A Million Nightingales (40 page)

“I had a mother,” Marie-Claire said. “She died.”

“I had a mother,” I said. “She died.”

“That's not fair.”

“No.”

We came toward my window, with my name in painted letters.

“My name was Jacinthe,” she said.

“I know. One night when you were feverish, you told me.”

“I don't know my mother's name.”

“I know.”

In our backyard were clean clothes walking in the wind, the empty sleeves reaching out for the laughing girls. Get the gravy out, you use this one. Get the rust out, this one. Get your monthly blood out, this one and cold, cold water.

“Who told you?” Marie-Claire asked, when I showed her how to erase her own blood.

“My mother.”

“Every month? Forever?”

“For a long time.”

She whispered, “For you, too? Even after you have a baby?”

I said, “Not anymore. Now I am finished.”

The white shirts we washed for all the lawyers and clerks and planters hung stiff and starched on another line. Marie-Claire liked to whisper, “That one is like a ghost. Reaching out his arms.”

She shivered. Marie-Thérèse would roll her eyes and say, “That's the shirt of Msieu the Boring Book Man.”

Msieu the Boring Book Man was Mr. Johnson, the new court clerk, who lived in Msieu Vosclaire's old room. Mr. Johnson had never married either. He wanted to read his books when he was not eating. He spoke only to the other men. He ate his breakfast and walked across to the courthouse every day, and he paid me his board every month, and because he was a red-faced, red-haired man who was known throughout the parish, and who planned to live out his life here in my house, no one ever bothered me or my daughters.

Msieu Césaire had died. Etienne had gone to New Orleans
with his wife, who hated Opelousas. He had sold Rosière to someone I never met.

Madame Lescelles had died, and her nephew inherited the store. But there were other stores now. Sometimes I wondered about Hervé Richard, who could have been in New Orleans or New York, but who would never be able to come back to Opelousas and see what had happened to me. He wouldn't see me with two daughters. “You will have your own child,” he said that day, but these were my own children now.

Julien Antoine and Jonah Greene lived in Paris. They wrote to me once a year and sent fine handkerchiefs or lace collars. Then, after seven years, their words ceased.

My work was now to speak. I told my daughters of my mother's mother, on the boat, and I washed their hair, so like my own. I told them of my mother's muslin clouds and pink-sequined arms, while I sat beside their bed. I told them of her stitches, and Jean-Paul's thread, and I put pinches of sugar in their palms.

Marie-Claire was seventeen in 1847. She was old enough to be noticed by Eugène the mason's son, Eugène fils, but she could not marry until she was free. She could not be free until she was twenty-one, and then she would own her sister, until Marie-Thérèse was old enough to be free.

I had to live that long.

“You smell,” my younger daughter said to me.

“Oui, Marie-Thérèse. I am ill.”

“You are not coughing.”

“No. I am ill inside my blood.”

She skittered away. She was twelve. She would never think of anyone but herself, and I had to smile at the obstinacy of her own blood. Marie-Claire was obedient, thoughtful, the older child, who would be a mother forever. Marie-Thérèse was disobedient, watchful, and never thoughtful, and she would always taste and smell and touch what she wanted before considering anyone else.

She studied me gravely in my chair, from which I could hardly move.

Pélagie—her husband's brother had left her barren from disease. The trapper had left me with something inside my blood— syphilis, whispered Doctor Vidrine's nephew Gustave, who treated me now. Impure contact. But how did the fluid of seeds leave something inside blood that raced through every part of my body? How did my vision fail? There was no blood in my eyes. Only salt water bathing my irises. Lead in Céphaline's blood, and sweet smell on her breath.

Did the animals in the woods leave disease with one another? The alligators and birds?

I felt like a child myself, melted into my chair, my flesh loose and soft, my feet swollen, while Marie-Claire cooked.

She would be eighteen, then nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. I drank the broth she made, and waited.

I remembered—in the clearing, Mamère stirring the black clothes, stirring the bloodied clothes of Eveline. I pricked my wrist and waited until the blood had formed the shining button— not black, not red—laid the dried perfect circle on a plate and crushed it with the pestle. Powder. Powder that contained all my thoughts and measurements and my mother and father. Sang mêlé. My blood mixed with theirs.

I added a drop of water and waited. Stirred. Only a smear of dark moisture. Nothing else. Resurrection. That was what the God of smoke and words promised during Mass. Heaven.

Home. That was what the Ibo god promised. What had the Bambara gods promised my mother?

Where was Jean-Paul? Had he ever believed in me? He had not believed I would come back. What God did he love?

They had to be waiting for me. He was with my mother. Là-bas. Over there. Tretite and my grandmother, her breath stained indigo blue. Céphaline and Pélagie? Were whites in the same là-bas? Heaven. Were we separate? I would have liked to tell Céphaline about the body, to tell Pélagie about celadon and ocher and aubergine satin. I would have liked Jean-Paul to tell her. But là-bas—

My daughters brought me broth and took my soiled clothes and combed my hair. My skull ached under their touch. Marie-Claire combed for hours, and I shivered like a horse's flank when he is stroked. Marie-Thérèse watched.

“You will take care of her,” I told Marie-Claire. “You will tell Marie-Thérèse the stories until she knows them.”

“Of course.”

“She has my mother's name. Every time I combed your hair I knew you had the
ni
of my mother.”

“Oui, Maman.”

“You will be the mother. Her blood.”

“Oui, Maman.”

“You will marry Eugène, and he will keep this house forever with you. He will not burn it.”

“Maman. No one will burn it.”

“Bricks cannot burn, but the floors. The doors. Watch the candles. Always watch the candles.”

“Maman.”

“Paper can burn. But the papers are in the courthouse. Mr. Johnson has already taken the papers.”

The papers already filed in the courthouse on October 3, 1849, in the large book of Notarial Acts, read:

It being understood that the said Moinette Antoine is to emancipate the said mulatto girl slave Marie-Claire, 19 years of age, the said griffone girl slave Marie-Thérèse, 14 years of age, when they arrive at the full age of majority, or before that period if the law changes to permit it, and the said Moinette Antoine hereby promises to obligate herself, or her executors Monsieur Richard Johnson and Monsieur Charles Drouet, to pass an act of emancipation in favor of the said girl slaves at the shortest period that the same can be done by law, giving the said slaves all the prerogatives and privileges of free persons, as though they had been born free.

I copied the wording of the last part from the document I had finally read: Le Code Noir of 1724.

All Jews must be expelled from the colony of Louisiana. I
thought of Mr. Jonah Greene, his bulb of flesh, the small cap I had seen him put on his head in his room. His church in his room, his murmured church words.

They were in Paris, with their own window, sitting in chairs before a fire with their shoulders touching or their knees.

I lay with my bed drawn close to the fire, inside my bricks, with my daughters nearby.

Every night, they slept in their large bed, their braided hair tangling with each other's outflung arms or tucked-close chins. Marie-Claire tried to inch away in her sleep, as she was grown now, her shoulder turned away from Marie-Thérèse, who began most nights still pressing her face to her older sister's spine. Then Marie-Thérèse would shift and lie facedown, separate, arms flat underneath her and toes pointed as if she dove all night through the air.

When I knew I would die, when the pain pulsed in every watery branch of my body, I asked Marie-Claire to buy the coffin. The coffin-maker refused to come. He said it was bad luck to measure someone for a coffin while they were still alive. So I measured myself but said the coffin was for a boarder who would take it to his plantation when he left town.

He was satisfied with this deception.

I wrapped myself in white linen, the shroud I had sewn many months ago and put aside, when I first felt little crystals shooting inside my heart. The girls knew nothing.

I left my daughters everything. Every brick and piece of wood and iron. Every ash and sliver of soap. I hoped they would love each other forever.

I laid myself in the coffin one night, in the kitchen where the man placed it. The fire burned low. The wood smelled sharp, and in one corner, I saw sap glistening from a wound in the pine.

I was inside a boat, a pirogue shaped to fit only one body, to take nothing down the river to hunt, to kill, to sell. Nothing of
value. Bones and skin and ligaments and the brain swimming in the skull. The muscle of the heart hurting, not aching, as people always said: heartache. Broken heart. Foolish. It was a thick, tough, pulsing thing. The pain was in the muscle, just as in the leg or the wrist, from twisting wet clothes, from moving and moving and moving.

I couldn't let them send Jean-Paul down the bayou, toward the ocean, because I wanted to lie beside him. All those years. My place in the earth. But if we went là-bas, to be with my mother, there was water. Céphaline would laugh, she would have an explanation for the clouds, for rain, but I didn't have to listen now. I was old. I could imagine all the rivers and oceans, the fog so thick and moist in the mornings, and the sky as one place. The rain came from somewhere above us, and fed the rivers, and it never disappeared.