A Million Nightingales (34 page)

I wanted my son to love me like that, soil and crumbs and hair and kisses and words all particles of gray in the thread of each day.

———

“I have never owned a human before.”

“You do not own her now, so why are you concerned?” Msieu Antoine was amused.

“Wouldn't it be more useful if she were pregnant? For—”

I paused in the hallway. For the illusion that a mulâtresse was Msieu Antoine's lover and not him.

Msieu Antoine laughed. Five low sternum-barks. “Though I own her, I do not wish to mandate her reproduction, Jonah. That has happened to her in the past.”

“She has a child.”

“Yes.”

“But then why not bring the child here, so others will think—”

I put my hand against the cool plaster to steady myself. My bare feet. The wood floor hot from summer.

“I have tried to purchase the boy. But the owner insists he will not sell him until he is ten, in order to abide by the slave code.”

“Code Noir. Black code. An outdated and insulting list that began with the illegality of my presence. The first article stated that all Jews be expelled from the colony.”

“Jonah. We agreed that there was good money to be made here and that we would find another place eventually. Moinette will be patient. As are we. Trust me.”

But one day, when the house was empty except for me and Tre-tite, Charité delivered beets and came inside to drink coffee. She pointed to the pheasant plate over the mantel and said, “Very fancy. But so small, who ever eat from that?”

The taste of coffee. My peacock plate. My son not here. My mother dead.

She was dead.

I lay in my room until Tretite came. The truth. “Christophe said my mother drowned herself in the bayou. Not looking for me. Giving up.”

Tretite shook her head. “She never give up. Christophe don't know.”

“He saw her.”

“He saw her leave.” Tretite sat on the bed and said, “My hair hurt my head. Please?”

I unwrapped the strings from her hair, grayer now like faint white salt circles on her temples. She said, “You are nineteen now? You can know the truth.”

“He told me the truth.”

Tretite shook her head so violently her soft jaw quavered. “No. Only Ibo people kill the self, so they can fly back to Africa. To their people.”

“She was Bambara.” I had read the word now, beside the names of so many slaves, in Msieu Antoine's papers. “From Senegal. That's what Senegalese means.”

Tretite shrugged. “Singalee people not like Ibo. When we live in Santo Domingo, I see Ibo people. They come on the ship, and the first week, they hang from the tree. I go outside in the morning, and twenty of them hang from the tree. Fig tree. Tie around the neck with rope from the barn. Together.”

I combed out the thick gray coils of hair until she fell asleep in the chair. Feet dangling from the branches. But I still saw my mother lying on her back in the bayou that led toward Barataria, her eyes closed to the branches above her.

The next night, she said, “Marie-Thérèse—not Ibo. One day, we will look outside that door and see her face.”

She cooked in her new white dress. I sewed it of fine linen. Not scraps. Absently, she rubbed the skirt between her fingers. While we sat beside the kitchen fire, after the men had moved to the office with their cigars, she watched me mend Mr. Jonah Greene's black coat, where a loose nail had torn a flap in the sleeve.

“People rise up and kill the masters on Santo Domingo. Madame Bordelon people come to Louisiana to start over. Bring Marie-Claire and me. They start in Pointe Coupee. Seventeen ninety-two. And no Ibo people. They don't buy Ibo. Only Mina or Singalee. But I see a man on the next place, and he tell his msieu he will marry me. I twenty-two then.”

Tretite's glossy chin trembled. The grooves beside her mouth
were deep now, as if her chinbone was wooden, attached to her face by threads.

“Where did you meet him?”

“In the woods. He is hunter for his place. But his msieu say no, he doesn't marry. Ramon. Ramon say his msieu cannot tell who love. The next day, he shoot his msieu with the musket. Three balls. He come to me that night and leave a bird. Pheasant. With the long tail. I pluck the feathers and make a hat, but Ramon never come back. The army come and bring me in chains to Ramon place. His msieu dead in the house. Ramon hanging in his room. Ibo.”

She held her hands before her. “Inside the pheasant—two balls. Inside the msieu—three. They take all the slaves to Ramon room. The belt around his neck. Say, ‘Who kill your master, he hang there. Who prove the love of the master will not be punish. You prove the love—cut off the murderer head.’ “

I bent forward and covered my face, but the coat smelled of bitter tea leaves and smoke, and I dropped it on the floor.

“Hippolyte the driver cut off the head. Manchac the gardener cut off the right hand. Gustave cut off the left. Hang the pieces over Ramon door for one month. Let them be warn.” She pleated the white fabric over her legs. “Bury his body in the street. Say now he never leave. Say Ibo foolish to think they fly back to Africa when they die. Say he never buy Ibo slaves again.”

She put the pot on the stand over the low flame and sat down. After some time, she said, “Marie-Thérèse not Ibo. She run to find you. One day, you open that door and she stand there.”

But even if my mother had run, she would never know the words we had left on Azure, with Christophe and Eveline and Hera. Msieu Antoine. Court Street, Opelousas.

Christophe had told me the truth. He didn't hate me now. He meant to save me the years of turning my head sharply at every knock, of my heart making that small leap like a fish searching for a fly, when the muscle would only knock against the flat bone that covered it.

———

“Aside from the absence of intelligent or original thought?”

“Jonah. There is more money to be made here. Louisiana planters have more assets than half of the eastern states.”

“And apparently that excuses them from the necessity to use logic and reason.”

“Can you not be patient?”

“Can you not be impatient?”

They both laughed at the dining room table, and then the long silence and turning of pages that meant they both read.

In September of 1817, the newspaper reported that hundreds were dying of yellow fever in New Orleans. We were far north, but someone must have brought the fever miasma to Opelousas, as a cloud that clung to his hair or coat or hands.

Miasma. What had Céphaline said of miasma? An air that contained something? How was that possible? I served dinner to Mr. Greene and a client from Baton Rouge, and the house was quiet. The night before, we'd been kept awake by men shouting in the streets about fever. Msieu Antoine had gone to New Iberia on business.

When I went upstairs in the morning, to bring the hot water for their pitchers and shaving, Mr. Greene was moaning. It sounded like the noises men made when they lay on top of women. I put my cheek against the door.

But he said, “Help me, please.”

His barre was torn, his bedclothes wet as if lifted from the washpot. He called again and again: “Julien. Julien.” Msieu Antoine's first name.

I took his clothes from him, and Tretite brought new sheets. His head was thrown back, and he panted. Water stood out on his skin. Salt and the smell of disease. I bathed him again and again with cool water, as Tretite told me. She had seen fever before. She said, “Doctor bleed him and give him bad medicine. Kill him. Like Céphaline. Don't get doctors. I make the beef broth and keep the windows open. Cold. Cold for hot blood. Not take the blood away.”

I prayed and prayed. If he died, we would be held responsible. Msieu Antoine would—what would he do? The sweat ran from the skin, and his eyes turned yellow as old wax. I prayed that the
fever was inside his blood but that the blood released it from the skin. But that night, when he was unconscious, writhing and turning like a wind inside his white sheets, I told Tretite I would find Doctor Vidrine.

Near the alley gate, I stepped on a hand. An Indian man, sprawled near the shed, his blanket open and his chest bare. His mouth was open as if to receive rain. He didn't move, but air went in and out past his teeth. Was that miasma?

I covered my mouth and nose with a rag and ran toward Madame Delacroix's boardinghouse and tavern. Three men walked down the street, American drunk voices, and I ducked into another alley.

And at the back of the boardinghouse, I heard moaning again. What if someone here had the fever? I peered into the yard. A man leaned against a tree near the cistern, and a woman knelt before him, her face pressed to the front of his pants. His white hands in her black hair, clenched into fists.

I turned my face and went to the back door. “Doctor Vidrine,” I breathed to the maid who answered. “Please. Please.”

He finished his bourbon and picked up his bag.

In three days, Mr. Greene was weak, but alive. He drank beef broth and said that he had lived because he never touched alcohol. Doctor Vidrine laughed and said that bourbon in the blood, or African immunity, refused entrance to the fever. “You don't have that, eh? But you are a Jew.”

Mr. Greene was quiet.

“I have seen the—the indications when the servant washed your body.” He laughed. “Perhaps the Jews have different blood, as well, that protected you from the fever. Two slave brokers from Virginia died this morning.”

I went upstairs to take away the last soiled bedding. The liquids from his body—blood and sweat and vomit and excrement. I boiled the linens with vinegar and alum.

“Do you know what a Jew is?” Mr. Jonah Greene looked at me from his bed. He drank leaves instead of beans. He didn't like sugar. He did not attend Mass. He loved Msieu Antoine. He was an American.

I shook my head.

“I am not certain I know anymore, myself.” He turned his head to the window then, and I went down the stairs.

When Msieu Antoine returned, he asked me to sit in his office.

Inside the courthouse, he said, ledgers recorded every transaction in the parish. Marriages, deaths, births, divorces, sales of property, suits brought against parties who had injured or wronged someone, such as the one against Mr. McAdam when he had hurt me.

He wrote for some time, the ink smooth as trails of excrement from an insect. I hadn't written anything except the labels for my bottles since we returned from Azure. I had nothing to record.

“This says that you will be freed on your twenty-first birthday, in consideration of services rendered by you in the saving of your master's life.”

I stared at my name. Moinette. But Mr. Greene was not my master.

Msieu Antoine looked at me as if he knew. “In saving his life, you have saved mine.”

I had no words.

“The code states that slaves cannot be manumitted until they are twenty-one. You were twenty this week, no? But this paper promises that you will be free on that very day you become twenty-one. Then you will continue to live here, but I will pay you for your services.” He put his fingers into his sideburns and rested his chin on his hands. “Doctor Vidrine asked if you serviced both of us.”

I nodded. Understood the indications—the bare purple bulb. The piece of flesh I washed for Mr. Greene, like nothing I had ever seen. Not like Msieu Ebrard and his groom. A hood of skin. A cape.

An absent piece of skin meant he was a Jew?

I touched the paper's edge. It was acceptable that two men, three at a time, lay with me. But it was not acceptable that one man loved another. Or that one would marry me.

“Moinette.” He lowered his forehead to look at me.

I knew him better than he knew me. That was what Mamère and Tretite had always said. Never trust blankittes. You are property. You are not people. They will sell you or kill you as they please. You know them. They don't know you.

But he was trying to give me my life. His name on a piece of paper said I was free. “Where will you keep it? What if it burns?”

He smiled then. “No thanks, no tears. Always practical. This is a brick building. Our important documents are in a metal box. But these papers will be filed in the courthouse tomorrow.” He waited. “And next you will ask me when you can buy your son.”

The fifth time I saw Jean-Paul was March of 1818. Etienne had delayed his marriage, had chosen a different bride. Msieu Antoine prepared the marriage contract, specifying the dowry and obligations for both families.

We stayed two days. Jean-Paul was somber and quiet when he sat beside me while I sewed. He was four years old. A pale, small, beautiful boy with silvery skin and black hair in waves that I combed down close to his skull. Eyes dark as indigo. He was the son of Etienne.

He had the same way of watching, seeing every small detail, hunting for what he wanted, but inside the house, the yard. He touched my skirts, my boots. He knew people were judged by the cloth and the hat and the boots, leather or hide. He trailed the colored threads through his fingers, and when I pricked my finger with the needle, sitting in Emilia's doorway, and I licked at the blood, he took my hand to examine the small hole.

I could see that he loved no one. He had not allowed himself to truly love. He held himself aloof from us, classifying everything in the folds of his brain. My brain and Mamère's and Etienne's, which meant Msieu Laurent's as well. He was me, measuring everyone.

He would be sent to the fields when he turned seven. If I did not buy him before then, he would lose fingers or legs or the intensity in his eyes. He would float in the green cane and the smoke and be lost to me forever.

I had fifty-two piastres.

That night, the men left the dining room for the office, for bourbon and cigars. Msieu de la Rosière, Etienne, another man I didn't know, and Msieu Antoine. Black coats, dark green, one gray. Only bones and skin inside the wool. Floating in the window, pale faces and black fur.

I couldn't hesitate. They were animals carrying paper. I was an animal carrying coins wrapped in cloth. I caught Msieu Antoine's glance before he entered the office.

“Please. If you sign a mortgage note, and use me as security—”

He knew. “I have made discreet inquiries already, pointing out that the Code Noir specifies the slave child shall not be sold from the mother before ten years, and that there is no mother here. But he specified no mortgages. He has been ill-used from those transactions in the past. He wants one hundred fifty dollars in cash or the trade of another slave.”