A Million Nightingales (20 page)

What was she speaking about?

“In New York. Dressing the models?”

“Madame, I don't understand.”

She glanced outside. “In the garçonnière is Monsieur Ebrard's
son. He saw you earlier. They say this is how it is done here in Louisiana.” She whispered, “I am sorry, Moinette.”

The grass was damp. He was pale in the darkened room. His sideburns were yellow-red tongues licking his cheeks. He said, “You are a vision. Take out your hair. A black cloud. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Vrai? Truly? And what do you know?”

“Rien, msieu.”

“Non.”

“Nothing, msieu.” My hair fell from the braids. I pulled my scalp away from my brain. What was I meant to know? Think quickly about what they wanted. Like Pélagie.

“Première fois, msieu.”

“First time? I don't believe you. But you are crying. Why? I don't have to pay you, non. But I will give you this if you stop crying.”

A gold coin.

He pushed. Blind, too. Were they all the same except for the smell of leather or pomade, except for whether they were angry or not?

No hand on my mouth. But he was a tall man. He told me to take off all my clothes. He did not remove his clothes. The cravat tied at his throat worked its way onto my face, and then, when he pressed harder and harder, the knot of cloth brushed my teeth, lodged there at my lips. Coat buttons on my ribs. Hands on either side of my head. The pain was rubbed into me again, again, and tears ran hot into my ears but turned cold inside my head.

“Sang mêlé. C'est vrai. True, what they say of your kind.”

Calluses on my hands. Would this rubbing, over and over, make a callus inside me? When he lifted himself from me, left wetness on my leg, I saw him look. I saw the blood.

“Première fois,” he said.

An ache pulsed like a ring pushed inside me. A circle brand burned.

“And true that money makes a girl cease crying,” he said when he turned around.

———

When I was lying in the hallway at Rosière, on my blankets that smelled of me, the passage still burned.

Première fois, Tretite said to me once when I was very small and refused to pick up mule droppings for her garden. First time you do something you don't like, you do it over and over, you grown.

I hadn't done the task over and over yet. I wasn't grown. What would grow inside me? Breeding. From one time?

The slave groom wanted his seed mixed with his msieu's. I was the gift he could not have.

Cadeau. But I had two gold coins. Which was worse? A gift or a purchase?

I tied the coins in my old tignon, with the clothespins and memory of coffee beans, and hid the bundle in the left sleeve of Madame Pélagie's oldest, plainest dress in the back of the armoire.

Hervé Richard said, Maybe I come back for something not so sad.

He wouldn't want me now.

The twinge of pain behind my ribs was sharp, like fingernails run over my insides. This was the money for my journey to Azure.

But then a dog barked in the distance. Dogs. My plan was a child's idea. Leap from the boat, swim to Azure—and Franz the overseer wouldn't see me? Circle through the ciprière swamp, past the indigo vats where Doctor Tom's bones would be black now? Hide in the cane and surprise my mother in her room? Expect Msieu Bordelon to allow me to stay? Take Mamère with me? Take her where?

I turned over on the pallet. If a baby grew, there would be no journey.

I was ashamed to ask Sophia. For days, I waited to feel illness, as Sophia said she felt with her new baby by Gervaise.

On the night of the last dance before Mardi Gras, before people received ashes on their foreheads from the priest, before they surrendered joy for Lent, we traveled to one more plantation outside Loreauville. I lay in the barn with the others.

If a slave came for me this time, I had a knife. If Madame Pélagie sent me to someone, I wouldn't let him hurt me.

He saw you. It would happen, again and again. He saw you.

The alligator's eyes rested above the water. Our eyes sat inside the holes of our skull, but what moved them farther apart, the way wide-set eyes were beautiful, and what made some lashes longer? He saw you. It's your fault you look like that. Mulâtresse good for dressing the hair. For the gentlemen. She so bright. Take but one candle. What was beautiful? Madame Bordelon said men looked at her ankles and wrists when she was a girl. She told Céphaline that lovely ankles were important. Céphaline said, “And may I cover my face now and leave my ankles out for display?”

Did we all look the same inside? Did we feel the same to the men? Did skin and hair and face mean my passage would be any different?

Fantine told me, “Basile say, I have nothing each day but your face.” All day in the cane, he saw her eyes and lips, but at night, he stared at the arrangement of her eyebrows and mouth and then reached to push himself into the passage. What else existed?

Amanthe breathed beside me. She knew no one here, at this plantation. The moths flew into the barn windows. All the roads and bayous leading to all the towns. Small places named for the man who owned the largest house, the land. All the less important people coming to eat his food, drink his wine, smile at his wife. All the people on the roads, and in the hallways that led to the rooms where they ate and danced and studied one another. And only to decide whom they wanted to use—to breed like the animals in the woods. In the cypress swamp with the Indian woman. Gervaise carrying dead birds to Sophia's door. The deer along the pathways, the horses in their pastures. The frogs at the edge of the pond. Ouaouaron. Calling to one another all night.

The flies sped along their own roads in the air, drinking at the lips of those who slept, searching for other flies. We couldn't see their pathways.

All the hallways, and the rooms like honeycombs. The people lying on each other or standing up so they wouldn't have babies, but babies growing. And filling the rooms and hallways and cabins. Then like puppies when the mother nips them sharp with her teeth to say Go. The puppies digging their own holes where they lay and panted and stared until they began to look for one another. The flies on their droppings.

A lunging sound, in the parlor. Breath expelled from the throat again and again, with sobbing force.

Madame de la Rosière held the elbows of a man, her face close to his, inside that small circle of her vision, and her crying was a rhythm like clothes scraping on the washboard.

Her son. “Your face. Your face. The sideburns.”

He said, “You'll hurt yourself.”

“I didn't think I would see you until I reached Paris, and I worried that the ship would take the rest of my eyes. Too much light on the water. I remembered it. But you knew! You knew what I was thinking! Look at your shoulders.”

“I thought I would be better able to withstand the voyage than you, Maman. And I know my father will be angry that I came early.”

“I can feel your shoulders.” She didn't hear, didn't see, she only touched his coat again and again.

I couldn't watch.

Soldier coat. He was a soldier. Soldier blue.

The silence of Sunday made me curl into the back of Pélagie's closet when they went off to Mass. My gold coins were cold. Indigo. Teeth like pearls in the dish and then they were bone.

On Sunday, I had no one. I hadn't wanted anyone.

Tretite's white dress used to float ahead of me. My mother
heard us approaching her house. But her eyes would still peer up from her sewing as if she were shy, and surprised that we had come.

Madame's son had known what she was thinking. Across the ocean.

I walked to le quartier, where no one knew what I was thinking.

Fantine waited for water at the pump. She turned to me and said, “Moinette, look at your blue dress. Mine let out now.”

Her belly swung around, and she gave me that smile, deep into her left cheek. “We move into a new place. Side of Gervaise.” She touched the fabric of my sleeve. “You sleep with Amanthe, eh?”

“Alone,” I said. “Mo toute seule.” I couldn't tell her I missed her.

She pulled me to her room at the end of the street. “Sophia stay with Fronie. She glad not to share now.”

Fantine had a washtub. I washed her hair, water rushing down the thick shoals and onto her shoulders. She washed mine, and we sat in the weak sun spilled into the doorway.

“Basile say, ‘I ain't have to be with you every minute in the day. But every minute in the night.’ “ She traced her long finger along the hem of my sleeve. “The Madame have lace fall out the sleeve, oui?”

She wanted to hear the details. “Lace, and the little buttons are pearl. The skirt is silk. And everything is trimmed in ribbon. A ribbon right under the bosom, to hold it up like a shelf.”

Ribbons are our stripes, I couldn't say. Our markings.

Fantine smiled. “How many dress you have?” She was measuring.

“Three,” I said. “From Amanthe. Not Madame.”

Fantine pressed her hand onto her belly. “A ribbon under my bosom,” she laughed. “Not now. Baby under there.”

Nothing under my bosom. No baby. Rien, Mamère used to say to Eveline at night. Rien en coeur pour qui n'est pas sang.

Nothing in the heart for someone who isn't blood.

That was the way the whites lived, and the way we couldn't.

Nothing in my belly. Nothing but soreness that left.

One night, Mamère made tiny braids for Tretite, fingers lingering on her skull until her eyes swam as if she were drunk. Tretite said Félonise had loved her madame and msieu, when she was young. She said nothing about her own love.

My mother cared for them. But she loved me, in her heart.

I had listened to Céphaline, had touched her hair, had loved her words and hated them. I had been afraid of everyone else.

I had never loved anyone either. Only my mother.

Sophia was fierce for Fronie, but she didn't love her. Fantine loved Basile in a foolish and dangerous way, with her brain full only of his smell and skin.

Her curving cheeks held a smile inside even when she wasn't smiling. She hadn't felt the white man in the woods flick her breast. She hadn't tasted her own hair rope. She stood up while she was loved, with her face against Basile's face.

When Pélagie and Msieu spoke alone, especially of their time back in France, their voices floated to me in the hallway, and in the quietness and ease of their words, it was clear that they had cared most for each other. Once, Pélagie said to him, “Our mother's blood is foremost in us, Laurent. We are closer in a sense than any other humans, even to those in our marriages.”

He had said, “If Etienne had a brother, he would feel that way. But he has always been solitary. He prefers to hunt over anything else, to be alone in the midst of trees.”

But Madame de la Rosière's face, always turned expectantly toward her husband, was somehow vague and sad in love, in the darting blurred eyes and the chin so still while she listened to his impatience.

When Etienne arrived, her whole figure turned into love. Her mouth wasn't set and waiting, but open and expectant, while he entered the room. And her eyes didn't matter, because she touched him every day, his hair, his coat, his knee.

I didn't want to feel that way about anyone else, ever, to have to wait, and die a little while she was gone. I never wanted a baby.

I said to Fantine now, “I will get you some cloth and ribbon, sew you a dress for when you are thin again.”

When she threw her arms around me, her belly felt so hard; how could water and blood and baby be hard as a gourd?

Madame Pélagie said nothing to me about that night. My blood came, and hers and Amanthe's, all at the same time now. When I washed all the cloths, the smell of the water tipped out near the two chinaberry trees was heavy and thick as freshly killed pig. The trunks should grow tiny fingers or maybe fur.

The white squares of linen hung on the line were like sheets of paper in the early summer sun.

The best dogs had papers. Horses had papers. Msieu examined them before he bought, before he bred. I had papers. I was worth more now, because I could sew and dress hair. Pélagie had papers that Msieu Antoine had written and notarized at the courthouse in Opelousas.

When Fantine had her baby, I went to le quartier to help, cleaning the hot blood and skin, the baby covered with white wax like myrtle.

When we told him, Msieu said, “First infant to arrive since we were sold to the Americans. Louisiana will never be American. She will be named for loyalty.”

He wrote in the book: négritte, Francine, 28 de mai 1812.

One more time, all of our blood came together, and disappeared with the water and bluing. Then Msieu and Madame left for Paris, Amanthe riding up in front, Philippine crying, and Firmin watching with his purple-rimmed eyes and collapsed cheeks.

Back at her house, staring into her fire, Philippine said, “Ocean passage never certain. Ocean have storm and wind.”

“Msieu said the ships are bigger and faster now,” I said. “His son just arrived, oui, with no trouble? They will write to us from Paris. Pélagie will get a letter, and I will come to you.”

“You read?” Philippine whispered.

“You cannot tell anyone. Not Sophia. No one.”

Philippine said, “No. No one.”

Firmin said, “Get a letter, but letter say nothing of Amanthe.” “But she will be inside the paper the same.”

I had never written an entire word, only the
M
on my skin. Each time paper or ink was near, I was afraid to try—if the ink made a blot that wouldn't launder clean, how would I explain?

My plans were on the paper inside my head. I had made Pélagie need me, for her beautiful hair and skin. In New Orleans, I would tell her about my mother's laundering skills, her fine seams and decorative stitches far better than mine. Msieu Bordelon would always need money; he would sell my mother, and she would sew lovely clothes and linens for sale in New Orleans, in Paris.

I read over Pélagie's shoulder when she made her lists of material to purchase, glanced at the pages of Msieu's daily journal when dusting his desk—not the ledger book of accounts. Msieu's flowing script slanted like people walking against a wind.