I heard nothing. No owls. No rustling. Only my son's throat working, though no milk came now, though he swallowed his own saliva and thought it sustenance.
A baby would never last inside an armoire. We would be found. Hervé and Jean-Paul could be killed. I saw my child dashed against a tree. Tucked into a basket and sold. Drowned like a kitten. Useful for nothing. I saw myself lying under men in the trees. The trees were a wall beside me. I couldn't take Jean-Paul into the trees. Hervé Richard thought he loved me.
He loved what he thought of me.
I didn't know Hervé Richard. Only that he wanted me. He didn't know I had a son. Pélagie had been the property of the man who'd shot her. Her shame—that she had run from him, even as he'd tied her to chairs and starved her—her shame, not his, now kept everyone Creole and French away from her body. Her body was dressed in fine silk, but she belonged to those men.
She wanted a window.
You belong to no one. Not Msieu. Not God. You belong to me.
My mother. My son. What if Hervé Richard made me leave him here, on the soft bed of oak leaves near my feet? What if Hervé Richard took me in the armoire to New Orleans and then tied me to a chair? He wanted my face. What if he didn't want my brain or my measurements or the issue of my body?
No issue.
I could take Jean-Paul back right now to Fantine. She would feed him. She would love him. He might love her. I could come back for him someday. When I was free.
His lips pulled hard again when I turned to hurry back. My arm hurt from bending. My left arm. The arm that did less work except to hold him.
I wrapped my cape around me more tightly and ducked past the low branches along the trail. If he stayed with Fantine, he would live.
The hooves approached from the street. Jean-Paul slept now, from my walking. Baillo leaned down from his horse and said, “You forget something?”
I said, “Léonide wants to start cooking early, for the funeral, so I have to leave my son now.”
He waited outside Fantine's door. I laid Jean-Paul next to her, and she turned away from Basile's back. The cabin smelled of sweat and milk and salt, warm cloth and almond oil. Jean-Paul jerked his head against her. Fantine said sleepily, “Ain't time yet.”
I whispered into my son's ear, “Adieu.”
My nipple was sore and cold. I buttoned my dressfront outside under my cape. Baillo slumped on his horse. I walked quickly up the road, and the sky began to turn purple in the trees. The hunting path through the woods was past the allée of crape myrtle trees. The hooves followed me at a distance all the way to the kitchen, where Léonide's fire sent smoke in black smudges across the dawn.
The second time he spoke to me, Etienne said, “Your baby stayed here with the old couple who ran. You never heard them plan to escape?”
“Non, msieu.”
“You were here but never heard them speak of where they would go?”
Did he not know that Amanthe was their daughter and that his own mother had taken her away forever? Did he not even know their names?
“Non, msieu.”
“Two more ran last night. For anyone who knew of these plans, or where the slaves are hiding, the penalty will be death.”
“Oui, msieu.” I tucked my lips between my teeth to keep them from shaking. Hervé Richard had come and gone. A week had passed. Pélagie lay under the earth. Jean-Paul lay sleeping on the bed. At night, he twitched and moved against my ribs, as hot as bread.
Etienne rubbed his middle finger hard between his brows. “My father doesn't want you to serve in the house again. He is not certain that you had no part in his sister's death.”
Was I allowed to say: I tried to save her, I touched her more than I have ever touched another human animal, every day I washed her and curled her hair and pulled the stays on her corset until her shoulder blades, not angel wings but shoulder blades, rose and a deep hollow formed between them and she couldn't reach the sweat so I wiped it from her skin there?
I said nothing. These words were not allowed.
“My father is unmoving in his opinions once they are formed.” Then he put his elbows on his knees and curled his shoulders toward the fire as if the heat were a cape.
But when Msieu Laurent went to New Orleans, Léonide insisted I help her with the meat. A hard freeze had set in, the cane couldn't be planted because the furrows were solid as stone, and the cold meant pigs should be killed for the smokehouse.
At the long wooden table we waited for the sound of iron crushing bone. Pig skulls were long and slanted compared to ours. Their brains would be made into jelly.
We were covered in blood, after we had cut the ribs into curving shelves. The ax severed the spine. The wind blew tiny splinters of iced blood from the table. The entrails, for sausage casings, were transparent as wet muslin in my fingers. I breathed in the salty, coppery blood—why did blood scent not enter my lungs, as the indigo smell had spread its poison in my grandmother's body?
When I went to feed Jean-Paul, his whole face drew back like a frightened turtle from the smell of my stained dressfront. In the lines of my knuckles, the dried blood was black.
His fingers were still curled soft as shrimp—easy to bite off if the wrong animal found him. His arms and legs tender. His skull pulsing under the useless thin fur in the cold room.
When the meat was ground into sausage and cooked into jellies and the hams submerged in their salt baths and then hung in the smokehouse, I went back to the canefield.
The silver air turned gold, and the frost melted into the earth. We pulled the seed cane from the matelas pile, where it was stacked in the field against frost. At night, my nostrils were coated with rings of white frost—no, rings of dried salt. I tasted the salt. All the excretions of our bodies contained salt—tears, urine, sweat. Saliva?
Like the taste of my own blood. Salty and rich.
Sophia craved salt, and a few times I had brought her small pinches of salt from the house.
Now, nursing Jean-Paul with my hands still cold and my legs aching from the canefield, I understood how much they needed salt, and meat. Mamère and her coffee, warm under her fingers in the morning.
I understood how desperate they were for the feathery pink ham, salty and solid in their back teeth. I bit off a callus from my palm. Hardtack. No salt in my skin. Where did the salt go?
Gervaise ran that night and took his baby with him. Sophia didn't scream or cry in the morning. She simply said, “He say Msieu could sell his son. He say you was sold to Madame Pélagie but who know about your son? Say nobody take his son or he die.”
“But how will he feed Amadou?”
“Amadou make a year last week. He eat cush-cush. I don't know what Gervaise feed him, but he live.”
Fronie came outside, her braids mussed from sleep, and Sophia smoothed the hairs. “Didn't say, What she do I take her son? Nothing. Say in his mind, She got Fronie.”
Was Gervaise in a camp of cimarrons with Philippine and Firmin? Or had they all been caught and taken to the cypress camp? Would Athénaïse see them? What if he had killed the white man, and he ran the camp himself now? Or the Indians? What would the brother and sister do with a baby like Amadou?
Days later, Gervaise slipped into le quartier and left Sophia a curl of Amadou's hair inside a map he had drawn. But she burned the map, saying she couldn't understand what he had tried to show her. She tucked the curl into her pocket and turned away from the fire.
Msieu Antoine came while Msieu de la Rosière was still in New Orleans. The Frenchwoman had been sent away as she was incompetent, and I was called to the house. Madame de la Rosière looked at the walls with her cloud eyes. She did not play the piano. She asked Msieu Antoine to read to her in the parlor.
When I brought breakfast to Etienne in the garçonnière, he glanced up from his maps. He asked me nothing. He began to speak.
“The Prudhommes will never visit this house again.”
My fingers arranged sugar on the tray. White
, sparkling shards.
“I was trained to kill for the protection of royalty, not to save a slave. All people will remember is that two French citizens are dead. And you live.”
His boots needed blacking.
“All my mother ever wanted was to see me again, and my father refused my return until now. Now she touches me but cannot see me.”
Am I meant to feel pity for you? All I ever wanted was to touch my own mother again.
He lifted his chin at the fields. “Reading Latin wasn't necessary for me to grow sugarcane. And unless I'm going to kill everyone here, with a massive plan, the military was useless as well.”
But he'd killed someone to save me. My eyes stayed on the bootheels. “How old were you when you were sent away?”
“Twelve,” he said. “I was always in the woods. The Indians lived on the back of this place, by the ciprière, and one old man taught me to hunt. He called me a voyageur. Coureur-de-bois. A woodsman. We went for miles into the forest, hunting deer, even bear. We skinned the bear and took the grease down the bayou to sell.” He moved his fingers on his hand-drawn map—preparing to hunt Philippine and Firmin? To see where the slaves could be hiding? He had inked in forests and bayous and slices of land along the water like crowded long teeth. “Now there are plantations everywhere. The Indian hunters are drunk in Opelousas.”
Etienne didn't know about the logging camp, the red trade cloth in my mouth. The clearwater breath of the Indian woman, the smoky smell of her brother's hair.
“Son.” He moved his boots on the wooden floor, and some of the drying mud fell into the cracks. “I will be the only son forever.”
Until your father is gone.
“My mother will stay blind here, until she dies.”
But you'll know. My toes pushed the clots of mud I would add to my land outside this door. You'll know when she dies. She will call to you. My mother will pray, holding the bracelet of hair, saying the African words I will never hear again unless someone sends me to Azure and she hasn't been sold. I will never know.
His eyes—darker than his mother's milky irises. Not the fierce flame blue of Céphaline's or the gray blue flecked with gold of Pélagie's. Etienne had eyes dark and muddy like indigo cloth. Soldier blue.
Taking the key from Madame's table, I told Léonide we needed ham. Madame had ordered a large dinner for Msieu Antoine and Etienne. She could see nothing. The men were in Opelousas until night. The dinner would be very late.
I cut two large slices of ham and wrapped the meat in rags. Léonide slept in her chair by the fire. I ate the slivers that fell on the cutting table, my fingers slippery with the greased skin.
In le quartier, I put half the meat in Sophia's room, on my old sleeping shelf. She had fed me pieces of small bird. She hadn't had to. I left the other meat in Fantine's. My palms smelled of fat, as when I'd measured tallow for Mamère.
Shreds of flesh on our teeth, ground to satisfy us. My milk bluish white in drops on Jean-Paul's cheek when he let go. The salt would float inside him and enter his blood.
The third time Etienne questioned me, he said, “Who is the father?”
I stood before his desk, where he was surrounded by books, maps, lead balls in a dish.
The metal toys lodged in Pélagie's heart.
“I don't know, msieu.”
“Ebrard or Léonce?”
Léonce must have been the boy who pinched me. I had never seen him since. Etienne didn't include his own name. Did he pretend he had never been with me? Or did he want me to say the words—c'est vous? But I didn't know, truly. Did he want me to name Léonce because none of us would see him again? That would be convenient.
Did he want to sell Jean-Paul?
“I don't know.”
He looked at me furiously, his cheeks white under the sideburns, which always looked like pelt decorations men had sewn to their skin. “How can you not know?”
My eyes dropped to the floor. Dust, tiny bits of paper like eggshells, and mud in the shape of small flowers where he had stepped on it. I was afraid to say anything now. If I said, How could you have taken me upstairs? I was insolent. I had no idea what he would tolerate. His father tolerated no eyes or words.
“Who does it look like?” he asked finally, writing quickly. He wrote numbers. Prices for Jean-Paul? For others?
“It looks like a baby.” My words were careful. “When they are only infants, they don't look like anyone sometimes.”
“What kind of hair does it have?”
“Not much hair has grown yet.” Jean-Paul's head still looked naked under his sparse black hair, veins pulsing when he cried.
Bluish purple blood. Sang mêlé. Quadroon. But a girl. Not a boy. What made a boy useful?
Then Msieu de la Rosière walked inside, and my brain felt filled with blood. Père. Père et fils. He said, “Are you finished with the calculations yet? We have to pay a blacksmith from Washington, now that mine has run.” Then he pointed at me. “Every slave must be branded. Even her child.”
Saliva rose bitter in my throat. Jean-Paul's small, limp arm, the thinness of his skin there.
“These Africans keep running, and I will not tolerate the assistance they find.” He leaned out the window and spat. His earth. His liquids. “In Africa, they live in huts and burn cattle dung. They starve and kill one another.”
But he didn't know Firmin was born in Louisiana, from an Attakapas mother. Firmin's blood was that of people who'd lived
in the woods.
Etienne said, “The old man was already branded, no?” “Firmin? Two fleur-de-lis. He will not return.” They would hang Firmin. Three times running meant death. Etienne wrote quickly. “Even brand the house slaves?” “Everyone. Everyone except this one. She is sold.”
Seven OPELOUSAS
I left him lifting his head. He lay on his stomach in the box, while I folded little shirts made with scraps of linen from the wedding tablecloths. Heaps of cloth still in Pélagie's room. Madame couldn't see them, and Msieu wouldn't look at them. Only two days to prepare after he told me I was sold, and I sewed all night.
On the last day, a sound woke me in the chair where I'd slept. My neck was bent, and moving my head sent pain coursing down through my muscles. My left hand held the shirt. Snuffling— Jean-Paul was pushing himself up on his chest, raising his eyes to the top of the box, his forehead like a new moon rising over the edge.
I left him that morning, his head bobbing as if he were underwater. I carried his box to Emilia's room. She faced her open door, Francine crawling on a blanket beside her. Emilia's leg was up on a crate, and the skin of her calf was purple and swollen around the dressing over the cut. When I turned, Jean-Paul had raised his head to stare at her toes.
Everything was a lie. Céphaline had believed in words. Péla-gie had believed in cloth and beauty. Amanthe had believed in waiting.
My mother had believed in her prayers. Or had she?
I now had nothing in my head or heart or hands. No words. Cranium. Faro. Dress the baby. Dress the table. Dress the body.
His footsteps made trails in the ceiling above me, where I lay on the pantry floor. Msieu Antoine's shoes. Then his feet. Washstand. Armoire. He knelt at the small altar. The knocking of knees.
When would he come? After he had prayed for himself?
Everyone believed in something. My mother and Hera. Each madame and her Catholic god. Marie-Claire, back on Azure, had believed in her own excretions entering the earth.
Philippine and Firmin had believed in Amanthe.
Hervé Richard had believed in me. He had believed I would wait for him in the woods and take his hand to step inside the armoire.
Jean-Paul was a baby. He was too small to believe in. And my mother? She couldn't still believe in her lessons, of ni and dya.
I believed in nothing now. I lay in the storeroom seeing my son's eyes. All new people, Gervaise had said. New people who could believe nothing.
Eyes tell. But Etienne's were blue, and I ha
d never looked at Msieu Ebrard's eyes. We were not meant to look into white eyes.
Jean-Paul's eyes were purple. A raincloud at evening. No one's eyes.
I hated Msieu Antoine.
I had not hated the Bordelons, even Grandmère. I'd been afraid of them, except for Céphaline. But I had not loved her.
I had not hated the de la Rosières. Even Etienne, when he lay on me—he was the rider, I the animal. The animal did not hate as much as it was tired and bitter and pained.
I had not loved Pélagie, but I wanted to spend my life with her.
I hated the man who slept in the room above me now. We were alone in his brick house in Opelousas. His footsteps moved over me.
Knives waited in the kitchen. Dress the meat. If I killed him, my name would be in the newspapers as far as New Orleans. Slaves who killed masters were always famous. Everyone knew their names. The heads on the pikes at the river road had names.
Then my mother would know where I had gone. My own son would not wonder why I left him to search and smell and cry. I left him lifting his head. I had not hated him, but I had not loved him yet. I hadn't had time.
“You can be useful to me,” Msieu Antoine had said this evening at the table. “More useful than you may understand. In fact, no one else in the world could accomplish for me what you can.”
He ran his fingers over the table's gritty surface. Thin black hairs like insect antennae danced on each knuckle. His lips twisted like he held in a laugh, and I hated him with a burn that seared my throat. He went upstairs. He would come to the storeroom and ride me like an animal. I would kill him.
My eyes stayed on the floor. The bright pool of light from a candle would slide under the door before the feet arrived.
He did not come to the door. Before dawn, the milk knew what it was meant to do, and it coursed again into the dried, crusted-hard cloth over my breasts as if a ghost suckled there.
“You may begin with coffee.”
The morning light streamed onto the floor around my blankets.
The knife would slide between his ribs. Cut off the long white fingers like egret feathers. The bones at the edge of each wrist like tiny eggs. His coatsleeves moving when he reached for the cup.
A Million Nightingales Page 22