A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  My eye was so burned and blurred that I could not cook or wash. My hands were skinned. People believed me—the wind had blown an ash into my eye, tripped me up to scrape my face and arms and knees.

  Msieu Drouet let me borrow two hundred dollars to hire a girl, as I couldn't run the house. A free woman of color in New Iberia had a niece who needed a trade, so a fifteen-year-old girl named Noémie was apprenticed to me for one year, for two hundred dollars, to learn washing, sewing, cooking, and cleaning. Msieu Drouet filed the papers in the court, the same day I received the payment for the year for Jean-Paul.

  I sat up all night in the office, writing the sums in the ledger, holding my good eye close to the paper. All we were. Conveyance of numbers and crumbs and passages full of liquid.

  But something had entered my blood and wouldn't leave. Not a baby. Not seeds. Something foul that made me burn and made me weak and made me faint.

  I locked the front door.

  The girl Noémie brought hot poultices for my belly. She was a nervous, kind child, with cinnamon-colored eyes and small hands, which she left hanging in front of her like a squirrel while she waited beside my bed. She said, “Should I let in boarders?”

  “No,” I said. “No one.”

  Noémie pulled up a chair. “You are so beautiful. My mother had heard of you. She heard you were married to a white man.”

  I shook my head no. Noémie whispered, “She said your beauty got you this house. A big brick house.”

  I closed my eyes and told her to get Charité from the store.

  Charité brought a tea she mixed for monthly troubles. I told her it was fever. But this was a different burning, and my head filled with wiry boiled moss so that my thoughts were caught and tangled.

  All the rivers and bayous led to the ocean, past walls of earth. The men built wooden walls and brick walls, and we moved inside them small as ants. Cages and chains. Then we went outside to gather pebbles and crumbs and bring them back. The birds caught seeds in their beaks and huddled in their nests. Léonide and Tretite could cook, but I had to lie down and lift my dress. Christophe and Gervaise could cut cane and move wood, but Jean-Paul had to drown.

  The steam from the washpots used to dance with the smoke, if the air was heavy enough in the clearing. Céphaline said the ankle had to show. Her mother said a small ankle, well-turned, might be all the man could see. Peeking out from the skirt. The ball of bone a tiny head under the skin. A petite skull rubbing against the iron ring. The feel of that chain, every night, and I couldn't move. Twice I had wet myself in the morning. I had washed my clothes and gone to the fields with them wet, and the sun was so hot the steam flew from my hem, when I hoed the bad grass from the good grass. The bad women from the good women. The ball of bone. Why would men care about the ankle? What could they put inside the ankle?

  “Impure contact,” Doctor Vidrine said, his face over mine. “I hadn't thought you would—”

  I turned my face to my wall. My whitewash. My plaster.

  He took my blood, with the lancet. It ran dark into the bowl. Give it to me. He poured it into the washbasin. Infected. Impure. Inside the blood. But what came from my passage was white and yellow, not blood. Noémie rubbed onto my passages an ointment. She was not my blood, and she had to wash my blood. My gums bled. I swallowed my blood. Then he purged me with liquids. Bottles and jars. Cleaning solutions. White corrosive sublimate and new rum, he said. Expel from the habitat all remains of the disorder. Once or twice a day. Nothing left inside me. No blood. No liquids. My liquids flew into bowls and towels, my throat scraped raw, my gums swimming in blood, my eye swollen closed.

  Half of their faces leaned over me. Jean-Paul. He came. He stayed and wiped my skin with cold water. He did not smile.

  The third man who bought my son said nothing.

  It had taken weeks for me to walk again. Around the gray floating scar, like a tiny cloud in my eye, I saw the man's boots. Were they shined with saliva?

  We stood in the office of Msieu Drouet. He had lent me money to pay the doctor, to pay Noémie's mother, to buy food and candles and cooking oil and soap. I had mortgaged the building to him months ago, for security on the loan, and now the payment was due.

  “You have written twice to Julien Antoine, three weeks have passed, and we have no answer. Clearly he must be traveling,” Msieu Drouet said.

  I nodded.

  “You have one asset remaining, Madame Antoine. Your son has offered himself for security.”

  The indenture to Vidrine could be canceled, he said. If I sold Jean-Paul to Msieu Drouet's cousin, who owned a sugar plantation in Petit Pinière, twenty miles away, I would receive $750. Half due now, which we could apply to the mortgage on the house.

  “They can use an upholsterer for their new plantation while they furnish the rooms, and then he can be trained as a carpenter. Valuable trades. If at the end of the year, when the balance is due, you wish to repurchase him, you may. That is written into the terms of sale.”

  “Don't lose the house,” Jean-Paul said. “This time don't sell the curtains. I worked very hard on that color. Celadon. Do you know how many dyes I mixed? They were for your office.”

  “Your office,” I said. “That is your office.”

  “Then don't sell my curtains. I'll make new ones when I come back.” He smiled slightly, and then his eyebrows leaped higher. “I will return. Remember, when you used to say that?

  “Celadon,” he said, shaking his head. “The perfect color.”

  If the house were lost, he would never have his own table for cutting cloth, for draping coats and dresses and couches. With no house, I could only sew or cook for someone else. “For one year?” I whispered.

  “Jean-Paul, quadroon slave for life, originally acquired from Laurent de la Rosière, sold by Moinette Antoine to Crespin Frozard for $750, on November 4, 1828.”

  Saint Landry Parish, Notary Book B, page 243.

  Msieu Crespin Frozard didn't look at me or at my son. He walked toward his carriage, and Jean-Paul walked backward for ten steps, facing me on the steps in front of the courthouse, smiling wider now to let me know that everything would be fine this time.

  Noémie's night breath rattled in her throat like dried gourd seeds. She was not my child. Her murmurs made me melancholy. I moved my bed to Jean-Paul's room.

  I would not rent that room, with the south-facing window overlooking the yard, where the chinaberries were winter-gold balloons for mice. I spent the nights watching the moon cold and December blue, the shadows like black needles on the bare ground.

  He had taken his trunk. What did he have? I didn't even know. His washbowl was white, but deep inside, I saw the faint black etchings. A boat on the little desk near the window. A june beetle had steered it once, his thorny legs attached to the tiny tiller made of a translucent grain of rice.

  My eyes hurt when I tried to sew. Only the blouse for Fantine, made of white ponds, was beautiful. My sewing was nowhere near Jean-Paul's, not fine like my mother's. I was only good for moving dirt and collecting money. Holding on to bricks. I could keep the bricks from burning, so Jean-Paul would someday have them.

  The wind returned, and the house swirled again with ashes and leaves and fine dust from horse hooves. The dust coated everything, even when we kept the shutters bolted and the house dark.

  Msieu Vosclaire said, “A shift in the atmosphere.”

  Msieu Césaire said, “Only God sneezing.”

  His valet said, “Some of that coffee there, eh?”

  They sent a cart for me.

  The Frozard groom said, “Didn't know who to send for. Boy a slave, the overseer said. Msieu Frozard, he in New Orleans. Then the cook say, That boy Jean-Paul tell me he not sold, he just loan. Say, Get the mother from Opelousas.”

  “Is he ill?” The road was rutted deep by wheel tracks, and my teeth cut my lip. Blood from inside the mouth tastes different. The wind pushed behind us, pushed the mule's tail along its side to make the skin tremble.

>   The groom was silent. “Bad off,” he said. Then he looked ahead at the road.

  Beef broth for fever, Tretite always said. Willow bark tea for headache. Ginger for stomach. I had packed these things hurriedly.

  The groom pulled down the long road to the canefields, passing the barn, and then he turned his head away from me as if a stone had struck him.

  Jean-Paul lay on a cane-cart, shaded with burlap over the frame. I bent over his face. His eyes were closed. His lips were hard as cypress. I reached out to move the burlap sacks covering his body and saw the blood. Pooled in the cart. Black. They had wrapped his thigh with sacking, and it was rusted brown, and already the dust from the wind clung to the wetness and his hair and his eyelashes.

  The cook. Smell of meat. Smell of coffee in her tignon when she held my shoulders. “Why is he in the cane?” I shouted. “He is an upholsterer! He was not hired for cane.”

  She whispered into my ear, “He took them chairs out piece by piece to the barn, put on new cloth, but she never like the work. The colors. Then she go off to New Orleans, and the overseer tell that boy go in the field. Too much cane.”

  The overseer shouted toward the cart, “That who owned him? Tell her get him out of here before the others stop working.”

  I climbed up into the cart, tearing my dress hem. So much blood. His eyes closed. You belong to me. You belong to me. His neck warm. His throat still.

  The groom stood close at my elbow and said, “That wind make the people angry all week. They work so hard, don't like how your boy smile all the time. Marques didn't cut him on purpose. That boy just don't move. Marques keep yelling at him go faster, stop smiling and move. All week I hear him. That boy don't answer no questions. Just smile. Smile and say something low. Like he ain't here. Then today Marques—he flail up that cane knife, and that boy don't move out the way.”

  “Her boy,” the cook said.

  The tall, sweet grass rose like a wall around us. I lifted his head to rest it in my lap. His neck bent. His spine. My fingers on his face.

  Cloth smelling of coffee. The cook bent herself around me, a stranger, and said as if she couldn't believe it, “You his mother.”

  I took him home.

  The cane knife had hit him in the thigh. A vein. The blood pooled at the bottom of the cart. The groom carried Jean-Paul, wrapped in sacking and a sheet brought by the cook. The overseer was a distant voice in the cane.

  I took him home.

  He lay in his room. Charité and Noémie's hands with mine on his skin. The passages. The swinging dangle. The sternum, where water pooled for one moment like a tiny bayou. The cut on his thigh like a tear in cloth. A vein. Wrist and throat and temple.

  When the women were gone, I lay on the floor beside his bed. With the sharpened knife, I cut off my braids. My mother was gone. There was no dya to shift into another skin. My hair lay under his bed. Ropes. Reins.

  I pulled the blade across my wrists, just where the scars were from the boat, and across the coffee bean burns. Blood welled up in a fine sting. I pulled again. But the tingle was only a burn. Not enough.

  And no voice spoke to me. God did not tell me to stop. My mother did not speak to me. Jean-Paul's utter silence above, on the moss mattress, did not change.

  Cut after cut after cut, threads of blood meshing, smeared with my palms, but I could not find my veins, because I did not have the courage. I lay on my back, my tears streaming past my neck onto the floor, my blood already drying so that it was a second skin.

  Dis-rien, moi. Rien.

  Say nothing.

  The spoon came close to my mouth. She was not my sister. Charité. She said, “Crime against God, what you do.”

  The rag was wet on my arms. She was not my daughter. She was someone else's child. Noémie. But she bathed me because I had paid for her. Paid money to her mother.

  Coffee. Sugar. All die. Tou-mort. The blue cloth. The dahlia plates. The peacock. His pheasant plate on the stand over the fireplace. My fireplace. His fireplace. His curtains. Tou-mort.

  Nothing in my mouth.

  Someone died for coffee? Where? Eggs and rice. Hera and Phrodite could have died in the rice. He died in the sugar.

  She tried to give me broth.

  Rien.

  Rien.

  Water. Who died for water? The rain fell on my roof and ran into my cistern.

  Bricks. He died for bricks. Wood burns. Ashes and pig fat make soap. Someone dies for soap. Ashes. No ashes from brick. Even if I knocked this candle over while his body lay here, in the room where he would have sewed, and we burned to ash and bone—my hair burned to my skull, his hair combed over so neatly—the bricks would not melt.

  I kicked at my own walls.

  Screamed and screamed into my pillowcase, my face hot— fevered as a child. As when I burned with fever and my mother moved a wet cloth over me. My mother. So much better than me. Gone. My son. I pushed my face into the wet cotton. I will not breathe. I can die now.

  “Madame!”

  Maman. Noémie turned me over. Her hands were brown. She was not my child.

  Twelve DYA

  “Did you have sisters?”

  “No, petite.” I held her small, pale hand in mine.

  “Who taught you to sew?” Marie-Claire asked.

  “My mother.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Dead.” We waited for a horse and cart to cross the street.

  “Why do we not visit her?”

  We walked through the dusty streets toward the cemetery. The ribbons I tied at the ends of Marie-Claire's braids were green as ivy.

  “She is in Africa,” I said. “I visit her in my memory. She is with her own mother, and her mother's mother.”

  “Where is Africa?”

  “Across the water, petite.”

  One spring, when I was five or six, a violent wind rattled the tops of the trees on Azure, and when we went out, baby birds were dead everywhere, lying on the brick paths and in our clearing, their bodies only scrawls of bone and their eyes dull buttons still covered with skin.

  When I cried, my mother said, “They see nothing, they feel nothing. They never live yet.”

  But I imagined them waiting, their beaks open, having heard and felt the larger wings in the nest that came and went, and then I imagined how they felt falling.

  ———

  She was my daughter.

  Marie-Claire was my daughter because I bought her, and she had no one else, and I was her mother, and would free her when she turned twenty-one.

  She helped me wash the angels every month. Jean-Paul. Tretite.

  I had washed them alone for five years. I sat on the earth beside Jean-Paul's headstone, and every time, the idea that he was under the grass hurt freshly behind my ribs. His femur. Thigh. His eyes. The soft spot on his skull, pulsing while he drank inside my dressfront. The smile that everyone knew was not a smile.

  A few times, my fingers pushed into the dirt. The conveyance of everything we were into dirt. Then I touched the angel wings, gray in the moonlight.

  But now when Marie-Claire helped me light the candles, the marble glowed golden yellow. Beloved son.

  Marie-Claire was not a candle. Her skin was bright. She lit my rooms the best she could.

  I had seen her sitting in a trader's cart in 1835. An American, the trader, a dirty man with a dark blond beard like sawdust clinging to his chin. He had been in the square for two days selling Indian blankets he said Opelousas people had sold him in the woods. It wasn't until the second day that the small head and shoulders moved above the cloth.

  “Who is the girl?” I asked him.

  She was about five. Lightest brown, pecan-shell, with curly hair matted and full of dried leaf specks. She sucked her thumb.

  “They found her in the woods and sold her to me. Them Indians. I'm takin her to Baton Rouge.”

  “I'll give you one hundred fifty dollars cash for her now.”

  He squinted at my dress. “I can g
et more for her in Baton Rouge. Sometime they want 'em small. Buy 'em cheap, get 'em ready.” He grinned at my breasts, covered with my shawl.

  “Two hundred dollars,” I said, coolly. “Cash.”

  When I lifted her off the wagon, she smelled like a wet dog. “You are ready now to be free,” I whispered to her.

  She didn't know her name. In front of the fire, where I bathed her, she answered the same to each question.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sais pas.”

  “How were you lost in the woods?”

  “Sais pas.”

  “You must be five, petite. Someone must have called you by a name.”

  She shook her head.

  “What did you do?”

  “What they tell me.”

  “Where are your parents? Your mother?” She only moved her shoulders, but her eyes had not been sealed under skin, never opened like the baby birds. She had seen a mother sometime. She ate rice with her fingers, but she knew how to hold a spoon.

  When she was finished with the rice and gravy, she lay before the fire in a clean blouse, which fell to her knees. She curled on her side, her thumb in her mouth, her cheeks pulling inward.

  I sat for a long time, watching the rice she had dropped on the tablecloth. Rice was wet and soft when cooked, and it dried hard and translucent, and if you cooked it again, nothing would soften the grain. It was finished in that form. A seed.

  I brushed the dried seeds from Jean-Paul's pheasant plate.

  I bent my legs and knelt near her, asked her if she would be called Marie-Claire, and she nodded.

  I said, “You may call me Maman.”

  I used to spit on Pélagie's floor every day. Manuel, the Rosière groom, always joked that the best bootblack was African saliva mixed with lead blacking. “Something in my spit make it hold and shine.”