A Million Nightingales (17 page)

Fantine's mouth curved. Her cheeks rose dark and full like velvet pillows when she smiled.

Basile kissed those cheeks until Fantine's head fell back. So he could have her neck. But no man had ever looked at me that way. I meant something different to them—Christophe, the men in New Orleans, the fingers, the boat, the white man in the shed while he flicked my breast with his stick. They wanted to clench their fists in my hair and pull my head back themselves.

“You bright. You get anything you want.”

Take but one candle to light a room, Mamère had said to Hera. I closed my eyes.

I could wash my dress and start over and pray.

Sophia came inside. “Get out there and finish.”

Fantine said, “She look pretty now.” A new edge shone hard in her voice. She wanted me to use my brightness.

“She look pretty at night when she chain up. She run again, Msieu blame me.” Sophia made her voice thin and low as roots
along the floor. “You girls only here cause nobody want you. Nobody have room. I only feed you. You are little animals, and I lock the gate.”

A bruise. A contusion, Doctor Tom had told Céphaline the name. The blood rushes to the site of injury, he said, then collects there and the ill humor of the place turns the blood black.

Under the skin, she said.

The skin merely holds the liquids inside and protects the organs.

How would you know, she said, if someone black—like Marie-Thérèse—had a bruise?

Doctor Tom shrugged. You could touch the skin, feel for swelling.

But Moinette—you could see under her skin.

Ah, yes. Half white. Maybe she would have half a contusion. Then he placed the leech on her temple, just at the hairline. Be still, my love. We bleed to restore the balance. Your poor blood is rushing to help your head, but there is too much. Your poor head aches. I know.

My shoulder. I lay on my shelf, on my side with the branded part in the air, and blood rushed to the burn and then rushed away. Blood was hot. That wouldn't help. You can't have cool blood. Cool blood is a hard shell over a cut. Then I could chew it. Cool blood bread on my teeth.

So hot. Dead skin. Burned like Mamère's from the fires and lye. Fire made a raised scar. Lye made a pink hole.

A steam burn on Mamère's forearm, from a kettle—then, after a week, the whole piece of dried skin lifted off, thin and crackling.

Leather.

My body shivered around my burn, which took all the heat of my blood for a time, then gave it back.

Underneath the burn, Mamère's skin had been pink as a puppy tongue, smooth as glass. I seized her arm each day to look at it. She let me. She said nothing. Every day, more etching appeared,
the wrinkles of dryness, new skin tinted with smoke and dirt— with the very air—until that large oval was only a bit lighter than the rest of Mamère.

I didn't know what my skin did, at the burn. I couldn't see it. Sophia dressed it with lard and cloth. Under my shift, it dried and the skin fell off, the fleur-de-lis crumpled into flakes of my body that disappeared into the canerows and yard dirt and washed into the cracks of the wooden floor.

At night, Sophia locked the cuff around my ankle and bolted the chain to the ring Gervaise had put in the wall beside my shelf. He knew metalwork. He brought Sophia a new spider pot to hang over the coals. Tiny bones—wings and legs—floated on the broth.

She unlocked me in the morning. I ate the boiled corn, remembering the hot liquid of my saliva working the stone kernel.

I hoed the grass. I heard Fantine and Basile in the trees. I heard Sophia and Gervaise at the wall. The rain dripped into the chimney, and I heard Philippine next door speak to her husband, Firmin.

His cheeks were scarred with
V.
Voleur. Thief. And the same flower that had healed to a scar my fingers could trace.

By the fall, Gervaise was making cane knives with a small curving hook. And he forged the new brand Msieu de la Rosière instructed him to fashion—a rosebud shaped like a diamond, with a curving stem and two slanted lines for leaves. It would brand slaves, if necessary.

Gervaise showed it to Sophia. She said the brand was my fault.

Amanthe came from the house to tell us what Msieu told his wife about the brand. “Say he lost one and almost lost Moinette. Say he see run in people eyes. Say you show the horse the whip, sometime you don't have to beat him.”

Sophia shouted at me, “Msieu say if one more run, he brand us all. Round up like cattle.” She caught my arm. “If Fronie get burn because of you, I hurt you worse than fire.”

I jerked my arm from her. “There is nowhere to run,” I said. It
was true. At the edges of the canefields, I imagined I saw the Indian, in the sudden wash of water at the bayou's edge or in a shiver of branches in the forest.

I pulled each stalk toward me and hit the base with the knife. We cut it blade by blade, like cutting someone's beard by pulling each hair separate and clipping it. The horses pulled their grass from the ground near their stable, their teeth sharp as our knives.

And it was clear to me, then, that every free person I met— Indian, white, African—would only sell me or use me as an animal. My skin. Hide. Pounds of money—my fat and fingers and breasts.

Mamère was wrong.

I belonged to anyone who could catch me or buy me.

The cane stalks stripped of leaves, their joints like knuckles when we loaded them onto carts. All around me—the knocking cut, then the whisper-slash of trimming, the rough swipe of the sharpening stone. At the end of the row, glints of water beyond the piled-high banks.

No one would ever love me but her. She wasn't wrong. I would be caught, sold, traded. I would never belong to anyone. I would never love anyone. Her fierce prayers rose each night and drifted into the water, the rivers and bayous and the rain, and stayed damp in my hair.

No one ran. We were too tired to walk. We woke when the bell sounded in the dark, ate cold cornmush from the night before, and walked behind the cart. The cane blocked all the moonlight, rustling over our heads.

The wall of grass was alive, moving in the wind as the sun rose. We lined ourselves before it, each with an entire row to cut.

Again. Again. Again. Like a puppet Céphaline had made with her governess once. The legs moving at the knee, the arms lifting and falling, the strings of ropy muscle.

Every day. Even Sunday. We stopped working at three on Sunday and went to the house for our food, with our clothes furred by dust clinging to cane juice, splinters in our hair.

Madame couldn't see us anyway. She said a prayer over our bowed heads. “Let the harvest continue safely and prosperously for all.”

At night, when the December wind blew cold, Philippine sat by our fire and said, “She don't pray for us next year.”

Sophia frowned. “She going?”

Philippine nodded. “Amanthe say she go to Paris for her eyes. In spring. She stay with the son. The Msieu sister come to run his house now. She order new furniture, new curtains. She can see. Amanthe washing all that dust Madame never see. At New Year, have a party. Show all them people in Opelousas and Washington the house.”

In the morning, I stayed in the woods to relieve my stomach. The barrel water was sour. The sky was bitterly cold, as it had been when I first arrived. The air hung like glass in the branches above me.

At the path, Baillo was waiting on his horse, his yellow eyes rimmed with red, his face unshaven. “I haven't forgotten you. Slow in the mind, but fast when you try to run.”

I was silent, as always. The words that I kept in my throat and chest swirled now like silt on the bottom of the bayou when I'd walked there for a moment, before the Indian pulled me up.

Baillo stared at me. “My father was a soldier when France came here. Seventeen sixty-nine. They never fed soldiers. He left one day to trap birds in the forest. When he came back, they said he had run. They tied him to a board and cut him in four pieces. The law.”

He nudged me forward with his canestalk, pushing at my hip, pointing me back to the field.

My words wouldn't stay inside. “What did they do with him?”

“They threw the pieces of him in the river.” He sighed and rested the canestalk on my shoulder, without pushing me. “But you—you are safe in the field. And you are fed.”

I hoed the grass and heard the birds above me.

When we walked back, over the bridge, the water was black as oil around the cypress stumps. There were no gods in the water here. Only in Africa. In the bayou and Barataria and the cypress
swamps and the Mississippi, which raced brown and wide past Azure, there were only pieces of flesh and the animals that ate us. The fish and alligators and even the tiny shrimp that crawled along the silt and mudbanks. They chewed our flesh, and it went into their own black sandy veins, and then they let the liquid left of us back into the current, which carried us away.

Madame Pélagie was her name. That first week, she called for me all night, every night. I lifted myself from the pallet of two blankets Amanthe had made for me in the hallway outside Madame Pélagie's room. She was propped on three pillows, her thick red-brown hair wrapped into curling rags by my nervous fingers, her eyes fastened on the window or the wall. She couldn't sleep. Her sewing lay on the coverlet beside her, even though it was after midnight.

She wanted scissors. A biscuit because it had been so long since dinner. A new candle. A book she had seen on Msieu's shelf.

Water. It was so hot here, she said, even in January. An hour later, she called me to empty the pot. I can't sleep with the smell, she said.

By the seventh day, I wanted to put the pot over her head. My eyes ached as if they rolled in sand. But the cuts on my hands, from the cane, were healed already. She slept all morning, and the cook, Léonide, roused me at dawn for my chores.

New candles for the dining room and parlor. Breakfast for Msieu, who would ride the fields or travel to town. Then begin the midday meal, Madame de la Rosière's favorite. Pinch the heads and shells from the shrimp—hold the clear, curved case in my palm. Try to think of the word Céphaline had used.
Carapace.

Don't think about the water now. Not in the hallway, the planks of shining wood stretched under me where I lay on the blanket, hearing Madame Pélagie call high and light like singing.

Her clothes were hung carefully in the armoire. I had arranged them from light color to dark, from finery to ordinary.

I had a new dress, too, a plain blue from Amanthe taken in at the waist and shoulder for me.

“I want a bright one,” Madame Pélagie had said when she'd seen us all lined up for the New Year, seen us all receiving our cloak and one set of clothing. “That one.”

“But that one doesn't know the house.” Madame de la Rosière squinted toward me.

“She will know me. I will train her myself.”

My old brown dress hung in the room next to the kitchen, where Amanthe and Léonide slept.

“They don't sleep inside with us,” Madame said.

“C'est de la folie! What if I need something in the night?”

“We are finished with the day at ten. Then Amanthe and Léonide go to the kitchen for the evening.”

“My brother has no valet?”

Madame shook her head, and Pélagie said, “This one sleeps in the hallway near my door until I become accustomed.”

Our carapaces. Our coverings. Pélagie measured coverings and hair and shoes and vases and carriages. Like the Auzennes, but not like them. I remembered Céphaline when she watched the Auzennes arrive in their carriage. Madame Pélagie was twenty-five years old, but her voice didn't have the sly, mean threads of those girls.

She was afraid. I lay near the glint of candlelight under her door. She moved restlessly on the chair, her bare feet brushing the floor while she sewed. She was here from France, to stay with her older half brother, Msieu. From the way she watched doors and paced at night, she was afraid of the dark hallways, like me.

On the seventh night, I filled the pitcher downstairs. The full moon rose over the roof. I missed Fantine's bubbling-water laugh. Was Sophia awake now, too, waiting for Gervaise to return with a small animal she could tear to pieces with her teeth?

The rainwater from the barrel smelled black and mossy. My mother was in her chair, the moon in her open window.

I closed Madame Pélagie's door and sat up against the hallway
wall. The moonlight was a silver knife down the canal of wood that Amanthe and I had polished that morning.

I imagined myself Mamère. Watching over myself, not sleeping, planning a way to keep myself safe.

I had been gone one year. Did she still stay awake, waiting for me? The smell of burned cane hung in the eaves here at Rosière, just as it had every year at Azure. The sugar had been packed into hogsheads and sent on the cart to the boat landing at Washington. Molasses dripped from the barrels, made glistening buttons on the dirt. I bent to touch a drop—already covered with dust. The smell of molasses would forever make me remember the cargo hold, and the darkness.

On New Year's Day, we lined up for Msieu, who wrote down name, age, and health. When he came to me, standing after Sophia and Fronie, he hesitated. “You have been here a year now,” he said.

“Oui, msieu.”

“You are not going to run again.”

“Non, msieu.”

“When I bought you, I was told that you dressed hair. You will come here in the morning.” His finger cut the air.

My ankle had a band of darkened shining skin, smooth as leather when I rubbed there. Tanned.

I would not run. I walked to the house. I saw a rabbit shivering under a bush, waiting for me to pass. When had my mother talked about rabbits? I passed the bell, the house of Mirande and Baillo, their two cows, the hog pens.

“Because my mother die and I was like a little rabbit out there,” Mamère had said one night. “Seven or eight. I move with Ama. Ama breathe that smell and die, too. Then we all, Ama children and me, we sleep in one room with the old woman. We call her Tante. So old her eyes like watermelon seed. But she watch us.”

That first day, when I reached the edge of the yard, the china-berry trees were bare, branches like walking sticks reaching for the sky. I stood beside the sweet olive bush. Madame de la Rosière couldn't see well at all now, Amanthe said, but she still
knew the keys. The piano music was like white clothes hanging in the trees, billowing. Céphaline's chemises. Moving like people against my hands as if they were friends, in our clearing, coming to tell me secrets.

No one knew me here, near this porch, in this big house. No one in le quartier. The piano notes went dark and soft. Quavering.

Mo tout seul. Mo tout seul. Christophe used to say that to me, fiercely, in the cane. You can't hurt me. I'm all alone. All alone.

“Look at this,” someone said from the porch. A man whose voice I had never heard. “From New Orleans? A daughter of joy.”

“Monsieur Antoine!” A woman's voice rose, light and calculated, strange to my ears. “She doesn't look very joyous.”

“The joy was in her past. In her creation.”

“Monsieur Antoine,” a darker, disapproving voice said. Madame de la Rosière. The piano had stopped. “Is that the little mulâtresse? That is not joy. That is licentiousness. And it is not her fault.”

“Not her fault, but her bestowal,” the man said gently, then went inside, closing a door.

“Come, child,” Madame de la Rosière said, her face turned toward the trees.

She wore a new dress, a fine silk with a sheen like oiled skin. Beside her was a younger woman, very beautiful, with red-brown hair lit as if from inside, and skin white and perfect as Céphaline's could never have been, even with the paste.

“Where did you learn to dress hair?” the younger woman said, her eyes moving over my clothes, my hands. “New Orleans?”

“No,” I said, and I saw her breast rise with words she would say to send me back to the field. I wanted to be inside the house, to find another route toward New Orleans, toward Azure. “But I was trained by a woman from New Orleans. She learned in Paris.”

The beautiful woman nodded.

My skin is a sheath, I thought, laying out Madame Pélagie's clothes from her trunk while she ate in the dining room. Silk,
wool, cotton—I tried to remember the receipts for cleaning lotions. The wool coat smelled of animal.

Animals have fur or hide. Mesdames have layers of corset, petticoat, linen chemise, and silk. I stopped at the mirror. My forearms were scarred with the finest white lines from the sharp blades of grass that had whipped around me when I cut down the stalks.

My face was nearly the same as when I left Céphaline's room, but my cheekbones held hollows underneath them. My skull. Cats have cheeks, to hold their whiskers. Mice hold corn there. What are we meant to store? Only smiles? I moved my lips and the bones rose, while the hollows moved.

We store nothing when we are not smiling, I thought.

“Laurent is gone for how long?” Pélagie asked. They sat in the parlor with their embroidery.

Laurent. The name of Msieu de la Rosière.

“Perhaps a month,” Madame answered.

I sewed flowers onto new napkins in the hallway just outside the door. It was my place now, my black-painted chair straddling the river of light down the wooden floor. Mamère was right—I tried very hard to make my stitches smaller than an eyelash. Had my eyelashes grown? Did they grow like our hair? I put down the linen square.

Mamère. She had sewn by her fireplace while she waited for me to come back from serving the dinner. I never came back. Was I taller, or were my arms only darker and thinner and marked by cane? My fingers and wrists marked by teeth?

My shoulder marked by fire.

“He is buying cloth in New Orleans?” Pélagie asked. Madame held her linen square close to her fading eyes, as if she were sneezing into a handkerchief.

“Cloth and flour, sugar and oil. Coffee. Slaves. Last year, I asked for a garden man, but Laurent needed to clear the new land.”

“A garden man?” Pélagie's voice was soft.

“I cannot plant the garden and move the earth, but I want to
be outside. I can still see something there. If you weren't here to distinguish these threads for me, I would burn this in the fire.”

“What can you see outside?”

Madame was quiet for a time. “I can see the leaves moving, somehow. The arrangement of the trees. Pale things.”

“How many men will he buy? No women?”

“The Americans have made buying slaves nearly impossible. No ships are to arrive from Africa. Laurent and the others go to the Barataria. It is illegal, but the only way. There will be mostly men, he says. The only female he bought last year was Moinette, and not for the house. He doesn't understand why you insist on her here as well as Amanthe. Amanthe has taken care of me for years. Since she was sixteen.”

A silence. In it, I heard that Pélagie didn't think Madame was taken care of. Her hair. Her clothes.

“I want one who looks good. Because she is seen with me. And I like the bright one. She's the only bright one you have.”

“Laurent says she ran last year.”

“But she sleeps fine here,” Pélagie whispered.

“The mixed-blood children are proof of wrong,” Madame whispered back. “I don't like to see them.”

“I am proof of wrong, apparently, because my mother died at my birth. That is what the old women in Lyon told me.” Pélagie laughed, high and sweet as cold water. “They said none of the first three girl babies had killed her, and they had all been bald, just like my father. He was sixty-seven when they married. They said when I came, I had a pate of red fur and must have been a child of the devil.”

“Pélagie,” Madame said. “That's not true.”

“What is true is that I never think of Lyon, only of Paris. I will never return to Lyon. I remember a jardin blanc in Paris. A white garden we can make here.”

Barataria. In the dark, in the narrow bayou with white-plastered walls and my own hair for a pillow, I remembered the sparkling sand thrown against the cage bars, the scars of the women, the endless roiling of the water.

In Barataria, I had believed I could swim to my mother.

All those nights in Sophia's house, fingering the corn kernels— they would have floated. Dried corn rose in boiling water—the kernels had gone farther down Bayou Rosière than I had.

Madame Pélagie's footsteps whispered. One choice remained: make her happy so she would take me to New Orleans. If I curled each section of her hair into a perfect spiral, if I stitched the rose pattern on the napkins, if I washed her linens to whiteness, she would need me in New Orleans.

Amanthe was accompanying Madame de la Rosière to Paris in June. I would accompany Pélagie, when she went back to Paris. We would dock at New Orleans, and then the boat to Paris would sail south, down the Mississippi. We would pass the places with familiar names. Orange Grove. Les Palmiers. Petit Clair.

At Petit Clair, when I leaped, the current would carry me, and the batture would give me a piece of wood to pull myself to shore amid the swirls of yellow water where eddies circled over a shallow snag, the riverbank where I'd spent hours as a child, watching the boats.

In the pond of light from a candle, I made my stitches smaller.

I wondered why Pélagie was nervous in the house at night with only Madame and me, and the groom, Manuel, who kept watch in the yard. She slept only a few hours. She must have sent a message to the town of Washington and asked for Msieu Antoine, the lawyer who took care of her money when her husband died in Paris.

He had called me a daughter of joy. He inclined his head at me now and said, “I'll be staying in the garçonnière.” That was the place for unmarried men and visitors.

Amanthe said, “Take him coffee and prepare the room.” She put her hand on my arm. “Do what he asks.”

Cadeau. Gift for an afternoon. A lifetime.

The garçonnière and pigeonnière were new and separate buildings on either side of the house. Eight sides on each tower—I tried to remember what Céphaline called eight sides. Octagonal. And diagonal—the brick paths that led to the towers. I had sat
folding, and she had spoken around me. Triangular. Parallel. Our lives not parallel. She would not have been a gift. A sale, she said. A trade.

He sat at the ebony-wood desk. He did not look up. I put the tray with coffee and sugar and milk on the desk. Upstairs, where the air was damp over the wooden floor, I made up the three beds, dusted the washbasin and chamber pot.

“You are from New Orleans?” he asked when I came downstairs. The brick floor was tinged with green. “A mulâtresse such as yourself?”

“No, msieu. Farther south.” My hands were crossed over my apron, my eyes on the floor. That was how we were meant to wait.

“Near the Balize, the mouth of the Mississippi? Where all commerce enters the river from the sea?” His lips drew in coffee with a hiss, as if he needed it badly. “Merci.” He sounded as if he smiled. “Look up, please.”

He was older than Madame Pélagie, younger than Msieu. His eyes were gray with flecks of green—tiny pieces of torn leaf. His beard was narrow, black sleeves reaching down his cheeks to cradle his chin.