He was satisfied with this deception.
I wrapped myself in white linen, the shroud I had sewn many months ago and put aside, when I first felt little crystals shooting inside my heart. The girls knew nothing.
I left my daughters everything. Every brick and piece of wood and iron. Every ash and sliver of soap. I hoped they would love each other forever.
I laid myself in the coffin one night, in the kitchen where the man placed it. The fire burned low. The wood smelled sharp, and in one corner, I saw sap glistening from a wound in the pine.
I was inside a boat, a pirogue shaped to fit only one body, to take nothing down the river to hunt, to kill, to sell. Nothing of value. Bones and skin and ligaments and the brain swimming in the skull. The muscle of the heart hurting, not aching, as people always said: heartache. Broken heart. Foolish. It was a thick, tough, pulsing thing. The pain was in the muscle, just as in the leg or the wrist, from twisting wet clothes, from moving and moving and moving.
I couldn't let them send Jean-Paul down the bayou, toward the ocean, because I wanted to lie beside him. All those years. My place in the earth. But if we went là-bas, to be with my mother, there was water. Céphaline would laugh, she would have an explanation for the clouds, for rain, but I didn't have to listen now. I was old. I could imagine all the rivers and oceans, the fog so thick and moist in the mornings, and the sky as one place. The rain came from somewhere above us, and fed the rivers, and it never disappeared.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Debts will always be owed.
I can't write anything without Richard Parks and Holly Robinson. At Pantheon, Alice van Straalen. Also Elaine Pfefferblit, Beth Kep-hart, Juli Jameson, Kate Moses, Dwayne Sims and all my Sims family, Revia Chandler and all the Aubert family, Kari Rohr, Eric Barr, Nicole Vines, and Tanya Jones, who helped me in many ways. My mother and father, who are never done, my neighbors who see the light on at 2:00 a.m., my relatives who tell stories—it takes a village to raise a book. In Washington, Louisiana, I was honored to share a house and stories with Susan and Robert Tinney.
I am immensely grateful to libraries and their staffs—the University of California, Riverside, library staff especially for years of friendly companionship. In the stacks, I found the story of a remarkable woman named Manon Baldwin in Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country, by Carl A. Brasseaux, Keith P. Fontenot, and Claude F. Oubre. I found recipes for cleansers and tonics in a book by a remarkable man, Robert Roberts, who wrote The House Servant's Directory, one of the first books written by an African American and published by a commercial press (in 1827). I found inspiration in Africans in Colonial Louisiana, by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba, by Christina Vella.
I owe my girls big-time: Gaila, Delphine, and Rosette.
A NOTE ABOUT THE LANGUAGES OF EARLY
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LOUISIANA
During the 1700s and the first few years of the 1800s, Louisiana was a colony ruled at different times by France or Spain. Many native Indian tribes lived there, along with French, Spanish, Swiss, German, and Canadian officials, soldiers, farmers, and trappers, as well as Acadian refugees and Africans from a number of tribes brought as slaves to the Americas. Each group contributed words and phrases from their own language to the standard French spoken by residents who had emigrated from France. The result was Creole French, unique to Louisiana. In 1803 Louisiana became an American territory and in 1812 it joined the Union, but it would be years before English was widely spoken.
GLOSSARY
Attakapas—Indian people of the Gulf Coast and other areas of Louisiana; a former colonial territory in Louisiana.
Bambara—an African people, as well as the language they speak.
la barbe espagnole—Spanish moss, from the French for “the beard of a Spaniard.”
barracoon—a barrack for temporary holding of slaves.
batture—the low-lying land between a riverbank and its levee.
besoin—French for “need.”
blanc, les blancs—French for “white,” “the whites.”
blankitte, les blankittes—single and plural form of a Creole word used by slaves for whites.
bousillage—a mixture of mud, horsehair, moss, and straw used to chink walls.
bouton—French for “pimple.”
bozal—Creole word for newly arrived African slaves.
cadeau—French for “gift.”
chalan—French for “barge,” a kind of boat often used in nineteenth-century Louisiana.
chênière—a wooded ridge or sandy hummock in a bayou or swamp.
cimmaron—a fugitive slave.
ciprière—Creole word for swampy uncultivated land with cypress trees in standing water.
cochon—French for “pig.”
Code Noir—The Slave Code instituted by France in 1724 to regulate the discipline and commerce of Negro slaves in the colony of Louisiana. In 1806, under American territorial rule, it was revised to restrict slaves and free blacks more harshly.
corbateur—itinerant trader.
coureur-de-bois—a hunter or explorer of the woods.
Dieu—French for “God.”
dya—Bambara word for the essence of one's spirit, which after death transfers to the next born in a family.
faro—Bambara word for water spirit.
fleur-de-lis—a stylized image of a lily, traditionally used as an emblem of French royalty, and by extension, France.
garçonnière—French for “bachelor apartment,” often a room separate from a main residence.
grandmère—French for “grandmother.” griffe, griffone— male and female versions of the word for a person
who is three-fourths black and one-fourth white. Ibo—An African people, as well as the language they speak; used in
nineteenth-century Louisiana to indicate African tribal origin. jardin—French for “garden.”
Ki—term used in 1800s Louisiana to indicate African tribal origin.
là-bas—French for “yonder,” “over there;” used for “afterlife” by Moinette.
maman—French for “mama.”
maringouin—Creole for “mosquito.”
matelas—Creole for piles made of harvested sugarcane to prevent freezing; from the French for “mattress.”
Mina—An African people, as well as the language they speak; used in nineteenth-century Louisiana to indicate African tribal origin.
mulâtresse—a woman who is half-black, half-white.
nègre—French for “Negro,” a black person.
ni—Bambara for “soul” or “spirit.”
octoroon—a person who is one-eighth black and seven-eighths white.
ouaouaron—Creole word for “bullfrog.”
oui—French for “yes.”
pas—French for “not.”
père—French for “father.”
petit, petite, petites—male, female, and plural forms of French for “child.”
pigeonnière—French for “dovecote,” a separate building.
quadroon—a person who is one-fourth black, three-fourths white.
le quartier—the slave housing area or street.
sacatra—a person who is seven-eighths black and one-eighth white.
sagamite—a gruel of hulled cooked corn.
sais pas—shortened French version of “I don't know.”
sang mêlé—a person of mixed blood.
Singalee—African-Creole for someone from Senegal.
tafia—a cheap rum made of distilled sugarcane juice.
tignon—headscarf required by a 1786 Spanish law stating that women of color, free or slave, must cover their hair.
toujours—French for “always.”
tout—French for “all.”
Copyright © 2006 by Susan Straight
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents ei
ther are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Straight, Susan.
A million nightingales / Susan Straight.
p. cm.
1. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 2. Plantation life—Fiction. 3. Teenage girls—Fiction. 4. Women slaves—Fiction. 5. Louisiana—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.T6795M55 2006 813'.54—dc22 2005050052
eISBN: 978-0-307-48826-8
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