knew whose son he was. No one saw him, now. Because Emilia could not walk, she kept the babies even while Fantine and the others received their provisions Sunday. Only someone who went into le quartier would see this pale silver child. Madame was blind, and Etienne had no wife.

  No one would notice Jean-Paul until he began to work, when he was about five or six, and would be set to gathering cane trash and carrying milk.

  By then, he had to be mine. His name had to be written on a paper with numbers and moved into my hand, so he belonged to me.

  Eight CONVEYANCE

  I saw him two more times in two years.

  In March of 1815, when Msieu Antoine was invited to a Mardi Gras dinner and dance, where everyone would meet the young woman from New Orleans who was meant to marry Etienne.

  I rode on top of the ca
rriage with the livery driver. My task was to assist with laundry and cooking.

  The dinner was elaborate, the plates new, but under the tablecloth was the same pale water-stain on the wood, like a halo around the moon. The young woman's arms were dappled with tiny brown spots, her hair blond and worked into a knot at the top of her head, with spirals of thin curls hanging before her ears and on her forehead. Etienne did not appear until the guests arrived.

  I cleaned Msieu Antoine's coat and shoes and laid them out on one of the beds in the garçonnière. The damp bricks smelled the same as that night. I pulled down the coverlet and spat into the mattress cover. My fluids mixed with theirs.

  In the kitchen, Léonide's huge arms trembled while we sliced the vegetables. Near dawn, the breakfast food laid out, Léonide finally pulled me close to her woodsmoke-smelling chest and then told me to go.

  Jean-Paul was asleep. Fantine glanced at me and then turned over.

  I lay beside him in a nest of blankets. His breath was loud and rhythmic as a tiny bellows applied to a fire at my throat. He pushed his finger into my nostril. The sun was up. Jean-Paul slanted his head and studied me.

  He slid his feet cautiously along the floor, holding on to my skirt, clutching fierce rosettes of cloth with damp hands. I picked him up, and he struggled to get down, but he touched my sleeves then. My dress was figured calico I'd sewn last week. The fabric was softer than Fantine's and Emilia's clothes. He patted the cloth and then lifted two handfuls as if he held reins.

  Sophia said, “Tout a travaille. He do his travaille like them.”

  So he could grow and cut cane and eat and grow and cut cane and eat and grow. He sat abruptly on the floor.

  “You do your job?”

  They thought Msieu Antoine slept with me, so I could grow babies to sell or train.

  “Wash and cook and clean. My only job.”

  “For now.”

  Chicken bones lay like bleached twigs on her plate. Wings, legs. Sophia against the door, Amadou in the ciprière with his father, hunting birds, throwing the feathers into the trees.

  Jean-Paul inched away from me, holding on to the wall.

  The next day, Hervé Richard was unloading wooden bins for Madame Lescelles at the store. His shirt was darkened with sweat in butterfly wings. When he saw me, his chest grew larger and the veins stood out on his neck.

  He said nothing. I nodded and went inside the store. My throat shook with words: coffee, sugar, flour.

  When I stepped outside with my packages, he spoke quickly. “I was in New Orleans for months. He sent me there to make furniture for one house.” He picked up another box. “I waited for you. That morning. You never came.”

  My eyes stayed on his knuckles. “I was ill. I thought you ran.”

  “I thought you ran.” He glanced into the doorway. “You were sold?”

  “To Msieu Antoine. On Court Street.”

  He dipped his head to the side as if he'd been struck. “Then you are with child?”

  Cold air hurt my teeth. He had seen my packages under my shawl. “I am not now with child. No.”

  He said quickly, “Are you free to come and go?”

  “In town.”

  “Meet me tomorrow at Bayou Carron.”

  I lay in my room that night, thinking of his voice when he said the word. Child. He did not want someone else's child. A white man's child. But he would have to steal Jean-Paul as well as me.

  Msieu Antoine did not mistreat me. But he did not even own me yet. I was mortgaged. I could be lost, like a horse. A mule.

  A mule screamed at me near Bayou Carron. The first two boarders, both men from New Orleans, had gone to the courthouse with Msieu Antoine. I'd left carrying my market basket.

  Two Indian men slept on a blanket under a tree, and a trapper's American voice banged from the door of a shack.

  Hervé Richard said, “If I touch you—”

  He put his fingers on both sides of my neck and his mouth on mine. The click of our teeth sounded deep inside my skull. The taste of smoke. Cigar leaves.

  It was only a taste. His mouth was only something attached to his face. But he still wanted me. I was gold. If we made it to New Orleans, I could find my way to my mother.

  Jean-Paul.

  He put a finger on my collarbone. “Coffin has to be nail shut. The cook write me a pass.”

  “Nailed?”

  He nodded. “Someone stop us on the road, nails make them think before they pry it open. But if they do, I take care of them.”

  The water of Bayou Carron shifted; fish rolled underneath. “You would hurt someone, just to get away?”

  Hervé said, “Tired of Lescelles. He treat mulatto worse than African.” Then he noticed the trapper. The same one who'd been at the store—his nose was scabbed and red as chicken wattles, and his beard flecked with food. His eyes were nearly as blue as Céphaline's, but blurred from drink.

  The trapper walked toward us, and the Indians stirred. Hervé began to walk his horse, pulling me along toward the street. “I ride past Court Street when it's time. Leave something small by the door. Clothespin. Then you meet me here that night.” He whispered, “You don't like this, but somebody think you Heureuse girl, and they don't wonder you here. Think you look for trade.”

  Voices shouted behind us as I pulled away and walked quickly home.

  Licking my lips that night, I only tasted the smoke. Hervé loved my face. When he left the clothespin, I would tell him about Jean-Paul.

  I waited for days and days.

  Two weeks later, Msieu Antoine rode to Rosière to pay for me in full.

  He didn't tell me he'd gone until after the transaction was complete. He said, “You wished to visit, but I didn't want complications.”

  I went to my room and did not cry. I had twenty-one piastres. Not even enough for an infant. Five piastres for someone old, like Marie-Claire. Ten for dahlia dishes.

  I had smelled Jean-Paul. He had smelled me.

  Mamère had smelled of coffee and soap and damp mossy water.

  I must have smelled bitter like fig leaves, from cleaning Msieu Antoine's good black coat, and sweet, from the sugar always kept in my apron pocket for Jean-Paul.

  The cart wheels stopped. A man bent down as if to examine them in front of the house.

  I took a damp rag and went outside to clean the panels of the front door, where dust collected every day.

  Two clothespins lay on the step.

  “I have a son.” My whisper was one breath.

  “What?” He turned the spiral of his ear toward me. His fingers were busy at the axle. Lashed to his cart was a shelf with wooden drawers, the kind Madame Lescelles used for spices.

  “On Rosière. He is one.”

  Hervé said, “One. One year old. You didn't come to the woods that morning on Rosière. You had that baby.”

  “I would get him tonight.”

  Hervé Richard didn't stop moving his hands at the axle. He said, facing the wheel, “A white baby.”

  “My baby.”

  “He would cry. We wouldn't get past Washington.” He stood and made as if to put his tools in the cart.

  “I would nurse him.”

  “Not for all them days.” Hervé Richard wiped his forehead with a cloth that turned translucent. His liquids. “We can't steal a baby from Rosière. Too dangerous.” He leaned forward. “You would have another baby. In New Orleans. Your own child. My child.”

  Then he pulled himself up into the seat and touched the leather to the horse's shoulder.

  My body was paid for.

  A seventeen-year-old virgin when he bought me, the men believed. Now he came into my room off the kitchen, the way he did a few nights every week when the new boarders were upstairs. He sat in the chair, and I sat on the bed. He said sentences enough for the time expected to bed me.

  “Pélagie taught you about cloth and arrangement. But someone taught you about color—the way blue dishes look with yellow cloth.

  “Mo
nsieur McAdam wishes you would cook dishes less spicy. He is Irish and American.

  “Was it better to see your son? Or worse?”

  When I didn't answer but continued sewing, he said, “If he could be brought here … But he cannot.”

  He sat with his shoes splayed on the floor like two crows who hated each other. I was sewing a new dress, to make myself appear more of a mistress.

  When he went upstairs, I wrapped myself in my blanket. Hervé Richard would be leaving now from Bayou Carron. Or maybe he would stay here in Opelousas and wait, for me or for someone else. Someone who was better at being treasure.

  But I did not see him again. Two days later, while measuring coffee beans, Madame Lescelles said to someone, “My nephew's slave ran off and left all his orders. You can order a chair if you wish, but …”

  When Msieu Antoine sat beside my bed, his fingers laced around his knees, I watched the half-moons at his fingernails.

  I couldn't speak at all for days. He understood that my throat was painful.

  I had no one. Not Hervé Richard. Not Jean-Paul. If my son were here, why could he not hide in this room? Where your secrets seem quite safe? How much to buy Jean-Paul's body? You would not have tasks for him. Instead, Jean-Paul would ruin my work.

  Do you need the illusion of me because you cannot lie with a woman and reproduce? Are you damaged? How are you so skilled at flirting with Madame Delacroix and all the widows and wives of your clients? How do you know what to say to them about their sleeves and their children and their husbands?

  If you found my money, if you knew that I would have disappeared inside a coffin, what could you do to me? Sell me or kill me? Who would provide the illusion and the food and the comfort?

  “It was better to see my son,” I replied one night. “To not see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.”

  He pulled his shoes together and stood up. The leather was spotless from my bootblack. “I will remember that.”

  When he left for Baton Rouge, Msieu Antoine said, “I will return after midday tomorrow. As the house is empty for tonight, keep the heavy bar over the front door.”