A Million Nightingales (36 page)

Who do you belong to?

The rose burned on his forearm was paler now, grown larger, stretched from baby to boy skin.

At night, I told Jean-Paul: “You belong to me now. Your name
is on the paper with mine. You belong to God, true, but you are mine.”

He asked me nothing for weeks. He watched us all.

If I said, “Is the chicken good?” he answered, “Oui, Maman, the chicken is good.”

If Tretite said, “Did you bring in wood for the fire?” he answered, “Oui, Grandmère, I brought in wood for the fire.”

If Msieu Antoine said, “How is your cold today?” he answered, “My cold is fine today, msieu.”

There was a glint of laughter in his eyes, like a thick darning needle under his long eyelashes. His voice was laced with polite cheer.

But when David came with the basket on his head, filled with strawberries and early onions, with okra and green beans, Jean-Paul's whole face changed. He put down his broom and sat on the back step, with molasses taffy or one of Tretite's tartes. David said, “I slept in your bed.”

Jean-Paul said nothing. They chewed, and I saw the sides of their faces when they stared at the chinaberry trees in starry bloom.

That night, he told me, “He said he was dark from the sun.”

“David?”

He nodded. “I see the biscuits. Lard and flour and salt and milk. All white. Not like cornbread. But she takes them from the fire and they are brown.” He looked at my neck. “He lived here. Before I came.”

“David slept here for a time. I bought him from a white man who treated him badly. Now he lives with Charité. She is his mother.”

He lay on the mattress, one cheek mashed into the fabric. Finally, when he seemed asleep, he said, “You bought me. You could give me to Charité.”

I left my chair and lay beside him. “No. I could never give you to anyone. I am truly your mother.”

“Charité isn't truly his mother?”

“She is now. But she wasn't before.” His knuckles were no longer soft and dimpled under my touch. They were hard little
rock-bones. “Tretite isn't truly your grandmère. But she is now. You sometimes make your family.”

He waited a long time again. “Sometimes you unmake a family.”

“You miss Emilia?”

“I miss Francine.”

He faced the wall. On the ceiling, a tiny puff of whitewash made a cloud when Msieu Antoine knocked a book from his bed.

Every day when Jean-Paul brought wood for the fireplaces, the boarders and lawyers and visitors narrowed their eyes. Then they would nod at Msieu Antoine and say, “You had this one hidden, no?”

“He and his mother were separated by circumstance,” Msieu Antoine said smoothly.

They smiled privately or frowned openly; there was no more to say.

In December, when we went over household bills, he laced his fingers like a fence over more papers.

“Just as with you, he cannot be freed until he is twenty-one.”

“But he is mine. He is safe.”

“No,” Msieu Antoine said. “What if you take ill and die? What if I am required to move? Then who does he belong to?”

“Move? Where?”

He only shrugged. He was not required to speak about everything.

Jean-Paul belongs to God, I thought. Là-bas, where I would be—I couldn't help him then.

“What are you planning to write?” I asked. He began with a blank piece of paper—the flat emptiness that held our lives.

I touched the edges of the contracts near me. Céphaline's voice—paper is made of wood fibers crushed and wetted and pressed and dried. They used to write on skin. Animal skin.

Write it on my chest. Burn it. My son. Don't take him away.

“He is a boy. He must have a trade. He needs a legal guardian and protector until his twenty-first birthday. You own him. But you have little to assist him, and if you leave his life, he is a slave for sale.”

“No.”

“If you died, he would become inherited property.”

“No!”

“Who is the father?”

I studied Msieu Antoine's moustache, his nose veined with tiny spiderwebs on one side. “Everyone thinks you are the father.”

“I know.”

“That is convenient.”

“It is someone from Rosière,” he said. “We both know who it is.”

“Does it matter?”

He shook his head. “But he cannot be assisted by his father, true? I am suggesting an indenture. I will be his guardian.”

We stood at the courthouse again, and Jean-Paul came with us. He threw back his head to look at the ceiling, the fans, the lights.

So the first man to buy my son didn't examine him, of course, didn't pull up his lips to look at the gums, the way men did. Didn't push hard on the boy's belly, as a stranger would have.

But I was afraid anyway, with a tremble like wet hair across my back, even though this was the only man who had ever been kind to me. I was an animal, and my skin reminded me that my brain controlled nothing.

Julien Antoine looked at me, not my son, and said, “This is not a sale, Moinette. These are indenture papers. They only state that he is under my care for a period of years. There is no reason to be nervous. This protects him, with my name.”

He turned to the clerk at the conveyance book and said, “The boy is only six, after all.”

This time, when I held the pen, my son watched my fingers.

My own father's name was unknown. My mother never had a last name. My first owner's name was Bordelon. I was not a de la Rosière. Now I was free.

This man, Julien Antoine, had brought us both here. People assumed this was his son. I had trusted him now with our lives. On page 156 of the conveyance book, I wrote his name: Jean-Paul Antoine, quadroon slave of Moinette Antoine, FWC.

———

We began by blowing on the embers of the fire Tretite banked each night. She slept in the kitchen now because her head hurt in the night, and she liked to sit up near the warmth. All those years, she said every morning to my mother, “Dorm bien?” Sleep well? And my mother said to her, “Tête bien?” Head well?

When I suggested we call Doctor Vidrine, Tretite said the pain was as if a scarf were inside, under her scalp and hair, and someone pulled the tie tighter and tighter. She said, “Let me quiet for a time.”

Jean-Paul and I woke her with our combined breaths on the red jewels inside the ashes because he loved the color.

I learned about texture and color and waiting from my son. He had waited for me for too long, and he liked only to be alone with his own imagination and with gradations of tint and shade. When I hung the shirts, when I lit the candles, when I added the flour, he watched. Skin and bone, bleached linen and muslin.

Folds and pleats. He taught himself to sew on scraps of cloth.

Every night, I prayed for him and for my mother, while Jean-Paul traced the branches on his plate. My mother's smell was in the heated iron, her night-shining eyes in the ink bottles.

Every morning, we went out into the yard. Jean-Paul shook the bottles, which each glowed different murkiness in the sun. The white shirts moving their sleeves, the pocked surface of the iron. New boats made of palmetto leaf.

This yard and kitchen were his place.

I remembered days and nights in the clearing and my mother's house with a vivid clarity. And I stared at him when he wasn't aware of me, wondering if these were his days. The ones that would remain sharp, every outline—like a child's pinwheel blurring in a breath and then stopped, frozen for a moment so each slice was distinct.

When he was seven, he brought me three dolls for Francine. He had made them of scraps of brown velvet, and he'd sewn
on black button eyes and crude mouths of red thread, even a crooked line of white in the center for teeth.

“Why can't we take them to her?” he said.

“We cannot visit Rosière. It isn't allowed.”

“You visited me before.”

It was winter, and his skin was so pale, a lavender bruise on his cheekbone from wrestling with David, his eyes the last moment of day.

“I was a slave then, and so were you. I came when Msieu Antoine visited. But the de la Rosières do not want free people there, on Rosière. They will not allow it.”

“But we can go at night. When they can't see.”

I shook my head. “Too dangerous.”

He shouted, “Danger is the fire. Danger is the knife. Emilia said that a thousand times.”

“Danger is different for you now.” I tried to pull him onto my lap, to examine the dolls, but he ran into our room and hid them in one of his secret places, all of which I knew, but none of which I ever touched.

When he was eight, he pulled my forearm to the candlelight and said, “What mark is this?”

His brand was the blurred rose, the two thorns.

I said, “My own brand.” I would not show him the fleur-de-lis. He put his fingernail next to the three coffee bean scars from the curling iron. My anger felt like a hot scarf pulled from my throat, but I couldn't cry. He was a child. The purple marks from the nail on the boat had disappeared. My dried blood on my teeth while the boat moved north in the water.

“I made those marks on myself to help me remember my mother.”

He asked what I knew he would. “Did she leave you?”

“I did not leave you because I wanted to. Msieu Antoine bought me, and I was impatient every day to come back for you.”

“And now he is your husband. He is my father.”

My mother had not lied to me. She had withheld the truth when it suited her, and me.

“He is our guardian. Like Tretite is your grandmother.”

He pulled at his own brand. A polliwog. A kite. Nothing recognizable.

“You don't have one of these. Everyone else has them. Fran-cine. Emilia.”

“I am the only one with your exact blood. The rest I have given you.” My needle was warm. The grooves in my fingertips were permanent.

“Did it hurt? When you made the three marks?”

Would he try it? To please me, or to better me?

“It hurt very much. I would never do it again.”

He smiled faintly. I kept his hair short and combed down tightly. His forehead was square, not round like David's. He said, “You wouldn't have to.”

The next week, he and David tried to carry wood from the shed to the kitchen, and both hobbled on the left foot. I was astonished that they'd both hurt themselves. “Did you drop something on your toes?”

They had marked themselves on the bottoms of their feet. When I made them take off their shoes, blue crosses were inflamed and red on their soles.

“How could you hurt David like this?” I asked.

My son smiled. “He said it didn't hurt.”

David was impassive as always. He added, “I hate the fire. We use a knife. And Jean-Paul put the ink.”

“Like the Indian who comes to the alley to bring the wood,” Jean-Paul said. “He has the ink on his chin.”

I rubbed salve onto their feet and made them sit in the kitchen. “Why would you put it there? Now you can't walk.”

Jean-Paul looked at me as though I were foolish. “We're the same color there.”

“A cross?”

“Two lines. Two of us.”

When he was nine, his voice grew little barbs like thistle. Soft and downy and pricking.

“Looking in the mirror won't help,” Jean-Paul said.

“Help what?” Tretite sat with him in the dining room. I paused on the stairs.

“His coat.”

They had been watching Msieu Redmond, who always examined himself in the large entry mirror. I stayed on the steps, listening until he left.

“Eh, là. You stop.”

“Won't help his sideburns either.”

Tretite whispered, “Ti maman hear you.”

There was silence then. I sat on the top step. Not “No, she won't,” or “But if she does, she'll laugh, too.” He didn't say these sharp-edged words around me.

“I like to make you laugh. Your dress shakes.”

“Eh, là, stop now!” She laughed again.

“I used to make Emilia laugh. And Francine.”

He had asked only once more if we would ever go to Rosière. I told him I didn't know. Etienne and his wife had passed me once on the sidewalk near the courthouse when I delivered letters to Msieu Antoine. The wife was blond and plump, whether with food or with child, her waist full under the bodice of her dress. Her face clenched itself tightly as a red fist. Maybe she knew me; maybe she hated anyone with skin like mine; maybe she assumed I was one of Jeanne Heureuse's girls and would unbutton my dress right there on the street for her husband.

Jean-Paul said softly, “Msieu Redmond pulls at his coatsleeves in front of the mirror as if that will help them grow. Every time. The mirror won't help. Pas magique.”

Tretite only huffed a little now.

I carried the basket of linens down the stairs into silence. “Jean-Paul,” I said, holding out my hand. He smiled, the effortless, polite smile he used for every human.

He followed me to the hallway mirror. The men spoke inside the office; cart wheels rumbled outside. “We are the same,” I told him. He was tall, like his father. His face was level with my shoulder. His cheeks were like old paper, his hair combed smooth and hard as black glass with pomade.

“We are,” he agreed. His smile did not change.

If my own father were reckless and unknown, what had his
blood given? Etienne's father was in Jean-Paul, the supercilious assessment and impatience that had passed down through his own son. His grandson. And Madame? Her white garden. Her blossoms.

Even Pélagie, his aunt—her judgment and calculations, her love of finery—she was inside my son.

“Your true grandmère refused to speak if she didn't care to. Even to whites,” I said to him now. “She trusted no one. As you do not.”

If my mother's eyes had been nightwater, his were twilight. I said, “Her blood, and mine, are in your tongue. You must be careful, because your words are often in your eyes, and anyone can see them.”

His smile became thinner, curled more at the corners of his lips. He said, “It is too bad we are not marked with ears and fur, like the dogs of Msieu de la Rosière. Hunting dogs are always easy to tell.”

I said, “Yes, they are,” remembering my mother's lessons, how she had spoken with weight and seriousness in the clearing and the words seemed to knuckle against my skull.