A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  “Do you know what a Jew is?” Mr. Jonah Greene looked at me from his bed. He drank leaves instead of beans. He didn't like sugar. He did not attend Mass. He loved Msieu Antoine. He was an American.

  I shook my head.

  “I am not certain I know anymore, myself.” He turned his head to the window then, and I went down the stairs.

  When Msieu Antoine returned, he asked me to sit in his office.

  Inside the courthouse, he said, ledgers recorded every transaction in the parish. Marriages, deaths, births, divorces, sales of property, suits brought against parties who had injured or wronged someone, such as the one against Mr. McAdam when he had hurt me.

  He wrote for some time, the ink smooth as trails of excrement from an insect. I hadn't written anything except the labels for my bottles since we returned from Azure. I had nothing to record.

  “This says that you will be freed on your twenty-first birthday, in consideration of services rendered by you in the saving of your master's life.”

  I stared at my name. Moinette. But Mr. Greene was not my master.

  Msieu Antoine looked at me as if he knew. “In saving his life, you have saved mine.”

  I had no words.

  “The code states that slaves cannot be manumitted until they are twenty-one. You were twenty this week, no? But this paper promises that you will be free on that very day you become twenty-one. Then you will continue to live here, but I will pay you for your services.” He put his fingers into his sideburns and rested his chin on his hands. “Doctor Vidrine asked if you serviced both of us.”

  I nodded. Understood the indications—the bare purple bulb. The piece of flesh I washed for Mr. Greene, like nothing I had ever seen. Not like Msieu Ebrard and his groom. A hood of skin. A cape.

  An absent piece of skin meant he was a Jew?

  I touched the paper's edge. It was acceptable that two men, three at a time, lay with me. But it was not acceptable that one man loved another. Or that one would marry me.

  “Moinette.” He lowered his forehead to look at me.

  I knew him better than he knew me. That was what Mamère and Tretite had always said. Never trust blankittes. You are property. You are not people. They will sell you or kill you as they please. You know them. They don't know you.

  But he was trying to give me my life. His name on a piece of paper said I was free. “Where will you keep it? What if it burns?”

  He smiled then. “No thanks, no tears. Always practical. This is a brick building. Our important documents are in a metal box. But these papers will be filed in the courthouse tomorrow.” He waited. “And next you will ask me when you can buy your son.”

  The fifth time I saw Jean-Paul was March of 1818. Etienne had delayed his marriage, had chosen a different bride. Msieu Antoine prepared the marriage contract, specifying the dowry and obligations for both families.

  We stayed two days. Jean-Paul was somber and quiet when he sat beside me while I sewed. He was four years old. A pale, small, beautiful boy with silvery skin and black hair in waves that I combed down close to his skull. Eyes dark as indigo. He was the son of Etienne.

  He had the same way of watching, seeing every small detail, hunting for what he wanted, but inside the house, the yard. He touched my skirts, my boots. He knew people were judged by the cloth and the hat and the boots, leather or hide. He trailed the colored threads through his fingers, and when I pricked my finger with the needle, sitting in Emilia's doorway, and I licked at the blood, he took my hand to examine the small hole.

  I could see that he loved no one. He had not allowed himself to truly love. He held himself aloof from us, classifying everything in the folds of his brain. My brain and Mamère's and Etienne's, which meant Msieu Laurent's as well. He was me, measuring everyone.

  He would be sent to the fields when he turned seven. If I did not buy him before then, he would lose fingers or legs or the intensity in his eyes. He would float in the green cane and the smoke and be lost to me forever.

  I had fifty-two piastres.

  That night, the men left the dining room for the office, for bourbon and cigars. Msieu de la Rosière, Etienne, another man I didn't know, and Msieu Antoine. Black coats, dark green, one gray. Only bones and skin inside the wool. Floating in the window, pale faces and black fur.

  I couldn't hesitate. They were animals carrying paper. I was an animal carrying coins wrapped in cloth. I caught Msieu Antoine's glance before he entered the office.

  “Please. If you sign a mortgage note, and use me as security—”

  He knew. “I have made discreet inquiries already, pointing out that the Code Noir specifies the slave child shall not be sold from the mother before ten years, and that there is no mother here. But he specified no mortgages. He has been ill-used from those transactions in the past. He wants one hundred fifty dollars in cash or the trade of another slave.”

  I could not trade myself.

  I did not own myself yet. I did not own Tretite.

  I owned only coins—from washing laundry for Madame Delacroix's boardinghouse, from selling bootblack and soap to Madame Lescelles.

  Near her store one day, I spent twenty of my sixty-three piastres. At home, I left my purchase in the kitchen.

  I waited for both men at the dinner table. The meat was arranged on the platter. They argued upstairs. Mr. Jonah Greene hated Opelousas. His clients were the Americans, traders who stank of tobacco and rum, who wanted papers drawn up to sell horses and carts, or rawboned farmers who'd come down from Illinois and fought with their French neighbors about cattle and fence lines. Though he was learning French tolerably well, most of the Creoles barely acknowledged him.

  Msieu Antoine loved him. He did not love me.

  He admired me. He was comfortable with me. He depended upon me. But I was not his wife, daughter, or sister. And even if Msieu Antoine purchased my son, a small disaster, such as bad business, or a large disaster, such as yellow fever or death, could mean that Jean-Paul, Tretite, and I would belong to someone else. There were no heirs—we might belong to Mr. Greene. We could end up in Philadelphia.

  They ate the muscles of a chicken, the way Tretite had cut them and poured sauce along their skin. Then I sat down.

  I had never sat down where white people ate.

  Msieu Antoine raised his eyebrows. I said, “I could say that I am twenty-one tomorrow. There is no paper record of my birth here.”

  Msieu Antoine said carefully, “This is true.”

  “If I am free tomorrow, I can own my own slave the next day.”

  Mr. Greene said, “You would participate in that which torments you? Slavery exists in the Christian Bible, in the children of Ham, in Moses leading his people. But it is only about money.” He held his napkin tightly. “I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom,” he said softly. “My grandmother knew someone who sang that. So always someone is not free.”

  “But Moinette, you can't have saved up so much money so quickly.” Msieu Antoine lifted his chin. “The rent paid by—”

  “I have not touched your money.” My palms moved across the tablecloth. Pale yellow linen. I had embroidered ferny indigo branches along the edges and blue dahlias. Imaginary flowers. Darkest blue. But they could be mistaken for ink blots if someone weren't careful.

  “Madame Pélagie used to talk about the French court. About how a beautiful woman could appear there and cause a stir. This is Court Street. Everything is recorded in the courthouse.”

  Mr. Jonah Greene wiped his mouth. “The American court is not full of beautiful women. It is fat Madame Richard appearing every week to file suit against her cousins for imagined offenses.”

  But Msieu Antoine said, “Here you have the court of law. The laws of France gave way to Spain, and now they have been changed by Americans.”

  “What are you asking, Moinette?” Mr. Greene said impatiently, pushing away his plate. “You and Antoine are so very French, circling around for hours not saying what y
ou—”

  “Let me bring coffee and tartes,” I said, and stood up. “And an American.”

  Mr. Greene had heard a song about birds on branches, but he knew nothing of what I would do to get my son. Tretite sang the song about the birds in the trees, but now, in the kitchen, she glared at me for having bought a boy.

  I found him on the street.

  American planters who'd come south from Virginia or North Carolina wanted hundreds of hands to work new canefields, and every week, we saw coffles of slaves—mostly men, but women and children, too—walking behind wagons in chains or riding huddled under canvas. The tobacco land in Virginia was used up, the men said, and the slaves being sold off for sugar land. Their hair and faces were so dusty that no matter if they were African— they were golden, and thin from hunger, and if the planter needed money to continue his journey south, a few were sold off near the courthouse.

  The American boy followed me into the dining room. His cheeks were mottled with silver tear tracks. I had deliberately not washed his face.

  Charité had pointed him out—a small, dark boy, being pulled by a rope around his neck. He trailed a group of five men following a cart driven by a trader. Charité said, “Look how he cries. The man say he mought well kill him. Say he been crying ten days while they walk and he mought kill him for some quiet. You have money. I know you have money. Give that white man ten dollars. I hear him say he take ten dollars for some quiet.”

  Charité's basket of green beans and peppers was beside her feet. She put her hand on my sleeve. “I know you long time now,” she said urgently. “You have money. Buy that boy, keep him a few weeks, you can sell him to Madame. She need a boy to deliver in town. Feed that boy. Teach him French words. I talk to her.”

  My hand was slick with lemon oil.

  “I want that boy,” Charité said to me. “He look like me. Look his face. Like mine.”

  “You want him for what?” I asked.

  “For company. A little voice like that. Speak English to me like home.” Charité pointed toward the square. “And you want money.”

  I shook my head. “Money for my own son.”

  “But you make twenty dollar on this one. Buy for ten. Everything buy can be sold again.”

  The trader pulled at his yellow beard with his finger and thumb, looked me up and down and said, “What? Nigger can't buy nigger. Yellow gal like you fetch a thousand yourself.”

  “I am a free woman of color.” I swallowed the dust from the road and held out ten dollars. “Sell me the boy. Cash.”

  “He's ten. Works the field. Worth thirty-five at least.”

  I had expected that. Soap. Meat. Cloth. Bargains. “He's small. He can't work that much.”

  I pulled out ten more gold coins.

  When the boy sat beside the fire, shaking uncontrollably from hours of crying, I rubbed a wet cloth over his head and his hair turned to separate black pearls. But I left his cheeks, dark as jet buttons, smeared with salt water. He said nothing when we asked him in English how old he was, but he held up each hand with four fingers spread wide.

  “The trader knew it was illegal to sell a child from its mother so young,” I told Msieu Antoine. “I need you to take me to the courthouse tomorrow morning. The sale papers are signed with my name.”

  Msieu Antoine motioned the boy back toward the kitchen, and then he pulled my arm to make me sit at the table again. “Moinette. You would trade this boy for your son?”

  My eyes were level with the green flecks in his. His pupils. His irises. The watery film over my sight. “Traffic the way others traffic? That is the word. Conveyance of bodies and coins. I do not know this boy. And I do not know my son.”

  The boy David ate cush-cush near the fire. What if he ran? Where would we keep him? I rubbed the bracelet of scars around my ankle. No. Not a rope, either.

  I put him in my room with Tretite, put a water jar in front of the door, and sat in my chair before the fire all night. My chair, covered with calico, smelled of my mother. I smelled like my mother. My cheeks rubbed the fabric, and the boy sobbed behind the door.

  Jean-Paul was smaller than this boy. He was only two hands to the de la Rosières. Small spindle fingers that would have to begin by gathering cane trash and wood; then the hands would learn to hold the knife, sharpen it with the stone, swing it into the tall Indian grass.

  It was July. This November, he would be hearing the cane knives sing, picking up the stalks left after the grown people moved on.

  In the morning, David was silent at the table. Tretite said in French, “Why you buy him?”

  I told her what Charité said, about his voice, his company, about selling him to Madame Lescelles.

  Tretite frowned. “He not a bird,” she said.

  I asked him in English—”Where are your parents?”

  “Die.” He pulled his lips in so sharply he appeared to be eating himself.

  “Your master?”

  “Die.”

  I opened the armoire and got out the tin of Tretite's pralines, put four on the table before him, and said, “It is July. But Christmas for you today.”

  He didn't know his birthday. No one had written it in a Bible, like the whites did for their children.

  Who would know when I was twenty-one? Until last year at Azure, I had never known my birthday. My mother always said fall, September because the pecans had only been small stars of green in the branches. The sugar broker had come to Azure for the crop in January.

  I could have lied and been free long ago. I was small, but so was Msieu Antoine, and Charité. Who knew how old any of us truly were?

  “Msieu,” I said to him. “You know the date I was born. But you can write that I am twenty-one now. I am a slave. The day I entered the world is not important. But the day I am free …”

  He separated the hair near his ears with his long fingers, again and again, before he said, “Very well.”

  We stood in front of the clerk at the Saint Landry Parish Courthouse. The clerk entered the documents into the conveyance book. Msieu Antoine had made a timely payment of the balance of my purchase back in 1815. There were no liens on my sale. I was now free. Manumitted. What a strange word. It didn't sound French or English.

  Latin, then. Like the words we heard in church. Céphaline said Latin came from the Romans, and the Romans had slaves. Had they sung the song about branches in their hearts?

  The ledger was so thick, the pages formed pigeon-breasts at the center. Page 142. July 20, 1818. I signed my name. Moinette, FWC. I didn't know what to feel. The ink dried.

  I couldn't trade him. I thought I would take him to Rosière and move him forward with my palms on his shoulders and nod to Etienne and pull Jean-Paul to me by his hand.

  But I couldn't even put a rope around his wrist.

  He was haunted. Crescents of white showed under his irises. Rings of gray around his lips. Tretite fed him cush-cush and milk. I didn't touch him, didn't want to be tender toward him, because he was not mine. But I couldn't put him in the cart.

  I kept him for a month. Charité came by nearly every day, with licorice from Madame Lescelles's store and cloth she had secreted away for a new shirt. I sewed the calico, set in the small sleeves, and then took him to Madame Lescelles.

  She lived over her store. She studied him. She asked if he would work. We had told him what to say in French.

  “Oui, madame. Work. Travaille avec Charité.”

  Her name had been Charity in Virginia. She smiled and waited for his hand.

  Madame Lescelles gave me forty dollars. In the courthouse, I signed the boy over to her. Sold to Madame Jeanne Lescelles. The slave David.

  The next day, David came to the door, holding the basket of figs. When he said, “Two for a penny,” shivers climbed the back ladders of my ribs. Pennies.

  “Where is he? You cannot have traded him,” Mr. Jonah Greene said at dinner. “I cannot watch it occur. It makes me a participant, and I cannot live with that.”

&nbs
p; “Keep your voice down,” Msieu Antoine said to him.

  “I have arranged for a bond to be cashed,” Mr. Jonah Greene said. “I will lend you one hundred dollars. I will only participate in the transaction for your son, and even so, I feel infected.”

  A week later, I signed my name on the third piece of paper: Jean-Paul, quadroon slave, 5 years old. Purchased by—

  I hesitated. Slaves never had last names.

  I looked up at Julien Antoine, whose fingers held down the edge of the page. Page 147. “Do I have a surname now?”

  “You may add mine,” he whispered. His chest rose and fell. The clerk was not looking at us.

  “We are not married,” I whispered back. “I am not your daughter. Not your wife.”

  “It cannot be defined,” he said. “Pick up the pen.”

  I signed quickly, Moinette Antoine, FWC.

  I didn't go to Rosière. Msieu Antoine had obtained the signatures from Msieu Laurent, notarized the papers, and filed them in the courthouse.

  He brought Jean-Paul into the kitchen.

  My son held nothing. No pecan shells, no feathers, no stones, no comb, no extra shirt.

  “Maman,” he said politely.

  Only my name.

  I could not embrace him. It felt as if I would hold a tame bird—wary yet pleasant. I smoothed his hair. His ears were like translucent shells attached to his skull, yet they were cartilage. When I touched one ear, he shivered.

  “Take your bath,” I said, turning his slight shoulders. Not angel wings. Child wings. He fit in the tin tub. He stared ahead, with a slight smile, somehow a flourish at the ends of his long, thin lips like a curl.

  I poured out the water from his bath—the dirt of Rosière and the road to Opelousas—onto my earth.

  Jean-Paul did not seem damaged at all—no ash ring of fear around his lips, no bruise of longing under his eyes. He never cried as if he missed anyone on Rosière. He gazed at Tretite's face closing in on itself even more, as if her tignon were pushing down her eyelids. By the third day, he whispered things to pull up a small laugh from her heavy chest.