A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Jean-Paul's figure, squatting near the puddle, wavered and blurred. “Why are you telling me this?” I wiped my eyes, and the grit from the beans hurt.

  “Let him work with David. Take the letters to the courthouse, the papers to the men. What you teach him here? Sweep and serve the table and watch you sew? That not a man.” She stood up.

  I went outside to the shed, a small brick building that kept our wood dry and my washpots and tools from rusting. I hadn't opened the shed for nearly a year, since Jean-Paul was old enough to haul things from here to the yard or kitchen.

  Could it be made into a room for him? There was only a tiny window, covered with cobwebs. When I pulled open the door, someone was breathing inside.

  Jean-Paul and David came running at my screams. “Maman! He won't hurt you! He won't!”

  An Indian slept beside the wood, rolled in a blanket so dirty the leaves and ashes looked like fur. His face was covered with a black hat, but the light made him twitch, and he sat up abruptly.

  Red trade cloth in my mouth. It was Joseph. From the ciprière.

  His eyes were filmed with alcohol. Waxed black buttons. He peered at me and pulled himself up, holding on to the woodpile.

  “Maman. We knew he slept here, but we didn't want to tell you.” Jean-Paul's fingers pulled at my sleeve. “When he brings the wood, I give him half the money you give me, and food. He likes it here.”

  Joseph said nothing. “What do you do with the money?” I asked Jean-Paul.

  “Buy candy with David. Or canvas for our boats. Paint.” He did not say he was sorry. He curved his mouth. “He saw us sailing our boat on Bayou Carron one day. He showed us his pirogue. But now it is gone. Maybe it was stolen. But he cannot talk.”

  Joseph could hear. He didn't move his eyes from mine.

  Jean-Paul said, “I never say anything mean about his clothes, and he never says anything mean at all.”

  “This is not a joke,” I told him sharply, but he pulled my ear to his lips.

  “He is not a pet. He has half a tongue. He showed me. The other half is gone. He is a fantôme, like Tretite said, from the woods. He will not harm us. He makes boats.”

  Joseph did not open his mouth. He walked out the back gate and down the alley, pulling his hat low over his forehead.

  “Jean-Paul, this is not our house. It belongs to Msieu Antoine. He could become so angry about this, he might send you away.”

  “I belong to you,” Jean-Paul said. “You won't send me away.”

  His voice was serene. Genial. He went back inside with Tretite.

  Half a tongue. The alley was bare, no summer vines, just wooden fences and gates. Why had Joseph left the ciprière camp? Where was his sister? Had the white man cut out Joseph's tongue?

  I leaned my back against the brick. Joseph and his sister had sold me for gold. Now he was one of the drunken bodies we stepped around in the alleys or the square.

  And my son had been to Bayou Carron, where I had not thrown my life away. He was a child, but not a child. He was not mine every moment of the day, as I had been my mother's, in the clearing.

  “Jeanne Heureuse dead,” Charité whispered to me when she came to the back door with her basket of sweet potatoes. “Someone put the belt around her neck and pull. The other girl in the house say she hear a man call Jeanne English words. Mongrel cur. Then he disappear.”

  Sweet potatoes heavy in my fingers. Rough skin and dirty eyes. Mongrel cur. Who had said those words? Not mule. Not mulatto. All these years, I had never seen her. She looked like me.

  “Who will bury her?” I asked Charité.

  “Say her girl send the body back to New Orleans. Say a mama there and five sisters.”

  “All this time?”

  Charité nodded, lowering her voice. “She the oldest, send to work Opelousas. Just her job.”

  All day I thought of her. How old was she? She owned one girl, sometimes two or three. Where would they go?

  I cleaned the coffee tray. When the men left the office for the courthouse, Jean-Paul said, “Msieu Césaire has white goose wings growing from his cheeks, but the hair in his nostrils is still black. How is that possible? You told me our skulls are full of cartilage.”

  “Hush,” I told him.

  “He hates us,” he whispered.

  “Hush!” I said.

  Msieu Césaire hated Mr. Greene.

  He and Madame Richard and others tormented Mr. Greene in offices and dining rooms and courthouse halls. Msieu Césaire, the tiny man who had lifted my skirt with his cane, stared at Jean-Paul with baleful eyes. He cocked his head at Msieu Antoine to ask, “You buy that one or make him?”

  His whiskers were like goose quills.

  “I do not see you at Mass,” he said to Mr. Greene while I left coffee the next morning.

  “I worship elsewhere.”

  “You are a Jew.”

  “It is difficult to worship in Opelousas.”

  “In the original Code Noir, in 1724, the first article decreed that all Jews must leave the colony or become Catholic.”

  “I have read the article. It was written nearly one hundred years ago.”

  “This is a Catholic parish.”

  “This is an American state.”

  “The Code Noir was the law.”

  “The Black Code. But I am not black.”

  “You are a Jew. I don't do business with Jews, and my friends don't do business with Jews.”

  Msieu Antoine could not make Mr. Greene stay. “The fever, the people, the swamps, the intolerable heat. The utter intolerance and lack of ideas. It is preferable to you that these Creoles think you have fathered a slave than to believe I worship differently.”

  “There are others to do business with us.”

  “No. No. I cannot live this way. Never.”

  ———

  But we had to live this way.

  “You and your son could accompany us to Paris.”

  I sat at the table for only the second time in my life. Accompany to Paris. Back when I was sixteen and thought I would swim home. Now this was my home. This brick building would never burn. My papers were in a metal box.

  “I have no trade in Paris. We will run the boardinghouse for you and put the money in the bank. You will return in a year? You will decide then what to do?” My eyes were level with Julien Antoine's. His eyes were surrounded by a burst of lines, like etchings on a fine table.

  “Yes, although it is doubtful given Jonah's feelings that we would return for long.”

  “Then we will make a pact. When Jean-Paul is fourteen, we will send him to school in Paris. Like the son of Madame Les-celles. Paris is better for sons who look like mine.”

  He was sleeping now in the shed. I crossed the dark yard, holding the poker. Joseph often slept outside, against the back wall of the shed, near the woodpile. But perhaps someone was with him—a trapper or a drunk. Tonight, no one was there.

  Jean-Paul's mouth was open. He lay on the rope bed. A crate for a desk. A square of hemmed brocade over the tiny window. I sat in the chair until he awakened.

  I never began with a word for a lesson, as my mother had. He began everything. He liked words but wasn't interested in writing. When he was a baby, I spent all my time imagining my absence, but now that he was half grown, I imagined nothing. There was only each day, the food and money and dirt there had always been.

  He said when he was twenty-one, he would own a store. Tailoring and fabric and notions. He liked that word. “And I will marry Francine. She will sit behind the counter, like Madame Lescelles. With a tignon of purple. She loves purple. Like the wild iris in the ciprière.”

  The following week, after Julien Antoine drew up papers naming me the manageress of the property, I asked him about Jean-Paul. “He is indentured to you.”

  He was sorting outdated papers for burning. Upstairs, Mr. Greene was moving trunks. “I have given that some thought,” he answered. “You don't know me at all by now? You think that I would be s
o careless?” He showed his palms to the ceiling. “The indenture will be nullified, Moinette. He is twelve years old now, oui? He needs a trade.”

  The circles of candlelight wavered on the windows against the blackness outside. “What kind of trade does a boy take when he loves cloth? Boats? Not coopering or carpentry or bricklaying?”

  Jean-Paul was taller than me, but just as slight. His fingers were narrow and long and moved the needle in and out of fabric as quickly as a bird dipping its beak into water. His hair was a shelf on his head, combed from a side part, with only four wide waves toward his left ear.

  The boarders looked at him with a mix of curiosity, when he took their boots in the evenings, and confusion when they happened to see him holding a bolt of brocade. He sewed in our bedroom, with the door propped open and his long table set up between the beds.

  How did he know how to pleat the drapes perfectly to fit the brass rings? He stacked the rings and played with the colors of the cloth. He made boats from cypress brought by Joseph, hollowed out and carved and fitted with elaborate sails and riggings, which he sold to Madame Lescelles for her store.

  The curtains and drapes she sold to wives who thought the décor had arrived from Paris. Green silk folds with appliqués of bronze leaves, slanted as if falling.

  “Moinette,” Msieu Antoine said, distracted by a box of contracts. “Men were unhappy with Jonah Greene and with me, for not marrying one of their daughters, for not drinking with them, for not being who we should have been. And you understand me fully.”

  I nodded.

  “You should apprentice your son to François Vidrine, the upholsterer. He lives near Grand Coteau. I will have a message sent to him before we leave.”

  ———

  The second man to buy my son's body only glanced at his hands and nodded. He was French, old enough to have dark gray moustaches and an old-fashioned queue at the back of his head, the hair like a small tail.

  The papers in the courthouse read: “Jean-Paul Antoine, age 11, quadroon slave of Moinette Antoine, is hereby indentured to François Vidrine, Grand Coteau, for the term of nine years, for the sum of $900, to be payable in equal installments each year.”

  A different book. So many pages. Slaves and horses and hogsheads of sugar. He was owned by me because I couldn't free him yet. Nine years. If Msieu Antoine came back in one year or two, and thought he should take Jean-Paul to Paris, he said it would be easy to cancel the indenture.

  “I am going with Msieu Vidrine. The cousin of the doctor,” Jean-Paul said. He sat near the trunk I had bought for him.

  “You are to work for him. You are not sold.”

  “I am not free.” He smiled.

  “You are only called a slave because of the law. Words on paper, Jean-Paul. Do you understand? You belong to me.”

  “David is a slave. You bought him.”

  “Jean-Paul.”

  “When I am free, and I have money, I will buy Francine. I will marry her, and David will buy someone to marry, too.”

  He was still a child.

  “When you are finished learning the trade, I will have bought this house from Msieu Antoine. He might not return here to live.”

  “My father.” His soldier-coat eyes were fixed on mine.

  “The house will be mine.” I pulled my shawl tight around me.

  He would be a free man of color, when he was twenty-one. He would have the bottom floor of this house for himself. His own window. His name painted. Chairs and sofas. Curtains. No one could object to curtains made by a free man.

  He had filled his trunk with fabric and needles and clothes and his new boots, which he would save from the long, dusty journey on the cart. He had nothing when he came, I told myself. He has things he loves now.

  When he turned to wave at me from the cart, his smile was measured and small as ever. Then he faced the road that led from Opelousas to Grand Coteau.

  David was angry, his thin face clotted with held-in tears. “He had to learn a trade,” I said, in the yard. “He will return.”

  Finally he said, “He told me you always said that when you left. ‘I will return.’ And you didn't come.”

  “I came when I could,” I told him. His eyes didn't waver. I went back into my kitchen. My kitchen. Bricks and my windows, where the moonlight fell blue from the eastern sky three nights of each month.

  Charité said, “He ask Madame Lescelles send him to Grand Coteau, work with Jean-Paul, and she look at him like he crazy. Tell him, your work drive the cart and deliver the goods.”

  The next week, Charité appeared with no basket, no sweet peppers, no madras, no candles. “Gone,” she said. “Supposed to pick up tobacco and cigar from somewhere. Drive that cart and never come home.”

  Her tears smeared hot at my neck when she fell into my arms. She whispered, “He could put me on the cart. He could say, My mother ride with me today.”

  She stopped shaking and pulled away.

  “Fourteen now. A man. I smell him grown, and I knew he would go,” Charité said. Her eyes were nearly hidden in the roundness of her cheeks, and her arms were so wide now from good food that they flattened themselves against her sides. “I come on a cart. He come on a cart. I had him a few years.”

  She must have cried all night, because her eyes were smaller in the morning than in the afternoon. Madame Lescelles studied me coldly in her store. Someone had delivered the cigars. I bought three of them for Msieu Vosclaire, who had stayed at the house for months. I laid them on the clean desk in the office.

  We kept it as an empty office, for men who needed to confer with someone in private or to write documents for court. The boarders ate in the dining room, but the office would not make a good parlor anymore. Parlors were for women who received callers. I received business. And the desk made me know Julien Antoine would return.

  Two months later, Jean-Paul rode with Msieu Vidrine to Ope-lousas to deliver furniture, and he bounded off the cart and ran into the kitchen, not to embrace me but to lay his palms along my face.

  “Feel this!” He had calluses from the needles and leather. “Here.” He handed me a parcel. A simple dress, brown watered silk, the puffed sleeves ending in a spray of lace.

  “Lace is worked by showing the absence,” he whispered. “The empty space is the art.”

  He fixed me hard with his eyes and then spun to hold out his arms.

  “David is gone,” I said.

  He knew. I saw the shift in the hollows that held nothing.

  “You saw him.”

  He would have moved his muscles differently if he'd been surprised. His smile required many muscles. “He came to the barn where I work. He asked people where Vidrine's place was. He had cigars and tobacco in the cart, and he said we could drive north and sell them until we had enough money to take a boat to Ohio.”

  “Ohio?”

  “Where everybody is free.”

  The dress was warming to my hands. I had forgotten how thin silk was against skin. Maybe David took the same road as Hervé Richard.

  “Did you want to go?”

  He straightened his cuffs. “Msieu Vidrine came out to the barn and saw the trunk full of cigars. He bought five.” Jean-Paul looked past me at the fire. “Are those biscuits for me?”

  ———

  Some days, I didn't want to rise in the morning. Tretite was awake before me, and blew on the embers and roasted the coffee. Her eyes were clotted with pain, and she moved as though blind, but I couldn't rise. The men's feet moved on the floors above my face. My ceiling. The sun shone on the chinaberry trees outside, their purple-star blooms, and the chickens groomed their feathers by the shed.

  But I couldn't move. He wasn't mine. He might have gone. I would never see my mother.

  All the coins and paper and fingers and the years of waiting and washing and then waiting. All the bones growing longer, and the hair, and the meat we ground between our teeth and the waste that left us to melt into the earth.

  My own braids
were so long, they wrapped around my head three times under the tignon. At night, my head ached from the weight. I was afraid to cut them. The ni is in the hair. Where was my mother's dya? The first time I cut Jean-Paul's hair, my fingers felt his skull. The African men's hair grew in whorls and curls. If we let Jean-Paul's hair grow, it would be long and wavy to his shoulders. He was a boy. I held his ni in my fingers, then kept it in a cloth bag under my bed.

  Tretite didn't sing. She hummed. The words had been worn down to sound. Finally she stood in the doorway. “You only twenty-some years old. Too young to be tired. Get up and heat that iron for Msieu Vosclaire.”

  My hand moved into the air beside my bed. The absence of wrinkles. Clean white space. My family was an odd assemblage of animals. Not a herd.

  Msieu Vosclaire stayed permanently in the far north bedroom. He worked all day as clerk of the court and drank one glass of wine while he read the newspaper at night. Then he went to sleep.

  Joseph slept sometimes in the shed. He brought wood once a week. We left food for him. His mouth moved over the cornbread and meat, but I could only imagine the stump of a tongue.

  Charité was not my sister. But she drank coffee with me and Tretite every morning at ten. She set her basket on the floor and rested her elbows on my table.

  The American men spoke loudly in front of the house.

  “It's run by a nigger.”

  “No, it's not.”

  “You've seen her. High yellow gal. I don't care how much the French like them, they're dirty. I wouldn't stay there.”

  “Vosclaire says it's clean.”

  “I'm staying at the other place. Eibsen. German.”

  But we had full rooms most nights. We cleaned the baseboards with a brush, swept the yard, washed the bedframes with boiling water in spring, oiled the hinges on the armoires.

  It was clean. But at night, I was afraid. Men in the dining room and upstairs, some of them coming home drunk. One day, I asked Madame Lescelles, leaning on the scarred counter so thick with varnish it looked as if the marks swam under our hands, “Do you have a gun?”