A Million Nightingales (26 page)

I cut two large slices of ham and wrapped the meat in rags. Léonide slept in her chair by the fire. I ate the slivers that fell on the cutting table, my fingers slippery with the greased skin.

In le quartier, I put half the meat in Sophia's room, on my old sleeping shelf. She had fed me pieces of small bird. She hadn't had to. I left the other meat in Fantine's. My palms smelled of fat, as when I'd measured tallow for Mamère.

Shreds of flesh on our teeth, ground to satisfy us. My milk bluish white in drops on Jean-Paul's cheek when he let go. The salt would float inside him and enter his blood.

The third time Etienne questioned me, he said, “Who is the father?”

I stood before his desk, where he was surrounded by books, maps, lead balls in a dish.

The metal toys lodged in Pélagie's heart.

“I don't know, msieu.”

“Ebrard or Léonce?”

Léonce must have been the boy who pinched me. I had never seen him since. Etienne didn't include his own name. Did he pretend he had never been with me? Or did he want me to say the words—c'est vous? But I didn't know, truly. Did he want me to name Léonce because none of us would see him again? That would be convenient.

Did he want to sell Jean-Paul?

“I don't know.”

He looked at me furiously, his cheeks white under the sideburns, which always looked like pelt decorations men had sewn to their skin. “How can you not know?”

My eyes dropped to the floor. Dust, tiny bits of paper like eggshells, and mud in the shape of small flowers where he had stepped on it. I was afraid to say anything now. If I said, How could you have taken me upstairs? I was insolent. I had no idea what he would tolerate. His father tolerated no eyes or words.

“Who does it look like?” he asked finally, writing quickly. He wrote numbers. Prices for Jean-Paul? For others?

“It looks like a baby.” My words were careful. “When they are only infants, they don't look like anyone sometimes.”

“What kind of hair does it have?”

“Not much hair has grown yet.” Jean-Paul's head still looked naked under his sparse black hair, veins pulsing when he cried.

Bluish purple blood. Sang mêlé. Quadroon. But a girl. Not a boy. What made a boy useful?

Then Msieu de la Rosière walked inside, and my brain felt filled with blood. Père. Père et fils. He said, “Are you finished with the calculations yet? We have to pay a blacksmith from Washington, now that mine has run.” Then he pointed at me. “Every slave must be branded. Even her child.”

Saliva rose bitter in my throat. Jean-Paul's small, limp arm, the thinness of his skin there.

“These Africans keep running, and I will not tolerate the assistance they find.” He leaned out the window and spat. His earth. His liquids. “In Africa, they live in huts and burn cattle dung. They starve and kill one another.”

But he didn't know Firmin was born in Louisiana, from an
Attakapas mother. Firmin's blood was that of people who'd lived

in the woods.

Etienne said, “The old man was already branded, no?” “Firmin? Two fleur-de-lis. He will not return.” They would hang Firmin. Three times running meant death. Etienne wrote quickly. “Even brand the house slaves?” “Everyone. Everyone except this one. She is sold.”

I left him lifting his head. He lay on his stomach in the box, while I folded little shirts made with scraps of linen from the wedding tablecloths. Heaps of cloth still in Pélagie's room. Madame couldn't see them, and Msieu wouldn't look at them. Only two days to prepare after he told me I was sold, and I sewed all night.

On the last day, a sound woke me in the chair where I'd slept. My neck was bent, and moving my head sent pain coursing down through my muscles. My left hand held the shirt. Snuffling— Jean-Paul was pushing himself up on his chest, raising his eyes to the top of the box, his forehead like a new moon rising over the edge.

I left him that morning, his head bobbing as if he were underwater. I carried his box to Emilia's room. She faced her open door, Francine crawling on a blanket beside her. Emilia's leg was up on a crate, and the skin of her calf was purple and swollen around the dressing over the cut. When I turned, Jean-Paul had raised his head to stare at her toes.

Everything was a lie. Céphaline had believed in words. Péla-gie had believed in cloth and beauty. Amanthe had believed in waiting.

My mother had believed in her prayers. Or had she?

I now had nothing in my head or heart or hands. No words. Cranium.
Faro.
Dress the baby. Dress the table. Dress the body.

His footsteps made trails in the ceiling above me, where I lay on the pantry floor. Msieu Antoine's shoes. Then his feet. Washstand.
Armoire. He knelt at the small altar. The knocking of knees.

When would he come? After he had prayed for himself?

Everyone believed in something. My mother and Hera. Each madame and her Catholic god. Marie-Claire, back on Azure, had believed in her own excretions entering the earth.

Philippine and Firmin had believed in Amanthe.

Hervé Richard had believed in me. He had believed I would wait for him in the woods and take his hand to step inside the armoire.

Jean-Paul was a baby. He was too small to believe in. And my mother? She couldn't still believe in her lessons, of
ni
and
dya.

I believed in nothing now. I lay in the storeroom seeing my son's eyes. All new people, Gervaise had said. New people who could believe nothing.

Eyes tell. But Etienne's were blue, and I had never looked at Msieu Ebrard's eyes. We were not meant to look into white eyes.

Jean-Paul's eyes were purple. A raincloud at evening. No one's eyes.

I hated Msieu Antoine.

I had not hated the Bordelons, even Grandmère. I'd been afraid of them, except for Céphaline. But I had not loved her.

I had not hated the de la Rosières. Even Etienne, when he lay on me—he was the rider, I the animal. The animal did not hate as much as it was tired and bitter and pained.

I had not loved Pélagie, but I wanted to spend my life with her.

I hated the man who slept in the room above me now. We were alone in his brick house in Opelousas. His footsteps moved over me.

Knives waited in the kitchen. Dress the meat. If I killed him, my name would be in the newspapers as far as New Orleans. Slaves who killed masters were always famous. Everyone knew their names. The heads on the pikes at the river road had names.

Then my mother would know where I had gone. My own son would not wonder why I left him to search and smell and cry. I
left him lifting his head. I had not hated him, but I had not loved him yet. I hadn't had time.

“You can be useful to me,” Msieu Antoine had said this evening at the table. “More useful than you may understand. In fact, no one else in the world could accomplish for me what you can.”

He ran his fingers over the table's gritty surface. Thin black hairs like insect antennae danced on each knuckle. His lips twisted like he held in a laugh, and I hated him with a burn that seared my throat. He went upstairs. He would come to the storeroom and ride me like an animal. I would kill him.

My eyes stayed on the floor. The bright pool of light from a candle would slide under the door before the feet arrived.

He did not come to the door. Before dawn, the milk knew what it was meant to do, and it coursed again into the dried, crusted-hard cloth over my breasts as if a ghost suckled there.

“You may begin with coffee.”

The morning light streamed onto the floor around my blankets.

The knife would slide between his ribs. Cut off the long white fingers like egret feathers. The bones at the edge of each wrist like tiny eggs. His coatsleeves moving when he reached for the cup.

“Who taught you to make such dark coffee?”

I wouldn't tell him. The dented pot. The working throat at dawn, eyes studying the slice of sky through the shutters.

“It is wonderful. I need coffee more than air. Thank you.” He smiled vaguely, as if I were his wife, and went into his office, where he closed the door.

I was not a mother. Not a daughter. Not a sister. Not a wife.

I swept the brick floor of the kitchen.

Every time I tried to become some semblance of those words, a shadowy replica like a mimic butterfly, someone took away the necessary person. The person who defined me.

———

Your eyes could never meet theirs. Your pupils, the black dots of your vision, could not be reflected in the colored orbs Céphaline called mere decorations of iris. You were to know what they wanted by their voices and hands and whips and words.

He said only, “You will make this a fine house.”

He needed sheets, curtains, wood for the stove, eggs, and plates for the eggs. He needed the hands to set plates on the table. But if this was a fine house for a bride, there was no bride.

On the top floor were four bedrooms. Three were bare. On the bottom floor, a kitchen with a dirty hearth, the pantry where I slept, a dining room with a scarred table, and a parlor Msieu Antoine had made into his office.

That room was comfortable, with a large desk and chair, with shelves to hold papers and books, with a couch and chair for clients, and a beautiful small table with curved legs to hold the coffee tray.

I made a second pot long before noon. “The coffee served at Madame Delacroix's boardinghouse is a poor imitation of this,” he said, standing in the kitchen doorway while more beans roasted in a shallow pan. “I have eaten there for a year.”

This was a statement. There was no answer.

“You didn't say who taught you to make coffee? Your mother?”

“Oui, msieu.”

“In New Orleans?”

“Non, msieu. South of there. Azure.”

“But you resemble a daughter of joy,” he said thoughtfully, and returned to his office.

This was not a question. Resemble. I resembled things I was not. Was I a replacement for someone who had brought him joy and then left? Was he waiting until I ceased resembling a mother? I had wrapped my breasts with flannel rags, so tightly that the milk seemed to move hot into my shoulders when I turned the grinder handle.

A large silver coffee urn had been delivered, a few pots, and simple white plates and cups. Spoons.

Boiling water onto the ground coffee. The smell filled the
kitchen like burning earth, like night erased by a different dark. Sun filled the shutters on the street windows with gold splinters.

I brought the coffee to his desk. He blew at the edge, took a sip and said, “Perfect.” Then he studied his ink and motioned me to open the shutters. The silver salt liquid leaped from my heart to my throat to my eyes.

In the kitchen, the bitterness of coffee swam over my teeth and burned my tongue before the heat dropped into my ribs. I was my mother, but I was not. She had felt this rush of warmth and then a movement in her brain as if a tongue had licked at her skull. She had begun each day looking at me. But Jean-Paul drank Fantine's milk; he saw Emilia's face. His brain was small. He learned lessons when his stomach was empty, and he tasted molasses soaked into the weave of rag Emilia put into his mouth.

I wiped the tears with my sleeve before they reached my own mouth. A cricket moved uncertainly from the broom's edge. Cricket babies grew antennae far longer than their bodies. Their mothers taught them nothing about watching and waiting. My eyelashes were long. Fantine's and Pélagie's lashes would probably measure the same, if they were ever compared. Jean-Paul's lashes would grow in my absence.

Msieu Antoine wrote all day. Men knocked on the front door. I looked at their shoes, heard their words, brought coffee to the office. An Acadian man wearing blue homespun appeared at the back door holding a dead chicken by the feet.

Beyond the dining room window was the street crowded with carriages and horses and men arguing. Bills of sale. Settle the estate. The suit claims wrongdoing. The words flew inside his office and in the dining room. In the kitchen, I thrust the black skewering iron through the body of the chicken and heard it tear the flesh.

The men examined me for joy. They said low and approving, “Very fancy piece.” “But this one cooks, too, eh? In addition.”

Msieu Antoine replied, “She is already invaluable in many ways.”

When the rooms grew dark, I was only afraid of the fingers. It sounds strange to say I hated the fingers more than the other, because the other seemed like a separate animal, a blind, foolish animal itself, and the fingers were attached to the man, his eyes watching.

“I would like to see your hair,” he said, near midnight when the front door was locked. I had sat for hours near the low kitchen fire. I pulled the tignon from my head and unpinned my two braids. My hair was dirty and the curls matted down, so that the six sections of undone braid hung about me like ropes.

But if he wanted to ride me as a horse—a mule—ropes would be fine. My eyes focused on the embers.

He did not move. He said, “Was your mother's hair as long?”

“No, msieu.”

“What color was your father's hair?”

“Sais pas, msieu.”

“In Paris, they say each generation of New Orleans courtesans is more beautiful. But Pélagie told me you are a hairdresser.”

This also was not a question. His hair was not in need of my attention. I was tired of not having antennae. My hair hung limp and heavy on my shoulders.

“Didn't you run once from Rosière?”

He sat at the scarred kitchen table. He looked into an empty coffee cup. His cuffs were blackened as if burned by the ink. An answer was required. “Oui, msieu.”

“Tomorrow I am to go to court. The courthouse is the large building directly across the square. I will be inside, not watching this house. If you run from here, with your looks, you will most likely be attacked at the edge of Opelousas or sold immediately to a bordello. You are intelligent enough to understand that.”

“Oui, msieu.” He was not trying to frighten me. His voice was like that of Mademoiselle Lorcey, the governess, when she gave a lesson in which she was very interested.

“You are extremely valuable. If you run, your circumstances would undoubtedly worsen. Are you branded?”

“Oui, msieu.” How did the words send heat to the scar? “With the fleur-de-lis.”

“Then you would be identifiable only as a former runaway but as no one's property. It is dangerous to belong to no one.”

This was not a question. The embers shifted into a thousand rubies. Madame Pélagie had a ruby necklace. The crystals were rectangular as burning wood.

“Can you calculate?”

“Oui, msieu.”

“I know that you made household goods for Pélagie. I will have cloth delivered and furniture. Three more beds upstairs and three more armoires.”

Armoires. If Hervé Richard delivered them, he would never meet my eyes again. I had refused him. He could have been killed.

“I wish to have the rooms upstairs readied for boarders. Opelousas is in need of accommodations.”

Accommodate. Was I to accommodate the boarders as well? Was that why he bought me? Or was he waiting for Msieu Ebrard or another man to see me here and offer more money than he had paid?

Accommodate. Acclimate. Accompany.

Accompany. I was to have accompanied Pélagie to New Orleans, to New York. If her husband had shot me, I would have been with her là-bas rather than my mother.

I couldn't remember this kind of silence. When he left, and the shutters were closed against the heavy rain that fell after daybreak, the house was like a mudswallow's nest attached to the eaves of God's house. Dark and hissing outside; dark and quiet inside. My mother's voice near the glistening fire. The women whispering in the barracoon and the men's laughter like barking dogs on the boat. Philippine's pots. Pélagie's incessant calling. Jean-Paul's cries rising to the trees even while I approached.

When Céphaline's spirit left her body, I had lain in the corner. Was that alone? In the indigo vat, waiting, and then the fox den, I had been alone, but the men labored near me.

The rain fell heavier, all afternoon, and no one delivered anything
in the storm. I put my cape over my head and sat before the smoldering fire. No candlelight. Take but one candle. Like the cargo hold of the boat that took me away. Alone. Dark and shuddering and pounding all about me.

He spent all his time in his office. He gave no more instructions. He was a man. Women ran a house, telling you what you could not touch or eat or open. He said nothing.

At night, in my pantry room, on the new rope bed, I tried to think, but the pain inside my head was sharp. My brain was scarred now, scarred like my wrists and fingers, scarred so that the thoughts would not pass through the wrinkles. What could Mamère do but wait? Even if someone had told her I was sold to Rosière, I was no longer there. What could Jean-Paul do but drink his milk from Fantine's breast, look into her face, and know her as his mother?

It would be better if I died.

The milk collected in my breasts and washed back toward my brain. Thick sweet blue inside my eyes. If I opened my veins with a knife and waited here in my room until everything went black, Jean-Paul would not know. He was still a small animal. What was in the gray meat of his brain? The pulsing skull? He stared at me or the branches or Emilia's toes with the same concentration just now.

He was most excited, arms trembling and head bobbing furiously, when he saw Francine's face near his own.