A Million Nightingales (33 page)

“She is not your mother.”

“No.” I lay beside him. My back was curled against his chest. “I would not lie to you. She is not my blood.”

Msieu Antoine let his breath out as if it were a small, silent laugh against the back of my hair. “But you have chosen her so. And you did wait to admit it until now, when we're on the boat home. So she is to be your mother in Opelousas.”

“Yes. Msieu.”

The steamboat labored against the current. North. Nothing was meant to go back up the river. Only to float down and end at the sea.

Msieu Antoine's breath moved the hairs at the back of my neck. “I thought something was strange by the way you spoke and moved near her, but perhaps it was that you had not seen her in years.” He sighed. “Did your mother run?”

“I will not run.”

“I didn't ask you that.”

“She may have run.”

The engine made his shoes tremble on the floor, as if they were walking of their own accord. I could smell the secretions on his body behind me. I didn't know their name. All the fluids that Céphaline had named—saliva, blood, sweat, tears, but no one ever named the fluids of sex, or the organs. Not even Doctor Tom would have been foolish enough to name that for her.

“Which man frightened you?” Msieu Antoine asked.

“The steward.”

“Where is—the woman you may consider your mother?”

“Her name is Tretite. She is asleep on the deck with the other slaves.” The engines shuddered so hard that the skin of my cheeks shook against my teeth. “She has always been able to sleep. And I can never sleep when I am afraid.”

“Did you sleep at all when I first brought you to Opelousas?”

“No.” Just his shoulders touched the backs of mine, through his shirt and my dress. “I thought you would hurt me.”

“You were hurt before.”

“Oui.”

But he did not ask who. That was another set of words no one wanted to name.

And now we were not to talk about Mr. Jonah Greene.

He was a different animal. He would not even taste the coffee. He drank tea. He instructed me to measure out the dried, curled black leaves from the tin and tie them into a muslin square.

He was a few inches taller than Msieu Antoine, with olive skin. His throat was long and it looked as if a stone was lodged above his collar. He did not kiss the men who greeted him in the hotel or on the boat, as the French greeted one another; he grasped the men's hands and patted them on the coat with the free hand, like some dance he had rehearsed and they had not.

I was afraid of him. He studied me when he thought I was not looking. He spoke English with a strange step inside the words. He didn't know I understood him. When Tretite sat in the hotel kitchen with her hands so still in her lap, I applied blacking to his shoes.

“They make me uneasy. It's different with an Irish housemaid. They want their pay for the least amount of work.”

“This isn't Philadelphia,” Msieu Antoine had said. “You must learn to live French. French Louisiana.”

“It is American now.”

“No—it is still French, even if Americans do not believe so.”

“They are like odd pets. Angry, watchful pets. They stare without staring.”

“She wants to know what you want.”

Then there was a long silence, and Mr. Jonah Greene's voice changed. “She cannot know,” he said. “No one can know.”

The cabin was dark and close as the cargo hold years ago. But I was not chained. Msieu Antoine's arms were twined with mine. He only lay behind me, in the small bed. His hips did not touch mine.

I had gone back to his table after midnight, when most of the passengers were asleep and only a few men drank and played cards. He had seen me wipe my face. Sweat and tears.

Mr. Jonah Greene had just left the table for his own cabin. “Sadly enough, gambling is not my favorite pastime,” he said in English, and the other three men frowned until Msieu Antoine translated into French.

Msieu Antoine had signaled me with his hand then. He said, “You may wait for me in the cabin.”

He said it quietly, but several of the men around him laughed, and one said, “The rhythm of the boat, oui?”

“You appeared agitated,” he said now, his mouth behind my neck.

Première fois you do something you don't like, Tretite had said. First time. Then you do it over and over and you grown.

Première fois to speak to him like I was grown.

“Sometimes the men don't even touch me. They stand near me and pleasure themselves. They get close in the kitchen or the store and they rub against me. Then they rub themselves.” I took a breath. “The steward has touched me twice already.”

“Touched you? Though he knew you belonged to me?”

“He accidentally caught his finger in my tignon and knocked it from my head. Then he stood close behind me when I was preparing your tray, so close I could feel—”

“Ah. Yes.”

I didn't feel that now. His body lay behind mine as my mother's had lain curled to me, a stripe of air like cotton batting between us.

There was only softness behind me because Msieu Antoine
was spent. He had been to Mr. Jonah Greene's cabin next door. He thought I had not heard the sound caught in a throat. Kept there. The way Gervaise used to keep his longing in his throat, while he leaned Sophia against the door. That same sound.

When Msieu Antoine came into his cabin, he'd said, “I needed air. Moinette, you cannot sit in the chair all night. It is not your fault you are frightened. Lie down. No one will hurt you here.”

Lying at the edge of the narrow mattress, I knew that smell— acid and biting, salt and snail. The fluid that men left on my dress, on my legs.

The engine shuddered harder. We were going home. He said, “You are nineteen now. How old were you when you left your mother?”

I bit my top lip the way she always had. “Fourteen.”

“That is the way,” he said. His fingers rested on my shoulder for a moment. “Whether your true mother ran or is lost to you in another way, as is my own mother, I am sorry.”

Then he tucked his hand along his side again. Past the thin wall near our faces, Mr. Jonah Greene lay on his bed. We could hear him murmuring to himself—was he praying? Was he angry? From the way Msieu Antoine drew in a breath so deep that his shirt moved against me, I knew he was not sleeping either.

He was listening.

“He is not the father.”

“No.”

“He doesn't look at you,” Tretite said. “Not like that.” She smoothed a wooden spoon. “Where your son?”

“He is on the place I left. He is three.”

“Who the father?”

This was the woman who'd slid already-chewed meat into my mouth when I was a baby. But now she looked bewildered, moving around my kitchen, touching pots, trying to feel the heat of the cooking fire and how those embers compared to her own hearth on Azure.

“I don't know,” I said, and she slid her eyes toward me without moving her head.

She ran her fingers over the rice, picking out tiny pebbles. I sewed the buttons back onto a cleaned coat.

“All these men upstairs?”

“No.”

Every morning, she looked puzzled by the men's boots and feet and voices from the floors above us. Sometimes she watched the ceiling. When she went to sleep in our room, where I had given her the rope bed, her round, plump back was turned toward me, trembling as though she were cold, even though it was nearly April.

She missed the women on Azure. I lay on the pallet beside her and heard her held-in sobs. We had no doorway here, no clearing, no Eveline or Hera.

In the morning, I said to her, “Charité brings vegetables and fruits every day. People bring chickens or fish or squab.”

“To the door?” Tretite frowned at the open back door. “I don't cook but for me. Madame say, No wedding dress. But Céphaline never die from my food.”

“I know,” I said.

She studied the bowl of pecans. “He like praline?”

“Msieu Antoine?”

“Your son.”

I had no idea, but nodded. We would pretend. Tretite said, “Li mère, she look for you. She don't give up.”

She knew nothing of Christophe. I bent my head to the brass button and said, “I haven't given up either.”

My tobacco tin was empty. The first few coins dropped in like rain on a tin roof.

At night, when Tretite had fallen asleep, and I stayed in the kitchen to watch the fire, to live with the memory people, even Jean-Paul, whom I had not seen now for two years, the bare footsteps moved quietly above me. Long after the boots and shoes had dropped onto the floorboards and the boarders had turned
and settled in their beds, someone walked cautiously from one room to another.

Msieu Antoine had been patient as well. He had waited a long time. He went to the room of Mr. Jonah Greene, whom he loved.

Every morning, I poured water through his leaves. He didn't look at me. He ate bread with his tea. He ate butter. He did not eat bacon or ham. He tried to speak French to the clients, and when they teased him, he tried to laugh, but he didn't laugh very often.

He took a bath every night in the tub we moved to his room and filled with hot water. When he was finished, we emptied the cool gray water pitcher by pitcher into the backyard. In this way, he entered the earth, though he hated Louisiana.

Msieu Antoine's hand rested near his whenever no one else was near them.

Though they had to be cautious, I saw the way his fingers settled on Mr. Greene's wrist, in the morning, if no other boarders were present when I poured the coffee. The footsteps above my head, the soft movement of feet to the other's room, only happened when the house was empty, but when there was a big trial, and the rooms were full for days, Msieu Antoine found a way. I had heard them once in the parlor, long after midnight. Only a breath. A sharp intake of breath, twice, three times. The wanting of all other functions to cease for a moment.

Two men. Their lips on each other's? Did one pull back the other's head, fingers in his hair? I crouched near the fire, my face hot, trying not to imagine someone's throat exposed to another's kisses. Did they kiss? But they had to, for Msieu Antoine to make that sound in his throat, that breath of shock at the strength of his feelings.

That breath had hovered over me, but it was not love.

The fingers of Msieu Antoine, on the other's wrist, judged the texture of skin, plush and clean from the morning washing.

I stood in the hallway, hearing that gasp, and inside my hip bones, where Jean-Paul had lain, something twisted. They were wrapped tightly around each other. Fantine's head thrown back. Msieu Antoine? His head thrown back?

They used other passages.

Did white men want to feel whether the insides of African women were different? Or only free? Pélagie's husband and his brother had lain with diseased women. The passages. The movement between them. They accomplished love. I could hear them moving against the wall.

I had lain near Msieu Antoine as a child, as a friend, and he had touched me with tenderness. I would never love anyone with that tenderness except my mother and my son, and those aches were different—a stiletto of fear that moved inside my belly or behind my lungs.

At night, when I thought of Hervé Richard and the way his mouth had tasted, sometimes I felt that twisting between my hip bones, but I would never see him again. No one would ever love me that way. Even he had only known my face. He had asked me to choose him over my child. I was not to love. I stood against the wall and listened until someone whispered a word again and again.

“Please. Please.”

Then I moved down the hallway and back to the fire.

Tretite sang the same song every day, the song she had sung when I was a child. “Moinette, Moinette, les zozos dans les arbres, les poulets dans les herbes, doucette, doucette.”

The birds in the trees. The chickens in the herbs. Sweet, sweet.

Loneliness rushed into the useless space behind my collarbone. What did we keep there? Jean-Paul's palm would be fatter now, his cheeks lifting so high his eyes would disappear when Francine made him laugh. Or perhaps he didn't laugh. He stared solemnly at everyone. He asked nothing.

Every day since Tretite began to sing, I dreamed of my mother's shape in her chair while the fire burned low, her needle glinting like the smallest lightning, of Fantine's fingers parting my hair to braid it, during that time when we returned from the cane and washed each other's hair, that time Jean-Paul slept beside me.

Tretite's voice was low and burbling like boiling water, but I still missed my mother's murmured prayers. Jean-Paul was twelve
miles away. Not in a pot or branches—someone else sang him a song. He sat in his own doorway, making pecan shells into boats for a puddle, plaiting strips of bleached palmetto for a hat. I had been hungry there, on Rosière. He was hungry. I had bought a mother, and now there was no money. But the longer I waited, the more that floor would be his place, and he might not ever love mine.

I saw him again in April of 1817. Msieu Antoine and Mr. Greene rented a carriage. Their law business had brought them new American clients, but the old Creoles were hesitant to trust Mr. Greene, an American from Philadelphia, with their estates and their marriage contracts. Msieu Antoine said they would call on the de la Rosières.

Jean-Paul was braiding palmetto with Emilia, who had lost her leg and was housebound. He was touching the diamonds of paler green inside the band of the hat they were making.

He was three. He called me Maman, but that was only my name.

He was pleased to see me.
Genial
, that word applied to certain men who liked everyone, but no one more than another. He leaped into my arms, he kissed me and spoke to me, and lay beside me, but I felt that he would have done the same for Emilia, for Fantine, for the next woman who would pet him and feed him and wash his cheeks.

I wanted there to be no one else who did that. I wanted him to love me the way I loved my mother, with that binding strong as spiderwebs woven into a rope. The silk threads individual, gossamer, floating across a bush, but when Firmin used to pull the cradles of web from the corners of the room, and roll the threads between his fingers, he made a dirty string no one could break.