“Who taught you to make such dark coffee?”
I wouldn't tell him. The dented pot. The working throat at dawn, eyes studying the slice of sky through the shutters.
“It is wonderful. I need coffee more than air. Thank you.” He smiled vaguely, as if I were his wife, and went into his office, where he closed the door.
I was not a mother. Not a daughter. Not a sister. Not a wife.
I swept the brick floor of the kitchen.
Every time I tried to become some semblance of those words, a shadowy replica like a mimic butterfly, someone took away the necessary person. The person who defined me.
———
Your eyes could never meet theirs. Your pupils, the black dots of your vision, could not be reflected in the colored orbs Céphaline called mere decorations of iris. You were to know what they wanted by their voices and hands and whips and words.
He said only, “You will make this a fine house.”
He needed sheets, curtains, wood for the stove, eggs, and plates for the eggs. He needed the hands to set plates on the table. But if this was a fine house for a bride, there was no bride.
On the top floor were four bedrooms. Three were bare. On the bottom floor, a kitchen with a dirty hearth, the pantry where I slept, a dining room with a scarred table, and a parlor Msieu Antoine had made into his office.
That room was comfortable, with a large desk and chair, with shelves to hold papers and books, with a couch and chair for clients, and a beautiful small table with curved legs to hold the coffee tray.
I made a second pot long before noon. “The coffee served at Madame Delacroix's boardinghouse is a poor imitation of this,” he said, standing in the kitchen doorway while more beans roasted in a shallow pan. “I have eaten there for a year.”
This was a statement. There was no answer.
“You didn't say who taught you to make coffee? Your mother?”
“Oui, msieu.”
“In New Orleans?”
“Non, msieu. South of there. Azure.”
“But you resemble a daughter of joy,” he said thoughtfully, and returned to his office.
This was not a question. Resemble. I resembled things I was not. Was I a replacement for someone who had brought him joy and then left? Was he waiting until I ceased resembling a mother? I had wrapped my breasts with flannel rags, so tightly that the milk seemed to move hot into my shoulders when I turned the grinder handle.
A large silver coffee urn had been delivered, a few pots, and simple white plates and cups. Spoons.
Boiling water onto the ground coffee. The smell filled the kitchen like burning earth, like night erased by a different dark. Sun filled the shutters on the street windows with gold splinters.
I brought the coffee to his desk. He blew at the edge, took a sip and said, “Perfect.” Then he studied his ink and motioned me to open the shutters. The silver salt liquid leaped from my heart to my throat to my eyes.
In the kitchen, the bitterness of coffee swam over my teeth and burned my tongue before the heat dropped into my ribs. I was my mother, but I was not. She had felt this rush of warmth and then a movement in her brain as if a tongue had licked at her skull. She had begun each day looking at me. But Jean-Paul drank Fantine's milk; he saw Emilia's face. His brain was small. He learned lessons when his stomach was empty, and he tasted molasses soaked into the weave of rag Emilia put into his mouth.
I wiped the tears with my sleeve before they reached my own mouth. A cricket moved uncertainly from the broom's edge. Cricket babies grew antennae far longer than their bodies. Their mothers taught them nothing about watching and waiting. My eyelashes were long. Fantine's and Pélagie's lashes would probably measure the same, if they were ever compared. Jean-Paul's lashes would grow in my absence.
Msieu Antoine wrote all day. Men knocked on the front door. I looked at their shoes, heard their words, brought coffee to the office. An Acadian man wearing blue homespun appeared at the back door holding a dead chicken by the feet.
Beyond the dining room window was the street crowded with carriages and horses and men arguing. Bills of sale. Settle the estate. The suit claims wrongdoing. The words flew inside his office and in the dining room. In the kitchen, I thrust the black skewering iron through the body of the chicken and heard it tear the flesh.
The men examined me for joy. They said low and approving, “Very fancy piece.” “But this one cooks, too, eh? In addition.”
Msieu Antoine replied, “She is already invaluable in many ways.”
When the rooms grew dark, I was only afraid of the fingers. It sounds strange to say I hated the fingers more than the other, because the other seemed like a separate animal, a blind, foolish animal itself, and the fingers were attached to the man, his eyes watching.
“I would like to see your hair,” he said, near midnight when the front door was locked. I had sat for hours near the low kitchen fire. I pulled the tignon from my head and unpinned my two braids. My hair was dirty and the curls matted down, so that the six sections of undone braid hung about me like ropes.
But if he wanted to ride me as a horse—a mule—ropes would be fine. My eyes focused on the embers.
He did not move. He said, “Was your mother's hair as long?”
“No, msieu.”
“What color was your father's hair?”
“Sais pas, msieu.”
“In Paris, they say each generation of New Orleans courtesans is more beautiful. But Pélagie told me you are a hairdresser.”
This also was not a question. His hair was not in need of my attention. I was tired of not having antennae. My hair hung limp and heavy on my shoulders.
“Didn't you run once from Rosière?”
He sat at the scarred kitchen table. He looked into an empty coffee cup. His cuffs were blackened as if burned by the ink. An answer was required. “Oui, msieu.”
“Tomorrow I am to go to court. The courthouse is the large building directly across the square. I will be inside, not watching this house. If you run from here, with your looks, you will most likely be attacked at the edge of Opelousas or sold immediately to a bordello. You are intelligent enough to understand that.”
“Oui, msieu.” He was not trying to frighten me. His voice was like that of Mademoiselle Lorcey, the governess, when she gave a lesson in which she was very interested.
“You are extremely valuable. If you run, your circumstances would undoubtedly worsen. Are you branded?”
“Oui, msieu.” How did the words send heat to the scar? “With the fleur-de-lis.”
“Then you would be identifiable only as a former runaway but as no one's property. It is dangerous to belong to no one.”
This was not a question. The embers shifted into a thousand rubies. Madame Pélagie had a ruby necklace. The crystals were rectangular as burning wood.
“Can you calculate?”
“Oui, msieu.”
“I know that you made household goods for Pélagie. I will have cloth delivered and furniture. Three more beds upstairs and three more armoires.”
Armoires. If Hervé Richard delivered them, he would never meet my eyes again. I had refused him. He could have been killed.
“I wish to have the rooms upstairs readied for boarders. Opelousas is in need of accommodations.”
Accommodate. Was I to accommodate the boarders as well? Was that why he bought me? Or was he waiting for Msieu Ebrard or another man to see me here and offer more money than he had paid?
Accommodate. Acclimate. Accompany.
Accompany. I was to have accompanied Pélagie to New Orleans, to New York. If her husband had shot me, I would have been with her là-bas rather than my mother.
I couldn't remember this kind of silence. When he left, and the shutters were closed against the heavy rain that fell after daybreak, the house was like a mudswallow's nest attached to the eaves of God's house. Dark and hissing outside; dark and quiet inside. My mother's voice near the glistening fire. The women whisperin
g in the barracoon and the men's laughter like barking dogs on the boat. Philippine's pots. Pélagie's incessant calling. Jean-Paul's cries rising to the trees even while I approached.
When Céphaline's spirit left her body, I had lain in the corner. Was that alone? In the indigo vat, waiting, and then the fox den, I had been alone, but the men labored near me.
The rain fell heavier, all afternoon, and no one delivered anything in the storm. I put my cape over my head and sat before the smoldering fire. No candlelight. Take but one candle. Like the cargo hold of the boat that took me away. Alone. Dark and shuddering and pounding all about me.
He spent all his time in his office. He gave no more instructions. He was a man. Women ran a house, telling you what you could not touch or eat or open. He said nothing.
At night, in my pantry room, on the new rope bed, I tried to think, but the pain inside my head was sharp. My brain was scarred now, scarred like my wrists and fingers, scarred so that the thoughts would not pass through the wrinkles. What could Mamère do but wait? Even if someone had told her I was sold to Rosière, I was no longer there. What could Jean-Paul do but drink his milk from Fantine's breast, look into her face, and know her as his mother?
It would be better if I died.
The milk collected in my breasts and washed back toward my brain. Thick sweet blue inside my eyes. If I opened my veins with a knife and waited here in my room until everything went black, Jean-Paul would not know. He was still a small animal. What was in the gray meat of his brain? The pulsing skull? He stared at me or the branches or Emilia's toes with the same concentration just now.
He was most excited, arms trembling and head bobbing furiously, when he saw Francine's face near his own.
If I died, Fantine would be his mother, Francine his sister, and they would love him. No one would have left him. He would leave, someday, if he were sold, but he wouldn't leave me, as I had disappeared from Mamère without a last touch.
His mouth had fastened onto my bare shoulder that last day as he butted his head against me. His gums were hard and hot.
With a needle, I opened the scars on my wrist. The blood pooled as fast as before, on the boat. Scars didn't hinder the blood. I made a hole in one of the burn marks from Pélagie's curling tongs. Dark as a coffee bean. My mother wouldn't have killed herself, after my birth. My mother was not of the tribe who drank blood, but once the liquid no longer trembled, once it turned darker in preparation to become blood no more, I took it in my mouth.
No tribe.
In the morning, in the narrow backyard in Opelousas, I built a fire under the black washpot. My washline stretched between two chinaberry trees. The dawn showed hundreds of chinaberries dangling like tiny suns from the black branches. I hung Msieu Antoine's white shirts with their purplish cuffs.
The milk dried on my dressfront, like all liquids from our bodies, and then turned to dust on my skin and flew into the air, to be washed into the earth behind this house.
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen.”
“My God.”
“Oui.”
“Worth every dollar.”
The pause let me know he smiled. “Oui.”
I would believe in money. The only thing there was.
Céphaline had known. Pélagie had known. My mother was wrong. The only reason to breed was to transfer money from body to body. The transfer pattern on the cloth let the dye bleed into the threads.
He would breed with me and sell my daughters.
But another day passed, and still he didn't touch me.
Only with the words that floated toward me in the kitchen from the men who sat in the office or dining room or stood at the front door.
“A virgin?”
“He says no.”
The silence was a shrug.
“I heard in New Orleans you can get them young or pretend.”
“Pretend?”
“Remove the hair. All of it.”
I could own nothing. Not even hair. If Msieu Antoine chose, he could remove every hair. If he chose, he could decorate my skin with burns and brands and ink. Every morning, he refilled the inkstand. His cuffs were blotted with ink.
“Msieu Antoine.”
He looked up, surprised that I had spoken first. “I will make a special cleanser for your cuffs if you give me the money for the dry goods store.”
If he thought I would run, he would never hand me coins or let me walk to the store.
He laid coins on the desk without looking up. His fingers did not touch mine.
The buildings were taller than high cane, and the alleys wider than the rows.
I found Bayou Carron, where one of the peddlers said he sold moss. I was free. At the muddy track along the low water, shacks on stilts leaned over the ditch. A man urinated into the stream from his porch. A trapper. He stared at me as the yellow drops flew into the air.
All these days waiting to leave the house and find water, but that was another child's dream. This water couldn't carry my body, or my prayers.
A child would throw herself into the water, into any water, and pretend that walking along the bottom, with the spirits her mother had told her about, would carry her back to that mother. A mother would never be so selfish.
But my son was with Fantine. I was alone. I spat into the water and watched the map of my saliva float.
My marks, on my body—the tattooed M, the coffee beans. My fingers pressed the scars. Mamère had not raised me to live as a coward. I left the idea of death, or running, in the liquid that was all of ours.
The coin was in my fist, inside my apron pocket. I walked toward the dry goods store.
———
It was easier to believe in the money than anything else. I could hold it and count it and hide it and move it. The money would not help Jean-Paul. A slave could not buy a slave. But in my hands, the coins were not Msieu Antoine's any longer. The money—bits and wedges of silver tied into my tignon and hidden in a new place every day, in the dirty laundry, in the tin box of coffee beans, in the yard under a flat stone where the bluing and wash water made the earth rank and soft—the money would help me learn how to get my son.
The silver reales and Mexican pesos and gold coins kept me alive.
Each day when I stepped onto the wooden sidewalk, something moved in me that took days to define. The words Cépha-line blurted with her hands held up in the air after she had put together a long string of numbers. “Not elation,” she told her governess. “Satisfaction mixed with calculation.”
Past storefronts and cottages, my feet moved in a pattern of my own calculation. Somewhere outside Opelousas, Hervé Richard fashioned armoires and chairs. But I had not seen him.
My task was to buy necessities.
Msieu Antoine burned candles most of the night, writing letters. He drank coffee all day. He ate bread. He liked salt.
The patterns of my feet were only interrupted by the men who spoke from doorways, from the road, from horses. The French kept their voices quiet; the Americans did not.
“Have you been trained to use your mouth?” “Who is your master?” “Do you work for Jeanne Heureuse?” “I don't have to pay if I catch you somewhere in the dark, sweet.” “Tell Heureuse I want you next time. Damn you, don't walk away. Goddamn French slaves need to understand Americans don't tolerate it. I'll catch her and teach her to listen.”
French clerks, Irish ditch diggers, German farmers—but the worst were the Americans. New planters, lawyers, speculators, boat captains.
My glances were careful and sideways at the women, never their faces so they wouldn't demand that I be whipped. Creole wives of planters, their dresses preceding them from the carriage, their curls gathered like fat black worms at their cheeks. The back of a neck white as flour, but downy black hair like a fairy spine. Acadian women in bonnets and homespun, lips thin as wires, hands browner than mine when they sold fruits and vegetables from baskets.
But the men were everywhere, touching m
y cheek if no one looked, sliding their hands under my sleeve, shouting at me on the street.
I made my ears underwater.
“Jeanne Heureuse!” a man yelled once, and tore at my sleeve to turn me around. Then he laughed and said, “You must be her daughter. Look just like her. But I'd have to see you naked to know for sure.”
She owned three women, the men in Msieu's office said, their cigar smoke tendrils like white vines. She was a mulâtresse who lived outside town in her own house, who had become free and made her name “Happiness” because that was the service she provided. Each of her girls had a task.
Were their mouths full of cloth or fingers or their own hair?
The three women were draft animals, with papers. Not cows; if they had babies, that milk couldn't be sold. Maybe Heureuse wanted more babies, lighter and lighter, but only girls.
Not boys. Quadroon boys weren't useful for anything. Animals of inconvenience. Their passages were not useful to anyone, and their faces only remembrances of something no one wanted to see.
Even though the milk had somehow disappeared into my body, strange twitches still moved in the looser skin of my belly. Where Jean-Paul had lain curled. I didn't know what my brain felt.
On Sunday, Msieu Antoine went to Mass, and I went also to ask God about my son.
I walked behind Msieu Antoine. We passed the courthouse, the building where he went daily, where all lives were decided on paper, and the spire of the church where we headed, where all lives were decided by the sprinkling of water and rush of smoke.
We passed the dressmaker's—a piece of glass, a sign over a doorway. Mode de Paris. A silk gown, draped and ruched, hung there. Ostrich feathers sprang from a hat.
Glass was made from sand, Céphaline had said. Sand burned and melted by fire. Pélagie had wanted glass. Msieu Lemoyne's house had burned to the ground and made ashes, and Mamère cooked ashes down to lye for soap.
The glass was cold. My finger made a mark on the window.
From the back pew reserved for slaves, the smoke of the incense was faint. Madame de la Rosière had babies baptized, with water on their heads, and grown men from Africa. Jean-Paul, Francine, and two other new babies had been daubed with the holy water by the priest when Pélagie had lain in the parlor, her hands on her chest, over the wounds covered by silk.
A Million Nightingales Page 23