A Million Nightingales (12 page)

The backs of the men were twisting. Each had a brand on the right shoulder, raised shiny as if thick worms had been inserted under the skin.
A.
They couldn't all be from the same people, so that must have been the name of the ship or the captain.

The letters moved when the rowers pulled, scars floating on the skin stretched over their shoulder blades. Not angel wings. No one could fly.

And Mamère—she had been a child on the boat. I had never seen her bare back—she always washed in the dark. Did she have a brand? Would they have branded a child? Quickly I bit at the scabs on my wrist to keep the splinter of fear from my ribs. I wasn't a child. When I got to the small Msieu's place, would he brand me?

The mate's whip was small, compared to the overseer's whip on Azure, but the tip cut easily into the skin. He split a thin gash
into the shoulder of one man, and a red smile opened whenever the man leaned forward to pull the oars.

Bile rose in my throat. That was what Doctor Tom called it, the fluid that ate our food for us. And then, seeing his eyes and the jar, lying next to him in the indigo vat, and Céphaline's black boutons and her red eyes, and the skin of the man closest to me now covered with skeins of white salt from his drying sweat, I threw up the sagamite and molasses over the side of the boat.

The captain laughed. “Feeding the fish,” he said. “Atchafalaya fish like corn.”

At dusk, when the wind came up and the boat rocked and pitched, they found a place to moor. They lashed the barge tight to the trees, and we walked onto a floating mat of driftwood and moss and earth, trembling when we passed over the water. The iron-collar man took the African men into the trees. They came back with wood and built a fire on top of black sand and ashes where others had cooked before.

The Africans were chained to a tree at the clearing's edge, but I was not. The small Msieu said, “Can you cook cornmeal and hardtack?” I shook my head. The captain said, “That's not why you buy her, oui?”

The iron-collar mate cooked the dinner. He served their food onto three wooden plates, then held the pot before me and I scooped a handful. The Africans ate from the pot after me. They held the warm corn in their palms and chewed, looking at the water.

When the trees and moss turned black, the fire was the only light, and only the three white men close to it were visible, their faces and beards and hats. They drank tafia, the molasses turned liquor.

The men's chains clinked near the trees, like crickets.

The small Msieu and the captain went back onto the barge, their footsteps on the sucking raft of wood. The captain called, “Keep watch until four and wake me.”

The mate called out, “Don't you chain the sang mêlé?”

“Oui.”

He locked the ankle bracelet onto me.

I curled into myself. My hair itched, and my legs were cold with air entering my tucked-under skirt.

The third night since I had left her. Was my mother praying, right now, with her coffee beans and piastre? Had she added something to her church? My peacock plate? My other tig-non? Something to bring me back?

I rubbed my fingers gently on one coffee bean in my pocket and then left my fingers over my mouth, so that I could smell her.

I woke to the iron-collar mate's fingers in my mouth. He held down my tongue and said close to my ear, “If you scream, I will choke you and claim a savage did it. Indians everywhere in the woods.”

The sounds of night had changed. It was nearly morning.

His fingers put the taste of ash and tafia in my mouth. Then he moved those fingers under my dress and pushed one inside the other lips. A different burning from ants. His finger clenched me inside and I wouldn't cry out. I listened to the sand under my skull. His elbow hit me again and again in the breast. He was moving his hand on himself.

When he breathed slowly again, he pulled away his fingers. The air was cold on my legs. My dress was wet. He pushed his mouth near my ear again, tongue sour-hot. “I had you and didn't pay for you.”

Then I heard nothing. No snoring from the boat. No clinking of the chains. Nothing but the water lapping against the banks.

If I got loose from the chain, if I slid into the water, this bayou would take me back to the lake, and Lafitte. The only reason to put my body inside the brown water would be to disappear. To go là-bas and wait.

But if Tretite had heard the small Msieu mention his home, and she told my mother, and Mamère made her way to wherever the small Msieu was taking me, I would be là-bas alone.

I put my hands into the pot of cornmush when he brought it. I smelled him. Céphaline said we receive the formation of babies
inside our wombs. Babies were inside the liquid. My dress was dry and stiff. The babies were dead. I ate the corn with my eyes closed.

How much had Msieu Bordelon sold me for? Had he written the name and address of the small Msieu? If Félonise polished his desk—

But no one could read any words except me.

The small Msieu unlocked the chain, and I leaned against the tree, burning between my legs. I took the empty pot from near the fire, cleaned it at the bayou's edge with wet sand, filled it again with the silty water, and went into the woods to wash myself.

Bayou Cocodrie. Bayou Boeuf. Bayou Courtableau was the longest. Deeper, blacker than the others. At the landing, the goods were loaded onto a wagon and the small Msieu paid a man to whip the two mules across their rumps to make them move.

We had legs. We were not loaded onto wagons. The Africans and I walked behind.

This bayou was black as lead, shining like Céphaline's pupils. There was no use to jump. This water would never reach the Mississippi River, only the gulf and then the ocean. The current moved so slowly that a leaf and I took a long time to pass each other when we left the landing, and the dust from all our hooves stayed in a brown cloud on the still water.

Even as he spoke, not looking at us but at his own hand moving over the paper as he wrote, I didn't listen.

I don't belong to you. I didn't belong to Msieu Bordelon, and not to God yet. I belong to her. I am hers. Until I die and find her. Là-bas.

“What is your name?”

We stood in the yard between the kitchen and the house. The wind had grown colder as we came farther north. The trees here were bare of leaves, their branches dark as though burned. This house was much larger than Azure, newer, with eight white columns along the front and a front door with stained glass over the top. The brick path where we waited smelled of new clay. The brick kitchen building was larger than Tretite's, and two women stood in the kitchen doorway staring at us.

“Water, Léonide,” the small Msieu said. The one who nodded was the cook. She held a spoon as if she never put it down. She was short and fat, even her earlobes plump as licorice drops under her tignon.

“Can you speak any French?” the small Msieu called out.

None of the Africans answered. They were still in chains. The neck of the man closest to me, the one with the cut on his back, was so coated with sweat and dust that trails had formed behind his ears.

“Amanthe,” the cook said to the other woman, who wore a white apron. She was about twenty-five. House people. She held out a gourd of water to me. Her eyes tilted upward, and her cheekbones were high ledges of stone flushed with red under brown skin.

I didn't want to know any new people.

But the cook looked at me, and in her eyes I saw fingers. What she thought she knew about me, and cadeau-filles. Gift girl. Bright. “New Orleans,” the cook murmured, low in her throat as if the words were shameful.

The small Msieu sat down at a wooden table. He took papers from his coat and spread them out. His fingers were still dirty, too. They held down the paper in the winter moving air.

All the fingers. Dangling on the man nearest me. The small Msieu's finger pointed again at the first African.

“Athénaïse is your name,” he said, toward the first African. He waited a moment in silence. “Sometimes they learn words on the ship. Not this group. So expensive. I even had to buy the chains from Lafitte,” he said, turning toward a driver on a horse, a Frenchman with tangled yellow teeth and red-cold hands resting on his pommel. “Let them sleep today. Start tomorrow on the new land across the bayou.”

The small Msieu named all the men.

“Athénaïse.” The finger stabbed the air before the first African. “Athénaïse.” Then the finger moved sideways, to direct the African to shuffle slightly nearer the driver.

“Gervaise. Apollonaise. Hélaise. Livaudaise.” Each time, his finger stabbed toward a face, then tore sideways through the air.

A white woman stepped outside now and stood at his shoulder, studying the paper. Her dress was calico, fine figures not faded by too much washing. Not as fancy as Madame Bordelon.

“You were missed.”

“Your cousin sends greetings.” He stopped writing. I could hear the absence of scratching. I kept my eyes on the sweet olive bush near the kitchen. “I am nearly finished. Then we may eat?”

She nodded. She swung her head slowly around to each figure in the yard, peered toward the backs of the leaving men. “I needed a man for the garden.” Her voice was directed at me. “Not a girl.”

Her eyes were blue. Not like Céphaline's, with the fierce glow of flame. Milky blue like china bowls. She didn't sound as if she hated me already.

“You'll have a man for the garden as soon as the new land is cleared,” the small Msieu said.

“How many men do we have now?” She squinted at the ledger. “Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? And no one to spare?”

“No one.” He pointed at me. “I don't like African names. But certainly you are not African.”

He wrote words again. I didn't want him to know I could read. I glanced quickly at the papers when he put the pen in the ink. He wrote next to the men's names: Congo, Congo, Congo, Ki, Ki. African tribes.

I was half Bambara. He knew nothing. If I told them my real name, and they didn't like it, and they changed it, then only Mamère would have my name. I could keep it inside my mouth. For myself. Until I saw her again.

But how would she find me, if I had a different name?

“She seems slow,” the Msieu said. “All the way here. Very slow. Bordelon said she was good at dressing hair. But she was not needed.”

The Madame said, “Someone besides Amanthe to dress my hair is not needed here either.” She didn't sound angry. She sounded as if she were choosing cloth. “How old are you?”

The way her eyes moved over my outline, vague and slow, I realized she couldn't see me well. That was why she didn't hate me. Her hair was pinned in a chignon. Dull and brown as acorns. Her knuckles were big, like pink roses. She wanted a man for the garden. Not a gift.

“Fourteen, madame,” I said. The small Msieu's pen scratched again. He could see me.

“Do you only dress hair?” she asked. Then she turned to her husband. “I can't imagine why you bought her.”

“Guillaume Bordelon needed a favor, and she was inexpensive.”

“What else can you do?” she asked, her eyes fixed somewhere to the left of my face.

If I said washing and ironing, I would stand every day in this yard, next to a woman who already did laundry. I would smell someone else's soap, hear someone else's words at my ear, and I
would never be able to learn the boundaries of this place, to be able to run from the closeness of this yard.

“The field,” I said.

He had already written Creole mulâtresse, 14.

His finger drew the same slanting line toward the driver. Then he paused and frowned. “Name?”

“Moinette,” I said.

A blanket, a bowl and spoon made from gourd, and a cape. That was what the woman named Sophia handed me. She said, “You from south? Past New Orleans? Get cold here. You near Washington. Cold and ice.” She showed me how the hood lifted up, for when wind scoured the fields.

Hers was the second house on the street that ran down le quartier. I couldn't see the big white Rosière house, only the barn and stable. Then the drivers’ house—Mirande and Baillo, fox-haired brothers from France. “One sleep, one ride all night keep a eye on us,” Sophia said.

Twelve houses, and trees down the center of the street.

Two doors on this house. Inside one door sat an old man and an old woman. The woman's fingers were so thin and dry, they looked covered in burned paper. She sewed the hem of a child's garment. When she looked up, the whites of her eyes were fili-greed with brown.

Inside Sophia's door was a front room: a fireplace, a table, and three chairs. In the back room were six wooden sleeping shelves, two on each wall.

Sophia studied me, almost like the Madame but her eyes moved faster. Then she put her hands up to her face and rubbed, her fingers disappeared in the hair at her forehead. “Why they put you here with me? So tired. I don't have time for someone else.”

I didn't belong to her, either, so I didn't answer.

Sophia handed me an extra dress. Coarse cottonade, dyed yellow brown, with stains of black at the hem, like mud painted on. She didn't speak to me but to the table. “Give her to me and don't
give no clothes. Madame forget everything. Sunday I have to say to her, No clothes. Because I have only one girl, I get other girls nobody want.”

I held my tignon in my lap, my fingers on my mother's stitches. When my mother's mother arrived at Azure, she had a small girl. She must have had nothing else.

Two girls entered, picking splinters from their skirts.

I wouldn't look at their faces, only at the weave of their skirts.

“All that wood we carried,” the smaller one said.

“Sang mêlé,” the older one said, looking at me.

“You mixed blood, too,” Sophia murmured. “Congo mix with foolish. Your mama told me. Wash up.” Then the younger girl held out her hands, and Sophia said, “This Fronie. She ten. She mine.”

“Fantine,” the older girl said. “I my own. My mother have three more boys. No room for me, so I stay here.”

“Bring in more wood,” Sophia said, frowning near the fireplace.

She heated water and poured it into the washtub. “You wash, Moinette. Don't want bugs in here.”

“I don't have bugs.”

“You got something.”

I had my bundle—my apron tied around the coffee beans and clothespins, the apron strings wrapped tight. I hid it inside the cape on my shelf. I didn't know yet who stole here. When I took off my dress, sand fell like sugar around my feet. Sophia took my dress outside to shake it.

“Sang mêlé,” Fronie said. “What color your blood?” The girls stared at me, and I knelt in the hot water.

I bit at the raw thumb until the red dripped to my palm and held it out so they could see. Then I felt the water reaching inside me, to the passage.

In the dark, on my shelf, I held my clothespins and the coffee beans. One bean had already splintered, into three of Céphaline's black commas. Céphaline bent over her paper, murmuring that
one comma changed an entire sentence, and one letter changed an entire word.

I missed her voice. Her words like embroidery in the air. She didn't love me. But I had heard her voice all my life.

Three pieces of bean, and water flooded my mouth when I brought them to my nose. The water was bitter as if it sprang like lye from my cheeks.

Mamère holding the coffee bean in her tongue all morning, to help her through the hours. I couldn't put this bean in my mouth. It would wear out in my teeth and I would swallow the brown liquid and then it would leave me. Through one of the passages.

I don't belong to God yet. I belong to her.

Three coffee beans. Two clothespins. Where could I keep them safe tomorrow? Who came inside this room when we were in the fields?

Sophia's voice came from near the fire. “Li mère?”

“My mother is on the other place. Azure.”

Then she was quiet. The fire made a shimmering sound in the dark. Glistening. Like Mamère's. All the fires, in all the houses, all next to the rivers and bayous. All the mothers. I breathed the coffee. What did she want me to do? To ask?

Sophia said, “No trouble for you. If you quiet. Want quiet all the time. Nobody argue. Everything quiet. Every day, every night. Winter, put the fire out when they ring that bell. Summer, keep the shutters open, and they come every hour to see you sleep. Everybody in the bed. Don't sleep in a chair or get your name in the book. Name in there two time for the week, no meat. None. Just corn.”

Doors clapped shut on houses down the street, and pots clinked on the old woman's hearth, the other side of our chimney. Fantine and Fronie were already asleep.

The fire shifted and Sophia said, “So. Enough.”

A horse moved slowly down the street, lingering outside each door. The bare wood was hard on my shoulder blades. Did anyone here know the bones? My cape was under my body, my tignon under my head.

If my things were wrapped in my tignon, someone might steal the cloth. And my hair had to be hidden.

My hair. I tore a piece from the ragged hem of the dress just given to me and wrapped the pins and beans tightly. In the morning, I would tuck them inside my braids.

On the second day, Fantine waited until I had lifted my arms to braid my hair, and she struck at my lap quickly as a snake. My bundle was undone in her fingers, and then she laughed at the clothespins. The coffee beans were shrinking, splintering all the time, and they fell onto the floor without her notice.

“Thought you had money,” she said. “Jewelry. You have nothing.”

Standing slowly, so she would think I was ashamed, I held out my hand for the clothespins. When she dropped them into my left palm, I brought my right wrist up to her chin, as Christophe had done once to me. The bone of her chin was sharp as a small stone, and I pushed harder, upward. “Don't ever touch my things again,” I whispered. “You can't hurt me. But I can hurt you.”

Her nostrils flew wider. “You have nothing. All you have is hair like la barbe d’Espagnol. A man beard hanging down your back.”

When she went outside, I gathered the coffee beans. Three shards of one, the other two still whole but smaller, drier.

My hair. Moss. Spanish beard. A fat man—a man who would tie me to a tree with my hair, who would jerk my head like a horse, who would choke me with my braids. My hair—how did something dead mean anything? How could there be a
ni
inside, a spirit, if my mother, who believed in that god, never touched my hair again?

My hair, heavy and dirty down my back because I had never washed it myself. My mother washed it. My mother's tightly coiled black curls, the sugar broker's blond hair—like useless chaff that flew off hay? How did bloods combine? In the passage? In the fist of womb?

Outside, I was the one afraid. Fantine would tell her mother, who shouted at her boys now, who had a hard face with lines like antennae that sprang between her eyes.

But her mother nodded and brushed past me at the well.
Fronie and Fantine studied me that night near the fire, as if I were a rabbit with five legs. Lying awake for a long time, to see if Fan-tine was still angry, I heard only the hooves outside, ringing sharper where the ground had frozen.

Every night, I looked at the wall near my face, wood chinked with bousillage, mud laced with horsehair, moss, straw. Had my mother run by now, to find me? Would she wait, as one did when lost?

I couldn't run. Every tree was bare, every bayou low and dank. Every morning for weeks, the sun came through the shutter cracks like silvery ice. I couldn't measure the distance—two days on the river north from Azure to New Orleans, two days from there to Lafitte's place, and four days north on the Atchafalaya and bayous to Rosière.

How many days by foot?

In the breathing dark, Sophia stirred, but I always started the fire. I wanted it to be mine.

But no matter how early I rose, the old woman next door was already at her hearth. The scraping of pot on brick came through the air swirling in the chimney we shared. Her name was Philippine, and her husband was Firmin. She spoke to him in a low, unceasing trickle while he carved spoons and bowls from gourd. His face was collapsed into his bones, his cheeks ribboned with odd scars.