A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  My fingers did not shake, because I had practiced every night and burned the pages.

  My slave Moinette has my permission to visit the plantation Rosière on Sunday, May 14, 1815. Julien Antoine.

  My hair and some of my face was covered with the black veil. Passing riders would see a widow walking, maybe an Acadian widow with a basket of cloth.

  The thick tangle of woods and vines along the road from Opelousas to Washington hummed with insects and movement. Clouds of dust approached and retreated. On the side of the road now, as on my little paths back at Azure, my paths of field and house at Rosière—I was a mule. It was true. I could calculate and write, but I was confined to the tracks of the other animals like me.

  But after a few miles, my forehead ached with the freedom and the fear. I could go anywhere. Find anyone with a carriage, like I had always dreamed at Rosière. How far would someone take me for eight piastres? But the carriages riding past me could be filled with people who might tell Msieu Antoine his slave had been out walking.

  When a cart with heavy wheels approached, I kept my face turned to the trees, so the dust wouldn't enter my nostrils. My mule nostrils. One hoof down. Then the other.

  The bridge was ahead. The narrow road to Rosière was marked by two ancient red rosebushes, their blooms black and untrimmed. At the garden, the crepe myrtles were in blossom, thousands of white halos suspended in the air.

  No one was in the yard, and Léonide's kitchen door was closed tight. At the back door, a white servant came outside and frowned at me. “I have a pass to visit in the quarter,” I said, holding up my paper, but she looked behind her and then shook her head. Her cap was stiff with starch, and her voice was French.

  “No one is to visit. There is sickness in the house and in the slave quarter. The doctor will arrive soon.” She raised her finger back toward the road.

  Under the crepe myrtles, where the path led to le quartier, my feet turned that way. Was I allowed to ask what kind of illness? Fever? Pox? Jean-Paul's skin covered with sores? The door had closed firmly. No one was on the path.

  It was near dark when I reached Opelousas. I kept the veil tight over my cheeks and cried much of the way, like a new widow. Look at my bereavement, I would have said. The bones of my feet rang inside my shoes.

  The wooden bar locked the door. The golden dust rinsed from my skirt into black water. You cannot walk. He cannot know me. Is it better or worse? Voices dwindled outside after midnight. I was too afraid to sleep. You cannot steal yourself. Was I afraid of myself? Take but one candle to light a room. Jean-Paul could die from the illness, and who would tell me? Mamère could be sitting now staring at her stub of candle exactly as I was, thinking exactly my thoughts. My one candle burned until it was only a red whisker in the dark.

  My son knew nothing. He had no one to leave behind.

  It was months until I saw him.

  Etienne came to the office in November of 1815. He was bigger somehow, as if riding the canefields had made him fill the black coat. I filled his cup with coffee, but he said nothing to me. His eyes were still soldier blue, his sideburns neatly trimmed to a swordspoint at his cheek. He told Msieu Antoine that his wedding would not occur for at least a year because his mother was dead, and Msieu Antoine was needed at Rosière.

  Madame lay in the parlor. Frost sparkled on the iron bands of the empty hogsheads, waiting for sugar. The tops of the cane were turning brown.

  Jean-Paul didn't move when I came to the door of Emilia's house. He had not been ill. He sat on the floor, arranging bits of stone inside the termite trails of a piece of wood. Making pebbly veins.

  He froze like a rabbit. How do baby rabbits know to be wary, when a pale stranger appears? Silent? Watchful? I knelt to let him study me. How do baby foxes know to kill?

  He had never seen himself in a mirror, I knew, because his suspicious glances at my face, my hands, told me he trusted only those around him with dark skin. He saw pale skin, Mirande and Baillo and anyone else, as dangerous. But he had to have seen his own hands and arms lighter than mine.

  He knew the word. Maman. He didn't call maman to Emilia or Fantine. He called them tante. Aunt. I cried, from gratitude to them, and said my name over and over to him. Maman. Maman. Here. Maman.

  It was only a word. Like Lolo, the horse, whom he called as well.

  On the darkening road back up to the house, my tongue gathered sweat from my lip. Salt. I'd forgotten to pray to the tiny gods in that salty water. I could work harder, make enough money.

  Madame had never seen the white roses Pélagie had planted— blossoms nearly blue when the moon rose.

  I would never see a coffin or an armoire without wondering what the wood would have smelled like if I lay inside, the cart moving under me, my lips tasting of Hervé Richard's smoke. The pads of his fingers like stones on my neck.

  I would never taste mint leaves without thinking of Amanthe, her mouth shared with her lover. I would never see white flowers without thinking of Madame de la Rosière, her unseeing eyes closed. I would never see a mosquito barre without thinking of Tretite's white wedding dress floating down the road. Every word my fingers wrote made me remember Céphaline's voice. Every window glass belonged to Pélagie.

  Coffee. Meat. Sugar. Every day—Mamère.

  And now I was eighteen and had already collected memory people.

  Is that how the balance shifted for the rest of life, as Tretite had once tried to explain to me? She said you grew older and lived inside your memory, the things you saw and tasted and smelled in the past.

  My son hadn't remembered me at all this time. Not until I said my name.

  Nine NEW ORLEANS

  Every morning, I woke as my mother had. After four years, if someone had asked me whether or not I still thought about her, whether or not I still ached behind my breastbone remembering her face or hands or the smell of sugar on her breath, I wouldn't have answered him. He couldn't have lost a mother.

  I woke in the dark, just as she had. I always wondered how she knew it was the dark just before morning and not the dark of midnight. What if she got up and blew gently on the embers to light the fire, drew water from the rain barrel under our eaves, and started to make coffee only to find it was two in the morning?

  But now, I knew. Waking from a noise, maybe a horse in the road or a boat whistle far away, one of the men upstairs turning in his sleep, I knew from the way the dark sounded that it was near morning.

  Like my mother had awakened.

  The four rooms upstairs were full. Msieu Antoine, Mr. Isaiah McAdam the writer, Msieu Estevez the sugar broker, and Doctor Vidrine's nephew, Jacques, who had stayed for a month now while working for his uncle. In two months, Mr. Jonah Greene would arrive in New Orleans from Philadelphia.

  I started the water for breakfast, took down the dry clothes. Every night, I laundered their shirts and linens, and now, while the water heated, ironed their shirts to be hung on their doors. I ground the coffee beans, putting one each day into my apron pocket, and boiled the water. I made biscuits and ham and cush-cush.

  The plates went on the long wooden table covered with a finely patterned tablecloth. Dahlias. When Msieu Antoine asked about the price, I replied, “Madame Pélagie would have chosen it.”

  The extra four piastres went into my apron pocket.

  Every day, I put flowers in a vase in the hallway, and an arrangement of lemons and blossoms on the fireplace mantel. The boarders might not have noticed, but they came back every time they had business at the courthouse. Their clothes were clean, their beds were clean, their food was good, and I didn't talk too much, as did Madame Eibsen or Madame Delacroix, who owned the other two boardinghouses.

  When the men left, discussing their defendants or who had died and left an estate worth fighting over, I cleaned the dishes and began to wash the bed linens and shaving towels. Then, when the brick house was calm around me, the sounds of the street filtered through the red dust and cement, my willow basket was filled with
laundry. If I were a white woman, my husband would have just left for his work, and my son would be playing nearby, and perhaps my mother would come down from her room in a moment to lecture me about my housekeeping.

  But I was not a wife.

  Outside, in the long, narrow piece of land from the back door to the wooden fence, I moved the sheets on the washboard, and my throat filled with my mother. I hung them up with new wooden clothespins. The sheets shifted in the breeze, so big and filled with light like clouds in the yard, as when I was a child, and my whole chest ached for Jean-Paul.

  I had coins and paper. Spanish money and French and American. Fifty-seven piastres locked in the metal tobacco tin with my first two pieces of gold and my tattooed clothespins, in a space under the floorboards in my room.

  The white sleeves reached for me.

  Was Fantine taking good care of him? Had he caught a cold this winter, or was he sitting by a fire at night? Did he eat a piece of meat with his cush-cush in the morning?

  Did he believe I was coming back for him, or did my face slip from his mind now, a smudged gold forehead that he used to kiss, only a blur in his memory? A kind woman. Her lips. Who was she, Fantine?

  But he was safe for now.

  If I took the pain of not seeing him, and multiplied it by a hundred, for all the days longer that my mother had known and loved me, if I thought about how little I had held Jean-Paul and touched him and then added the years that my mother had believed my life was hers, I could not say that my mother was safe. Either every muscle of her heart still ached for me, or she had been sold to someone else and told to make a new life to believe in. And how would she believe in anything now?

  What I had of my mother, four years after I last saw her, was the touch of a stranger's gnarled white fingers.

  An old corbateur, a trader, walked down the wooden banquette. He was trying to sell plates and jars to women washing front windows. I brushed the dust from the shutters and watched him. We used to see the traders on Azure, when they slid through the bayous behind plantations, with goods to trade with the slaves, always at a secret place. But here in town, this corbateur didn't have to hide.

  His hair stood up in a white shock, and his left cheek was marked with a red map of his own country. He'd told me that when I was small. My mother had gotten my peacock plate from him. His country was Hungary.

  He laid out plates and two silver spoons and a rice pot on my table. I gave him coffee and pralines, asked him if he remembered a woman on Azure, south of New Orleans.

  “Oui,” he said, looking at the ceiling as if reading his route. “English Turn. Then Orange Grove. Magnolia. Petit Clair before it burn. Azure.” He frowned. “Azure—they say Madame never appear after the daughter die. The only child.” He shook his head and crossed himself. “I remember many women.”

  “She was Singalee. Marks on her cheeks. She made soaps and dye.”

  “Oui.” He lifted his chin, but I could see that he knew many women like that. “I stay north now. Better business here.”

  I bought a small plate. Pheasants at the edge. Indigo blue. When my fingers touched his, I thought, his fingers touched hers. His were leathery and pink, hard as wood at the tips. He took my coins.

  Mamère. Every morning, when my aching feet slid onto the floor, I drank the black coffee sweet with sugar, felt the surge in my veins, heated the blackened iron, and looked at my son's blue plate. The plate said he was better than anyone believed he was. I would take it from the mantel every morning when I would give him his breakfast.

  “McAdam has said that he misses the food of Boston. Potatoes.”

  Today's dinner was simmering. Stew of chicken, tomatoes, herbs, peppers, and celery. “Perhaps we should hire a cook for certain days,” I said to Msieu Antoine. I had waited for weeks to suggest this. “With the boarders, there's so much extra laundry. There is a wonderful cook on my old place. Near New Orleans.”

  Msieu Antoine was reading mail. “McAdam will be with us for at least another month while he finishes his book. He will interview early families of the region. Perhaps when my partner arrives, I can think about acquiring a cook, though the purchase price would be high.”

  He left a bottle on the table. “Here is the sour beer you asked for. The barkeep was amused.”

  When he left, I mixed fine blacking and sweet oil in a bowl, a midnight sludge. I dissolved the gum arabic in the bitter beer, corked the bottles. Small-shouldered soldiers on a shelf. Jean-Paul was safe. No one would sell a child that small, useless yet. But Mamère. She had waited for a long time.

  I had to sell more soaps and bootblack.

  Mr. Isaiah McAdam sold books. Collections of lies or half-truths.

  “Some Observations on the Development of the Colony of Louisiana and Its Present Statehood,” he said to Msieu Antoine one morning.

  “You decide the title before you are finished?”

  “Well, I do. A publisher in France is interested.”

  “But the book is critical of the former crown, no?” Mr. McAdam shrugged. He was the son of an Irish father and American mother, and spoke English and French. He said, “It is critical of laziness, critical of inaccurate spending to hasten development of the colony. Especially here in Attakapas Territory.”

  At dinner, he read sections to Msieu Antoine.

  The Opelousas tribe once occupied the area, and one may see some remnants of the savage people who have civilized themselves enough to find work selling skins or navigating the numerous bayous. But formerly they, along with the cannibalistic Attakapas, were barbaric and savage enough to attack both settlers and shipments.

  His writing slanted as if in heavy wind. The Attakapas would be known in France as men who ate men. To whoever read them, the words would be true.

  The Africans recently purchased from that savage continent are best suited for the malarial, fever-ridden climate of the swamps in Louisiana. Baptism and religious instruction were encouraged by France, which made them law, but America sees little benefit to allowing Africans access to God.

  When he wrote of mulattoes and sang mêlé women, he would write his truth. Best suited for the climate of bedrooms.

  Once he asked Msieu Antoine. I came inside the kitchen with a basket of eggs, and in the dining room, the Irishman said, “She doesn't breed for you?”

  Msieu Antoine said, “She has a child who lives at the plantation of her former master. But she has not borne another.”

  “Those yellow girls are likely, yes? But they don't breed as well as the Africans, one of the planters told me.”

  “I didn't buy her for breeding,” Msieu Antoine said carefully.

  “But she's useful for pleasure.”

  “She is useful in every way.”

  Two of the eggs were streaked with blood. What was the word Doctor Tom used? A mirage. Not a dream, not a ghost.

  My mother had said to me one night, “Rêve. A dream. Les autres—the others tell a nice story to their girls. Dream of a man. Or they tell nothing. They say, Go with that man and find out. Learn yourself. Tou-seule. But me—I tell you everything. All of the maybe stories.”

  I washed the cuffs of the white shirts and the sleeves of the black and green coats; the soap cakes foamed and pulled the ink into their bubbles. Something inside the bubbles made its own miniature wind, which held the ink. Leeches pulled the blood from the body. Our mouths pulled the coffee from the rim of the cup. The heavy iron blade at Madame Lescelles's cut the silver real into eight bits, and she picked up six bits for the paper. I put the change—two sharp wedges of metal—into my pocket.

  I read everything. Paper and money were all that mattered. Paper moved people from place to place, moved goods to where we could eat or use them.

  Bills of lading, at the dry goods store: mosquito netting; linen for napkins, which I embroidered with A; sacks of coffee beans and flour and rice; bolts of cloth. Salt meat. Pork. Eggs. Adult chickens. Babies unborn. Tongues in a jar. Feet swimming in pickled water.

>   Hands. When someone died, and the estate was partitioned, every item was detailed in Msieu Antoine's office, down to each plate and glass. The children fought over hands. Field hands. House slaves. Griffone. Mulâtresse. Congo. Senegal.

  Msieu Antoine's letters were addressed to his tante Justine in Paris and to Mr. Jonah Greene in Philadelphia.

  Mr. McAdam wrote letters to no one, had no friends, and wrote nothing except his book.

  Brute Africans, commonly called bozals, might appear stronger than the Creole-born negroes, but the newly arrived slaves tend to fare poorly in the miasmas that rise from the swamps during the summer months, when yellow fever removes profits from nearly every planter in Louisiana. Creole slaves seem to have an inbred resistance to certain plagues and are able to work in all seasons.

  I read the pages in his room while putting away his clothes. Many times he crossed out words and began again, heavy lines like rope drawn through sentences that he disliked.

  I didn't hear him in the doorway.

  “You can read.”

  I had found these pages on the floor. “No, msieu. No. These were discarded, and I wondered whether to burn them for you.”

  “What do the words say?”

  “I do not know, msieu. The ink blot on this page looks like— like a country.”

  “A country? On a map? You have read maps?”

  “No. But they are colorful shapes.” I put the pages on the desk and turned to pick up the bundle of dirty linens.

  His eyes were hard on me. I didn't need to see the eyes. They were faded glass green.

  Msieu Césaire refused his request for an interview. Msieu Césaire's cousin refused to see him. Mr. McAdam asked to speak with Msieu de la Rosière, but he sent his son.

  “My father does not have the time to speak with you at length. We are planting cane,” Etienne said in the office.

  Mr. McAdam said, “Of course, one afternoon of annual planting is more important than a permanent record of the history of the area.”