A Million Nightingales (11 page)

Mixed blood. From a sugar broker's blood. A tall blond man, eating a soup of beef meat and laughing upstairs now with the small Msieu, who was not the laughing kind. In the morning, we would go farther away from Azure. From Mamère. The sugar broker would ride for another plantation, where he would taste the sugar and talk about money and look for a woman. The one for that night, for that week.

No. He was dead. Tretite had said long ago to Mamère, very quietly when I was in the bed, lying down: “That one, the one Madame call le gros blond avec les yeux rouges? Big blond man, with red eyes? Mort. Dead. Msieu say he don't come back for next crop because he gamble on a boat and they kill him.”

I leaned my head against the big jar of olive oil. Lie down mean you can't watch, Mamère always said. So I rest like this.

In the morning, the woman spoke to someone in the kitchen, and the door opened quickly. She screamed.

“Aiee! I forget this little nègre! Like a ghost with la barbe d’Es-pagnol hanging in her face!”

I tied my tignon tightly. She pushed me out to the kitchen, handed me two biscuits, and reached behind her for the rope.

On the street, the small Msieu and the factor listed goods. Fabric, coffee, white sugar in cones, iron hoops for the hogsheads.

The molasses on my dress was dried at the hem, collecting dust. The water would run brown when I washed it.

The small Msieu said impatiently, “I need two boats—one for all the goods, one for new slaves.”

“But then you're trusting
two
Canadians,” the factor said. “Hire Chalan. He's named for his boat. Take everything you buy together.” He turned away then. “I have to collect the payments for Bordelon's crop and take his goods down to Azure.”

His black coat disappeared into the crowd, hundreds of backs and hats and boxes. He was going back.

But the rope pulled me toward the boats and the river, so wide and brown that trees on the other side looked like puffs of smoke.

I wouldn't cry in front of this man. I sent the welling tears back into the hollows in my skull. The salt water burned like lye. My mother could dip a turkey feather into the pools below my eyes, and the quill could come away stripped bitter like a white needle.

The small Msieu engaged the boatman named Chalan.
“Lafitte always have cloth and spice. Wine. What else you need?” The Canadian's beard was thick and brown as a rabbit pelt along his cheeks.

“How many slaves will fit?” The Msieu looked at the big boat, the boxes.

“This voiture hold enough. See how many he have when we there.”

“How long will it take?”

“My job is to get us there. Your job is to pay.”

The small Msieu pulled me to the center of the boat, where boxes were covered by a tarpaulin, and he looked at me for the first time that day.

“If I chain you here and the boat capsizes, you'll drown. You understand that, oui?”

“Oui.” I knew what he was asking. But I refused to say it. I will not jump. Not now. Not yet.

I sat on a box. The clothespins in my apron pocket nestled against my leg. He did not chain me. I was not in a box. Fancy piece. Good for one thing. Christophe was right.

The captain said, “When they jump, like a bag of piastres thrown in the river. Bag of black hide, the Africans. Sang mêlé aren't wild most of the time.”

The small Msieu said nothing. He hadn't decided whether I was fit or wild or not.

Four slave oarsmen filed onto the boat ahead of another white man. They didn't look at me. They sat in the benches and rowed us away from the dock while the second white man called out to them from his seat just behind. The air was cold on my face, the salt water inside my cheekbones, the words I wouldn't speak collecting in my chest.

The shoulder blades of the rowing men moved up and down, like hatchets under their shirts. Not angel wings.

A white egret burst into the air when we turned into a narrower bayou, his wings spread like sewn-together fans and his black feet dangling over me.

Christophe used to boast about running away to see a girl below LeBrun's. He said that if he got lost, he would find the
egret nesting place in cypress swamps to the south, then walk the right way.

But we had gone north, and now the sun was hidden, and I had no idea which way we floated. Two more egrets flapped away, in a different direction.

Bayou Coquille. Bayou des Familles. Bayou des Rigolets. The men threw the names back and forth. “To lose the Americans, when they look for Lafitte, we have so many ways we can't count,” the captain said to the small Msieu. “The Americans are slow. They eat too much beef.”

The small Msieu laughed and leaned against the pole holding the tarpaulin. “And you?”

“Me? I live on tafia,” the Canadian said. “Cane rum.”

Back on the night they sewed together, Hera told my mother about some Africans she'd heard tell never killed their cows. They let blood run every day into a gourd and let milk run into another gourd. The people drank and grew tall, and the cows lived.

Only when someone marry or die, they kill a cow and eat the meat, she said.

Mamère was quiet, and then she said, On the boat I drank blood.

Eh! Hera frowned.

My blood, my mother said. That boat, the men shout and the wood scream. We were so hungry. My mother tell me eat a piece of your finger. I chew around the nail, but no more skin there. Then I taste my blood. Make a cut. Hold the blood in my mouth a long time.

The boat wake moved branches. Steam flew from the rowers’ mouths. A nail was loose on a box beside me, and I barely moved my wrist, punctured the ridges left by the iron bracelet.

I made four holes in my wrist. That seemed like a good number. When the fourth sting turned warm, I felt it was enough. The air dried the blood, and I brought my skin to my teeth to nudge the black buttons into my mouth.

———

“Lake Salvador,” the captain said. A black mirror, with the clouds above. Céphaline would have liked it. A looking glass where you could see nothing.

The boat stayed at the edge of the water until a whistle sounded in the trees. “Lookout says safe from Americans,” the captain said, and spat into the dark water. “They call this place the Temple because the Indians killed here. Prayed when they killed.”

The steep ridge of land was a chênière, where shell mounds were piled high and trees now grew. Michel always said the chênières behind Azure were good places to hunt because the animals fled there in high water. But this island had scattered buildings.

And the captain took me off the boat and put me in a small cage, like an animal. He paused in front of a low brick building and said, “Keep her here. You don't want Lafitte and his men to see a sang mêlé pretty like that. Unless you want to sell her now.”

Another man opened the lock at the iron bars of the doorway. Someone breathed inside. Even if the door were open, there was nowhere to run here. Only into the water to drown. Would the spirit be ruined then? Did a hide bag of piastres lose a spirit?

The small Msieu put his finger on my shoulder. “You. Is your father there? On Azure?”

He wanted to know if my father was Msieu Bordelon or the overseer Franz. “Non.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“Non.”

Small brown hairs on his wrists and even on the fingers, between his knuckles. What had Céphaline said about knuckles? Why did they look so foolish?

He was thinking of selling me here. To Jean Lafitte.

“Can you cook?”

“A bit.”

“What can you do?”

His eyes were small—raisins in a biscuit, glossy from risen sugar when they baked. If I said the words—
wash, clean, iron
— would he keep me or sell me? I could—sew. That word made
needles move in my throat. I couldn't sew yet. My clumsy, crooked stitches weren't ready. She wasn't done with me. All the lessons …

“Only field work. They put me in the house just sometimes for dinners.”

The small Msieu shrugged. “No field here.”

The captain said, “Inside.”

The key twisted like Tretite's knife on the sharpening stone.

Three brick walls and the door of bars. Three women inside. They knew one another, because one brushed a fly from another's shoulder. Two of them talked low, words I had never heard, and the third vomited over and over into the pit dug in the corner.

I sat on the sand in the other corner. They stared at me. I watched the water until darkness rose from under it to fill the sky.

A woman with a lantern opened the door. Her skin was red brown, like old brick, her eyes green blue as shallow water. She said, “Quatre!” and shook her head. Four of us. She put down three wooden plates full of sagamite. The boiled chunks of corn glistened in the lantern's flame.

She came back with one more plate. When I finished eating, she took my hand to examine my nails. “Dirty,” she murmured, at my fingers, but she pulled out curls from my tignon. “Lafitte see you?” she asked.

Stealer of slaves. I didn't move my lips or eyes.

“You quarteron? Or mulâtresse, eh? Not Indian like me. I red-bone like my father.”

I said, “Am I sold to Lafitte?”

She stood suddenly and shrugged, and her dress turned the corner of the doorway after she did.

In the night, the wind blew off the lake, and sand flew against the walls, spattered against the wood and my skull. I was so cold I couldn't sleep sitting up, like Mamère. Purple night erased the bars, and the three women's shapes curled against one another.

Tomorrow they might be sold south on the river. Sold to Azure
or Petit Clair. They could walk in the canefields near my mother's house, smell coffee, and knock on her door to whisper when they learned French. “Just get here. You trade?”

I woke to fingers, in the stripes of gray light through the bars. Two of the women squatted next to me, pulling at my tignon. When it fell, I thought they would take it. But they touched my hair, loosened from the braid.

They said nothing. My hair rustled between their fingers when they lifted curls and rubbed them. Then I moved and they pulled back. I picked up my tignon and turned away from their faces, dark as Mamère and Hera, but with tiny raised scars in two rows along their hairlines.

Not Singalee. Not Bambara. A people I had never seen. Their faces didn't show the four lips, but something only they knew.

The ocean-eyed woman came again with sagamite. She left without speaking or looking at me. Molasses sank quickly into the corn.

Mamère melted sugar on her tongue right now, in pearl dawn. It didn't matter whether he sold me to Lafitte or traded me for other slaves. The sick woman sank down against the wall and moaned.

Like Hera had slid against Mamère's wall that night, when she wanted the dress. Now her daughter had the dress. In the cloth we had dyed would be threads of her mother's love and worry and all the words she had collected. The indigo plant torn from the ground was a child of the plants that killed my grandmother. The blue was in her blood.

I had nothing but clothespins and coffee beans now. I waited for whoever would come, holding the carved wood in my apron pocket. I had no wisdom. Just the oils of my mother's fingertips, moving to mine.

The sand under me didn't rock like the boat. But I put my teeth to the black scabs on my wrist until fresh blood welled. Did I
taste rust? Maybe rust from the nail would seep into my veins and infect my blood. Céphaline said rust was a compound. Mamère said rust was the most difficult to bleach from the white shirts.

“Sang mêlé,” a voice shouted through the bars.

A white man with a beard, hands webbed with dirt. He put an iron collar around my neck and pulled me to the door. When I stopped in the sunlight, he pinched the tip of my breast with his free hand and pulled me farther that way.

It hurt like ants attached to me there. He laughed and said, “My favorite way to make them walk. Pain or plaisir, make the nipple hard and then you just hold on.”

The collar was heavy on my neck. I held my head still and followed my breast.

“There he is,” the man said. I realized he was the captain's mate. He dropped his hand quickly, and my breast burned and throbbed. The small Msieu turned from the boat deck.

“The iron collar is not necessary,” he said. “Ne pas sauvage.”

“Maybe she is wild,” the man said when he unlocked it. He kept his back to the small Msieu. “But I like to put it on,” he whispered to me. “I like to walk them that way.”

My breast felt as if the ants were still chewing at the flesh. I stood near a dock. I smelled cinnamon. Then five men walked toward us, chained together, matched step to step like horses. They didn't look at me or at the small Msieu. They stared at the water.

No marks on their cheeks. What did they believe was in the water?

More boxes were brought. I stood still. A patient animal. Small mule. My breast burned faintly.

From the barge moored nearby, moans rose like vapor from the water. A doctor, with black coat and bag, squatted on the deck where men lay on pallets in the shade of a tarpaulin covering. The doctor smeared something on the gums of each man, and one man kept his lips stretched wide, sound winding from his throat, rising and falling.

“Scurvy,” said the mate, swinging the iron collar, to the small
Msieu. “Africans have scurvy and pestilence when they get here. Doctor buys them cheap and tries to fix them. Sells them in the city.”

The white paste on their gums, the greenish paste on their arms and legs and shoulders—their eyes closed except for the sighing man, whose eyes stared at the tarpaulin over him. He couldn't even see the sky, if he was dying. Was he a sky person? A water tribe?

The five new Africans were chained by the ankles into the rowers’ benches. The captain made gestures to the Africans, and his own rowers tried to speak to them, but the Africans didn't answer or acknowledge. When they rowed, though, they tried to keep pace with the others.

When the boat moved away from the dock, the wind was cold against my face, and I closed my eyes for a long time. It no longer mattered if I remembered where we went. I would never find my way back.

When I opened them, we were in another bayou surrounded by black willows. Nothing but winter branches and dangling bare vinestems.