A Million Nightingales (3 page)

One day when I was ten, she took me into Msieu Bordelon's room to clean the furniture. Félonise gave me a small rag sprinkled with lemon oil, and my hand followed hers circling steady on the armoire. She hummed above me, the hum vibrating in her throat, falling down to my scalp and entering my skull as a shivering. The lemon oil disappeared into the wood, leaving behind a sheen. It turned my cloth translucent, and when we were finished, Félonise had still not said a word, only hummed so long that my ears felt tender. She took my hand in hers, our fingers shells of glaze, Félonise's hand sealed to my own when we left the bedroom.

Now we carried a new mattress to Grandmère Bordelon's room, on the women's side of the house. Grandmère was very fat, and she sat in her chair before the doors that led to the gallery. She had a spyglass, and she watched the river. She turned to us and said, “You—don't forget to roll it well. Always roll a new bed.”

The rolling pin rested in notches atop the mahogany headboard. We put the mattress on the ropes and lifted down the rolling pin, polished and heavy. Back and forth, smoothing the stubborn lumps of moss, and while we worked, Félonise's eyes crossed until I knew she saw nothing, not the cotton ticking or my own fingers on the other side.

All day and night, Grandmère Bordelon spoke to her and moved her about the house to bring and take and hover. I was afraid of Grandmère Bordelon's huge trembling cheeks, which hung below her chin as if her face had melted; fat was under our skin, fat like the waxy white smudges under the rough skin of ham.

Grandmère was Msieu's mother. She had lived in the first small house, amid the oaks on the side land, and after her husband died, she could not be alone. Her slave Marie-Claire was told never to leave her side, even when she slept. But once Grandmère awakened alone. She screamed, but Marie-Claire was in le quartier with a fevered child.

Grandmère had Marie-Claire tied down. Two days she was staked in the side yard. Tretite said that from the gallery, Marie-Claire looked like a doll forgotten on the ground, and no one could go near her.

When she was released from the stakes, Tretite saw bleeding holes in her cheeks. “Rats,” Marie-Claire said, and didn't speak again for weeks. The rats came every night to Grandmère's house, where she kept a store of sweets and nuts.

That first old house burned down from a cooking fire, and now nothing was there amid the oaks.

I could smell Grandmère's breath. When we had made the bed with the white coverlet I had bleached so many times to take out the stains, Grandmère held my skirt with her finger and thumb.

“Sang mêlé,” she said, lifting my pale wrist—mixed blood— and letting it fall. “I forgot about you.”

Her black crepe dress smelled of sour wine and onions and smoke.

“And you are old enough now. In New Orleans, les mulâ-tresses are the best for dressing the hair.” How could mules be good with hair? She nodded decisively. “Today. Today you will learn about the hair. Whether she is forced or not, Céphaline needs a maid now to dress properly.” She peered up at my face, her eyes blue like Céphaline's but murky around the edges, as if someone had stirred cornstarch inside.

I went back to the kitchen. Mulâtresse. “You a mule, but mule don't breed,” Christophe said once. “You only work for pleasure.”

Babies. I couldn't have babies? Félonise stood near the table eating a fig. Her skin was the pale gray of washed-too-many-times shirts. Her eyes were the same. She took her fig and disappeared into the parlor, and Tretite came inside.

“Tretite,” I whispered, knowing that this was something my mother didn't want to teach me yet when we were alone in the clearing. Maybe my mother didn't know. “Tell me the name for Félonise.”

“Comprends pas,” she said, shrugging, sorting the purplish figs.

“Mulâtresse, c'est moi,” I said. “Me. And Félonise?”

Tretite looked up sharply, her tiny mouth pursed to disappearing under her draped-down cheeks. “Pourquoi?”

I lifted my chin and felt my mother inside my skull. Then I lifted my chin higher and said, “Grandmère Bordelon said mulâtresse must learn to do hair.”

Tretite put the figs in a blue bowl and then rested her fingers in a fan on the table's edge. “Oui. Mulâtresse. So. Félonise, c'est quadroon. The mother, like you, the father, c'est blanc. Eh là, Félonise had a girl, and the father blanc. In New Orleans. C'est octoroon, that baby. They take her away when she is two, and Félonise is sold down here. That baby—so white, like Céphaline, but black, black hair and black, black eye.”

Félonise's fingers were tight on mine, that day, the lemon oil glossing our palms.

Tretite said, “And other way—that is Eveline. Griffe. The mother mulâtresse, the father nègre. Eveline's enfants call sacatra—griffe mix with nègre. So.”

I heard Mamère with the cart, bringing up Céphaline's new mattress, and I stepped outside. My mother was African, Sin-galee, but her forehead shone not pure black under her tignon— brown and red, too. Her palms always wrinkled white from washing. Her tongue pink when she stirred. Her eyes nearly purple when she looked into mine. And a stripe of golden dust on her cheek, where she'd rubbed.

How could you do numbers as on Céphaline's lessons, but inside someone's blood? Félonise came behind me to help lift the next mattress into Céphaline's room.

Céphaline sat at her desk writing. Her hair was lank and tied with a dirty ribbon. She did not look up at me. The letters and numbers were so small and close together, the page seemed covered with black lace. I had been learning to read her words since I was small. I could make out only a few of these—
coeur, cheval
,
écrire, ordinaire
—when I walked past slowly, to get down the rolling pin from her headboard. Heart, horse, write, ordinary.

I wouldn't tell my mother yet that I would leave her for the house. It was still early. I shook the bottles of our cleaning solutions, to see if any had gone bad.

The tablecloth was stained with many colors, spread out on the worktable in our clearing. Wine spill like a red tongue. That must have come from Msieu Lemoyne, the very old man who lived alone next door at Petit Clair. His hands always shook at Sunday dinner.

The Bordelons had entertained two families from down the river yesterday. That meant Céphaline would have had to smile and speak to sons, and today she would be as bitter as the smell from this bottle for oil stains.

Mamère tied different colors of thread around the neck of each bottle to show what they were.

The grease from the ham made windows of clear in the linen, made the cloth shimmer so the table's wood was visible underneath, and I pressed my fingertip to the fat. How did the pig's fat enter the threads? The same fat we boiled for soap, how did the ashes change the grease to the—what did Céphaline call it, in her lessons with Mademoiselle, when the Auzenne girls were laughing at her concentration, the way her forehead wrinkled? The agent. The agent to erase the grease?

And how much fat and grease was under my own skin? I wondered, pinching my arm. Mamère caught my fingers.

“Get the grease out, you use green one.”

“I know.”

I shook the bottle gently. White soap shaved very fine, soft rainwater and salt, two yolks of fresh eggs, cabbage juice and bullock's gall, and salt of tartar from Tretite's kitchen.

I rubbed the liquid onto the golden spots.

“What?” She knew a question circled in me.

She saw me looking at her forearms and wrists, wider than the part above her elbow, and she said, “Wash toujours, every day, the arm so.”

“No. Not your arm.”

“What?”

I couldn't ask her. She hated the questions I brought from Céphaline's room with dirty clothes, when I'd heard her reading or arguing with her governess. How do you measure the grease in a person? I pushed in my own cheek. Was that fat under the cheek? Not muscle?

She never wanted to discuss the lessons about brains and bones and books, so she began her own teaching quickly with one word when we were alone.

“Blood.” She pushed Eveline's black clothes into a pot of water that did not steam. But then she handed me a white pillowcase with brown freckles. Céphaline's pillowcase. She had scratched her boutons again, the bumps on her cheeks.

“White thread.”

White soap shaved fine, a pound of alum, tartar, and rainwater. Mamère soaked a white flannel rag with the liquid and rubbed it onto the dried blood.

Since I was small, she had always begun with one word. “Blood. Cold water and be careful. Blood stay forever, like it grow in the cloth.”

“Gravy. Get it out, you use that bottle with the brown thread.”

“Mud. The bottle with the black thread.”

“Wine. Red thread.”

Soap for the perspiration stains under the arms of Madame's chemise and Céphaline's, which smelled of salt and worry, Msieu's white shirts, which smelled of smoke and grass, and the huge pantalettes Grandmère wore under her dresses—rancid meat and rosewater.

How did yellow egg yolks and sour cabbage juice take the fat from the threads? The bottles held their murky fluids. Blood and saliva and tears were inside us. What made the tears?

We boiled the white clothes and rinsed them in bluing. Before noon, I hung them on the lines strung from the pecan branches, with the wooden pins Eveline's husband, Michel, carved for Mamère long ago. Flared out at the ends like dancing ladies, I thought when I was small, only playing with the pins. Now they looked like faceless men straddling the clothes.

It was so warm, the white clothes dried quickly, and they seemed alive against me. The air was inside them. I took down Céphaline's first, the same size as me, and it was as if we were walking together down the line. Her chemise was full with the wind, leaning into me. And Msieu's shirt twisted away.

Madame Bordelon came out onto the back gallery and put her hand over her eyes, like she did all day. Her fingers a goose beak, her wrist and forearm a long curved goose neck. Like a secret signal to someone, even though she couldn't actually see any slaves except us. She could almost always see us.

“White?” she called loudly to Mamère. “You washed all that white and not Grandmère's dress yet?”

Mamère didn't look nervous. Madame came halfway down the gallery stairs that led to the yard. The kitchen and clearing were her charge—not the fields. Madame's eyes were a dark stripe of shade, but her mouth was a glittering stripe of teeth when she lifted her lip to help her squint. To see.

Mamère wasn't supposed to wash clothes for field people. They had to do their own laundry. We washed only for the Bor-delons and their guests and Tretite. Eveline's black skirt floated in the pot.

“Madame dress next.” Mamère raised her voice but not her face. She never seemed nervous that Madame might come down into the clearing.

But Madame didn't turn yet, as she usually did. “Moinette.”

“Madame?” I called back. My mother stopped rubbing clothes on the washboard, the sluff sluff ceasing.

“You'll come at noon bell, Moinette.” Then Madame turned on the stairs. “Marie-Thérèse,” she shouted. “Don't forget to take off the buttons …”

“They jet buttons from Paris,” Mamère finished softly.

Fig leaves boiled in water—what we used to take the stains from Grandmère's black crepe dresses. She had worn black for ten years, since her husband died and left Azure and all the land to her. Since that day, everyone else had worn black as well.

She liked to say, Easy to see black crows in the cane. See if they steal. See if they sleep.

Sleeping was stealing. Stealing time. I cut the button threads.

My mother looked up at me now. “Noon bell?” she asked. “Today?”

She held up the pile of cloth, black as charred paper, but the wash water ran dark red. Eveline's blood. Under her dress. “You going up there just for today?” she asked.

The jet buttons glittered on the table like bird eyes. I said, “Don't know.” My mother was afraid. She was afraid I was going to have to sleep inside the house, away from her.

Then horses’ hooves rasped on the shell road. Madame Auzenne was here with her daughters. They came every week for lessons, but today they brought their hairdresser from New Orleans to prepare Céphaline for winter season—dinners and dances and men.

Mamère listened to the carriage wheels. “Céphaline feel about her lesson for marry like you feel about sewing?” she asked.

She knew I hated making my stitches smaller and smaller, like they were supposed to be. I smelled the always-wet place at the edge of the cane where we poured off the dirty wash water, the mossy smell of bluing and damp, and suddenly our clearing felt crowded, like Tretite's armoire when I hid in it as a child. My head felt much too large under the black scarf. The Auzennes’ voices came through the leaves like tiny hammers on iron. Laughter high and chattering. My mother's face so small and dark under her tignon.

The clothes wrapped damp sleeves around me. I couldn't go into the cane and find a stalk to chew, couldn't wander along the riverbank looking for what the current brought. I had to stay here, so close to the washpots their heated iron breathed on my arm.

“Not her lessons,” I said. “Not the lessons you think about.”

I thought I knew what would happen, I wanted to say. I knew the cleaning liquids, the way clothes had to be ironed and sewn and folded, the places to get moss, the way the tallow smelled when we made soap. I thought I knew where I belonged. To Mamère.

But I wanted to see Céphaline's room again, to glimpse her words on the paper and the words in the books, to hear the words she spoke for her own lessons. Last year, when Madame argued with Céphaline over the corset and my fingers tightened the laces, my eyes kept moving over Céphaline's papers. Pages covered with fine writing, numbers, drawings, and poems. I learned to read some words from listening to her lessons and seeing her children's books. I knew my numbers because I loved them as a child, arranging pecans in circles and multiplying them the way Céphaline did her ink dots on the page.

“My lessons from you I understand,” I said now to Mamère, because Madame Bordelon came out onto the gallery and put her hand to her brows. She was looking for me. “Céphaline's lessons from books she understands. But her other lessons, to become wed to someone with money, she refuses to hear.”