A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

I said the right words over and over in my head, but Msieu Antoine had to speak for me. If Msieu Bordelon refused, at least my mother would know where I was. With no one else looking, I would write down for her my name, and Jean-Paul, on a scrap of paper she could tuck into her pocket with her coffee bean and her pinches of sugar.

  The river surged past the batture, the tangle of driftwood and cane trash. English Turn, where the river bent. Then the allée of blooming trees at Orange Grove. I had seen it only from the boat, that night, the trees lit by lantern. Now I followed Msieu Antoine through the orange trees to the plantation house, which was cold and empty, the fireplace clean, the furniture marked for sale, the walls dirty around white places where portraits had hung.

  My heart. It pushed the blood hard against the bones in my chest, against the bones in my wrists, even somehow in my forehead. Did my mother feel me coming?

  Once, standing behind her where she ironed, I had yawned silently, and she'd yawned, too. We were so tired, folding clothes late at night, the fire drying the last of the linens. I yawned again, and I heard her mouth open so wide something rustled in her jaw.

  Msieu Antoine bought two chairs at Orange Grove. The light moved past the ghost squares on the wall. In late afternoon, a boat stopped for us, then took us the ten miles to Azure.

  “The end of the world, eh?” Msieu Antoine said, looking down the river. “The beginning of the sea. I'm waiting for a boat from Philadelphia coming north, and we could be passing it now.”

  “Thank you.” I could say nothing else.

  The old landing at Azure trembled under my feet. We passed under the front oaks that belonged to Madame Bordelon. The moss for decoration. For her eyes. Could she see me? Was she still in her room?

  We walked toward the house. Could my mother see me? Was she in the kitchen with Tretite? Tablecloths and napkins. Wine stains.

  Christophe. He came around the side of the house, leading a horse, and stopped when he saw Msieu Antoine.

  “Msieu?” he said, indifferently. Then he looked at my dress first, my face, and his eyes narrowed to gashes of black under his brows. “Madame?” But in his brain, he said, Cadeau. Gift girl. I was not a girl now.

  I said, “Christophe. You are well. Msieu Antoine would like to speak to Msieu Bordelon.”

  He said nothing, but led us around to the kitchen.

  Tretite was not there. A huge mulatto woman threw shelled corn to chickens in a pen behind the kitchen. She said, “What you want?” to me. Then Msieu Antoine rounded the corner, and she curtsied.

  Christophe rode to find Msieu Bordelon. I stood outside the kitchen. The path, my path, to the clearing was wet and muddy. My hand shaded my eyes from the low sun, my fingers a shelf as Madame Bordelon's had been all those years ago.

  I couldn't run down the path. My feet wore shoes, and my body did not belong to my mother.

  I touched his cuff.

  I had never touched his body. Only his clothes. “I will walk down to le quartier, if you permit.”

  He nodded.

  The huge cook had on a white apron. She was waiting for me to say who I was. All my life in this yard, when strangers saw me, my mother had explained my existence however she chose.

  “I am Moinette,” I said in French. The cook only nodded. “Where is Tretite?”

  Now her face had a guarded look. She nodded toward the street. “Là-bas.”

  My blood moved faster. “And Marie-Thérèse?”

  The name. The name. The feel of my tongue against my teeth, my lips against each other.

  She frowned and shrugged, shoulders lifting like flour sacks.

  I walked quickly to the clearing. Only a thread of smoke, wisp of moss curling upward into the sky. I ran the last few yards, and in our doorway sat Tretite, holding a pipe to her mouth. “Cher bébé, bébé,” she said, holding out her arms.

  “Last year. Cinq année, she say to me one night. Five year I wait. One night we don't see her, and we look everywhere. She gone.”

  I didn't know what my face would do. But nothing collected in the hollows of my cheeks. Eveline, Hera, and Phrodite crowded into the room. Tretite sat in the corner with her pipe.

  I said, “Where was she going to look for me? The city?” She could have been walking past the hotel every morning before I'd finished cleaning Msieu Antoine's boots.

  Eveline covered her mouth with her fingers. “Moinette. She wait so long, and she so tired.” She went to her trunk, rough cypress planks with a lock. A cloth bag with braided hair, coffee beans, and three shards of broken plate. Feathered tail and purple wing.

  “She go down Bayou Les Palmiers. Where the traders come. Say that water go into another bayou and down to Barataria. Slave stealer used to come up that way. She tell me, I go now. She leave this by her door. Christophe—he say he saw her in a pirogue on the bayou. By where the white birds live.”

  She couldn't have made it all the way to Barataria. I saw her nightwater eyes, her thick wrists covered with scars. Mamère. She was going to New Orleans.

  She wouldn't have known I went to Barataria. She would find something to sell in New Orleans. We could go back and look for her.

  The fire was burning high. All those eyes on me—Eveline was crying, Hera's tears smeared over the scars on her cheeks. Phrodite—I had hardly known her. She was pregnant, hands on her belly.

  Christophe stood outside the door and said, “Msieu Bordelon back from the field.”

  He waited outside. Tretite said, “Madame look out her window one day, see me wear that white dress, and say never come to the house again. Say do the wash and leave it on the back step. No bride here.”

  “Tretite,” I breathed, and held her close. She felt full of air, soft and collapsed. “If she comes back, tell her I am in Opelousas. North. Opelousas. Court Street.”

  Christophe waited near the ashes heaped under the pecan trees. “You married Phrodite,” I said.

  He nodded and we began walking.

  “Your mother don't get in no pirogue,” he said suddenly when we reached the back gallery. “I say that for Eveline and Tretite. For they feel better. I don't think you come back. Never.”

  “Was she sold?” My fingernails buried in my palms. Red moons.

  “She walk in the bayou and go under.”

  His teeth didn't show, and he didn't raise his chin as he had when we were children; no anger in his eyes, no desire to push me onto a rock and pull up my dress.

  “It's not true,” I said. “Pas vrai.”

  “I see her go out past Petit Clair, and I follow.”

  “You hate me, and I will never see you again.”

  Then he shook his head. “I don't hate you. Never think of you.” He was wide in the shoulders now and dressed in groom's clothing, with tall boots splashed by mud. “I follow her down by my traps. Maybe she have a boat hide there. But when she get in the bayou, she roll over on her back. Like she swim before. Roll over on her back and look up in the trees, and float down the water.”

  On her back. Resting. It is frightening to be so rested. You might never get up. Like flying.

  I put my knuckles in my mouth. Maybe she was truly gone. Maybe he was lying. Msieu Bordelon's voice rose high. “Where's the damn scraper?”

  “Christophe,” I whispered. “If you're telling the truth, go get Tretite. Please. Bring her to the house. Tell her to only walk and not think. Not talk.”

  He began to walk, and I began to cry.

  At the back gallery where Madame had stood all those times with her hand shading her eyes, the door where my palm measured Msieu's head, I wiped the tears from my eyes, pulled at the skin beside them. This would never work if I cried.

  Msieu Bordelon knocked the mud from his boots onto the gallery. I had to say it to him now, before he went inside. He did not own me. I belonged to Mamère. But if she was là-bas, and she belonged to God, then I belonged to God now, too.

  “Do you remember me, msieu?”

  He turned. His lips were even thinn
er, only an edge of skin over his long teeth, and his eyes were still fierce. Céphaline's eyes. “No. I do not.”

  “Moinette. Your daughter's servant.” I was afraid to say her name.

  He ran the scraper under his boot. “I sold you.”

  “Oui, msieu. Msieu Antoine owns me now. He would like to buy my mother.”

  He put down the scraper. “Your mother ran away.”

  My brain was filling with blood, the wrinkles running red inside my skull. He was a coat. A black wool coat, hanging on the line, the sleeves moving gently. “Msieu Antoine wishes to buy Tretite. She can be called my mother. She isn't useful to you now. You can strike me for disrespect, but I know there is a man buried in the woods. I saw it. It is written on paper in Opelousas.”

  He frowned and inclined his head, as if listening even after I was quiet. Then he said, “You cannot write.”

  He could whip me for admitting it—no, I was not his property now but Msieu Antoine's, and yet he could demand that Msieu Antoine whip me. My back trembled under my dress. “Mademoiselle Céphaline taught me to read and write,” I said, turning sideways. “She taught me things while we made her beautiful.”

  “Do not say her name,” he shouted behind me.

  Msieu Antoine sat in the parlor, drinking coffee and looking at the paintings over the fireplace. “Msieu,” I said, calmly as possible. My mother. Her hands trailing in the water. The water cold.

  “Did you find her?”

  “Oui. She is coming.”

  Msieu Bordelon stood looking down on Msieu Antoine. “You are a lawyer? I don't like lawyers or speculators.”

  Msieu Antoine stood and smiled. “Then it is fortunate that I am not a speculator. I am a clerk of the court in Opelousas.” He lifted his hand to the portrait. Céphaline. Her eyes open, her cheeks flushed. Not dead. “That is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen painted. Your wife?”

  Msieu Bordelon's chest rose high and fell. “My wife has not left her bedroom for five years. Since the day her daughter died. What is the reason for your visit?”

  “Not for speculation but for sentiment—I came to buy my housekeeper's mother.”

  “Her mother?”

  The red moons on my palms stung. I said, “Christophe is bringing her. My mother is coming.”

  Msieu Bordelon disappeared into his office, and he came out with the ledger I had dusted so many times but been afraid to open.

  “Moinette. Creole mulâtresse. Born September 19, 1797, Azure.”

  Tretite came silently inside and stood with her small mashed-in face turned to the floor. I said, “My mother used to be the cook. She has been replaced, no?” My eyes stayed on Msieu Bordelon's fingers. Short and strong, with webs of thick skin where he held his reins.

  He waited for a long time. I waited for him to say my mother's name, to say my lie out loud. But he read, “Jeannette. Nègre. Born 1765, St. Domingue.”

  “How much would you ask?” Msieu Antoine said, frowning at Tretite's wrinkles, her shoulders slumped like dove wings flat to her sides. “For the mother?”

  Msieu Bordelon didn't look at me. “Her breeding days are certainly past now. But that doesn't mean she has turned into a bargain.”

  Christophe put out the flag to signal a steamboat. Tretite held my hand as she stepped onto the cargo deck, and she trembled with fear when the engines groaned. “Jamais en bateau,” she whispered. Never on a boat.

  “Don't move,” I said. “Don't look at the foam.”

  ———

  Back at the hotel, we learned Mr. Jonah Greene's ship had docked.

  He was olive-skinned and tall, with wells of darkness around his eyes. He asked me to make tea. He handed me a tin filled with curled black leaves, and Msieu Antoine said carefully, “In a city famous for coffee, you bring an English drink.”

  He waited for Mr. Jonah Greene to smile and again shake his hand.

  Tretite slept in the slave quarters. I walked back to the kitchen. All the years I'd waited, and now I stood beside a hearth waiting for water to boil. As every day. No ladder to heaven. To là-bas. No pirogue to the gods of water. Only leaves in a cup.

  All the heat inside my face, stored in my cheeks and behind my eyes and even under my tignon—I squatted near the fire and covered my skull with my hands and cried until my face felt as if it had melted into wax.

  Ten COURT

  “She is not your mother.”

  “No.” I lay beside him. My back was curled against his chest. “I would not lie to you. She is not my blood.”

  Msieu Antoine let his breath out as if it were a small, silent laugh against the back of my hair. “But you have chosen her so. And you did wait to admit it until now, when we're on the boat home. So she is to be your mother in Opelousas.”

  “Yes. Msieu.”

  The steamboat labored against the current. North. Nothing was meant to go back up the river. Only to float down and end at the sea.

  Msieu Antoine's breath moved the hairs at the back of my neck. “I thought something was strange by the way you spoke and moved near her, but perhaps it was that you had not seen her in years.” He sighed. “Did your mother run?”

  “I will not run.”

  “I didn't ask you that.”

  “She may have run.”

  The engine made his shoes tremble on the floor, as if they were walking of their own accord. I could smell the secretions on his body behind me. I didn't know their name. All the fluids that Céphaline had named—saliva, blood, sweat, tears, but no one ever named the fluids of sex, or the organs. Not even Doctor Tom would have been foolish enough to name that for her.

  “Which man frightened you?” Msieu Antoine asked.

  “The steward.”

  “Where is—the woman you may consider your mother?”

  “Her name is Tretite. She is asleep on the deck with the other slaves.” The engines shuddered so hard that the skin of my cheeks shook against my teeth. “She has always been able to sleep. And I can never sleep when I am afraid.”

  “Did you sleep at all when I first brought you to Opelousas?”

  “No.” Just his shoulders touched the backs of mine, through his shirt and my dress. “I thought you would hurt me.”

  “You were hurt before.”

  “Oui.”

  But he did not ask who. That was another set of words no one wanted to name.

  And now we were not to talk about Mr. Jonah Greene.

  He was a different animal. He would not even taste the coffee. He drank tea. He instructed me to measure out the dried, curled black leaves from the tin and tie them into a muslin square.

  He was a few inches taller than Msieu Antoine, with olive skin. His throat was long and it looked as if a stone was lodged above his collar. He did not kiss the men who greeted him in the hotel or on the boat, as the French greeted one another; he grasped the men's hands and patted them on the coat with the free hand, like some dance he had rehearsed and they had not.

  I was afraid of him. He studied me when he thought I was not looking. He spoke English with a strange step inside the words. He didn't know I understood him. When Tretite sat in the hotel kitchen with her hands so still in her lap, I applied blacking to his shoes.

  “They make me uneasy. It's different with an Irish housemaid. They want their pay for the least amount of work.”

  “This isn't Philadelphia,” Msieu Antoine had said. “You must learn to live French. French Louisiana.”

  “It is American now.”

  “No—it is still French, even if Americans do not believe so.”

  “They are like odd pets. Angry, watchful pets. They stare without staring.”

  “She wants to know what you want.”

  Then there was a long silence, and Mr. Jonah Greene's voice changed. “She cannot know,” he said. “No one can know.”

  The cabin was dark and close as the cargo hold years ago. But I was not chained. Msieu Antoine's arms were twined with mine. He only lay behind me, in the
small bed. His hips did not touch mine.

  I had gone back to his table after midnight, when most of the passengers were asleep and only a few men drank and played cards. He had seen me wipe my face. Sweat and tears.

  Mr. Jonah Greene had just left the table for his own cabin. “Sadly enough, gambling is not my favorite pastime,” he said in English, and the other three men frowned until Msieu Antoine translated into French.

  Msieu Antoine had signaled me with his hand then. He said, “You may wait for me in the cabin.”

  He said it quietly, but several of the men around him laughed, and one said, “The rhythm of the boat, oui?”

  “You appeared agitated,” he said now, his mouth behind my neck.

  Première fois you do something you don't like, Tretite had said. First time. Then you do it over and over and you grown.

  Première fois to speak to him like I was grown.

  “Sometimes the men don't even touch me. They stand near me and pleasure themselves. They get close in the kitchen or the store and they rub against me. Then they rub themselves.” I took a breath. “The steward has touched me twice already.”

  “Touched you? Though he knew you belonged to me?”

  “He accidentally caught his finger in my tignon and knocked it from my head. Then he stood close behind me when I was preparing your tray, so close I could feel—”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  I didn't feel that now. His body lay behind mine as my mother's had lain curled to me, a stripe of air like cotton batting between us.

  There was only softness behind me because Msieu Antoine was spent. He had been to Mr. Jonah Greene's cabin next door. He thought I had not heard the sound caught in a throat. Kept there. The way Gervaise used to keep his longing in his throat, while he leaned Sophia against the door. That same sound.

  When Msieu Antoine came into his cabin, he'd said, “I needed air. Moinette, you cannot sit in the chair all night. It is not your fault you are frightened. Lie down. No one will hurt you here.”

  Lying at the edge of the narrow mattress, I knew that smell— acid and biting, salt and snail. The fluid that men left on my dress, on my legs.

  The engine shuddered harder. We were going home. He said, “You are nineteen now. How old were you when you left your mother?”