A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Mamère—she said so little because she couldn't keep her true thoughts from her sentences. When she spoke, she meant every word.

  When I returned to Azure, I would tell her about everything—the bags of coffee on the wharf in New Orleans, the African women with wreaths of scarring, the blackened marbles of bird meat on my tongue. The way the water had felt when the gods rose in the silt under my feet and floated away down the bayou toward her.

  For now, I listened to Pélagie, fastening her into a new dress just as a carriage arrived.

  She said, “Oh, Monsieur Prudhomme, look at your sideburns. Dark hair looks so much more attractive on a man than on a woman. Your coat? Moinette—” She handed me the man's coat and said, “My brother tells me you know everything about horses, and I am ashamed that I never learned to ride. But in Paris—”

  One night, she spoke to herself, voice fierce and low as Cépha-line's reading from her own pages. Pélagie murmured, “A window. Only a window. I can do the rest.”

  Did she mean a mirror?

  “He will not come. He will not know.”

  Did she mean Etienne? Was she planning to take Msieu's money, somehow?

  Pélagie wrote a letter.

  Dearest, Can you not find your way here, to the wilderness of Louisiana? for my heart is sore with the loss of your company. Can Paris not afford to lend you to me for a time?

  The wilderness of ciprière swamp and canefields, of this house miles from a small town.

  But if a lover came from Paris, who would she love here? Her plans were to find a husband. My plans depended upon that, as well.

  They rode in the carriage, Msieu and Madame, Pélagie, and Msieu Antoine, who would escort Pélagie to the dances. We rode atop, with trunks full of clothes and gifts. To my surprise, Amanthe whispered to me that she would see the third man she had loved.

  “I can only love him a few times a year. He cannot leave his place, and I cannot leave Rosière.” She turned her head to the trees, and cords of muscle stood high in her throat.

  I wondered if Hervé Richard, the carpenter, ever came to a dance. But his owner was a free man of color. The French Creoles wouldn't have him in their houses. And there wouldn't be any use to love someone for only a few nights. It would be dangerous to love at all.

  Grand Piniére was the name of the first place. The pines made a carpet of needles to quiet our wheels. The house was yellow, with green and red trim. The wind chattered in the pine trees, and women's voices like breaking glass all around us. Pélagie is your sister? But she is lovely! Ah, oui!

  I heated the curling tongs in the guest bedroom. Pélagie's marks, my marks, Mamère's marks. I slid the tongs down each section and rolled them up steadily, just tight enough, and counted to eight. Ten curls on each side. She stared in the mirror, not at the other women moving around us. Eight. Move to the next section. Eight. Then five fingers of each glove. I counted the same way as in the field, hoeing weeds from the cane. Move the hoe once, twice, thrice, and then take three steps. Three, three, three, three.

  Even a fly breeds before it lays eggs, Céphaline whispered once in front of the mirror, where I dressed her hair for dinner with the Auzennes’ cousin. But it doesn't have to look at the other fly.

  The last curl dropped onto Pélagie's shoulder. It was so hot that she flinched and let it hang for a moment in the air before her.

  While they danced, we stayed outside the kitchen. The sounds from the violin were shards inside my ears. Amanthe waited for the man she would love tonight, but he hadn't arrived.

  By the time we slept, in the horse barn, in the long central hallway between the stables, she had heard. She shivered with tears beside me. Manuel, the groom, had just told her the third man she had loved, the valet named Autin, had died of a fever weeks before. She said Autin's lips tasted of mint, because he chewed the leaves before he saw her, and his mouth was soft as baby's cheeks, the only other time she had ever kissed someone.

  She put her shawl around her face and lay shaking, while around us voices rose and fell in the straw.

  A week later, we rode a long way to a ball outside Perreauville. The house, Cécile, was very large, and when the dancing and dinner were finished, people who lived in town left in their carriages, and the ones staying settled into the garçonnières and guest rooms. The slaves had pallets all along the railings of the gallery, wrapped around the entire house. I lay on my side, my cheek to the cool green-painted boards. The water of this bayou broken up by islands of sleeping people, their shoe-soles brown or foot-soles pink, or their feet tucked into blankets like puckered cocoons. How did some people stay warm, with no coverings, and others shivered each night?

  I was awakened by a hand on my shoulder, on the cloth over my scar. Fingers hot. Branding iron again. I twisted away, but a man whispered, “Non, non, mademoiselle. Your madame. She call.”

  A groom? He smelled of horses—his coat black, his trousers lighter. He walked ahead of me, his head uncovered, a few strands of silver hair twined like wire at his temple when he turned his head.

  He pushed me into a storeroom and closed the door. Then his hand clamped over my mouth. Calluses hard as dry beans on my lips when he rubbed his palm over my face. No windows. Coffee beans. My skull's empty spaces filled with tears. I couldn't breathe.

  “I know why she call for you. He saw you. I know what you work. And me—I see you, too.”

  He tore off my tignon and crossed my two braids over my mouth, held them tight with one hand like reins and worked at my dress with the other hand. He knew how to unfasten women's buttons. When I bucked away, he pulled my head back hard.

  “I first this time. You scream, no one hear.”

  He said, “Stand still. You move, I hurt you where he can't see.”

  He held my braids tight. Strangle. That was what my hair was for. He worked open his trousers and rubbed himself against my thighs. Blind. Rooting. No pain, just wetness as before, with the boat's mate on our passage north. They spent themselves on their idea of me. Not me. Not me.

  When he hit my head against the wall, my brain shivered. My skull. Céphaline said it was such thin bone. My thighs are muscles. We eat the muscles of the cow and pig. His saliva dripped onto my shoulder.

  His elbow hit me in the side when he used his handkerchief on himself. But wetness remained on my thighs. “Now mine mix with his,” he said, low. “I first.”

  Then he said, “Scream I say I catch you in here thief.” He took the braids from my mouth and pulled. My neck bent. Leash. Reins.

  “Scream I say you thief this money from Msieu Ebrard.” He held a gold coin. His teeth were white.

  Slapping games with Fronie—my hand shot out, and I raked the coin with my fingers.

  He couldn't hit me. He couldn't leave a mark.

  He turned me with my braid, and the hairs at my temple pulled my skin away from the bone.

  Madame Pélagie sat at her dressing table, in the guest room. I had thought the groom was lying, but she nodded for him to leave.

  I tasted leather from his palm. He was gone.

  Pélagie tightened her wrapper. “I know you were sleeping already. There is another task.”

  She led me down the hallway, much longer than Rosière's, and at the back door, she paused. “Do you want to work in the window?”

  What was she speaking about?

  “In New York. Dressing the models?”

  “Madame, I don't understand.”

  She glanced outside. “In the garçonnière is Monsieur Ebrard's son. He saw you earlier. They say this is how it is done here in Louisiana.” She whispered, “I am sorry, Moinette.”

  The grass was damp. He was pale in the darkened room. His sideburns were yellow-red tongues licking his cheeks. He said, “You are a vision. Take out your hair. A black cloud. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Vrai? Truly? And what do you know?”

  “Rien, msieu.”

  “Non.”

  “Noth
ing, msieu.” My hair fell from the braids. I pulled my scalp away from my brain. What was I meant to know? Think quickly about what they wanted. Like Pélagie.

  “Première fois, msieu.”

  “First time? I don't believe you. But you are crying. Why? I don't have to pay you, non. But I will give you this if you stop crying.”

  A gold coin.

  He pushed. Blind, too. Were they all the same except for the smell of leather or pomade, except for whether they were angry or not?

  No hand on my mouth. But he was a tall man. He told me to take off all my clothes. He did not remove his clothes. The cravat tied at his throat worked its way onto my face, and then, when he pressed harder and harder, the knot of cloth brushed my teeth, lodged there at my lips. Coat buttons on my ribs. Hands on either side of my head. The pain was rubbed into me again, again, and tears ran hot into my ears but turned cold inside my head.

  “Sang mêlé. C'est vrai. True, what they say of your kind.”

  Calluses on my hands. Would this rubbing, over and over, make a callus inside me? When he lifted himself from me, left wetness on my leg, I saw him look. I saw the blood.

  “Première fois,” he said.

  An ache pulsed like a ring pushed inside me. A circle brand burned.

  “And true that money makes a girl cease crying,” he said when he turned around.

  ———

  When I was lying in the hallway at Rosière, on my blankets that smelled of me, the passage still burned.

  Première fois, Tretite said to me once when I was very small and refused to pick up mule droppings for her garden. First time you do something you don't like, you do it over and over, you grown.

  I hadn't done the task over and over yet. I wasn't grown. What would grow inside me? Breeding. From one time?

  The slave groom wanted his seed mixed with his msieu's. I was the gift he could not have.

  Cadeau. But I had two gold coins. Which was worse? A gift or a purchase?

  I tied the coins in my old tignon, with the clothespins and memory of coffee beans, and hid the bundle in the left sleeve of Madame Pélagie's oldest, plainest dress in the back of the armoire.

  Hervé Richard said, Maybe I come back for something not so sad.

  He wouldn't want me now.

  The twinge of pain behind my ribs was sharp, like fingernails run over my insides. This was the money for my journey to Azure.

  But then a dog barked in the distance. Dogs. My plan was a child's idea. Leap from the boat, swim to Azure—and Franz the overseer wouldn't see me? Circle through the ciprière swamp, past the indigo vats where Doctor Tom's bones would be black now? Hide in the cane and surprise my mother in her room? Expect Msieu Bordelon to allow me to stay? Take Mamère with me? Take her where?

  I turned over on the pallet. If a baby grew, there would be no journey.

  I was ashamed to ask Sophia. For days, I waited to feel illness, as Sophia said she felt with her new baby by Gervaise.

  On the night of the last dance before Mardi Gras, before people received ashes on their foreheads from the priest, before they surrendered joy for Lent, we traveled to one more plantation outside Loreauville. I lay in the barn with the others.

  If a slave came for me this time, I had a knife. If Madame Pélagie sent me to someone, I wouldn't let him hurt me.

  He saw you. It would happen, again and again. He saw you.

  The alligator's eyes rested above the water. Our eyes sat inside the holes of our skull, but what moved them farther apart, the way wide-set eyes were beautiful, and what made some lashes longer? He saw you. It's your fault you look like that. Mulâtresse good for dressing the hair. For the gentlemen. She so bright. Take but one candle. What was beautiful? Madame Bordelon said men looked at her ankles and wrists when she was a girl. She told Céphaline that lovely ankles were important. Céphaline said, “And may I cover my face now and leave my ankles out for display?”

  Did we all look the same inside? Did we feel the same to the men? Did skin and hair and face mean my passage would be any different?

  Fantine told me, “Basile say, I have nothing each day but your face.” All day in the cane, he saw her eyes and lips, but at night, he stared at the arrangement of her eyebrows and mouth and then reached to push himself into the passage. What else existed?

  Amanthe breathed beside me. She knew no one here, at this plantation. The moths flew into the barn windows. All the roads and bayous leading to all the towns. Small places named for the man who owned the largest house, the land. All the less important people coming to eat his food, drink his wine, smile at his wife. All the people on the roads, and in the hallways that led to the rooms where they ate and danced and studied one another. And only to decide whom they wanted to use—to breed like the animals in the woods. In the cypress swamp with the Indian woman. Gervaise carrying dead birds to Sophia's door. The deer along the pathways, the horses in their pastures. The frogs at the edge of the pond. Ouaouaron. Calling to one another all night.

  The flies sped along their own roads in the air, drinking at the lips of those who slept, searching for other flies. We couldn't see their pathways.

  All the hallways, and the rooms like honeycombs. The people lying on each other or standing up so they wouldn't have babies, but babies growing. And filling the rooms and hallways and cabins. Then like puppies when the mother nips them sharp with her teeth to say Go. The puppies digging their own holes where they lay and panted and stared until they began to look for one another. The flies on their droppings.

  A lunging sound, in the parlor. Breath expelled from the throat again and again, with sobbing force.

  Madame de la Rosière held the elbows of a man, her face close to his, inside that small circle of her vision, and her crying was a rhythm like clothes scraping on the washboard.

  Her son. “Your face. Your face. The sideburns.”

  He said, “You'll hurt yourself.”

  “I didn't think I would see you until I reached Paris, and I worried that the ship would take the rest of my eyes. Too much light on the water. I remembered it. But you knew! You knew what I was thinking! Look at your shoulders.”

  “I thought I would be better able to withstand the voyage than you, Maman. And I know my father will be angry that I came early.”

  “I can feel your shoulders.” She didn't hear, didn't see, she only touched his coat again and again.

  I couldn't watch.

  Soldier coat. He was a soldier. Soldier blue.

  The silence of Sunday made me curl into the back of Pélagie's closet when they went off to Mass. My gold coins were cold. Indigo. Teeth like pearls in the dish and then they were bone.

  On Sunday, I had no one. I hadn't wanted anyone.

  Tretite's white dress used to float ahead of me. My mother heard us approaching her house. But her eyes would still peer up from her sewing as if she were shy, and surprised that we had come.

  Madame's son had known what she was thinking. Across the ocean.

  I walked to le quartier, where no one knew what I was thinking.

  Fantine waited for water at the pump. She turned to me and said, “Moinette, look at your blue dress. Mine let out now.”

  Her belly swung around, and she gave me that smile, deep into her left cheek. “We move into a new place. Side of Gervaise.” She touched the fabric of my sleeve. “You sleep with Amanthe, eh?”

  “Alone,” I said. “Mo toute seule.” I couldn't tell her I missed her.

  She pulled me to her room at the end of the street. “Sophia stay with Fronie. She glad not to share now.”

  Fantine had a washtub. I washed her hair, water rushing down the thick shoals and onto her shoulders. She washed mine, and we sat in the weak sun spilled into the doorway.

  “Basile say, ‘I ain't have to be with you every minute in the day. But every minute in the night.’ “ She traced her long finger along the hem of my sleeve. “The Madame have lace fall out the sleeve, oui?”

  She wanted to he
ar the details. “Lace, and the little buttons are pearl. The skirt is silk. And everything is trimmed in ribbon. A ribbon right under the bosom, to hold it up like a shelf.”

  Ribbons are our stripes, I couldn't say. Our markings.

  Fantine smiled. “How many dress you have?” She was measuring.

  “Three,” I said. “From Amanthe. Not Madame.”

  Fantine pressed her hand onto her belly. “A ribbon under my bosom,” she laughed. “Not now. Baby under there.”

  Nothing under my bosom. No baby. Rien, Mamère used to say to Eveline at night. Rien en coeur pour qui n'est pas sang.

  Nothing in the heart for someone who isn't blood.

  That was the way the whites lived, and the way we couldn't.

  Nothing in my belly. Nothing but soreness that left.

  One night, Mamère made tiny braids for Tretite, fingers lingering on her skull until her eyes swam as if she were drunk. Tretite said Félonise had loved her madame and msieu, when she was young. She said nothing about her own love.

  My mother cared for them. But she loved me, in her heart.

  I had listened to Céphaline, had touched her hair, had loved her words and hated them. I had been afraid of everyone else.

  I had never loved anyone either. Only my mother.

  Sophia was fierce for Fronie, but she didn't love her. Fantine loved Basile in a foolish and dangerous way, with her brain full only of his smell and skin.

  Her curving cheeks held a smile inside even when she wasn't smiling. She hadn't felt the white man in the woods flick her breast. She hadn't tasted her own hair rope. She stood up while she was loved, with her face against Basile's face.

  When Pélagie and Msieu spoke alone, especially of their time back in France, their voices floated to me in the hallway, and in the quietness and ease of their words, it was clear that they had cared most for each other. Once, Pélagie said to him, “Our mother's blood is foremost in us, Laurent. We are closer in a sense than any other humans, even to those in our marriages.”

  He had said, “If Etienne had a brother, he would feel that way. But he has always been solitary. He prefers to hunt over anything else, to be alone in the midst of trees.”