A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Twelve houses, and trees down the center of the street.

  Two doors on this house. Inside one door sat an old man and an old woman. The woman's fingers were so thin and dry, they looked covered in burned paper. She sewed the hem of a child's garment. When she looked up, the whites of her eyes were fili-greed with brown.

  Inside Sophia's door was a front room: a fireplace, a table, and three chairs. In the back room were six wooden sleeping shelves, two on each wall.

  Sophia studied me, almost like the Madame but her eyes moved faster. Then she put her hands up to her face and rubbed, her fingers disappeared in the hair at her forehead. “Why they put you here with me? So tired. I don't have time for someone else.”

  I didn't belong to her, either, so I didn't answer.

  Sophia handed me an extra dress. Coarse cottonade, dyed yellow brown, with stains of black at the hem, like mud painted on. She didn't speak to me but to the table. “Give her to me and don't give no clothes. Madame forget everything. Sunday I have to say to her, No clothes. Because I have only one girl, I get other girls nobody want.”

  I held my tignon in my lap, my fingers on my mother's stitches. When my mother's mother arrived at Azure, she had a small girl. She must have had nothing else.

  Two girls entered, picking splinters from their skirts.

  I wouldn't look at their faces, only at the weave of their skirts.

  “All that wood we carried,” the smaller one said.

  “Sang mêlé,” the older one said, looking at me.

  “You mixed blood, too,” Sophia murmured. “Congo mix with foolish. Your mama told me. Wash up.” Then the younger girl held out her hands, and Sophia said, “This Fronie. She ten. She mine.”

  “Fantine,” the older girl said. “I my own. My mother have three more boys. No room for me, so I stay here.”

  “Bring in more wood,” Sophia said, frowning near the fireplace.

  She heated water and poured it into the washtub. “You wash, Moinette. Don't want bugs in here.”

  “I don't have bugs.”

  “You got something.”

  I had my bundle—my apron tied around the coffee beans and clothespins, the apron strings wrapped tight. I hid it inside the cape on my shelf. I didn't know yet who stole here. When I took off my dress, sand fell like sugar around my feet. Sophia took my dress outside to shake it.

  “Sang mêlé,” Fronie said. “What color your blood?” The girls stared at me, and I knelt in the hot water.

  I bit at the raw thumb until the red dripped to my palm and held it out so they could see. Then I felt the water reaching inside me, to the passage.

  In the dark, on my shelf, I held my clothespins and the coffee beans. One bean had already splintered, into three of Céphaline's black commas. Céphaline bent over her paper, murmuring that one comma changed an entire sentence, and one letter changed an entire word.

  I missed her voice. Her words like embroidery in the air. She didn't love me. But I had heard her voice all my life.

  Three pieces of bean, and water flooded my mouth when I brought them to my nose. The water was bitter as if it sprang like lye from my cheeks.

  Mamère holding the coffee bean in her tongue all morning, to help her through the hours. I couldn't put this bean in my mouth. It would wear out in my teeth and I would swallow the brown liquid and then it would leave me. Through one of the passages.

  I don't belong to God yet. I belong to her.

  Three coffee beans. Two clothespins. Where could I keep them safe tomorrow? Who came inside this room when we were in the fields?

  Sophia's voice came from near the fire. “Li mère?”

  “My mother is on the other place. Azure.”

  Then she was quiet. The fire made a shimmering sound in the dark. Glistening. Like Mamère's. All the fires, in all the houses, all next to the rivers and bayous. All the mothers. I breathed the coffee. What did she want me to do? To ask?

  Sophia said, “No trouble for you. If you quiet. Want quiet all the time. Nobody argue. Everything quiet. Every day, every night. Winter, put the fire out when they ring that bell. Summer, keep the shutters open, and they come every hour to see you sleep. Everybody in the bed. Don't sleep in a chair or get your name in the book. Name in there two time for the week, no meat. None. Just corn.”

  Doors clapped shut on houses down the street, and pots clinked on the old woman's hearth, the other side of our chimney. Fantine and Fronie were already asleep.

  The fire shifted and Sophia said, “So. Enough.”

  A horse moved slowly down the street, lingering outside each door. The bare wood was hard on my shoulder blades. Did anyone here know the bones? My cape was under my body, my tignon under my head.

  If my things were wrapped in my tignon, someone might steal the cloth. And my hair had to be hidden.

  My hair. I tore a piece from the ragged hem of the dress just given to me and wrapped the pins and beans tightly. In the morning, I would tuck them inside my braids.

  On the second day, Fantine waited until I had lifted my arms to braid my hair, and she struck at my lap quickly as a snake. My bundle was undone in her fingers, and then she laughed at the clothespins. The coffee beans were shrinking, splintering all the time, and they fell onto the floor without her notice.

  “Thought you had money,” she said. “Jewelry. You have nothing.”

  Standing slowly, so she would think I was ashamed, I held out my hand for the clothespins. When she dropped them into my left palm, I brought my right wrist up to her chin, as Christophe had done once to me. The bone of her chin was sharp as a small stone, and I pushed harder, upward. “Don't ever touch my things again,” I whispered. “You can't hurt me. But I can hurt you.”

  Her nostrils flew wider. “You have nothing. All you have is hair like la barbe d’Espagnol. A man beard hanging down your back.”

  When she went outside, I gathered the coffee beans. Three shards of one, the other two still whole but smaller, drier.

  My hair. Moss. Spanish beard. A fat man—a man who would tie me to a tree with my hair, who would jerk my head like a horse, who would choke me with my braids. My hair—how did something dead mean anything? How could there be a ni inside, a spirit, if my mother, who believed in that god, never touched my hair again?

  My hair, heavy and dirty down my back because I had never washed it myself. My mother washed it. My mother's tightly coiled black curls, the sugar broker's blond hair—like useless chaff that flew off hay? How did bloods combine? In the passage? In the fist of womb?

  Outside, I was the one afraid. Fantine would tell her mother, who shouted at her boys now, who had a hard face with lines like antennae that sprang between her eyes.

  But her mother nodded and brushed past me at the well. Fronie and Fantine studied me that night near the fire, as if I were a rabbit with five legs. Lying awake for a long time, to see if Fan-tine was still angry, I heard only the hooves outside, ringing sharper where the ground had frozen.

  Every night, I looked at the wall near my face, wood chinked with bousillage, mud laced with horsehair, moss, straw. Had my mother run by now, to find me? Would she wait, as one did when lost?

  I couldn't run. Every tree was bare, every bayou low and dank. Every morning for weeks, the sun came through the shutter cracks like silvery ice. I couldn't measure the distance—two days on the river north from Azure to New Orleans, two days from there to Lafitte's place, and four days north on the Atchafalaya and bayous to Rosière.

  How many days by foot?

  In the breathing dark, Sophia stirred, but I always started the fire. I wanted it to be mine.

  But no matter how early I rose, the old woman next door was already at her hearth. The scraping of pot on brick came through the air swirling in the chimney we shared. Her name was Philippine, and her husband was Firmin. She spoke to him in a low, unceasing trickle while he carved spoons and bowls from gourd. His face was collapsed into his bones, his cheeks ribboned with odd scars.


  At dawn, the bell rang in the tower, and hooves moved up and down the street.

  No coffee. Only cornmeal to boil into cush-cush. Sometimes milk. No sugar.

  The scabs on my wrist had dried and fallen off now. I chewed at the corner of my thumb until I had a piece of meat between my teeth, until I tasted the warmth of blood.

  The people measured me. I said nothing except in answer. When anyone spoke to me, I had to decide how intelligent to sound.

  We are all animals, Céphaline said. We eat and excrete and breed.

  You listen and be careful, Mamère said.

  The two drivers, Mirande and Baillo, didn't look at me except to say I held the hoe wrong. When I saw them the first days in the field, brothers with ocher eyes and moustaches red and sparse as ants on their faces, I was afraid. But Sophia said they never touched the women. They were waiting for wives from France to join them when they had land of their own, and Sundays they rode to a church in another town.

  Every morning we walked behind the cart that carried hoes and noon meals and water. Mirande rode his horse above the men, the new Africans chained at the back of the line—cutting the cypress and draining the new swampland.

  Baillo rode above the women—clearing for next year's cane. The fields were all stubble, littered with burned stalks and dried leaves. When I wiped at my face, Sophia said to me, “This ain't even cane. This January. Pas même. Not the same. Cane is October when we cutting, yes.”

  My hoe blade chopped at clots of dirt. The earth was frozen until the weak sun appeared. The frost dissolved into water. The water entered the earth, and we moved the dirt from place to place. Furrows and rows. Every day.

  We gathered the cane trash from last harvest into piles. Mirande lit the fires. The smoke burned hard into the gray sky, and I imagined the clouds crystaled with sugar, moving south, the rain falling on my mother's tongue.

  Where did she wait? Here on earth? Or là-bas?

  Bayou Rosière cut through the land, too narrow for large boats, only pirogues loaded with moss or skins or solitary hunters who passed the fields. I watched the path to the ciprière where the men disappeared with axes and chains.

  I measured east and west by the sun. I measured the fields by the ditches and bayous. Five fields. Boats passed on Bayou Courtableau.

  I couldn't run yet. Every morning, frost covered the steps to the porch gallery, gathering like white fur in the splinters. The branches of even the lowest bushes were bare, nothing to hide me in the woods at the edges of the fields we cleared. Roofs were white as if the ice contained bluing. I wrapped my cape tighter around my shoulders, pulled the hood over my tignon. A circle of cold air hung before my face when we followed the cart to the fields. We hardly ever had ice like this at Azure. I saw Mamère sitting by her fire, sewing, holding her lips still. Waiting.

  The dark came before dinner, and one of us girls stood in line to grind corn in the two hand mills, with light only from the torches. Then Sophia baked corn cakes or boiled mush.

  The street was a tangle of voices, but I didn't want to sort the people, to know them, because I wouldn't be here long. But they spoke to me. The women tried to ask me questions, their eyes shining like coins in the light. The men grinned and nodded, their teeth floating in the dark.

  Sophia said, “You better speak. Be polite. Who grind corn for them Africans? You come here with them.”

  I shook my head. “I don't know them.” The one with the grin-scar on his back, Athénaïse, always glared at me with his eyes narrowed to fierce crescents. He spoke a word to the others. I knew the word was African for me—mulâtresse, light skin, white blood—anger at how the mate on the river spoke to me, at what my very existence meant.

  I looked back at him, imagining my mother and her own mother, and spat on the ground. I said out loud, “Saliva is all the same.”

  Sophia said, “Africans think they better. But how they gon eat?”

  Fantine's mother sent her three boys down to the house occupied by the Africans, at the end of the street. The boys reported that the Africans had made their own mortar and pestle with a cypress trunk and trapped a bird, which was roasting in their coals.

  Sophia said, “Big bird or little one?” She was thinking of meat.

  Every day, I kept my eyes on the cart ahead of me, then on the trees at the fields’ edge. At night, I kept my eyes on the porch steps. The edges of women's brooms. The men sat in doorways waiting for dinner. I saw their shoes.

  I listened to Baillo's shouted orders in the field and to Fantine's soft, high voice while we ate. She was in love.

  “When you sixteen, you get a man,” she said to me. “Madame marry you with the Bible.”

  “So you can make her some money.”

  “No. So you can be happy.”

  She walked with a boy near the slave cemetery.

  Breeding, I wanted to say to her. Curling myself near the fire, I thought of Hera. “Where your man?” my mother had asked, and Hera had replied, “We sold three times, me and mine. I'm gon be warm at night, all a man is.”

  At night, Sophia was happy not to talk to me, and I was happy not to listen. She hit my arm with her piece of kindling to move me to my bed. She didn't want the hooves to stop outside our door. She wanted her meat on Sunday.

  Sunday mornings we walked up the long road to the big yard behind the house for prayers. Madame spoke from the Bible, and I understood some of the words. Céphaline used to read Latin aloud. Deus was God. Corpus was body. Doctor Tom said corpse was a dead body. I told my mother the word Deus. Her voice was low and harsh in her throat at night, when she prayed over her altar, her piece of cloth from her own mother. When she prayed to keep me alive.

  I was alive. Msieu would hand me dried corn without looking up, keeping his eyes on his papers with their scratchy black lines of ink. I was not a corpse. I was alive. She wanted me to be safe. She didn't know if I was alive or safe or a corpse.

  Mamère prayed to find out the name, the place. She prayed to the same gods. She was patient. She had to be patient.

  Sophia stared at the pile of meat and the knife.

  When Madame's voice had finished, silence hung in the air until we moved our feet.

  If your name wasn't in the book—for not finishing your work, for talking out of turn, for sleeping in your chair or by the fire when Baillo heard snoring from the wrong room when he passed by on his horse and he poked open your shutters with his long stick to see where you were—you got a piece of meat. Salt pork in square chunks, sometimes bacon, sometimes strange pieces of a pig's body. Corpse.

  Dried corn. Molasses in a wooden bucket.

  Sophia ate all her meat on the first afternoon, while we washed our clothes. She boiled it with dried peppers she kept in a bag or fried it until the fat spit. Every time we hung up a dress, she took another bite of her meat until it was gone. Her eyes were focused far away while she chewed, and when she handed small pieces of the meat to Fronie, she looked at the trees.

  I remembered my mother slipping pieces of dried meat into her mouth while we washed, remembered the splinters of flesh she worked with her teeth. She gave me the fresh and she ate the dried.

  Fronie said one Sunday, “I don't like the fat.”

  Sophia glared at her. “Fat good for you. So you don't be cold.”

  Fronie glared back defiantly and said, “Warming up now. The sun staying into night. I'm not cold.”

  Sophia whispered like wire cutting through wood. “When you a baby, I chew meat and put it in your mouth. So you grow. You eat this piece even if I want it. You don't be kind. Kind don't work.”

  She saw me watching and said, “Look at Moinette. Used to eat plenty meat where she come from. Meat from the msieu. Your father, no? Plenty meat. Your mother, she chew meat for you, no?”

  I stared into Sophia's eyes, flat and black like iron nailheads pounded into her forehead.

  She folded her arms, her elbows pointed sharp at me. I had felt them so many nights to move me from
the fire. “You sang mêlé. No other sang mêlé here. You miss your place where your father treat you good. You très jolie.”

  I said nothing. She accused me of beauty. Mamère would keep her words on her teeth, with the coffee beans.

  “Make a new place here or keep a old place in your head. Only two choice,” she said now, her voice softer.

  One night, when Sophia was outside, Fronie said that they used to live on another place, and her father had died, and all she remembered was her mother breaking dishes to cover the grave. “She break em special,” Fronie had whispered. “Not wooden dish. China dish, with red trim. Two of em. Crack crack. I remember. I was scared.”

  The Africans passed by carrying wood. They kept their place in their heads, they hadn't made a place here, because twice the one named Gervaise had refused to understand orders in French, and he was put in stocks. No food, no water, no clothes. He whispered to himself all night in African. We could hear him through the shutters.

  Msieu didn't whip. Baillo locked the people naked in stocks in the center of the street, under the bell tower, and they had to sleep and pee where they knelt.

  One night, I came back late from the privy, and Athénaïse knelt beside Gervaise. Athénaïse spoke that word that meant me, and he spit in the dirt near the stocks. I said, “I don't speak African.”

  Gervaise—head floating in the dark before the pale wood. The heads on the pikes. I could say my mother's words—ni and faro and dya. But these men were Congo, Sophia said. They didn't believe in the same spirits.

  On Sundays, the men moved the privies and shoveled dirt and lime over the pits, and our smell went inside Msieu's earth to move with the rain into his fields.

  The skin on my palms was raised with calluses. I could see all the tiny lines on the calluses, like pillows with fancy stitching. Around my fingernails, the skin was hard and dry, torn from the cane and the hoe. It was easy to find a loose piece, to worry it.

  Loose thread—pull it and ruin the shirt. Pull it and naked the man, Tretite said one night, when Mamère was sewing for her.