A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Amadou was baptized by Gervaise in the ciprière, with the black water where they lived. Sophia might never see him again.

  I had not felt God since I lay in the dark watching my mother pray.

  That night, holding my clothespins, I prayed. I had nothing of Jean-Paul. His hair was not long enough to cut. I had bitten off his fingernails and spat them into the dirt.

  I didn't feel one God but prayed to the gods of all the water, the bayous and Barataria and the Mississippi, the water in my mother's washpot, the saliva and tears in our skulls. I imagined God inside everything that shone and trembled.

  Should I love my son? And my mother? Would Msieu Antoine—who seemed alone in this world with no wife, brothers, or parents of his own—ever go to New Orleans? Would he let me see my mother?

  The embers crumbled. I wanted to see Jean-Paul, before he could speak and call someone else's name.

  I knew now what my presence accomplished, what no other presence could.

  I was in the imagination of all the men who came to this office, to this building, even those who never entered the door.

  They saw me there, my body working even after the cooking and sewing and cleaning were finished. My body under Msieu Antoine's, my mouth open in pleasure or pain or fear, my hair tangled in his elbows. And my mouth closed in the morning.

  An elderly man named Msieu Césaire stayed in the office one day while Msieu Antoine went across to the courthouse. For days, they had been meeting about the sale of an entire estate in Arnaudville. I heard his name constantly: “What does Césaire think? He's still the wealthiest Creole in Opelousas. Césaire's grandmother came here with a land grant from the king.”

  Msieu Césaire told me to stand before him. Then he lifted my dress hem with his cane, until the fabric edge was near my own eyes.

  He examined me for some time. My linen pantaloons, discarded by Pélagie long ago, were attached to my thighs with sweat.

  He dropped my hem and said, “You are wearing underclothes. That is foolish. An impediment. You should be prepared to lift your dress at any time, if that is your purpose.” He dismissed me by moving the cane across my spine and pushing me toward the door.

  The next day, Msieu Antoine said, “You are not a daughter of joy, but your very existence makes men think of particular joys.”

  Was I meant to acknowledge this, while gathering discarded ink-stained pages from the floor?

  “It is assumed that your status is concubine.” His mouth was not the kind that smiled upward; when he was amused, his lips drew back and made two hollows in his cheeks, above his moustaches.

  I had to learn how much was allowed. “I do not know that word.”

  He drew his lips back again. “The origin—maybe Chinese. Another term for mistress. The woman who performs the duties of marriage but without the official legal sanction. With no papers.”

  When he said the word performs, drawing it out to make it not true, he sounded almost like Msieu Vincent before he drew the gun.

  “Everyone has papers.” The words fell from my mouth.

  Msieu Antoine was not angry. He was amused again. “Every human and horse, it is said.”

  “Dogs.”

  “Yes.”

  I put the silver coffee urn on its small brazier, the same kind that heated the curling tongs every morning in Pélagie's room. “Madame Pélagie was killed because of papers.” Was I allowed to speak of actual events or only amusing generalities?

  He finished his coffee and said, “Come this way into the office.”

  He showed me the pages, the ink, the seals, the letters and contracts. “Do you see all these transactions?” He bent his face under mine until I had to see his eyes. His eyelashes were like small paintbrushes. I didn't allow myself to flinch but looked into the black spots of his vision.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Finally he nodded. “Madame Pélagie was killed because of money and paper and desire.”

  He was a man. He didn't understand. Not desire. Desire was too sentimental. Besoin. The mere need for the passage.

  “The assumptions will be convenient for both of us. It is clear to me that you were not trained in the arts of physical love. I see no avarice or desire in your bearing.”

  Did he see besoin? I wanted my mother and my son.

  “Do you understand? I want you to be accommodating if you are asked about your duties. Domestic pleasures of all kinds. Right now, my satisfaction lies completely in the smooth running of this house.”

  He looked down to end the conversation. I moved around the desk, collecting blotter paper and bits of sealing wax. He did not know I could read.

  The pages were covered with ink spiders crawling across in Msieu Antoine's curling, slanted hand. He wrote down events to make them official. Marriages, births, deaths, transfers of property. Sales.

  Estate of the Widow du Plantier. Lartigue—Creole nègre, 45— 850 piastres. Charité—Creole négresse, 20—450 piastres.

  If he did not write them down, they did not exist.

  My name was written on three pieces of paper now. Azure, Rosière, and here, in this room somewhere. My mother's name had only been written once. My son's name remained in Msieu de la Rosière's office.

  Msieu Antoine moved his pen over the paper. I looked into his face again. He was writing. His mouth burrowed into his cheek on one side as if he chewed on that part. His hair was black, and his left fingers lined up on the paper as his right hand wrote.

  Long ago, he had written letters to someone he missed. I had seen them in the garçonnière. He missed the woman's fingers in his. He had loved someone else. Was he waiting for that woman?

  I still looked at fingers.

  He wrote, “The owner testifies that—”

  I could not testify. My words would not be written down. I would have testified for Pélagie, lying on the floor with her collarbone coated in blood. Her husband had lied. She had not sold my son.

  Jean-Paul, quadroon, infant. No price.

  Madame Lescelles had her name painted on the window of the new dry goods store two blocks from the courthouse. She looked up from her ledger when I came in to order cloth and coffee. She never spoke to me. She only lifted her chin, as Mamère had, to let me know she had noticed my presence.

  The name—Hervé Richard's owner was a Lescelles, a free man of color. But could a slave ask about another slave?

  I studied her when she was not watching, when she was counting the money placed into her hand by a customer. She was somewhat darker than me, with skin the reddish copper of new pots used only a few times in the fire. She always wore a tied-high tignon of blue, royal blue, and her eyes were a strange green. Verdigris. The color that collected on the statue outside the courthouse.

  A statue at her counter, only her eyes moving when people touched her provisions. Flour, coffee, sugar, candles, myrtle wax.

  Today I said, “Candles, please, and coffee. One pound of lead.”

  She narrowed her eyes and spoke. “Why do you buy the alum and the lead and beets? Who eats so many white beets?”

  I was startled into my chance. “They are for soap, for ink stains. And bootblack for Msieu Antoine. I could make extra, if you wanted to sell them here.”

  She said nothing.

  I said, “Does your husband own a carpentry shop outside town?”

  Her eyes narrowed again, to a tiny horizon on her cheeks. “My nephew.” Then she rolled the candles into a bundle and tied it with twine. An American appeared in the doorway and shouted in English, “You! Get your master out here to take a look at these deerskins.”

  Madame Lescelles's fingers didn't shake as she tucked the twine under tightly. “I have never had a master,” she said, slowly, blandly, her eyes lingering at the man's knees, cupped with bowls of mud. “I am born free and remain so until I die.”

  He was a trapper, one of the men who came in winter to sell their skins, to buy liquor and women, to fight in the bars until the trees were ready to recei
ve them and their weapons again. They lay drunk in alleys, beards flecked with food and blood.

  This trapper had skin red and mottled as boiled shrimp shells; he was missing two bottom teeth, the dents fresh and purple in his gums.

  “You could die right now, mongrel. Yellow as babyshit. Worth as much. Where's the owner?”

  “I am the owner. I do not buy deerskins.”

  He spat onto the floor. “Maybe I'll take you and your daughter here in the woods and fuck you both until you ain't free. Skin you and sell you in New Orleans. Sell anything there. Even free niggers.”

  We had moved our eyes. We looked at each other's shoulders. Hers were plump as hams under the printed cotton of her dress.

  “No master to complain if I steal you.”

  Her eyes remained on my own shoulder.

  He spat tobacco again. When he left, she still moved only her eyes and fingers. It was as if her feet were part of the wooden floor behind her counter, and I wondered how swollen they were by the end of the evening.

  The foamy circles of saliva trembled like gelatin on the planks. She said nothing to me when I paused in the doorway where his smell lingered. Not “Adieu, not my daughter.” Not “Don't be afraid, petite.” Not “Bring your bottles tomorrow.” Nothing except, “The price of candles will increase next week.”

  Hervé Richard might have already run. Madame Lescelles had said she was born free. But if her father was French and her mother African, how had her mother gotten free? Had she bought herself?

  Her nephew had bought Hervé Richard in New Orleans. Washing the front steps and windows, I watched for his cart.

  A few weeks later, in her store, she said, “Bring the articles. I will examine them.”

  The presentation. I stayed awake most of the night, my throat thumping with nerves. My mother's ribbons. The beauty of the ordinary. I braided black thread for the bottleneck of the bootblack, white to tie around the paper wrapping the soap cakes.

  Madame Lescelles said, “You did not label them?”

  I shook my head.

  “You cannot write.” She sighed.

  She gave me two silver reales, which I tied into a cloth and pushed deep into my hair.

  The next day, the items were arranged on her counter, priced at twice what she gave me. That was what a window did. That was why Pélagie wanted a window.

  I found a tobacco tin for my earnings, but left my old tignon wrapped around the coins to muffle the sound of money.

  One day, I put down the coffee, which Msieu Antoine needed so very badly. I was not afraid of him now, but this would not be a lesson he had begun. He was silent.

  I asked, “Why did you not purchase my son?”

  He took some of the coffee between his teeth, as he did when it was very hot. “Monsieur de la Rosière agreed to sell you for a very high price. Nine hundred piastres. I paid him five hundred piastres, and I will owe him the balance until exactly a year. April 1815. He holds a mortgage on you until the sale is final.”

  “Mortgage?”

  “Security. If I do not pay by that date, he may take you back. But I am only waiting for payment from the settlement of an estate and will pay him the balance on that date.”

  “And my son?”

  He sighed. “I did not feel I could inquire about your son. De la Rosière mentioned that he never sells male slaves, as they are always needed for the fields. And having your son here would have called too many aspects of our relationship into question.”

  I had no answer for that, and no more questions.

  But what if he couldn't pay for me? Then I would be returned to Rosière, to Jean-Paul. Msieu de la Rosière might sell me again, and farther away. What if Jean-Paul's silvery face reminded Eti-enne or his father of me—of Madame Pélagie's death? Did Jean-Paul crawl now, over the floor toward the fire, while Fantine bent her head toward her own baby? Did he reach for a piece of meat? Was he that kind of child—greedy, grasping? Or did he lie still and stare?

  What did they tell him about me?

  One morning in December, when the smoke from the burning cane had reached into Opelousas, when in a few days my son would be one year old, I opened the front door and Etienne stared at me with no expression. His forehead was brown, as if he'd ridden the fields all summer. My eyes dropped to his boots.

  “Monsieur Antoine is expecting me.”

  He brushed past me and went into the office.

  Animals couple in the trees or the barn or the water, and when the babies are born, the mother feeds them until their bellies shrink from comical to lean. Then they are killed for food or money, or they scour the woods looking for their own food. The adults cannot recognize each other or the offspring in the cypress or the river.

  Only if they are tame. Enclosed. Owned. Hunting dogs. Horses. Mules.

  The front door closed when he left.

  In the kitchen, my fingers tore the skin of the chicken from the boiled meat, and I returned the muscles to the pot.

  The trees were cut and shaped into walls. We walked through the forest of town seeking food carried by other animals in baskets or held behind counters. The men hunted money and sex. The women were hunted and captured, even the white women, and they demanded money for cloth and plates. The store owners wrote down what people bought and what they owed. In the courthouse, words were the only truth.

  Each day, Msieu Antoine's hand moved across the pages. When he left for the courthouse, I read what he left on his desk. I wanted to know the truth of this house.

  He did not write to the woman whose letters had been so tender when I read them in the garçonnière back on Rosière. He wrote letters of business, but nearly every night he wrote to Mr. Jonah Greene, of Philadelphia. While cleaning the shutters, I read words: favorable climate, expanding populace, methods of transport. He tried to convince Mr. Jonah Greene to come to Opelousas as his business partner.

  It was necessary to see everything the way the whites did. Money and business. To ask him to buy my son was business. Perhaps he'd purchased me for Mr. Greene, since he did not touch me himself.

  But I never saw my name.

  When he slept, I took paper, ink, quills from his office and hid them in my basket of sewing. He noticed nothing. The French hadn't cared much if a few slaves read and wrote, but the Americans had made it against the law. They whipped slaves to death for writing. I had to teach myself now, before Mr. Jonah Greene arrived.

  At night, when the streets were quiet, I put down my sewing and held the quill, dipped it into the ink moved to a tiny empty salve jar. When the quill touched the paper, blotches of thundercloud spread like storms. I burned the paper and smelled blue. India ink. Indigo on the quill, so like the ones my mother had pulled from her pot of boiling lyewater.

  It was harder to form the letters with my fingers than to see them with my eyes. And spilled ink would stain my fingers or sleeves, to give me away. I began with M. M M M M M. It took several nights, the curls like tiny hairs, the slant as if they were running off the page.

  I began by writing their names over and over. Jean-Paul. Marie-Thérèse. And maybe the whites were right about that— seeing the names come from my own fingers, on the tiny piece of paper folded in my apron pocket, did make me feel as if I owned something. Someone. Their names, if nothing else.

  Msieu Antoine sold words. But how did he know they were true? Did the words become truth only because he wrote them, and he had the title of notary, and the seal? Were words clearly false made true when he wrote them?

  What if Msieu Vincent had lived, and I had died there on the floor next to Pélagie, and when our blood was cleared from the wood and fabric, Msieu Antoine had written that Msieu Vincent said I had shot her because she wouldn't take me to Paris? Years later, those words would have been truth to Jean-Paul if he ever asked what happened to his mother. “Who was she, Fantine? Why did she kill her madame?”

  How did the truth turn into words? How did Céphaline read all those words and know the person wh
o wrote them and then bound the pages knew the truth? Not words like horse and mule, and hybrid, and the names of the birds I remembered from all those afternoons with her—egret and crane and gull and sparrow and wood duck and canary—but words like a man said to Msieu Antoine: “I, the undersigned, on November 20, 1813, do bequeath my property as follows: to my son Pierre, my sword; to my son Adolphe, my gold watch and chain; to my daughter Marguerite, all household goods, furniture, four slaves, and the residence at Bayou Grégoire, with 1,217 acres of land, because of the care and pain with which the said Marguerite took care of her father for many years after the death of her mother.”

  The man was small, his hands clawed like chicken feet on the blanket over his knees, and his daughter so plump and watchful when she took coffee from the table where I had placed it. How did Msieu Antoine know that she had not hurt her father, that she had not starved him until he said those words?

  But once they were written, in Msieu Antoine's ink, and signed, and the papers taken to the courthouse across the street, the words were true. Toujours. Always.

  Numbers were always true. They did not alter themselves. I wrote his birthday. December 29, 1813. I had been gone for eight months from Jean-Paul, nearly the time he'd been carried inside me.

  I had been gone for nearly three years from my mother.

  But my mother remembered everything—my face and voice and fingers and heart. She would remember the words she hated—patella, clavicle, iris.

  My son, if I didn't see him, would remember nothing.

  I knew Msieu Antoine would refuse, if gently, but I asked him. Jean-Paul's birthday was a Sunday. He would be moving himself across a floor, gripping skirts with anxious fingers. Would someone make him a toy? Would they remember the date? It was written in Msieu de la Rosière's ledger, and maybe in someone else's memory but mine.