Sweeping and washing floors every day, back then, if I came back into a room to see a small clot of mud from Etienne's boots, or a tangle of reddish brown hair or green thread, I spit onto the floor and gathered with my cloth the dirt that would not be gathered dry.
My saliva stayed in the grain of the wood floor, and my dirt was outside, and even though the whites would not eat with me or look at me, their feet touched my spit, and when I bathed Madame de la Rosière and Madame Pélagie, I saw that though our skin hung and creased and gathered differently, they had two breasts, with tiny passages for milk, and under our dresses we were all the same.
The tiny passages for milk, even years after my breasts had no one to feed, still collected sweet-smelling moisture sometimes.
If I left the earth, and lay under a third stone angel, and my soul went là-bas to be with my mother and Jean-Paul and Tretite and the others I had loved, but no one left behind ever remembered me, the touch of my hand on skull, the tender part down the center of someone's hair—if no one remembered that I had saved coins and then the paper printed with ink worth much more, that I had paid for this house where my blood stained the floor in one room and was covered with a small Turkish rug—then my mother's words were nothing but sound formed around lye steam and saliva and evaporated in the wind of the clearing, and my own words were nothing but ink in trails on pressed tree bark.
Only human animals remember us, aside from the words we leave behind on paper. Five years later, when Marie-Claire was ten, I bought Marie-Thérèse. Marie-Thérèse was dark as my mother, with glowing cheeks and fine hair in whorls along her skull. She was part of an estate being partitioned at the courthouse, and I stood near the group of men buying slaves.
Across from me was Etienne. He stared at me for a long time, while the bodies were being assembled.
I stared back. I was not owned but should never look at white people's eyes. He could have me arrested. But he could not meet my eyes. He dropped his own eyes to my breasts and then looked away.
My breasts, like any other woman's. Céphaline's had been small as biscuits. Pélagie's round and trembling pushed forward in her dresses. Fantine's cone-shaped, like anthills, and then plump when she fed her daughter and my son. And mine had grown large and veined after Jean-Paul's birth. When I left him behind, it seemed to me the blue veins would burst. How did blood turn to milk?
Etienne lifted his chin.
We had buttocks cleft in two. Toes. Collarbones. Angel wings—not shoulder blades. We were marked. Not marked.
He lifted his hand to bid for two men. Field slaves. Then he turned and left.
I waited for another daughter, watching her vacant stare.
The money was set aside. Sometimes, counting it at night, I held a coin and thought of my son's fingers pushing the needle through cloth or my own fingers sliding the first coin into my apron pocket here on this very street near the courthouse.
The boardinghouse was always full. Marie-Claire helped me now with the laundry, ironing men's shirts for Madame Delacroix's house, which was run now by her daughter, who, when she saw me every day, still called to her own slave, “The laundry girl is here for the shirts!”
I was not a girl, but a woman who had saved enough money so that if someone small were falling, someone with no wings, I would open my mouth.
I waited for the small girl, five or six, who sat in no one's lap, who was held around the wrist by a piece of rope.
Only our pelts were different, I told Marie-Claire and Marie-Thérèse. Our skin and fur. Everything else was the same.
Marie-Thérèse didn't listen in the same way. She was feral, like a cat raised out-of-doors who wasn't certain she wanted to be inside. She hid biscuits, buttons, pralines, and even eggs. She knew how to make a hole in an eggshell and suck out the liquid.
When she learned that inside the yolk was a baby chicken, Marie-Thérèse said, “I don't taste no feathers.”
“What if we had feathers?” Marie-Claire said.
We hung up the sheets, the mended spots like moths in the sunlight.
“Sell your pelt,” I murmured. The American trapper had said he'd skin us and sell the pelts. He'd traveled through the woods, killing and skinning, leaving his seed. Etienne loved the forest— not his own land, his wife, his daughters. He never knew his son. He had nothing now, perhaps.
I had my children. My memories of Jean-Paul, and now the laughter of my girls. The trapper tried to erase me, my skin and breath, but he was nothing and he left no one.
I had my daughters, my property, my memory, my history, my future. I had never wanted to raise animals, or crops in the earth—not sugarcane growing from green femurs to tall grass.
Inside my kitchen, in a dark cupboard, the cone of sugar hung away from the ants. Each morning, Marie-Thérèse took it out and cut large pinches with the sugar scissors, and put two or three pieces in her mouth, her fingers quick as bird beaks reaching down for the sweetness.
Then Marie-Claire took the cone away from her sister and said, “Greedy pig. Cochon.” She ground the rock-hard sugar into powder in a bowl for our baking.
I was forty-three years old, and all I wanted to do was sit down. The year was 1840.
You can taste one crystal of salt or sugar on your tongue. One. The ocean water dries, the cane juice boils, and they leave behind pieces of sparkle.
I remembered boiling the yard grass at Azure, trying to make it into sugar. I remembered the first time Jean-Paul saw sand, outside Emilia's door, and he put the pebbles in his mouth. I remembered my mother dropping one shard of sugar into my palm and studying my face.
I had left my mother behind nearly thirty years ago.
All I wanted to do was sit in my velvet chair by the fire and sleep.
The fire was enough sound for company. The fire was never silent. That was why old people always had a fire. Not just for the heat.
———
Every piece of cloth made me see Jean-Paul. Fine muslin for mosquito barres. Linen for the tablecloth. Fine soft calico printed with flowers for the girls’ dresses. Pleats. Tucks. Sleeves. My fingers on the needle. Their fingers on the needle. We sat before the fire. They talked, the coals shifted, and I could cry silently without them ever knowing. I knew how to keep my nose from sniffing. I knew how to move the handkerchief—soft as an old tignon—up to my eyes as if sweat gathered there to sting.
I didn't want them to think my tears meant I was unhappy with them. My girls.
My blood now. My name after theirs. My daughters.
But water still moved inside me. Salt water. Céphaline had said the ocean took the water from the rivers, the clouds took the water from the ocean, and the rivers took the water from the clouds.
One night, I cried for her. For her voice, her fine brain that held all those words and patterns and numbers and the way she gave them to me because she couldn't keep them all for herself.
One night, I cried for myself. The girls had gone to sleep in our room, the door open a black wedge because they never wanted it dark; they wanted a slice of firelight and the glint of my needle.
But my hands rested on my skirt. By the end of the day of plucking chickens and rinsing clothes and cutting onions, the veins on the backs of my hands looked like green-blue letters. My shoulder was marked with a flower of France. My eye was marked with a floating scar. My insides were marked with poison. I was shrinking, the way women did as they got older, and my skin was thin as old parchment. My wrists and arms and hands scribbled with tiny dark bayous.
When the fire was only jewels, and the house was safe from burning, I let my head rest on the black velvet pad sewed for my chair. I couldn't sleep lying down but had to begin my rest this way, as my mother had, as old women did, with my body still convinced that it was working, watching, waiting.
———
Every month, at my son's grave, my daughters laid the only flowers he had ever loved: sewn blossoms, on scraps of cloth.
My own place was be
side him and Tretite, my stone already ordered, my angel already carved by the mason.
At the outskirts of the cemetery, we passed the grave of Joseph, Opelousas Indian, died 1829. He had frozen to death one night in the alley behind my house. I had paid for him to be buried in a cypress box in this small piece of earth near the other graves of Indians. I tied red trade cloth to the small iron cross once a year, and it faded to pink.
“Why do the Indians wear blankets and the whites wear coats?”
“The Indians don't all wear blankets.”
“The ones near Bayou Carron do.”
“Why were you near the bayou?”
“You told us to take that package of shirts to Madame Delacroix.”
“That's not near the bayou.”
“Noémie's Eulalie said the water was so low we might find something in the banks. But all we saw was a dead dog.”
“Why would you want to see that?”
“I thought we would find gold. From the pockets of a dead man who someone threw into the bayou.”
“Marie-Thérèse!”
“Eulalie says bad men fight and throw one another in the bayou. But now the water is only black puddles. It smells.”
“When the rains come, the bayou will flood again.”
“Where does all the water go?”
“To the ocean.”
“How does it get into the sky?”
“I don't know.”
Marie-Claire had been silent all this time. Then she said, “Who told you to buy me?”
We stopped walking, and our reflections froze in the window of a tavern. “I saw you waiting there for me, petite, told myself you needed a mother.”
“I had a mother,” Marie-Claire said. “She died.”
“I had a mother,” I said. “She died.”
“That's not fair.”
“No.”
We came toward my window, with my name in painted letters.
“My name was Jacinthe,” she said.
“I know. One night when you were feverish, you told me.”
“I don't know my mother's name.”
“I know.”
In our backyard were clean clothes walking in the wind, the empty sleeves reaching out for the laughing girls. Get the gravy out, you use this one. Get the rust out, this one. Get your monthly blood out, this one and cold, cold water.
“Who told you?” Marie-Claire asked, when I showed her how to erase her own blood.
“My mother.”
“Every month? Forever?”
“For a long time.”
She whispered, “For you, too? Even after you have a baby?”
I said, “Not anymore. Now I am finished.”
The white shirts we washed for all the lawyers and clerks and planters hung stiff and starched on another line. Marie-Claire liked to whisper, “That one is like a ghost. Reaching out his arms.”
She shivered. Marie-Thérèse would roll her eyes and say, “That's the shirt of Msieu the Boring Book Man.”
Msieu the Boring Book Man was Mr. Johnson, the new court clerk, who lived in Msieu Vosclaire's old room. Mr. Johnson had never married either. He wanted to read his books when he was not eating. He spoke only to the other men. He ate his breakfast and walked across to the courthouse every day, and he paid me his board every month, and because he was a red-faced, red-haired man who was known throughout the parish, and who planned to live out his life here in my house, no one ever bothered me or my daughters.
Msieu Césaire had died. Etienne had gone to New Orleans with his wife, who hated Opelousas. He had sold Rosière to someone I never met.
Madame Lescelles had died, and her nephew inherited the store. But there were other stores now. Sometimes I wondered about Hervé Richard, who could have been in New Orleans or New York, but who would never be able to come back to Opelousas and see what had happened to me. He wouldn't see me with two daughters. “You will have your own child,” he said that day, but these were my own children now.
Julien Antoine and Jonah Greene lived in Paris. They wrote to me once a year and sent fine handkerchiefs or lace collars. Then, after seven years, their words ceased.
My work was now to speak. I told my daughters of my mother's mother, on the boat, and I washed their hair, so like my own. I told them of my mother's muslin clouds and pink-sequined arms, while I sat beside their bed. I told them of her stitches, and Jean-Paul's thread, and I put pinches of sugar in their palms.
Marie-Claire was seventeen in 1847. She was old enough to be noticed by Eugène the mason's son, Eugène fils, but she could not marry until she was free. She could not be free until she was twenty-one, and then she would own her sister, until Marie-Thérèse was old enough to be free.
I had to live that long.
“You smell,” my younger daughter said to me.
“Oui, Marie-Thérèse. I am ill.”
“You are not coughing.”
“No. I am ill inside my blood.”
She skittered away. She was twelve. She would never think of anyone but herself, and I had to smile at the obstinacy of her own blood. Marie-Claire was obedient, thoughtful, the older child, who would be a mother forever. Marie-Thérèse was disobedient, watchful, and never thoughtful, and she would always taste and smell and touch what she wanted before considering anyone else.
She studied me gravely in my chair, from which I could hardly move.
Pélagie—her husband's brother had left her barren from disease. The trapper had left me with something inside my blood— syphilis, whispered Doctor Vidrine's nephew Gustave, who treated me now. Impure contact. But how did the fluid of seeds leave something inside blood that raced through every part of my body? How did my vision fail? There was no blood in my eyes. Only salt water bathing my irises. Lead in Céphaline's blood, and sweet smell on her breath.
Did the animals in the woods leave disease with one another? The alligators and birds?
I felt like a child myself, melted into my chair, my flesh loose and soft, my feet swollen, while Marie-Claire cooked.
She would be eighteen, then nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. I drank the broth she made, and waited.
I remembered—in the clearing, Mamère stirring the black clothes, stirring the bloodied clothes of Eveline. I pricked my wrist and waited until the blood had formed the shining button— not black, not red—laid the dried perfect circle on a plate and crushed it with the pestle. Powder. Powder that contained all my thoughts and measurements and my mother and father. Sang mêlé. My blood mixed with theirs.
I added a drop of water and waited. Stirred. Only a smear of dark moisture. Nothing else. Resurrection. That was what the God of smoke and words promised during Mass. Heaven.
Home. That was what the Ibo god promised. What had the Bambara gods promised my mother?
Where was Jean-Paul? Had he ever believed in me? He had not believed I would come back. What God did he love?
They had to be waiting for me. He was with my mother. Là-bas. Over there. Tretite and my grandmother, her breath stained indigo blue. Céphaline and Pélagie? Were whites in the same là-bas? Heaven. Were we separate? I would have liked to tell Céphaline about the body, to tell Pélagie about celadon and ocher and aubergine satin. I would have liked Jean-Paul to tell her. But là-bas—
My daughters brought me broth and took my soiled clothes and combed my hair. My skull ached under their touch. Marie-Claire combed for hours, and I shivered like a horse's flank when he is stroked. Marie-Thérèse watched.
“You will take care of her,” I told Marie-Claire. “You will tell Marie-Thérèse the stories until she knows them.”
“Of course.”
“She has my mother's name. Every time I combed your hair I knew you had the ni of my mother.”
“Oui, Maman.”
“You will be the mother. Her blood.”
“Oui, Maman.”
“You will marry Eugène, and he will keep this house forever with you. He will not burn it.”
&
nbsp; “Maman. No one will burn it.”
“Bricks cannot burn, but the floors. The doors. Watch the candles. Always watch the candles.”
“Maman.”
“Paper can burn. But the papers are in the courthouse. Mr. Johnson has already taken the papers.”
The papers already filed in the courthouse on October 3, 1849, in the large book of Notarial Acts, read:
It being understood that the said Moinette Antoine is to emancipate the said mulatto girl slave Marie-Claire, 19 years of age, the said griffone girl slave Marie-Thérèse, 14 years of age, when they arrive at the full age of majority, or before that period if the law changes to permit it, and the said Moinette Antoine hereby promises to obligate herself, or her executors Monsieur Richard Johnson and Monsieur Charles Drouet, to pass an act of emancipation in favor of the said girl slaves at the shortest period that the same can be done by law, giving the said slaves all the prerogatives and privileges of free persons, as though they had been born free.
I copied the wording of the last part from the document I had finally read: Le Code Noir of 1724.
All Jews must be expelled from the colony of Louisiana. I thought of Mr. Jonah Greene, his bulb of flesh, the small cap I had seen him put on his head in his room. His church in his room, his murmured church words.
They were in Paris, with their own window, sitting in chairs before a fire with their shoulders touching or their knees.
I lay with my bed drawn close to the fire, inside my bricks, with my daughters nearby.
Every night, they slept in their large bed, their braided hair tangling with each other's outflung arms or tucked-close chins. Marie-Claire tried to inch away in her sleep, as she was grown now, her shoulder turned away from Marie-Thérèse, who began most nights still pressing her face to her older sister's spine. Then Marie-Thérèse would shift and lie facedown, separate, arms flat underneath her and toes pointed as if she dove all night through the air.
When I knew I would die, when the pain pulsed in every watery branch of my body, I asked Marie-Claire to buy the coffin. The coffin-maker refused to come. He said it was bad luck to measure someone for a coffin while they were still alive. So I measured myself but said the coffin was for a boarder who would take it to his plantation when he left town.
A Million Nightingales Page 35