A Million Nightingales (18 page)

If he touched me, I could only comply.

If he made me go upstairs because he thought I was a daughter of joy, if he were from New Orleans, he might take me back there if I was pleasant. I could not care how I left this place.

But he turned to the desk, his back bent so sharply over his writing that the spine showed through his shirt as I left. Dashes of bone.

At dinner, Msieu Antoine said that he had decided to open an office in Opelousas. He asked who ran Rosière when Msieu was gone, asked about Mirande and Baillo, but he never rode his horse down the street to the fields or le quartier.

Night after night, I stayed awake, gliding my hand along the wax of the floor, listening for her footsteps and for his. But he never came at night to seek me, or anyone else. He was not in love with Pélagie. I had read his letters.

It was difficult. It took me some time. I knew many words from Céphaline and Doctor Tom, but at first, it wasn't clear how the words were strung together, the stitching of the smaller words to connect them. Madame Pélagie wrote no letters, only lists of household tasks or things she wished to buy:
Polish moldings and table legs. Launder tablecloths again. Squab, tartes aux fruits.

But Msieu Antoine covered pages and pages with his ink. I could read only scattered words on those long documents. Arpents of land. Beloved son. Division of estate.

To love. To divide.

How did the words stay inside the skull, in those arrangements? How many words could the brain hold? I did not smile at him while I hung his clean clothes and saw his fingers stained black, moving across the page. Céphaline's brain had been so full of sentences and numbers that her skull pushed out her hair, and her skin pushed out boutons.

Mamère could measure with her eyes bullock's gall and cabbage juice for her recipes. Léonide could judge the fire below the pot with only a glance and tell me to add exactly two pieces of wood.

I had to measure the whites now, their words and eyes and hands.

After dinner, he played cards with Pélagie. He was not in love with her, and he still did not touch me. He studied me, but with nothing in his face except curiosity, as if he studied a species of dog. Alone in the garçonnière, I looked at his letters, in which he complained to his aunt about his love.

Tante Justine: The Americans here in Louisiana have disgusted the Creole French, and the French-born, with their greed and low habits. I know this, and am sorry that the object of my affection was born in Philadephia, but I wish you could overlook citizenship for character.

Companion. A friend. An American.

But the next letter was more than friendship, and he left it unsigned.

It is difficult to pass another month without your company. Your sly asides at the table, your assessments of character flaw. I cannot express how much I miss your fingers in mine.

He loved someone far away. At night, in the hallway, I wrote my own letters, in my head. It was difficult to read without anyone knowing, but to find paper and ink and a place to practice writing?

I think of you every minute. I remember every lesson. I measure things in my head, so no one sees. I will find a way back.

In the mornings, Pélagie stirred much later than anyone else, and the first words she spoke were always the same. “My hair,” she said without moving, and I put down the cup of coffee with no sugar or milk on the vanity. Every day the same. She sat in the chair before the mirror. The fourteen curls piled high on her head came down gently into my palm. Scars from the curling tongs of her past. Like silver wood lice on her neck and even two on her ear.

After her hair was finished, and she had powdered her face and I had helped her into a dress, she drank another cup of coffee and went to meet Madame in the dining room.

“How can you not have had a trained laundress?” she began one day, while they sewed for the Paris trip. “Did you see how Moinette has taken care to brighten your chemises?”

Madame nodded. “They smell like rosemary.”

“I brought it from Paris. When I heard about your sight.”

Then they were silent, and we sewed.

Léonide said, “I don't touch les blancs, me. Hair like spiderweb.” But mine is moss, I thought. Yours is wool. Touching her hair

is my task.

We moved about the pantry, in the cool brick-paved area

under the house, counting the huge jars of olive oil from France.
It was Sunday, and Amanthe had secreted away bits of the roasted chicken from dinner, the splinters of white meat she picked from the breastbone, and spongy pieces of dark meat from behind the back. Madame, Pélagie, and Msieu Antoine had eaten. Amanthe carried the meat wrapped in paper, in her apron pocket.

When we walked to le quartier, I chanted to myself the receipt for cleaning white clothes, because Philippine and Firmin would be glad to see Amanthe, but no one would care whether I had come or not.

Fronie and Fantine were elsewhere with their friends. And Sophia was asleep on her shelf. When I went inside, to touch the place where my coffee beans had been ground into the cracks of the floor, she heard me. Her back was curved like a turtleshell, and she turned her head, opened one eye at me, and then covered her face again with her tignon.

“Opelousas?” Madame said at breakfast. “You and Monsieur Antoine need the carriage for Opelousas? But that is half a day's journey, and it's very rough in places.”

“He says I must see the French dressmaker in Opelousas. For Mardi Gras. For the dinners and dances.”

“But everything you have is new to the people in Washington and Arnaudville. And to Opelousas.”

“A lovely dress from her would show I want to be part of here. This place.” Pélagie moved her curls carefully from her ear. “I want to see her display.”

“Your clothes are from Paris.”

“The women will know that soon enough.”

“Clothes. Always clothes.”

“I had only one dress when I was young. One dress. You will never know how it feels.”

“No.”

“One dress, and when it's being washed, you sit inside in your chemise, with the shutters closed. All day in winter. Like a foolish, helpless cat with no fur.”

“Your eyes did look like a cat's. When you were small. Slanted like that.”

“You can't know. And I'm sorry that you're going. But I will take good care of Etienne when he comes. My nephew, and he is only five years younger than me! So handsome now. I saw him twice in Paris.”

“Yes.”

“He doesn't want to return to Louisiana?”

“I don't know. I will know when I see him in Paris. Oh—what if I cannot see him? What if the treatments are too late for my eyes?”

“No. No. Paris has the best doctors in the world.” She turned to me. “Moinette, Monsieur Antoine's shoes need that bootblack you made. He says he's never seen them shine so.”

I had my own bottles now. Every day, when I saw them lined up on the kitchen shelf, my heart turned like a small animal curled in sleep, hunching tighter.

The bottles were marked with thread I had braided at night. Bootblack: Eight ounces of best ivory black, rubbed fine, with three ounces of molasses, one ounce each sugar candy and sweet oil. Gum arabic dissolved in sour beer. Shake well and cork four days.

The threads were miniatures of my braids, tied around the bottlenecks. I rubbed the bootblack in small circles.

Madame said, “I don't understand you, Pélagie.”

“You don't have to. I told Laurent when I first saw you, when I was five and you were being married, that your eyes were like the ocean and I knew you would leave France.”

“Now my eyes are gray and black.”

“No, darling, they are still full of ocean. But the doctors in Paris will cure you. Paris has the best of everything in the world.”

Behind the house, between two chinaberry trees, I had made my laundry. I washed out Pélagie's cloths, from her monthly blood. All the blood that left us, and how did we make new blood, exactly the same? When a leech gorged itself on the human liquid,
how did the body make it anew? Was it always the same, the mix of mother and father?

When the African was brought to Louisiana, how did his blood not change inside him?

Msieu had bought four Africans. Two perhaps my age, and two older. Léonide said the Africans had gone straight to le quartier because it was night.

The blood smell was coppery in the rinse. All I knew of Africa: the sentences Mamère told me and the sentence Céphaline had recited for her tutor: Africa is a vast continent of savagery and war, containing many of the great rivers of the world.

My blood. Mamère had left with her own mother, to go on the ship where men and women died and leaped overboard to swim back up their rivers. Their
faro
guided them. Had her mother's sisters and brothers remained, to make the marks on the faces of their own children? And had those children been captured and sent down the river? To enter Barataria Bay?

But when the new Africans came to the yard for their clothes, they did not have marks like my grandmother and like Hera. They had no marks at all.

From the trunk in the pantry, I took out trousers and capes. Like my cape. The wool so heavy on my neck, that first week in the fields.

Msieu had his ledger on the table. February 4, 1812—Esclaves: Augustin—Mina. Philomen—Mina. Célestin—Ki. Berquin—Ki.

Not Senegalese or Congo. They fixed their eyes on the trees beyond the house and shivered. Three backs bore brands from the ship.

Like Mamère's?

That night, when the women had gone into the parlor to wait for Msieu, I stood before Pélagie's mirror.

You belong to me.

The scar around my ankle was smooth and dark, purple on cold days, brown on warm ones.

You belong to me.

I uncovered the blade of my shoulder and looked at the fleur-de-lis. Etched brown, flat, not shiny. The petal sharp as sword.

I don't belong to you.

The curling tongs were hot over the candle flame. On my forearm, not my wrist scarred with lavender rosettes from the boat nails, but higher, where I could see it anytime I pushed up my sleeve, I burned small images with the ends of the tongs. Sharp, like a pen nib. Three coffee beans, little circles of white pain.
M
— for Marie-Thérèse: four lines, with the tongs laid flat.

Tears ruined my vision, blood raced to the burns, and I dropped the tongs.

Her name was not Marie-Thérèse. That was given to her. What was her real name, from her own mother? How could I not know?

I smelled wax and picked up the tongs, but not before a small black mark had seared into the wooden floor by the vanity's legs.

When Madame Pélagie came up from dinner, she smelled burned wood. She could smell a single rose petal. “Why have you heated the curling tongs? Take that cloth from your hair. If you have touched them to—” She frowned at the braid that fell from my tignon. She had never seen my hair.

My arm was covered by my sleeve. She couldn't smell the scorched flesh. I had rubbed ashes into the burns to make them darker.

She bent to touch the mark on the floor. “Burned wood cannot be restored without sanding.”

Burned skin—sanding would never help.

“I will not beat you,” she said, cutting off each word in Paris French, not like Louisiana French. “I have never had a slave. Only a maid. I will not touch you. But if you begin to touch my things, I will recommend to my brother that you be sent back to the cane and ask him to purchase someone who will not be careless. Comprends?”

I nodded. “Oui, madame.”

Two of the new Africans were dead within a week. Baillo rode for the doctor in Washington, and Madame had me take her down to le quartier.

The Africans were in a newly built house at the end of the street. Two wore leg chains attached to the wall. The youngest kept his back to us. His hair sat on his skull like a hundred black pebbles. Two were outside, their faces covered with blankets.

“The disease of the gums,” the doctor said, his lip rising. “They tell you the men are healthy, and they shine them up with oil. But half the time, they've been in the barracoon for months waiting for the ship, and then eating rotten meal on the water.”

Madame sighed. “They weren't baptized. There was no time.”

Msieu said, “They must be buried at night, then, in the field.”

“Laurent,” Madame said, but he lifted his hand, palm out.

“The code.”

They turned to the house, and we waited for the coffins.

A carpenter brought them on his cart, pine boxes so newly made that they bled golden sap. The men carried the coffins into the woods and dug the holes amid the weeds near the bayou. The new graves filled with water. When the coffins were lowered, mirrors of black broke and then stilled again around the wood.

The carpenter stopped me with one finger. “You have some water, mamselle?”

He said his name—Hervé Richard. His forehead shone like syrup, even though the air was cold. His skin was a bit darker than mine; he had French blood. Was he free? Was I allowed to look at his face? I glanced up at his hair—black waves combed down from a part. His scalp was paler than his forehead.

He said, “You don't mind I ask—you not free?”

“Me?”

He shrugged, leaning against the well. “So light, like some mulâtresse in New Orleans. When I bring furniture, sign the name and FWC. Tell me that is free woman of color.”

“This is not New Orleans.” The knot in his throat rose and fell when he drank. “And you? Free?”

His smile worked deep only on one side of his face, making a second grin in his cheek. “Msieu Lescelles buy me last year from New Orleans. Sign his name FMC. He run a carpenter shop near Opelousas.”

His horse blew air through its nostrils. “Free to come and go
with wood. Maybe your people buy armoire or chair. Maybe I come back.” He checked the axle on his cart. His sleeves were rolled up and his forearms light as gold, but marked with cuts and nicks. A splinter was lodged like an exclamation point in the webbing between his finger and thumb. “Come back when I don't make something so sad.”

I walked alone toward the house. But ahead of me, Sophia slipped into the blacksmith shed. At the half-open door, I peered inside. Loud pounding, mixed with strangled noises coming from Gervaise, lunging sounds forced from his throat.