A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I sat on the sand in the other corner. They stared at me. I watched the water until darkness rose from under it to fill the sky.

  A woman with a lantern opened the door. Her skin was red brown, like old brick, her eyes green blue as shallow water. She said, “Quatre!” and shook her head. Four of us. She put down three wooden plates full of sagamite. The boiled chunks of corn glistened in the lantern's flame.

  She came back with one more plate. When I finished eating, she took my hand to examine my nails. “Dirty,” she murmured, at my fingers, but she pulled out curls from my tignon. “Lafitte see you?” she asked.

  Stealer of slaves. I didn't move my lips or eyes.

  “You quarteron? Or mulâtresse, eh? Not Indian like me. I red-bone like my father.”

  I said, “Am I sold to Lafitte?”

  She stood suddenly and shrugged, and her dress turned the corner of the doorway after she did.

  In the night, the wind blew off the lake, and sand flew against the walls, spattered against the wood and my skull. I was so cold I couldn't sleep sitting up, like Mamère. Purple night erased the bars, and the three women's shapes curled against one another.

  Tomorrow they might be sold south on the river. Sold to Azure or Petit Clair. They could walk in the canefields near my mother's house, smell coffee, and knock on her door to whisper when they learned French. “Just get here. You trade?”

  I woke to fingers, in the stripes of gray light through the bars. Two of the women squatted next to me, pulling at my tignon. When it fell, I thought they would take it. But they touched my hair, loosened from the braid.

  They said nothing. My hair rustled between their fingers when they lifted curls and rubbed them. Then I moved and they pulled back. I picked up my tignon and turned away from their faces, dark as Mamère and Hera, but with tiny raised scars in two rows along their hairlines.

  Not Singalee. Not Bambara. A people I had never seen. Their faces didn't show the four lips, but something only they knew.

  The ocean-eyed woman came again with sagamite. She left without speaking or looking at me. Molasses sank quickly into the corn.

  Mamère melted sugar on her tongue right now, in pearl dawn. It didn't matter whether he sold me to Lafitte or traded me for other slaves. The sick woman sank down against the wall and moaned.

  Like Hera had slid against Mamère's wall that night, when she wanted the dress. Now her daughter had the dress. In the cloth we had dyed would be threads of her mother's love and worry and all the words she had collected. The indigo plant torn from the ground was a child of the plants that killed my grandmother. The blue was in her blood.

  I had nothing but clothespins and coffee beans now. I waited for whoever would come, holding the carved wood in my apron pocket. I had no wisdom. Just the oils of my mother's fingertips, moving to mine.

  The sand under me didn't rock like the boat. But I put my teeth to the black scabs on my wrist until fresh blood welled. Did I taste rust? Maybe rust from the nail would seep into my veins and infect my blood. Céphaline said rust was a compound. Mamère said rust was the most difficult to bleach from the white shirts.

  “Sang mêlé,” a voice shouted through the bars.

  A white man with a beard, hands webbed with dirt. He put an iron collar around my neck and pulled me to the door. When I stopped in the sunlight, he pinched the tip of my breast with his free hand and pulled me farther that way.

  It hurt like ants attached to me there. He laughed and said, “My favorite way to make them walk. Pain or plaisir, make the nipple hard and then you just hold on.”

  The collar was heavy on my neck. I held my head still and followed my breast.

  “There he is,” the man said. I realized he was the captain's mate. He dropped his hand quickly, and my breast burned and throbbed. The small Msieu turned from the boat deck.

  “The iron collar is not necessary,” he said. “Ne pas sauvage.”

  “Maybe she is wild,” the man said when he unlocked it. He kept his back to the small Msieu. “But I like to put it on,” he whispered to me. “I like to walk them that way.”

  My breast felt as if the ants were still chewing at the flesh. I stood near a dock. I smelled cinnamon. Then five men walked toward us, chained together, matched step to step like horses. They didn't look at me or at the small Msieu. They stared at the water.

  No marks on their cheeks. What did they believe was in the water?

  More boxes were brought. I stood still. A patient animal. Small mule. My breast burned faintly.

  From the barge moored nearby, moans rose like vapor from the water. A doctor, with black coat and bag, squatted on the deck where men lay on pallets in the shade of a tarpaulin covering. The doctor smeared something on the gums of each man, and one man kept his lips stretched wide, sound winding from his throat, rising and falling.

  “Scurvy,” said the mate, swinging the iron collar, to the small Msieu. “Africans have scurvy and pestilence when they get here. Doctor buys them cheap and tries to fix them. Sells them in the city.”

  The white paste on their gums, the greenish paste on their arms and legs and shoulders—their eyes closed except for the sighing man, whose eyes stared at the tarpaulin over him. He couldn't even see the sky, if he was dying. Was he a sky person? A water tribe?

  The five new Africans were chained by the ankles into the rowers’ benches. The captain made gestures to the Africans, and his own rowers tried to speak to them, but the Africans didn't answer or acknowledge. When they rowed, though, they tried to keep pace with the others.

  When the boat moved away from the dock, the wind was cold against my face, and I closed my eyes for a long time. It no longer mattered if I remembered where we went. I would never find my way back.

  When I opened them, we were in another bayou surrounded by black willows. Nothing but winter branches and dangling bare vinestems.

  The backs of the men were twisting. Each had a brand on the right shoulder, raised shiny as if thick worms had been inserted under the skin. A. They couldn't all be from the same people, so that must have been the name of the ship or the captain.

  The letters moved when the rowers pulled, scars floating on the skin stretched over their shoulder blades. Not angel wings. No one could fly.

  And Mamère—she had been a child on the boat. I had never seen her bare back—she always washed in the dark. Did she have a brand? Would they have branded a child? Quickly I bit at the scabs on my wrist to keep the splinter of fear from my ribs. I wasn't a child. When I got to the small Msieu's place, would he brand me?

  The mate's whip was small, compared to the overseer's whip on Azure, but the tip cut easily into the skin. He split a thin gash into the shoulder of one man, and a red smile opened whenever the man leaned forward to pull the oars.

  Bile rose in my throat. That was what Doctor Tom called it, the fluid that ate our food for us. And then, seeing his eyes and the jar, lying next to him in the indigo vat, and Céphaline's black boutons and her red eyes, and the skin of the man closest to me now covered with skeins of white salt from his drying sweat, I threw up the sagamite and molasses over the side of the boat.

  The captain laughed. “Feeding the fish,” he said. “Atchafalaya fish like corn.”

  At dusk, when the wind came up and the boat rocked and pitched, they found a place to moor. They lashed the barge tight to the trees, and we walked onto a floating mat of driftwood and moss and earth, trembling when we passed over the water. The iron-collar man took the African men into the trees. They came back with wood and built a fire on top of black sand and ashes where others had cooked before.

  The Africans were chained to a tree at the clearing's edge, but I was not. The small Msieu said, “Can you cook cornmeal and hardtack?” I shook my head. The captain said, “That's not why you buy her, oui?”

  The iron-collar mate cooked the dinner. He served their food onto three wooden plates, then held the pot before me and I scooped a handful. The Africans ate from the pot af
ter me. They held the warm corn in their palms and chewed, looking at the water.

  When the trees and moss turned black, the fire was the only light, and only the three white men close to it were visible, their faces and beards and hats. They drank tafia, the molasses turned liquor.

  The men's chains clinked near the trees, like crickets.

  The small Msieu and the captain went back onto the barge, their footsteps on the sucking raft of wood. The captain called, “Keep watch until four and wake me.”

  The mate called out, “Don't you chain the sang mêlé?”

  “Oui.”

  He locked the ankle bracelet onto me.

  I curled into myself. My hair itched, and my legs were cold with air entering my tucked-under skirt.

  The third night since I had left her. Was my mother praying, right now, with her coffee beans and piastre? Had she added something to her church? My peacock plate? My other tig-non? Something to bring me back?

  I rubbed my fingers gently on one coffee bean in my pocket and then left my fingers over my mouth, so that I could smell her.

  I woke to the iron-collar mate's fingers in my mouth. He held down my tongue and said close to my ear, “If you scream, I will choke you and claim a savage did it. Indians everywhere in the woods.”

  The sounds of night had changed. It was nearly morning.

  His fingers put the taste of ash and tafia in my mouth. Then he moved those fingers under my dress and pushed one inside the other lips. A different burning from ants. His finger clenched me inside and I wouldn't cry out. I listened to the sand under my skull. His elbow hit me again and again in the breast. He was moving his hand on himself.

  When he breathed slowly again, he pulled away his fingers. The air was cold on my legs. My dress was wet. He pushed his mouth near my ear again, tongue sour-hot. “I had you and didn't pay for you.”

  Then I heard nothing. No snoring from the boat. No clinking of the chains. Nothing but the water lapping against the banks.

  If I got loose from the chain, if I slid into the water, this bayou would take me back to the lake, and Lafitte. The only reason to put my body inside the brown water would be to disappear. To go là-bas and wait.

  But if Tretite had heard the small Msieu mention his home, and she told my mother, and Mamère made her way to wherever the small Msieu was taking me, I would be là-bas alone.

  I put my hands into the pot of cornmush when he brought it. I smelled him. Céphaline said we receive the formation of babies inside our wombs. Babies were inside the liquid. My dress was dry and stiff. The babies were dead. I ate the corn with my eyes closed.

  How much had Msieu Bordelon sold me for? Had he written the name and address of the small Msieu? If Félonise polished his desk—

  But no one could read any words except me.

  The small Msieu unlocked the chain, and I leaned against the tree, burning between my legs. I took the empty pot from near the fire, cleaned it at the bayou's edge with wet sand, filled it again with the silty water, and went into the woods to wash myself.

  Bayou Cocodrie. Bayou Boeuf. Bayou Courtableau was the longest. Deeper, blacker than the others. At the landing, the goods were loaded onto a wagon and the small Msieu paid a man to whip the two mules across their rumps to make them move.

  We had legs. We were not loaded onto wagons. The Africans and I walked behind.

  This bayou was black as lead, shining like Céphaline's pupils. There was no use to jump. This water would never reach the Mississippi River, only the gulf and then the ocean. The current moved so slowly that a leaf and I took a long time to pass each other when we left the landing, and the dust from all our hooves stayed in a brown cloud on the still water.

  Four ROSIÈRE

  Even as he spoke, not looking at us but at his own hand moving over the paper as he wrote, I didn't listen.

  I don't belong to you. I didn't belong to Msieu Bordelon, and not to God yet. I belong to her. I am hers. Until I die and find her. Là-bas.

  “What is your name?”

  We stood in the yard between the kitchen and the house. The wind had grown colder as we came farther north. The trees here were bare of leaves, their branches dark as though burned. This house was much larger than Azure, newer, with eight white columns along the front and a front door with stained glass over the top. The brick path where we waited smelled of new clay. The brick kitchen building was larger than Tretite's, and two women stood in the kitchen doorway staring at us.

  “Water, Léonide,” the small Msieu said. The one who nodded was the cook. She held a spoon as if she never put it down. She was short and fat, even her earlobes plump as licorice drops under her tignon.

  “Can you speak any French?” the small Msieu called out.

  None of the Africans answered. They were still in chains. The neck of the man closest to me, the one with the cut on his back, was so coated with sweat and dust that trails had formed behind his ears.

  “Amanthe,” the cook said to the other woman, who wore a white apron. She was about twenty-five. House people. She held out a gourd of water to me. Her eyes tilted upward, and her cheekbones were high ledges of stone flushed with red under brown skin.

  I didn't want to know any new people.

  But the cook looked at me, and in her eyes I saw fingers. What she thought she knew about me, and cadeau-filles. Gift girl. Bright. “New Orleans,” the cook murmured, low in her throat as if the words were shameful.

  The small Msieu sat down at a wooden table. He took papers from his coat and spread them out. His fingers were still dirty, too. They held down the paper in the winter moving air.

  All the fingers. Dangling on the man nearest me. The small Msieu's finger pointed again at the first African.

  “Athénaïse is your name,” he said, toward the first African. He waited a moment in silence. “Sometimes they learn words on the ship. Not this group. So expensive. I even had to buy the chains from Lafitte,” he said, turning toward a driver on a horse, a Frenchman with tangled yellow teeth and red-cold hands resting on his pommel. “Let them sleep today. Start tomorrow on the new land across the bayou.”

  The small Msieu named all the men.

  “Athénaïse.” The finger stabbed the air before the first African. “Athénaïse.” Then the finger moved sideways, to direct the African to shuffle slightly nearer the driver.

  “Gervaise. Apollonaise. Hélaise. Livaudaise.” Each time, his finger stabbed toward a face, then tore sideways through the air.

  A white woman stepped outside now and stood at his shoulder, studying the paper. Her dress was calico, fine figures not faded by too much washing. Not as fancy as Madame Bordelon.

  “You were missed.”

  “Your cousin sends greetings.” He stopped writing. I could hear the absence of scratching. I kept my eyes on the sweet olive bush near the kitchen. “I am nearly finished. Then we may eat?”

  She nodded. She swung her head slowly around to each figure in the yard, peered toward the backs of the leaving men. “I needed a man for the garden.” Her voice was directed at me. “Not a girl.”

  Her eyes were blue. Not like Céphaline's, with the fierce glow of flame. Milky blue like china bowls. She didn't sound as if she hated me already.

  “You'll have a man for the garden as soon as the new land is cleared,” the small Msieu said.

  “How many men do we have now?” She squinted at the ledger. “Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? And no one to spare?”

  “No one.” He pointed at me. “I don't like African names. But certainly you are not African.”

  He wrote words again. I didn't want him to know I could read. I glanced quickly at the papers when he put the pen in the ink. He wrote next to the men's names: Congo, Congo, Congo, Ki, Ki. African tribes.

  I was half Bambara. He knew nothing. If I told them my real name, and they didn't like it, and they changed it, then only Mamère would have my name. I could keep it inside my mouth. For myself. Until I saw her again.

&
nbsp; But how would she find me, if I had a different name?

  “She seems slow,” the Msieu said. “All the way here. Very slow. Bordelon said she was good at dressing hair. But she was not needed.”

  The Madame said, “Someone besides Amanthe to dress my hair is not needed here either.” She didn't sound angry. She sounded as if she were choosing cloth. “How old are you?”

  The way her eyes moved over my outline, vague and slow, I realized she couldn't see me well. That was why she didn't hate me. Her hair was pinned in a chignon. Dull and brown as acorns. Her knuckles were big, like pink roses. She wanted a man for the garden. Not a gift.

  “Fourteen, madame,” I said. The small Msieu's pen scratched again. He could see me.

  “Do you only dress hair?” she asked. Then she turned to her husband. “I can't imagine why you bought her.”

  “Guillaume Bordelon needed a favor, and she was inexpensive.”

  “What else can you do?” she asked, her eyes fixed somewhere to the left of my face.

  If I said washing and ironing, I would stand every day in this yard, next to a woman who already did laundry. I would smell someone else's soap, hear someone else's words at my ear, and I would never be able to learn the boundaries of this place, to be able to run from the closeness of this yard.

  “The field,” I said.

  He had already written Creole mulâtresse, 14.

  His finger drew the same slanting line toward the driver. Then he paused and frowned. “Name?”

  “Moinette,” I said.

  A blanket, a bowl and spoon made from gourd, and a cape. That was what the woman named Sophia handed me. She said, “You from south? Past New Orleans? Get cold here. You near Washington. Cold and ice.” She showed me how the hood lifted up, for when wind scoured the fields.

  Hers was the second house on the street that ran down le quartier. I couldn't see the big white Rosière house, only the barn and stable. Then the drivers’ house—Mirande and Baillo, fox-haired brothers from France. “One sleep, one ride all night keep a eye on us,” Sophia said.