A Million Nightingales (5 page)

Mamère hated his balding head and dirty blond sideburns, his jars, and especially the things he told me. Every day now, I worked at the house, and at night, I tried to explain the body to my mother.

“Lungs?” She gripped the needle. “He show you a chest? I tell you the other words.” When I turned away from her rasping tone, so tired from the way I held myself at the house, the constant listening, she said, “No! My work is I tell you. Your work is be careful.

“Skin? He say the skin protect the body?” She slammed the heavy iron onto his shirts as rain swirled in the pecan branches outside. My fingers hurt from the pastes and the washing and the needle. My mother asked angrily, “Why the skin soft so? Why les blancs have boutons? And fur on the face and arms?”

I put my head down over the stitches in the coat. How could the red bumps only appear on Céphaline's face, not her feet or hands or her stomach? Not a pox.

Then, for the first time, I saw my mother not sure. “Hair,” I said. “You taught me how to hide my hair under the tignon. They teach me how to put Céphaline's hair into curls. All for nothing. Hair is dead. Like the wreath in Madame's room, the wreath with her mother's hair.”

“Moinette,”
Mamère said, hard as if she spat out broken pecan shells.

“All the hair is dead. That is what Doctor Tom talks to me about. He says hair and fingernails are like fur and claws. We use them the wrong way. He doesn't look at me as—under my dress. He looks at me as—a body. A brain. Men or women. Animals.” The ants of my stitches walked around the sleeve. “Why should we try anything if we are just going to be like animals in the end?”

My mother said, “Don't ask me that. Don't ask.” She turned away and lifted the next coat, heavy and shapeless without arms.

The woman named Hera slid her voice through the closed shutters, and my mother let her in.

I had been asleep, my mother sewing in her chair. She had hung an old tablecloth from two nails to shield the bed from the fire, so the light wouldn't keep me awake. The grease spots were like islands of gold water in the light, and I could see Hera near the door.

My mother said softly, “Where you get that name? Don't hear that, jamais. Never before. Hera.”

I had never heard her ask questions of anyone.

“Name of a queen. He tell me something like that. Name us all from a book. My girl Phrodite.”

“Where?”

“South Carolina. Come here last year to grow sugar. Should stayed in the rice like before. He got fever. Die in one week.” She held her arms out for a moment, her neck bent while she studied them. “Sugar more dry than rice. But smoke and sharp. People get cut.”

My mother nodded. “Toujours. All the days.” She picked up her sewing again, dismissing the woman.
Dismiss
—that was the word Céphaline used on her mother, who hated it. You can go now. You are dismissed.

Hera slid down the wall, so slow it was as if she were drying a line of liquid with her back. She squatted on the floor, leaning her head back, and then her hands went to her cheeks, fingers spread out like a fan. Between her fingers, I imagined her sparkling scars.

“Him up there, he buy us at the death sale. Buy for the harvest. He sell fast?” she whispered.

“No,” Mamère said, gently now, to my surprise. “He keep.”

Hera dug her fingertips into her cheeks so hard she lifted the skin toward her eyes. “Phrodite. They tell her only black clothes on this place, but on Sunday wear what you want.” She nodded toward the black coat in Mamère's lap. “That all they give here. But she need a dress. Something pretty, so she can find her own man. A place. If I go, she can take care my three little ones.”

“Go?” Mamère said.

“What I see here—Louisiana—how easy to go.”

“Parti?” My mother was confused. “Leave?”

“Go die.”

Now my mother stood up and held out her hand so Hera would sit in my chair. This woman thought a dress could solve everything, that beauty and cloth could make her daughter safe.

“Them scar,” my mother said.

Hera put her feet apart and rested her hands on her knees. “Here they say them scar Singalee. My mama say Bambara. She pass when I was nine. You don't get the marks until you get the blood. When I was fourteen, an old woman do them.”

Then my mother said something in the same African words with which she prayed. I recognized a few words.
Ni. Dya. Faro.

Hera drew in her breath.

My mother said, “Mine pass when I eight. But no one to do the mark on me. Like on her.”

Hera said, “I can't mark Phrodite. They don't like the Africans here. Want Creole nègre. Ask me always am I Creole nègre. Can't do nothing for Phrodite.” She breathed hard, close to crying, and her breasts fell and shook. “You can't mark your bright light.”

My mother said, “No. No mark for Moinette.”

My eyes were closed because I knew they would study my sleeping form and lower their voices. Hera said, “Not him up there?”

She was asking again about my father. But my mother wasn't angry. She said, “Sugar buyer come to see the crop. Tretite the cook say he see me in the field, he like my face. Call me petit visage when he come here.” My mother cupped her hands around her cheeks.

Small face. The man who was my father. But what he wanted—

“And her,” Hera said. “Small face, them eyes like honey. All that hair. And so bright—”

My mother shook her head. “No. Don't say it.”

“Who look?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody see her. But now she up there.” My mother lifted her chin toward the house.

“Bright girl—” Hera began to speak again, but my mother interrupted her.

“Say you trade hair.”

Hera said, “Do her hair?”

“Mine.”

Neither of them moved. Then my mother said, “I make a dress. Blue. For Sunday nights.”

She was already outside when I woke in the morning.

She was cutting up one of Céphaline's old linen pillowcases. The rectangles of cloth were sleeve size. She was going to make a dress for a girl she didn't know, for a woman she had only met twice.

A woman with marks like my mother's mother. Their voices soft and braided as woven grass.

The blacking was a raincloud on Céphaline's pillowcase every morning. Madame had given me white linen to make seven new pillowcases, one for each day.

We soaked the black stains in the white solution. Then my mother said, “Go on to the house now. Madame call for you.”

I was dismissed.

I applied the white paste with the back of a spoon.

“My face is so cold,” Céphaline said. “And the iron is so hot.”

Zerline had shown me everything. I made the paste with egg whites and rosewater and alum, made the blacking with lead and camphor and a drop of almond oil. Zerline had told me if we ran out of lead to use lampblack, but lead was what they used in Paris.

I understood how Mamère felt when I sat in her chair. I didn't want to lie down. My arms ached from all the wash, from the combing and holding the irons over the fire, from keeping myself so careful not to hurt Céphaline that my shoulders burned.

Then Hera stood behind my mother's chair and took off her tignon. My mother's hair was newly washed. Hera took the comb and began to section off the long shoals of hair that sprang from around my mother's forehead.

She always washed her hair at night and combed it herself, after I was sleeping. She kept it in a rough bun under her cloth.

But Hera made it into patterns of braids that swirled away from my mother's face as if a strong wind blew her hair into rows.

“Because you don't know how,” she said. “You comb Céphaline hair. Not mine.”

“Why are you angry? Where are we going so late?” The night bell had rung.

“Angry?” My mother walked quickly. She carried a small bag with a knife and a rag. Her words were ragged. “I am nothing. Qu'est-ce—the word?” She looked down the street toward le quartier, where the shutters were closed and houses dark. “Useless. Like fingernail. Pas animal to kill with a claw.”

She had been crying while I had come back late from Cépha-line's room. The edges of black in her eyes were blurred into red.

We hurried down a path toward the side land. Franz the overseer would see us on his rounds. “Are we running?” I whispered, and when my mother didn't stop walking, I pulled at her arm, as I had when I was a child.

We were just near the edge of the canefields. The blackened outline of the small house, where Grandmère Bordelon used to live, was beneath our feet. Then Franz rode toward us on his horse, and a small figure appeared from the low fence surrounding the family gravestones.

Marie-Claire. Grandmère Bordelon's old slave—her cheeks marred with pink rosettes from the rats, the only thing I saw for a moment in the darkness. Like fistfuls of flowers approaching. Then the rest of her, mouth surrounded by wrinkles that danced when she smiled. “Marie-Thérèse,” she whispered to us. “And her girl.”

She held up a gourd. “I make my water every night, me, and carry over here. I pour little on his gravestone. Pee on his name. The rest where they bury her when she time. Old and fat. I make the ground soft for her. When she gone là-bas—” Marie-Claire flicked her fingers like sprinkling water on cloth for ironing. “Moi, I still here. Then I pee on her head every night.”

She turned as Franz rode up to us. She said, “I finish stretch my old bones, Msieu. Merci.”

She walked toward le quartier. Franz said to us, “You ain't old. Where you going?”

My mother, as always, didn't look nervous. “Gather herb for take out stain from Mademoiselle pillowcase. Her medicine.”

“Thirty minutes I be back,” he said. “Stand here and wait until I see you. Or I get the dogs.”

We slipped into the canerows. The rustling stalks were high above us, lit by the moon into silver ribbons. Ribbons for dresses. Mamère swung the cloth sack and said, “Thirty minutes. And I finish.”

Her narrow back and tignon were like black smoke ahead of me in the light. The canestalks brushed sharp against my face until I covered my cheeks with my sleeves. My new dress—an old dress from Céphaline's rag pile. Calico print of yellow and pink.

We came out at the headland road that separated Azure from Petit Clair, and my mother headed toward the ciprière, the swampy backland that was not cultivated. Somewhere deep in the ciprière was a bayou where the privateers and river traders met. Christophe said he'd watched them in secret. My peacock plate had come from that water.

I could smell the sharpness of coming frost deep inside my nose and throat. The cane cutters would have to start tomorrow or the next day, before ice ruined the sugar.

When we came to the ciprière, my mother panted while steam blew past her face. She turned and a single tear glittered down each cheek.

“Hera get this dress and give to her girl. Madame and Grand-mère buy dress for Céphaline, make her beautiful. And me—” She swept her hand along my skirt. “Nothing from me. Only words from me. Words you don't want. You get words from the doctor. He can take you with him when he go, and I never see you. Jamais! Never! I have nothing!”

I tried to embrace her, but she turned so that I was draped along her back like a cape. I held her tightly, and she shook under my arms. I knew she was forcing everything back inside her. Then she wiped at her eyes and said, “Thirty minutes until Franz look for us. The old plants in the trees.”

The black water stood like coffee around the cypress stumps in the swampy area, but we turned down a weed-choked trail into the forest itself. I had never been here before. The half-moon lit my mother's neck when she bent her head and pushed through the growth. This had once been a road wide enough for a wagon.

“You are not finished,” I said to her back. “I always listen.”

“Won't matter.”

“Just tell me. Or why did you bring me?”

We stumbled through bare vines like gray threads for a giant's shirt. My mother fell and the knife skittered into the leaves. She put her face into her knees and cried again, and I could only kneel beside her. “I never leave you alone,” she said. “I always sit in my chair, wait for who send for me. Or for you. But now I see no one come for you. You go to them.” She clutched the sack. “I make this dress for Hera girl, and she find someone. Maybe Christophe. She stay by Hera and have her baby. But Céphaline find someone and go. She take you with her, and I never see you again.”

She laced her fingers behind her neck and pulled so hard that her knuckles swelled for a moment. When she stood, she cleaned her face with her sleeve. Salt in the cloth, I thought, touching the wet.

“Nonc Pierre and the men cut this road,” she said, her voice lower. “Cut the cypress for Msieu house. Singalee men know the wood.”

“When?” I found her knife in the leaves, and a stumbling of tiny feet rushed away from us.

“Time pass. When they first come, Bordelon and Lemoyne. From France. Everyone from somewhere else. Except them Indian used to live here in the ciprière.”

We pushed through to an open space in the trees. Brick walls draped with vines—two large square vats. Four iron pipes pierced the wall of the higher vat; they must have let the liquid drain into the lower vat.

“Far from the house because that smell,” my mother said, her voice nearly dead. “When they make the indigo.”

She always said the word like poison. I breathed carefully but smelled only cold standing water and the musk of a fox den.

“Where the cane grow now, all indigo. They pick branches and pile them up in the first pool and soak with clear water. Then the leaves go rotten and make that smell. Drain the water into the second pool, and the women have to put up the dress and stand in the water and beat with a stick. Get the blue, have to beat the water. The blue settle on the bottom. But the smell go inside the skin. In the body.”

A vine hung like a necklace from one of the pipes. The second vat was filled with dried leaves and brackish mud. Nothing blue.

“Cane cut you,” my mother whispered, soft as soap foam on the wind. “But indigo go inside. Tout mort.”

“All die?” Brick crumbled under my fingers.

She nodded. “Nonc Pierre and the men build the house and barn, but the women make the crop. Four, five years. Then they bury.”