A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  The full moon wakes in the east and sleeps in the west, my mother said. This moon was on its downward arc. White as a soap cake, but missing two days’ worth of a sliver, as if my mother had shaved off a portion for washing.

  The boat was slowing for the next stop. This house had an allée of trees covered with oranges, nearly glowing behind the lanterns someone held at the landing.

  The water churned—but water would hold my soul. Faro? The water spirit? Would I would drift down to her, even if I died? Then she could join me là-bas.

  “Orange Grove,” someone shouted.

  The small Msieu said sharply, “Put her with the cargo. We'll only be here a few hours. If we bring her ashore, she might run.”

  I could see nothing, not even the outline of all the hogsheads in the hold with me. The eye focused when it was given enough time to adjust, Céphaline used to say.

  Your eyes were purple when you were born, Mamère used to say. Then when you grew, they turned brown and followed me around, every moment of the day until I had to leave you at the end of the canerow.

  What did I look at until you came back?

  Sais pas. Don't know. Maybe the sky. Maybe nothing.

  I cried until my dress was wet as if we'd washed it. No one else was on the boat now. I tried to make my brain work, but my head felt swollen as Eveline's baby who died.

  Her baby gone. Madame's baby gone. My mother's baby gone.

  Think. Your brain is the same size as theirs. The small Msieu had eaten with Msieu Bordelon. They knew each other somehow. All the sugar was loaded for New Orleans, where everything was sold.

  Under my dress was worth money.

  The other lips. That night Hera sat with Mamère while she sewed, and they talked about the marks. Two on each side. The four lips. The ones on your face. The ones between your legs.

  In New Orleans, someone would lift my dress and stick his hand there and then buy me.

  “They put their finger there,” Eveline said once, shrugging.

  I could mark my face. Hera said she didn't mark Phrodite's face because it wasn't good. If my face was scarred, no one would want me.

  I moved my wrists against the iron bracelet, which was attached to the ring in the wall. My apron. I still wore my apron from serving. Maybe there was something in the pocket with which to cut myself. Numb fingers into my apron pocket. Small round objects, smooth long ones.

  Coffee beans and clothespins. My palms felt only their shapes, my hands were so cold.

  I threw back my head against the wood, banging the bone covering my brain. Nothing to scar me. And if I did scar my face, then what would I be sold for?

  What if the small Msieu shot me, like a lame horse, for my ruined face?

  Then I would be là-bas. And Mamère would find me there. In the other world.

  But what if Mamère waited for me to come back to her? Not là-bas but in our bed, lying there but not sleeping? Sitting, just like me, waiting.

  Iron scraped in the lock. My eyes were dry and swollen as if sand filled the holes. I saw the eye in the indigo vat, imagined Doctor Tom's eyes now, and Céphaline's inside the earth.

  What was my mother looking at? What did she want me to do?

  A brown-skinned man in a white jacket studied me. He put down a plate with cornbread and a small, limp pile of bacon, and left a tin mug of water and a bucket. I wouldn't drink the water. I wouldn't use the bucket. I wouldn't lift my dress. They might be listening.

  We left Orange Grove. People shouted, “North!” The iron bracelet left red ridges in my right wrist. My eyes filled with water again. Where did it come from? Maybe all the water in my body would leave through my eyes and I would never have to use the bucket.

  My legs were stiff. A rush bloomed inside my back when I tried to move too far, my spine bending wrong. Vertebrae.

  Knowing the word didn't matter. I was staked down like Marie-Claire, whorls of pink flesh decorating her cheeks. It didn't matter that Céphaline had taught me all those words, merely by saying them. I needed other words, if I was going to live.

  I had to use the bucket. I said words to myself, words Céphaline had used when her mother was angry. Only excretions. Sweat. Urine. Tears. Where in the folds of the brain did our words form?

  Nothing on my tongue would help me now. When the small Msieu opened the door and seemed surprised to see me amid the sugar, I waited for the right words to come from a secret branch of the softness inside my bones. But somewhere between my eyes, which saw the key's teeth move into the lock at my hand, and my throat, which filled with fear when they took me out onto the deck where the river reached wide and brown to the levees, where rooftops were visible now, no sentences formed themselves for me.

  “He sold you with no defect,” the small Msieu said, studying my face at the railing.

  Foolish or intelligent? Which would hurt me, or help me? I looked at his buttons. Obedient.

  “Oui, msieu,” I said.

  “Did you try to run from Azure?”

  “Non, msieu.”

  “Why were you not needed?”

  He must know about Céphaline. He must not know I had been there that night. I said, “His daughter is gone now.”

  His eyes were the silvered gray of a new cane knife. My eyes moved down. My feet on the shaking wood. Screaming wood.

  “You,” he said, and the brown-skinned man came again. Coffee stain on his jacket sleeve. “Stay here while I prepare for the landing. She is not to move.”

  On the riverbank, two heads were mounted on poles at the bend, where the boat slowed.

  The eyes were gone. The skin was dried like hide. Purple brown. The hair was coated with dust from the river road. The curls left were pale as gold.

  “Saint John the Baptist.” The steward spoke softly. “They try to rise up. Heads above the city and below.”

  The pikes had gone into their brains then. And how did they find a man willing to mount them there? Lifting them and then …

  They were not faces. I closed my eyes until the boat stopped moving when we docked at New Orleans.

  The other man, the factor, tied a small rope around my raw wrist. I pulled my shoulders in, like a cape. The men were everywhere— their eyes went to my face, my dressfront.

  On the wharf, the Msieu and the factor bought coffee, breaking open bags and chewing a few beans. The smell—the bean tucked into my mother's cheek—my eyes filled with water again. It should be dry inside me now.

  My mother had had her mother, when they brought her here to the slave market. Or did she come to Azure straight from the boat with sails, sold at the landing? She had her mother's hand.

  “I never stay here longer than necessary,” the small Msieu said to the factor, who pulled me along the dock.

  “With all the balls and dinners?” the factor said.

  “People make money at home, and they lose it in the city.” The small Msieu studied sacks of coffee, iron hoops, and heaps of cloth.

  He gestured to the boat. “Engage dock nègres to move the sugar.” Then he looked at the men on the wharf. “I have forty arpents of new land,” he said, his voice lower now. “I need five men to clear it. Africans, but it's unlikely I'll find any here. Since the damned Americans have changed the law, I'll have to take a boat down to Barataria Bay. Jean Lafitte always has Africans for sale.”

  The factor nodded. “When I met you at Auzenne's place, he mentioned it. Did you enjoy the sight of the daughters?” He stopped abruptly, the rope bristles burning my wrist. I was an animal—larger than a dog, smaller than a horse. A mule. Petite mulâtresse.

  The Auzenne girls. Their fair cheeks and perfect curls. He might have to come back for one of them soon, and I might come back, too.

  But the small Msieu flicked away their names with his fingers. “Too far south. And my son remains in Paris. I want to leave tomorrow for the Barataria.”

  The factor whispered, “You would truly buy from Lafitte and the privateers? With the Americans patrolling?�
�

  You couldn't watch them or let your eyes meet theirs. A shoe paused nearby; a white toe poked from its hole like a pale grub.

  The small Msieu shrugged. “This one can't clear the land. Bor-delon said she wasn't needed.” He shaded his eyes to look at the levee. “She can be needed somewhere else, he said, and I agreed.”

  The factor's voice seemed distant. “Bright girl is worth good money in the city. Or trade with Lafitte for some men.”

  Hera's voice—Bright hardship. My mother—Take but one candle light a room.

  While we walked to the hotel, two men stopped us. “You sell that one, oui?” Fingers on my sleeve. A hand with sparse black hairs, a jacket with a grease stain like a map, a knee round as a saucer when a man bent a leg up onto a block and studied me.

  If one bought me, what did it matter if he hit me with that hand or covered my face with that jacket or pushed that wide knee between my legs?

  I would let all my blood out of my body as soon as I could, and it would clot and dry like sugar boiled in the last pan, and then someone could grind up the solid blood into powder. Drink my body in coffee.

  Finally we went into a door below a sign on a large house. The factor handed the rope to a woman with cheeks red from a cooking fire.

  She opened the door of the storeroom, and I sat on the cloth coffee sacks piled near the olive oil jars. “You break something, I make him pay,” she said, and locked the door.

  The bricks were warm and not trembling. I took off my tignon and made my hair into a pillow at the back of my head.

  Lie down make me too rested, my mother said. Lie down mean I can't watch.

  Watch me. Watch me.

  Who do I pray to? Ni? Faro? No water here. My blood would turn to powder, and someone could thicken soup with my body. A red soup. Beef meat and sang mêlé.

  Mixed blood. From a sugar broker's blood. A tall blond man, eating a soup of beef meat and laughing upstairs now with the small Msieu, who was not the laughing kind. In the morning, we would go farther away from Azure. From Mamère. The sugar broker would ride for another plantation, where he would taste the sugar and talk about money and look for a woman. The one for that night, for that week.

  No. He was dead. Tretite had said long ago to Mamère, very quietly when I was in the bed, lying down: “That one, the one Madame call le gros blond avec les yeux rouges? Big blond man, with red eyes? Mort. Dead. Msieu say he don't come back for next crop because he gamble on a boat and they kill him.”

  I leaned my head against the big jar of olive oil. Lie down mean you can't watch, Mamère always said. So I rest like this.

  In the morning, the woman spoke to someone in the kitchen, and the door opened quickly. She screamed.

  “Aiee! I forget this little nègre! Like a ghost with la barbe d’Es-pagnol hanging in her face!”

  I tied my tignon tightly. She pushed me out to the kitchen, handed me two biscuits, and reached behind her for the rope.

  On the street, the small Msieu and the factor listed goods. Fabric, coffee, white sugar in cones, iron hoops for the hogsheads.

  The molasses on my dress was dried at the hem, collecting dust. The water would run brown when I washed it.

  The small Msieu said impatiently, “I need two boats—one for all the goods, one for new slaves.”

  “But then you're trusting two Canadians,” the factor said. “Hire Chalan. He's named for his boat. Take everything you buy together.” He turned away then. “I have to collect the payments for Bordelon's crop and take his goods down to Azure.”

  His black coat disappeared into the crowd, hundreds of backs and hats and boxes. He was going back.

  But the rope pulled me toward the boats and the river, so wide and brown that trees on the other side looked like puffs of smoke.

  I wouldn't cry in front of this man. I sent the welling tears back into the hollows in my skull. The salt water burned like lye. My mother could dip a turkey feather into the pools below my eyes, and the quill could come away stripped bitter like a white needle.

  The small Msieu engaged the boatman named Chalan. “Lafitte always have cloth and spice. Wine. What else you need?” The Canadian's beard was thick and brown as a rabbit pelt along his cheeks.

  “How many slaves will fit?” The Msieu looked at the big boat, the boxes.

  “This voiture hold enough. See how many he have when we there.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “My job is to get us there. Your job is to pay.”

  The small Msieu pulled me to the center of the boat, where boxes were covered by a tarpaulin, and he looked at me for the first time that day.

  “If I chain you here and the boat capsizes, you'll drown. You understand that, oui?”

  “Oui.” I knew what he was asking. But I refused to say it. I will not jump. Not now. Not yet.

  I sat on a box. The clothespins in my apron pocket nestled against my leg. He did not chain me. I was not in a box. Fancy piece. Good for one thing. Christophe was right.

  The captain said, “When they jump, like a bag of piastres thrown in the river. Bag of black hide, the Africans. Sang mêlé aren't wild most of the time.”

  The small Msieu said nothing. He hadn't decided whether I was fit or wild or not.

  Four slave oarsmen filed onto the boat ahead of another white man. They didn't look at me. They sat in the benches and rowed us away from the dock while the second white man called out to them from his seat just behind. The air was cold on my face, the salt water inside my cheekbones, the words I wouldn't speak collecting in my chest.

  The shoulder blades of the rowing men moved up and down, like hatchets under their shirts. Not angel wings.

  A white egret burst into the air when we turned into a narrower bayou, his wings spread like sewn-together fans and his black feet dangling over me.

  Christophe used to boast about running away to see a girl below LeBrun's. He said that if he got lost, he would find the egret nesting place in cypress swamps to the south, then walk the right way.

  But we had gone north, and now the sun was hidden, and I had no idea which way we floated. Two more egrets flapped away, in a different direction.

  Bayou Coquille. Bayou des Familles. Bayou des Rigolets. The men threw the names back and forth. “To lose the Americans, when they look for Lafitte, we have so many ways we can't count,” the captain said to the small Msieu. “The Americans are slow. They eat too much beef.”

  The small Msieu laughed and leaned against the pole holding the tarpaulin. “And you?”

  “Me? I live on tafia,” the Canadian said. “Cane rum.”

  Back on the night they sewed together, Hera told my mother about some Africans she'd heard tell never killed their cows. They let blood run every day into a gourd and let milk run into another gourd. The people drank and grew tall, and the cows lived.

  Only when someone marry or die, they kill a cow and eat the meat, she said.

  Mamère was quiet, and then she said, On the boat I drank blood.

  Eh! Hera frowned.

  My blood, my mother said. That boat, the men shout and the wood scream. We were so hungry. My mother tell me eat a piece of your finger. I chew around the nail, but no more skin there. Then I taste my blood. Make a cut. Hold the blood in my mouth a long time.

  The boat wake moved branches. Steam flew from the rowers’ mouths. A nail was loose on a box beside me, and I barely moved my wrist, punctured the ridges left by the iron bracelet.

  I made four holes in my wrist. That seemed like a good number. When the fourth sting turned warm, I felt it was enough. The air dried the blood, and I brought my skin to my teeth to nudge the black buttons into my mouth.

  ———

  “Lake Salvador,” the captain said. A black mirror, with the clouds above. Céphaline would have liked it. A looking glass where you could see nothing.

  The boat stayed at the edge of the water until a whistle sounded in the trees. “Lookout says safe from Americans,” the capt
ain said, and spat into the dark water. “They call this place the Temple because the Indians killed here. Prayed when they killed.”

  The steep ridge of land was a chênière, where shell mounds were piled high and trees now grew. Michel always said the chênières behind Azure were good places to hunt because the animals fled there in high water. But this island had scattered buildings.

  And the captain took me off the boat and put me in a small cage, like an animal. He paused in front of a low brick building and said, “Keep her here. You don't want Lafitte and his men to see a sang mêlé pretty like that. Unless you want to sell her now.”

  Another man opened the lock at the iron bars of the doorway. Someone breathed inside. Even if the door were open, there was nowhere to run here. Only into the water to drown. Would the spirit be ruined then? Did a hide bag of piastres lose a spirit?

  The small Msieu put his finger on my shoulder. “You. Is your father there? On Azure?”

  He wanted to know if my father was Msieu Bordelon or the overseer Franz. “Non.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Non.”

  Small brown hairs on his wrists and even on the fingers, between his knuckles. What had Céphaline said about knuckles? Why did they look so foolish?

  He was thinking of selling me here. To Jean Lafitte.

  “Can you cook?”

  “A bit.”

  “What can you do?”

  His eyes were small—raisins in a biscuit, glossy from risen sugar when they baked. If I said the words—wash, clean, iron— would he keep me or sell me? I could—sew. That word made needles move in my throat. I couldn't sew yet. My clumsy, crooked stitches weren't ready. She wasn't done with me. All the lessons …

  “Only field work. They put me in the house just sometimes for dinners.”

  The small Msieu shrugged. “No field here.”

  The captain said, “Inside.”

  The key twisted like Tretite's knife on the sharpening stone.

  Three brick walls and the door of bars. Three women inside. They knew one another, because one brushed a fly from another's shoulder. Two of them talked low, words I had never heard, and the third vomited over and over into the pit dug in the corner.