A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I bit my top lip the way she always had. “Fourteen.”

  “That is the way,” he said. His fingers rested on my shoulder for a moment. “Whether your true mother ran or is lost to you in another way, as is my own mother, I am sorry.”

  Then he tucked his hand along his side again. Past the thin wall near our faces, Mr. Jonah Greene lay on his bed. We could hear him murmuring to himself—was he praying? Was he angry? From the way Msieu Antoine drew in a breath so deep that his shirt moved against me, I knew he was not sleeping either.

  He was listening.

  “He is not the father.”

  “No.”

  “He doesn't look at you,” Tretite said. “Not like that.” She smoothed a wooden spoon. “Where your son?”

  “He is on the place I left. He is three.”

  “Who the father?”

  This was the woman who'd slid already-chewed meat into my mouth when I was a baby. But now she looked bewildered, moving around my kitchen, touching pots, trying to feel the heat of the cooking fire and how those embers compared to her own hearth on Azure.

  “I don't know,” I said, and she slid her eyes toward me without moving her head.

  She ran her fingers over the rice, picking out tiny pebbles. I sewed the buttons back onto a cleaned coat.

  “All these men upstairs?”

  “No.”

  Every morning, she looked puzzled by the men's boots and feet and voices from the floors above us. Sometimes she watched the ceiling. When she went to sleep in our room, where I had given her the rope bed, her round, plump back was turned toward me, trembling as though she were cold, even though it was nearly April.

  She missed the women on Azure. I lay on the pallet beside her and heard her held-in sobs. We had no doorway here, no clearing, no Eveline or Hera.

  In the morning, I said to her, “Charité brings vegetables and fruits every day. People bring chickens or fish or squab.”

  “To the door?” Tretite frowned at the open back door. “I don't cook but for me. Madame say, No wedding dress. But Céphaline never die from my food.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She studied the bowl of pecans. “He like praline?”

  “Msieu Antoine?”

  “Your son.”

  I had no idea, but nodded. We would pretend. Tretite said, “Li mère, she look for you. She don't give up.”

  She knew nothing of Christophe. I bent my head to the brass button and said, “I haven't given up either.”

  My tobacco tin was empty. The first few coins dropped in like rain on a tin roof.

  At night, when Tretite had fallen asleep, and I stayed in the kitchen to watch the fire, to live with the memory people, even Jean-Paul, whom I had not seen now for two years, the bare footsteps moved quietly above me. Long after the boots and shoes had dropped onto the floorboards and the boarders had turned and settled in their beds, someone walked cautiously from one room to another.

  Msieu Antoine had been patient as well. He had waited a long time. He went to the room of Mr. Jonah Greene, whom he loved.

  Every morning, I poured water through his leaves. He didn't look at me. He ate bread with his tea. He ate butter. He did not eat bacon or ham. He tried to speak French to the clients, and when they teased him, he tried to laugh, but he didn't laugh very often.

  He took a bath every night in the tub we moved to his room and filled with hot water. When he was finished, we emptied the cool gray water pitcher by pitcher into the backyard. In this way, he entered the earth, though he hated Louisiana.

  Msieu Antoine's hand rested near his whenever no one else was near them.

  Though they had to be cautious, I saw the way his fingers settled on Mr. Greene's wrist, in the morning, if no other boarders were present when I poured the coffee. The footsteps above my head, the soft movement of feet to the other's room, only happened when the house was empty, but when there was a big trial, and the rooms were full for days, Msieu Antoine found a way. I had heard them once in the parlor, long after midnight. Only a breath. A sharp intake of breath, twice, three times. The wanting of all other functions to cease for a moment.

  Two men. Their lips on each other's? Did one pull back the other's head, fingers in his hair? I crouched near the fire, my face hot, trying not to imagine someone's throat exposed to another's kisses. Did they kiss? But they had to, for Msieu Antoine to make that sound in his throat, that breath of shock at the strength of his feelings.

  That breath had hovered over me, but it was not love.

  The fingers of Msieu Antoine, on the other's wrist, judged the texture of skin, plush and clean from the morning washing.

  I stood in the hallway, hearing that gasp, and inside my hip bones, where Jean-Paul had lain, something twisted. They were wrapped tightly around each other. Fantine's head thrown back. Msieu Antoine? His head thrown back?

  They used other passages.

  Did white men want to feel whether the insides of African women were different? Or only free? Pélagie's husband and his brother had lain with diseased women. The passages. The movement between them. They accomplished love. I could hear them moving against the wall.

  I had lain near Msieu Antoine as a child, as a friend, and he had touched me with tenderness. I would never love anyone with that tenderness except my mother and my son, and those aches were different—a stiletto of fear that moved inside my belly or behind my lungs.

  At night, when I thought of Hervé Richard and the way his mouth had tasted, sometimes I felt that twisting between my hip bones, but I would never see him again. No one would ever love me that way. Even he had only known my face. He had asked me to choose him over my child. I was not to love. I stood against the wall and listened until someone whispered a word again and again.

  “Please. Please.”

  Then I moved down the hallway and back to the fire.

  Tretite sang the same song every day, the song she had sung when I was a child. “Moinette, Moinette, les zozos dans les arbres, les poulets dans les herbes, doucette, doucette.”

  The birds in the trees. The chickens in the herbs. Sweet, sweet.

  Loneliness rushed into the useless space behind my collarbone. What did we keep there? Jean-Paul's palm would be fatter now, his cheeks lifting so high his eyes would disappear when Francine made him laugh. Or perhaps he didn't laugh. He stared solemnly at everyone. He asked nothing.

  Every day since Tretite began to sing, I dreamed of my mother's shape in her chair while the fire burned low, her needle glinting like the smallest lightning, of Fantine's fingers parting my hair to braid it, during that time when we returned from the cane and washed each other's hair, that time Jean-Paul slept beside me.

  Tretite's voice was low and burbling like boiling water, but I still missed my mother's murmured prayers. Jean-Paul was twelve miles away. Not in a pot or branches—someone else sang him a song. He sat in his own doorway, making pecan shells into boats for a puddle, plaiting strips of bleached palmetto for a hat. I had been hungry there, on Rosière. He was hungry. I had bought a mother, and now there was no money. But the longer I waited, the more that floor would be his place, and he might not ever love mine.

  I saw him again in April of 1817. Msieu Antoine and Mr. Greene rented a carriage. Their law business had brought them new American clients, but the old Creoles were hesitant to trust Mr. Greene, an American from Philadelphia, with their estates and their marriage contracts. Msieu Antoine said they would call on the de la Rosières.

  Jean-Paul was braiding palmetto with Emilia, who had lost her leg and was housebound. He was touching the diamonds of paler green inside the band of the hat they were making.

  He was three. He called me Maman, but that was only my name.

  He was pleased to see me. Genial, that word applied to certain men who liked everyone, but no one more than another. He leaped into my arms, he kissed me and spoke to me, and lay beside me, but I felt that he would have done the same for Emilia, for Fantine, for the next w
oman who would pet him and feed him and wash his cheeks.

  I wanted there to be no one else who did that. I wanted him to love me the way I loved my mother, with that binding strong as spiderwebs woven into a rope. The silk threads individual, gossamer, floating across a bush, but when Firmin used to pull the cradles of web from the corners of the room, and roll the threads between his fingers, he made a dirty string no one could break.

  I wanted my son to love me like that, soil and crumbs and hair and kisses and words all particles of gray in the thread of each day.

  ———

  “I have never owned a human before.”

  “You do not own her now, so why are you concerned?” Msieu Antoine was amused.

  “Wouldn't it be more useful if she were pregnant? For—”

  I paused in the hallway. For the illusion that a mulâtresse was Msieu Antoine's lover and not him.

  Msieu Antoine laughed. Five low sternum-barks. “Though I own her, I do not wish to mandate her reproduction, Jonah. That has happened to her in the past.”

  “She has a child.”

  “Yes.”

  “But then why not bring the child here, so others will think—”

  I put my hand against the cool plaster to steady myself. My bare feet. The wood floor hot from summer.

  “I have tried to purchase the boy. But the owner insists he will not sell him until he is ten, in order to abide by the slave code.”

  “Code Noir. Black code. An outdated and insulting list that began with the illegality of my presence. The first article stated that all Jews be expelled from the colony.”

  “Jonah. We agreed that there was good money to be made here and that we would find another place eventually. Moinette will be patient. As are we. Trust me.”

  But one day, when the house was empty except for me and Tre-tite, Charité delivered beets and came inside to drink coffee. She pointed to the pheasant plate over the mantel and said, “Very fancy. But so small, who ever eat from that?”

  The taste of coffee. My peacock plate. My son not here. My mother dead.

  She was dead.

  I lay in my room until Tretite came. The truth. “Christophe said my mother drowned herself in the bayou. Not looking for me. Giving up.”

  Tretite shook her head. “She never give up. Christophe don't know.”

  “He saw her.”

  “He saw her leave.” Tretite sat on the bed and said, “My hair hurt my head. Please?”

  I unwrapped the strings from her hair, grayer now like faint white salt circles on her temples. She said, “You are nineteen now? You can know the truth.”

  “He told me the truth.”

  Tretite shook her head so violently her soft jaw quavered. “No. Only Ibo people kill the self, so they can fly back to Africa. To their people.”

  “She was Bambara.” I had read the word now, beside the names of so many slaves, in Msieu Antoine's papers. “From Senegal. That's what Senegalese means.”

  Tretite shrugged. “Singalee people not like Ibo. When we live in Santo Domingo, I see Ibo people. They come on the ship, and the first week, they hang from the tree. I go outside in the morning, and twenty of them hang from the tree. Fig tree. Tie around the neck with rope from the barn. Together.”

  I combed out the thick gray coils of hair until she fell asleep in the chair. Feet dangling from the branches. But I still saw my mother lying on her back in the bayou that led toward Barataria, her eyes closed to the branches above her.

  The next night, she said, “Marie-Thérèse—not Ibo. One day, we will look outside that door and see her face.”

  She cooked in her new white dress. I sewed it of fine linen. Not scraps. Absently, she rubbed the skirt between her fingers. While we sat beside the kitchen fire, after the men had moved to the office with their cigars, she watched me mend Mr. Jonah Greene's black coat, where a loose nail had torn a flap in the sleeve.

  “People rise up and kill the masters on Santo Domingo. Madame Bordelon people come to Louisiana to start over. Bring Marie-Claire and me. They start in Pointe Coupee. Seventeen ninety-two. And no Ibo people. They don't buy Ibo. Only Mina or Singalee. But I see a man on the next place, and he tell his msieu he will marry me. I twenty-two then.”

  Tretite's glossy chin trembled. The grooves beside her mouth were deep now, as if her chinbone was wooden, attached to her face by threads.

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “In the woods. He is hunter for his place. But his msieu say no, he doesn't marry. Ramon. Ramon say his msieu cannot tell who love. The next day, he shoot his msieu with the musket. Three balls. He come to me that night and leave a bird. Pheasant. With the long tail. I pluck the feathers and make a hat, but Ramon never come back. The army come and bring me in chains to Ramon place. His msieu dead in the house. Ramon hanging in his room. Ibo.”

  She held her hands before her. “Inside the pheasant—two balls. Inside the msieu—three. They take all the slaves to Ramon room. The belt around his neck. Say, ‘Who kill your master, he hang there. Who prove the love of the master will not be punish. You prove the love—cut off the murderer head.’ “

  I bent forward and covered my face, but the coat smelled of bitter tea leaves and smoke, and I dropped it on the floor.

  “Hippolyte the driver cut off the head. Manchac the gardener cut off the right hand. Gustave cut off the left. Hang the pieces over Ramon door for one month. Let them be warn.” She pleated the white fabric over her legs. “Bury his body in the street. Say now he never leave. Say Ibo foolish to think they fly back to Africa when they die. Say he never buy Ibo slaves again.”

  She put the pot on the stand over the low flame and sat down. After some time, she said, “Marie-Thérèse not Ibo. She run to find you. One day, you open that door and she stand there.”

  But even if my mother had run, she would never know the words we had left on Azure, with Christophe and Eveline and Hera. Msieu Antoine. Court Street, Opelousas.

  Christophe had told me the truth. He didn't hate me now. He meant to save me the years of turning my head sharply at every knock, of my heart making that small leap like a fish searching for a fly, when the muscle would only knock against the flat bone that covered it.

  ———

  “Aside from the absence of intelligent or original thought?”

  “Jonah. There is more money to be made here. Louisiana planters have more assets than half of the eastern states.”

  “And apparently that excuses them from the necessity to use logic and reason.”

  “Can you not be patient?”

  “Can you not be impatient?”

  They both laughed at the dining room table, and then the long silence and turning of pages that meant they both read.

  In September of 1817, the newspaper reported that hundreds were dying of yellow fever in New Orleans. We were far north, but someone must have brought the fever miasma to Opelousas, as a cloud that clung to his hair or coat or hands.

  Miasma. What had Céphaline said of miasma? An air that contained something? How was that possible? I served dinner to Mr. Greene and a client from Baton Rouge, and the house was quiet. The night before, we'd been kept awake by men shouting in the streets about fever. Msieu Antoine had gone to New Iberia on business.

  When I went upstairs in the morning, to bring the hot water for their pitchers and shaving, Mr. Greene was moaning. It sounded like the noises men made when they lay on top of women. I put my cheek against the door.

  But he said, “Help me, please.”

  His barre was torn, his bedclothes wet as if lifted from the washpot. He called again and again: “Julien. Julien.” Msieu Antoine's first name.

  I took his clothes from him, and Tretite brought new sheets. His head was thrown back, and he panted. Water stood out on his skin. Salt and the smell of disease. I bathed him again and again with cool water, as Tretite told me. She had seen fever before. She said, “Doctor bleed him and give him bad medicine. Kill him. Like Céphaline. Don't
get doctors. I make the beef broth and keep the windows open. Cold. Cold for hot blood. Not take the blood away.”

  I prayed and prayed. If he died, we would be held responsible. Msieu Antoine would—what would he do? The sweat ran from the skin, and his eyes turned yellow as old wax. I prayed that the fever was inside his blood but that the blood released it from the skin. But that night, when he was unconscious, writhing and turning like a wind inside his white sheets, I told Tretite I would find Doctor Vidrine.

  Near the alley gate, I stepped on a hand. An Indian man, sprawled near the shed, his blanket open and his chest bare. His mouth was open as if to receive rain. He didn't move, but air went in and out past his teeth. Was that miasma?

  I covered my mouth and nose with a rag and ran toward Madame Delacroix's boardinghouse and tavern. Three men walked down the street, American drunk voices, and I ducked into another alley.

  And at the back of the boardinghouse, I heard moaning again. What if someone here had the fever? I peered into the yard. A man leaned against a tree near the cistern, and a woman knelt before him, her face pressed to the front of his pants. His white hands in her black hair, clenched into fists.

  I turned my face and went to the back door. “Doctor Vidrine,” I breathed to the maid who answered. “Please. Please.”

  He finished his bourbon and picked up his bag.

  In three days, Mr. Greene was weak, but alive. He drank beef broth and said that he had lived because he never touched alcohol. Doctor Vidrine laughed and said that bourbon in the blood, or African immunity, refused entrance to the fever. “You don't have that, eh? But you are a Jew.”

  Mr. Greene was quiet.

  “I have seen the—the indications when the servant washed your body.” He laughed. “Perhaps the Jews have different blood, as well, that protected you from the fever. Two slave brokers from Virginia died this morning.”

  I went upstairs to take away the last soiled bedding. The liquids from his body—blood and sweat and vomit and excrement. I boiled the linens with vinegar and alum.