A Million Nightingales (31 page)

Léonce. Pinching and waiting and angry. Like a child himself. If he were thought of as the father, no one would care. There was no other answer but “Oui, msieu.”

He turned, but then his jaw swung back around to my sight. “You were brave to try to protect my aunt. Your child is well and healthy, from my glimpses of him with the other boys when they bring water.”

Jean-Paul rode on the back of the mule-cart with the other small boys. I could see him with my eyes closed. Their legs dangled into
the raised dust. They held on to the buckets, and when they reached the fields, the hoes paused while the smallest hands brought water gourds to the end of the rows.

That picture was meant to comfort me. Sometimes it did.

I wrote his name at night. I wrote the truth on labels made from scrap paper: Formula to Restore Whiteness. Formula to Remove Oil Stains. I attached the labels to empty bottles of brandy, the smallest ones. Mr. McAdam drank more and more each night. His book was nearly finished, but he could not write what he wanted to. He said to Msieu Antoine, “The parochial nature of these people infuriates me. They have no interest in the wider world except for fashion and wine from France.” He took another glass of brandy. “You have been to New York and Philadelphia. Do you not find Opelousas intolerable?”

“I find it my opportunity.”

“I find it finished for me. I will move on to New Iberia.”

“Then you may settle your account with me in the morning,” Msieu Antoine said angrily, and went upstairs.

My plates were clean in the cupboard. The men were sleeping, so I took off my tignon, which needed washing. The white shirts hung before the fire, as the evening was so damp and foggy that the yard was invisible outside the window. We were underwater.

Mr. McAdam's feet. Larger than Msieu Antoine's. He put his glass on the table. “Get me something to eat that doesn't have peppers or onions in it.”

“We have only the stew, and bread, msieu.”

“Sir!”

“Sir.”

“You are insolent. Cut me bread. I would pay ten dollars for someone to make a dish of potatoes and cabbage.”

I put the bread on a plate. He wavered in the doorway, steadying himself with his palms on the frame.

“You are not French.”

“No, msieu. Sir.”

“Don't belittle me.” He shoved me aside and leaned hard on the table, grasping the bread.

“You are drunk, msieu.”

“I am not a monsieur. I am an American. I am Sir. Say Sir.”

“You are drunk, sir.”

“You are impertinent. You are not to tell me my condition.”

“Oui. Yes, sir.”

“You are an abomination. An insult to American women.”

“Msieu Antoine—” I looked into the hallway.

“—Doesn't know that you can read, that you are dishonest. There are diseased French whores everywhere, but he doesn't touch you. Why not a French cook?”

“I am not an abomination. I am an animal. Like you.”

He threw the bread into the fire and steadied himself against the table again. Then he spat onto the floor. “I am an American. You are nothing. Not French. Not American. Nothing.”

My clean floor. His saliva moved. I dropped a napkin over it so as not to see his liquids. While I was crouched there, Mr. McAdam stood over me, so close the knee of his breeches touched my forehead. Then he shoved me out of his way so roughly I fell backward against the hearth.

“Get up. You appear nearly feral with all that hair. Get up. No one wants to lie with you.”

His boots slid along the wooden floor and out of the kitchen.

I had landed on my back against the bricks. The pain was in my spine—no, between my buttocks. I tried to lift myself, but the pain sent black rags over my eyes.

Msieu Antoine's room was directly above the kitchen. His chair scraped over the wood floor.

I couldn't move. As a child, I had shouted once at a riverboat passing by, and the faces turned toward me like those of the turtles on the banks.

My scream hurt my chest. Not my lungs. My legs wouldn't move at all. My scream hurt the muscles in my throat.

We do not have tails. But we must have in the past. If we descended from God, who took off our tails and left us with only a bone?

Femur. Tibia. Spine? I did not know the name for the bone between my buttocks, which was broken.

Doctor Vidrine smiled and shook his head. “Monsieur
Antoine, your slave must stay in bed for at least a month. Otherwise, she could do permanent damage and be unable to—”

Msieu Antoine frowned. “To work?”

Doctor Vidrine turned his head and spoke softly. “To bear children. The pain would be too intense to even—”

“I understand. She cannot perform any of her normal duties.”

Doctor Vidrine nodded. “For pain, you may give her a tincture with laudanum. You will have to hire someone to run the house.”

They had carried me to my room. When my legs moved against the sheets, pain felt like a knife inserted up my spine. Msieu Antoine said, “The first task is to wake the American, who is drunk and still sleeping upstairs. He will pay for this damage.”

Doctor Vidrine was mixing a tincture when Mr. McAdam burst in, smelling of the sour used alcohol seeping from his skin. He shouted, “I have done nothing! This mulatto bitch tried to seduce me, and she was pushed away! She is fabricating an injury.”

Doctor Vidrine said, “Are you calling my medical opinion a lie?”

“Where is the injury? The blood?”

Doctor Vidrine said, “Her tailbone is broken or severely bruised. She fell as if someone pushed her down to—” He shrugged.

Mr. McAdam laughed. “Tailbone! Her African blood gave her a tail too long for a human!”

Doctor Vidrine said, “Monsieur, I have seen two men with exaggerated tailbones, protrusions you could see clearly at the base of the spine. One could actually make that bone move. Neither were African. Both were Jews.”

Msieu Antoine said, “She told me you harmed her for no reason.”

“I didn't touch her! She lies. She can write! Somewhere in this room, she has written plots against you. There is poison here. I've seen her taking bottles.”

I looked up at Msieu Antoine. He kept his face very still, even when I made my pupils match his. I said, “Inside my trunk you will find words on the labels for cleaning solutions, to keep them separate for the laundry.”

Mr. McAdam threw open the lid to my trunk. He dumped the
clothing on the floor and held up the bottles. “Formula to restore whiteness,” he shouted. “Perhaps she meant to drink it to make herself human.”

Msieu Antoine took the bottles from him. He said, “If you never touched her, how did this come to be attached to your cuff?”

He held up the writer's hand. From the button dangled a black curling hair that reached halfway to the floor.

In court, he said, “The slave Moinette is valuable property, and the American, Isaiah McAdam, attacked her and damaged her. She has been unable to work for several weeks. I have had to hire Charité, the slave of Madame Lescelles. This civil suit asks for one hundred fifty dollars to cover the costs of Doctor Vidrine's attentions and for hiring a replacement servant. Compensation should be forthcoming immediately, considering the fact that Monsieur McAdam has tried to leave Opelousas.”

Msieu Antoine had written what he would say on paper. June 12, 1816: Proceedings of civil suit. He had asked me questions. Slaves could not testify. But he spoke for me. He touched my hand and said, “Your words are represented.”

I looked across the table at his eyes, the flecks of green. “Your words are appreciated.”

Mr. McAdam insisted the proceedings be in English and French, which took longer. Mr. McAdam said that I had uncovered my hair in a public place, as a means to try to seduce his attentions, and that was illegal according to the Code Noir.

Msieu Antoine said that the fireplace was not a public place. The dining room was a public place. The kitchen was private, his slave was his private property, and Mr. McAdam had lied about touching me.

The jury, twelve landowners from the parish, including Msieu Césaire and Msieu Laurent de la Rosière, found Mr. McAdam guilty of property damage and awarded Msieu Antoine $120.

Msieu Antoine sat beside my bed and said, “You are aware that the jury thought his intentions amoral.”

I met his pupils with mine. “But intentions are my task.”

He stroked the sides of his chin as if it were a small pet. “You have performed all your tasks to perfection.” He looked at my trunk. “You sell the soaps and cleansers?”

“And bootblack. To Madame Lescelles at the dry goods store.” There could be no lying to him. He had spoken for me, and if he did not trust me, he would not buy my mother and my son. “Every coin in this house is yours. I would have given the money to you when enough was saved for—”

Msieu Antoine held up his hand. “Your son.”

He buried his fingers in his sideburns again. “I believe you. In my accounts, twenty dollars of the award Monsieur McAdam was compelled to pay is marked for you. For clothing or material or even jewelry.”

“It is illegal for me to wear jewelry in public. Even in front of your fire,” I said, and he raised his brows. With each cough, somehow the bone moved, just as it did when a cat or dog coughed. And when I tightened my muscles there in fear, when Mr. McAdam shouted horrible accusations about me, the tail-bone drew itself under.

But Msieu Antoine had sat in this chair close to my bed telling me what was said. My name had appeared in the books of the courthouse. I had lain here sewing and thinking while Charité sang in the kitchen. I had learned to speak. “My son cannot live here. I know that. I have fifty-seven piastres to add to that sum. When you go to New Orleans, I would like you to buy my mother.”

I did lie again, telling him about the dishes she could cook: roasted squab, tartes with apricot and peach, ham bathed in clove-scented glaze. Pralines and rice balls.

In February of 1817, Msieu Antoine planned to go to New Orleans to meet Mr. Jonah Greene, who would arrive to take up residence in Louisiana. Mr. Greene was a lawyer, too, and they would be partners.

“The trip could take three weeks. The weather makes ships’ arrival uncertain, and then we will need to make purchases in New Orleans. I have not been to the city in some time.”

I had waited for those words—New Orleans—all these years, and yet there was no real reason for me to accompany him. Pélagie would have needed me for her hair, her clothes, but he could find someone to launder his shirts in New Orleans. He might even meet a woman there. Whatever had happened to the woman of his letters long ago, he still flirted with the planters’ wives: “Your hair gleams in the sun—amazing how much light can be given off by such darkness.”

Possibly he would be gone a month, would return with Mr. Jonah Greene and a woman, and they would have me sent away. Or I could be sold to Mr. Greene, an American—he might hate me as much as Mr. McAdam did, or he might use me every night.

But Msieu Antoine had sat next to me, had defended me. I had to trust him.

I wrote what I felt, as my mouth could not say it while he sat at the long table with Doctor Vidrine and the nephew, while they laughed about New Orleans and the gambling. I left the note on his bed and sat beside the fire.

I am afraid to stay here alone. I am afraid of the men. I want to accompany you. My mother is at Azure. South of New Orleans. Please. We need her here.

At the new steamboat landing in Washington, I sat on the cargo deck with other slaves. Bayou Courtableau churned below, black and clear turning to dirty beige foam. The steam dissolved in the air. Water. I had come this way, on that first boat, and then floated on the pirogue on this water, this water in a branch on another bayou. I had walked on the bottom.

We traveled all night, the steamboat stopping to buy wood from an Indian man who sat with his back against the huge pile he had cut. His signal fire pulsed in the blackness when the boat pulled away from the bank.

Msieu Antoine stayed in the stateroom playing cards. At dawn, the waters of the Atchafalaya River slid past us like silver.

Backward. I was going backward. I was a daughter.

The second night, an American planter, with a soft brown hat
and white moustaches, said in English, “That's a likely gal. How much you want for her?”

Msieu Antoine's fingers were long and white on his coffee cup, the tiny black hairs moving in the wind. “She is not for sale.”

“But you can name a price for a fancy piece like that.”

“Merci, monsieur, but she is necessary.”

On my pallet in the passageway, I heard the men snoring in the stateroom where cots had been set up for them.

My mother had to be necessary. What if Msieu Antoine bought her to be—a concubine? What if Msieu Greene took her? Would my mother hate me? This man had never touched me. But he was nearly forty. Maybe he wanted someone else.

Would my mother sleep with him to be close to me?

I would sleep with anyone to be close to her, and to Jean-Paul. I would not breathe. I would touch what I had to touch. I would finish the task.

When he had read my note days before, he said softly, “You are still your mother's child. My mother lives in Paris. She will never see me again, by her own choice.” He sighed. “I will consider it.”

What if Msieu Bordelon only laughed, or asked so much money Msieu Antoine said no?

What number was written next to her name?

My name was crossed out.

Marie-Thérèse. Dahlia plates. Quadroon infant.

What if my mother had another child now? What if she were happy there on Azure, with another child, and she smiled tenderly at me with her head slanted, stroked my hair, and then turned away to her room where the child she loved now slept?

I prayed, holding nothing but my own braid.

The steamboat left us on the wharf, which was crowded with boats vying for space. Men shouted and rolled hogsheads from the boats, and girls held baskets on their heads and screamed what they sold: pralines, cakes, flowers, cloth.

Hervé Richard was somewhere in New Orleans. He was right—no one could keep track of all these slaves; runaways hid
in plain sight, selling or working on the docks, holding false work papers.