A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I hoed the grass and heard the birds above me.

  When we walked back, over the bridge, the water was black as oil around the cypress stumps. There were no gods in the water here. Only in Africa. In the bayou and Barataria and the cypress swamps and the Mississippi, which raced brown and wide past Azure, there were only pieces of flesh and the animals that ate us. The fish and alligators and even the tiny shrimp that crawled along the silt and mudbanks. They chewed our flesh, and it went into their own black sandy veins, and then they let the liquid left of us back into the current, which carried us away.

  Five JARDIN BLANC

  Madame Pélagie was her name. That first week, she called for me all night, every night. I lifted myself from the pallet of two blankets Amanthe had made for me in the hallway outside Madame Pélagie's room. She was propped on three pillows, her thick red-brown hair wrapped into curling rags by my nervous fingers, her eyes fastened on the window or the wall. She couldn't sleep. Her sewing lay on the coverlet beside her, even though it was after midnight.

  She wanted scissors. A biscuit because it had been so long since dinner. A new candle. A book she had seen on Msieu's shelf.

  Water. It was so hot here, she said, even in January. An hour later, she called me to empty the pot. I can't sleep with the smell, she said.

  By the seventh day, I wanted to put the pot over her head. My eyes ached as if they rolled in sand. But the cuts on my hands, from the cane, were healed already. She slept all morning, and the cook, Léonide, roused me at dawn for my chores.

  New candles for the dining room and parlor. Breakfast for Msieu, who would ride the fields or travel to town. Then begin the midday meal, Madame de la Rosière's favorite. Pinch the heads and shells from the shrimp—hold the clear, curved case in my palm. Try to think of the word Céphaline had used. Carapace.

  Don't think about the water now. Not in the hallway, the planks of shining wood stretched under me where I lay on the blanket, hearing Madame Pélagie call high and light like singing.

  Her clothes were hung carefully in the armoire. I had arranged them from light color to dark, from finery to ordinary.

  I had a new dress, too, a plain blue from Amanthe taken in at the waist and shoulder for me.

  “I want a bright one,” Madame Pélagie had said when she'd seen us all lined up for the New Year, seen us all receiving our cloak and one set of clothing. “That one.”

  “But that one doesn't know the house.” Madame de la Rosière squinted toward me.

  “She will know me. I will train her myself.”

  My old brown dress hung in the room next to the kitchen, where Amanthe and Léonide slept.

  “They don't sleep inside with us,” Madame said.

  “C'est de la folie! What if I need something in the night?”

  “We are finished with the day at ten. Then Amanthe and Léonide go to the kitchen for the evening.”

  “My brother has no valet?”

  Madame shook her head, and Pélagie said, “This one sleeps in the hallway near my door until I become accustomed.”

  Our carapaces. Our coverings. Pélagie measured coverings and hair and shoes and vases and carriages. Like the Auzennes, but not like them. I remembered Céphaline when she watched the Auzennes arrive in their carriage. Madame Pélagie was twenty-five years old, but her voice didn't have the sly, mean threads of those girls.

  She was afraid. I lay near the glint of candlelight under her door. She moved restlessly on the chair, her bare feet brushing the floor while she sewed. She was here from France, to stay with her older half brother, Msieu. From the way she watched doors and paced at night, she was afraid of the dark hallways, like me.

  On the seventh night, I filled the pitcher downstairs. The full moon rose over the roof. I missed Fantine's bubbling-water laugh. Was Sophia awake now, too, waiting for Gervaise to return with a small animal she could tear to pieces with her teeth?

  The rainwater from the barrel smelled black and mossy. My mother was in her chair, the moon in her open window.

  I closed Madame Pélagie's door and sat up against the hallway wall. The moonlight was a silver knife down the canal of wood that Amanthe and I had polished that morning.

  I imagined myself Mamère. Watching over myself, not sleeping, planning a way to keep myself safe.

  I had been gone one year. Did she still stay awake, waiting for me? The smell of burned cane hung in the eaves here at Rosière, just as it had every year at Azure. The sugar had been packed into hogsheads and sent on the cart to the boat landing at Washington. Molasses dripped from the barrels, made glistening buttons on the dirt. I bent to touch a drop—already covered with dust. The smell of molasses would forever make me remember the cargo hold, and the darkness.

  On New Year's Day, we lined up for Msieu, who wrote down name, age, and health. When he came to me, standing after Sophia and Fronie, he hesitated. “You have been here a year now,” he said.

  “Oui, msieu.”

  “You are not going to run again.”

  “Non, msieu.”

  “When I bought you, I was told that you dressed hair. You will come here in the morning.” His finger cut the air.

  My ankle had a band of darkened shining skin, smooth as leather when I rubbed there. Tanned.

  I would not run. I walked to the house. I saw a rabbit shivering under a bush, waiting for me to pass. When had my mother talked about rabbits? I passed the bell, the house of Mirande and Baillo, their two cows, the hog pens.

  “Because my mother die and I was like a little rabbit out there,” Mamère had said one night. “Seven or eight. I move with Ama. Ama breathe that smell and die, too. Then we all, Ama children and me, we sleep in one room with the old woman. We call her Tante. So old her eyes like watermelon seed. But she watch us.”

  That first day, when I reached the edge of the yard, the china-berry trees were bare, branches like walking sticks reaching for the sky. I stood beside the sweet olive bush. Madame de la Rosière couldn't see well at all now, Amanthe said, but she still knew the keys. The piano music was like white clothes hanging in the trees, billowing. Céphaline's chemises. Moving like people against my hands as if they were friends, in our clearing, coming to tell me secrets.

  No one knew me here, near this porch, in this big house. No one in le quartier. The piano notes went dark and soft. Quavering.

  Mo tout seul. Mo tout seul. Christophe used to say that to me, fiercely, in the cane. You can't hurt me. I'm all alone. All alone.

  “Look at this,” someone said from the porch. A man whose voice I had never heard. “From New Orleans? A daughter of joy.”

  “Monsieur Antoine!” A woman's voice rose, light and calculated, strange to my ears. “She doesn't look very joyous.”

  “The joy was in her past. In her creation.”

  “Monsieur Antoine,” a darker, disapproving voice said. Madame de la Rosière. The piano had stopped. “Is that the little mulâtresse? That is not joy. That is licentiousness. And it is not her fault.”

  “Not her fault, but her bestowal,” the man said gently, then went inside, closing a door.

  “Come, child,” Madame de la Rosière said, her face turned toward the trees.

  She wore a new dress, a fine silk with a sheen like oiled skin. Beside her was a younger woman, very beautiful, with red-brown hair lit as if from inside, and skin white and perfect as Céphaline's could never have been, even with the paste.

  “Where did you learn to dress hair?” the younger woman said, her eyes moving over my clothes, my hands. “New Orleans?”

  “No,” I said, and I saw her breast rise with words she would say to send me back to the field. I wanted to be inside the house, to find another route toward New Orleans, toward Azure. “But I was trained by a woman from New Orleans. She learned in Paris.”

  The beautiful woman nodded.

  My skin is a sheath, I thought, laying out Madame Pélagie's clothes from her trunk while she ate in the dining room. Silk, wool, cotton—I
tried to remember the receipts for cleaning lotions. The wool coat smelled of animal.

  Animals have fur or hide. Mesdames have layers of corset, petticoat, linen chemise, and silk. I stopped at the mirror. My forearms were scarred with the finest white lines from the sharp blades of grass that had whipped around me when I cut down the stalks.

  My face was nearly the same as when I left Céphaline's room, but my cheekbones held hollows underneath them. My skull. Cats have cheeks, to hold their whiskers. Mice hold corn there. What are we meant to store? Only smiles? I moved my lips and the bones rose, while the hollows moved.

  We store nothing when we are not smiling, I thought.

  “Laurent is gone for how long?” Pélagie asked. They sat in the parlor with their embroidery.

  Laurent. The name of Msieu de la Rosière.

  “Perhaps a month,” Madame answered.

  I sewed flowers onto new napkins in the hallway just outside the door. It was my place now, my black-painted chair straddling the river of light down the wooden floor. Mamère was right—I tried very hard to make my stitches smaller than an eyelash. Had my eyelashes grown? Did they grow like our hair? I put down the linen square.

  Mamère. She had sewn by her fireplace while she waited for me to come back from serving the dinner. I never came back. Was I taller, or were my arms only darker and thinner and marked by cane? My fingers and wrists marked by teeth?

  My shoulder marked by fire.

  “He is buying cloth in New Orleans?” Pélagie asked. Madame held her linen square close to her fading eyes, as if she were sneezing into a handkerchief.

  “Cloth and flour, sugar and oil. Coffee. Slaves. Last year, I asked for a garden man, but Laurent needed to clear the new land.”

  “A garden man?” Pélagie's voice was soft.

  “I cannot plant the garden and move the earth, but I want to be outside. I can still see something there. If you weren't here to distinguish these threads for me, I would burn this in the fire.”

  “What can you see outside?”

  Madame was quiet for a time. “I can see the leaves moving, somehow. The arrangement of the trees. Pale things.”

  “How many men will he buy? No women?”

  “The Americans have made buying slaves nearly impossible. No ships are to arrive from Africa. Laurent and the others go to the Barataria. It is illegal, but the only way. There will be mostly men, he says. The only female he bought last year was Moinette, and not for the house. He doesn't understand why you insist on her here as well as Amanthe. Amanthe has taken care of me for years. Since she was sixteen.”

  A silence. In it, I heard that Pélagie didn't think Madame was taken care of. Her hair. Her clothes.

  “I want one who looks good. Because she is seen with me. And I like the bright one. She's the only bright one you have.”

  “Laurent says she ran last year.”

  “But she sleeps fine here,” Pélagie whispered.

  “The mixed-blood children are proof of wrong,” Madame whispered back. “I don't like to see them.”

  “I am proof of wrong, apparently, because my mother died at my birth. That is what the old women in Lyon told me.” Pélagie laughed, high and sweet as cold water. “They said none of the first three girl babies had killed her, and they had all been bald, just like my father. He was sixty-seven when they married. They said when I came, I had a pate of red fur and must have been a child of the devil.”

  “Pélagie,” Madame said. “That's not true.”

  “What is true is that I never think of Lyon, only of Paris. I will never return to Lyon. I remember a jardin blanc in Paris. A white garden we can make here.”

  Barataria. In the dark, in the narrow bayou with white-plastered walls and my own hair for a pillow, I remembered the sparkling sand thrown against the cage bars, the scars of the women, the endless roiling of the water.

  In Barataria, I had believed I could swim to my mother.

  All those nights in Sophia's house, fingering the corn kernels— they would have floated. Dried corn rose in boiling water—the kernels had gone farther down Bayou Rosière than I had.

  Madame Pélagie's footsteps whispered. One choice remained: make her happy so she would take me to New Orleans. If I curled each section of her hair into a perfect spiral, if I stitched the rose pattern on the napkins, if I washed her linens to whiteness, she would need me in New Orleans.

  Amanthe was accompanying Madame de la Rosière to Paris in June. I would accompany Pélagie, when she went back to Paris. We would dock at New Orleans, and then the boat to Paris would sail south, down the Mississippi. We would pass the places with familiar names. Orange Grove. Les Palmiers. Petit Clair.

  At Petit Clair, when I leaped, the current would carry me, and the batture would give me a piece of wood to pull myself to shore amid the swirls of yellow water where eddies circled over a shallow snag, the riverbank where I'd spent hours as a child, watching the boats.

  In the pond of light from a candle, I made my stitches smaller.

  I wondered why Pélagie was nervous in the house at night with only Madame and me, and the groom, Manuel, who kept watch in the yard. She slept only a few hours. She must have sent a message to the town of Washington and asked for Msieu Antoine, the lawyer who took care of her money when her husband died in Paris.

  He had called me a daughter of joy. He inclined his head at me now and said, “I'll be staying in the garçonnière.” That was the place for unmarried men and visitors.

  Amanthe said, “Take him coffee and prepare the room.” She put her hand on my arm. “Do what he asks.”

  Cadeau. Gift for an afternoon. A lifetime.

  The garçonnière and pigeonnière were new and separate buildings on either side of the house. Eight sides on each tower—I tried to remember what Céphaline called eight sides. Octagonal. And diagonal—the brick paths that led to the towers. I had sat folding, and she had spoken around me. Triangular. Parallel. Our lives not parallel. She would not have been a gift. A sale, she said. A trade.

  He sat at the ebony-wood desk. He did not look up. I put the tray with coffee and sugar and milk on the desk. Upstairs, where the air was damp over the wooden floor, I made up the three beds, dusted the washbasin and chamber pot.

  “You are from New Orleans?” he asked when I came downstairs. The brick floor was tinged with green. “A mulâtresse such as yourself?”

  “No, msieu. Farther south.” My hands were crossed over my apron, my eyes on the floor. That was how we were meant to wait.

  “Near the Balize, the mouth of the Mississippi? Where all commerce enters the river from the sea?” His lips drew in coffee with a hiss, as if he needed it badly. “Merci.” He sounded as if he smiled. “Look up, please.”

  He was older than Madame Pélagie, younger than Msieu. His eyes were gray with flecks of green—tiny pieces of torn leaf. His beard was narrow, black sleeves reaching down his cheeks to cradle his chin.

  If he touched me, I could only comply.

  If he made me go upstairs because he thought I was a daughter of joy, if he were from New Orleans, he might take me back there if I was pleasant. I could not care how I left this place.

  But he turned to the desk, his back bent so sharply over his writing that the spine showed through his shirt as I left. Dashes of bone.

  At dinner, Msieu Antoine said that he had decided to open an office in Opelousas. He asked who ran Rosière when Msieu was gone, asked about Mirande and Baillo, but he never rode his horse down the street to the fields or le quartier.

  Night after night, I stayed awake, gliding my hand along the wax of the floor, listening for her footsteps and for his. But he never came at night to seek me, or anyone else. He was not in love with Pélagie. I had read his letters.

  It was difficult. It took me some time. I knew many words from Céphaline and Doctor Tom, but at first, it wasn't clear how the words were strung together, the stitching of the smaller words to connect them. Madame Pélagie wrote no letters, o
nly lists of household tasks or things she wished to buy: Polish moldings and table legs. Launder tablecloths again. Squab, tartes aux fruits.

  But Msieu Antoine covered pages and pages with his ink. I could read only scattered words on those long documents. Arpents of land. Beloved son. Division of estate.

  To love. To divide.

  How did the words stay inside the skull, in those arrangements? How many words could the brain hold? I did not smile at him while I hung his clean clothes and saw his fingers stained black, moving across the page. Céphaline's brain had been so full of sentences and numbers that her skull pushed out her hair, and her skin pushed out boutons.

  Mamère could measure with her eyes bullock's gall and cabbage juice for her recipes. Léonide could judge the fire below the pot with only a glance and tell me to add exactly two pieces of wood.

  I had to measure the whites now, their words and eyes and hands.

  After dinner, he played cards with Pélagie. He was not in love with her, and he still did not touch me. He studied me, but with nothing in his face except curiosity, as if he studied a species of dog. Alone in the garçonnière, I looked at his letters, in which he complained to his aunt about his love.

  Tante Justine: The Americans here in Louisiana have disgusted the Creole French, and the French-born, with their greed and low habits. I know this, and am sorry that the object of my affection was born in Philadephia, but I wish you could overlook citizenship for character.

  Companion. A friend. An American.

  But the next letter was more than friendship, and he left it unsigned.

  It is difficult to pass another month without your company. Your sly asides at the table, your assessments of character flaw. I cannot express how much I miss your fingers in mine.

  He loved someone far away. At night, in the hallway, I wrote my own letters, in my head. It was difficult to read without anyone knowing, but to find paper and ink and a place to practice writing?