A Million Nightingales (13 page)

At dawn, the bell rang in the tower, and hooves moved up and down the street.

No coffee. Only cornmeal to boil into cush-cush. Sometimes milk. No sugar.

The scabs on my wrist had dried and fallen off now. I chewed at the corner of my thumb until I had a piece of meat between my teeth, until I tasted the warmth of blood.

The people measured me. I said nothing except in answer. When anyone spoke to me, I had to decide how intelligent to sound.

We are all animals, Céphaline said. We eat and excrete and breed.

You listen and be careful, Mamère said.

The two drivers, Mirande and Baillo, didn't look at me except to say I held the hoe wrong. When I saw them the first days in the field, brothers with ocher eyes and moustaches red and sparse as ants on their faces, I was afraid. But Sophia said they never touched the women. They were waiting for wives from France to join them when they had land of their own, and Sundays they rode to a church in another town.

Every morning we walked behind the cart that carried hoes and noon meals and water. Mirande rode his horse above the men, the new Africans chained at the back of the line—cutting the cypress and draining the new swampland.

Baillo rode above the women—clearing for next year's cane. The fields were all stubble, littered with burned stalks and dried leaves. When I wiped at my face, Sophia said to me, “This ain't even cane. This January. Pas même. Not the same. Cane is October when we cutting, yes.”

My hoe blade chopped at clots of dirt. The earth was frozen until the weak sun appeared. The frost dissolved into water. The water entered the earth, and we moved the dirt from place to place. Furrows and rows. Every day.

We gathered the cane trash from last harvest into piles. Mirande lit the fires. The smoke burned hard into the gray sky, and I imagined the clouds crystaled with sugar, moving south, the rain falling on my mother's tongue.

Where did she wait? Here on earth? Or là-bas?

Bayou Rosière cut through the land, too narrow for large boats, only pirogues loaded with moss or skins or solitary hunters who passed the fields. I watched the path to the ciprière where the men disappeared with axes and chains.

I measured east and west by the sun. I measured the fields by the ditches and bayous. Five fields. Boats passed on Bayou Courtableau.

I couldn't run yet. Every morning, frost covered the steps to the porch gallery, gathering like white fur in the splinters. The branches of even the lowest bushes were bare, nothing to hide me
in the woods at the edges of the fields we cleared. Roofs were white as if the ice contained bluing. I wrapped my cape tighter around my shoulders, pulled the hood over my tignon. A circle of cold air hung before my face when we followed the cart to the fields. We hardly ever had ice like this at Azure. I saw Mamère sitting by her fire, sewing, holding her lips still. Waiting.

The dark came before dinner, and one of us girls stood in line to grind corn in the two hand mills, with light only from the torches. Then Sophia baked corn cakes or boiled mush.

The street was a tangle of voices, but I didn't want to sort the people, to know them, because I wouldn't be here long. But they spoke to me. The women tried to ask me questions, their eyes shining like coins in the light. The men grinned and nodded, their teeth floating in the dark.

Sophia said, “You better speak. Be polite. Who grind corn for them Africans? You come here with them.”

I shook my head. “I don't know them.” The one with the grin-scar on his back, Athénaïse, always glared at me with his eyes narrowed to fierce crescents. He spoke a word to the others. I knew the word was African for me—mulâtresse, light skin, white blood—anger at how the mate on the river spoke to me, at what my very existence meant.

I looked back at him, imagining my mother and her own mother, and spat on the ground. I said out loud, “Saliva is all the same.”

Sophia said, “Africans think they better. But how they gon eat?”

Fantine's mother sent her three boys down to the house occupied by the Africans, at the end of the street. The boys reported that the Africans had made their own mortar and pestle with a cypress trunk and trapped a bird, which was roasting in their coals.

Sophia said, “Big bird or little one?” She was thinking of meat.

Every day, I kept my eyes on the cart ahead of me, then on the trees at the fields’ edge. At night, I kept my eyes on the porch steps. The edges of women's brooms. The men sat in doorways waiting for dinner. I saw their shoes.

I listened to Baillo's shouted orders in the field and to Fantine's soft, high voice while we ate. She was in love.

“When you sixteen, you get a man,” she said to me. “Madame marry you with the Bible.”

“So you can make her some money.”

“No. So you can be happy.”

She walked with a boy near the slave cemetery.

Breeding, I wanted to say to her. Curling myself near the fire, I thought of Hera. “Where your man?” my mother had asked, and Hera had replied, “We sold three times, me and mine. I'm gon be warm at night, all a man is.”

At night, Sophia was happy not to talk to me, and I was happy not to listen. She hit my arm with her piece of kindling to move me to my bed. She didn't want the hooves to stop outside our door. She wanted her meat on Sunday.

Sunday mornings we walked up the long road to the big yard behind the house for prayers. Madame spoke from the Bible, and I understood some of the words. Céphaline used to read Latin aloud.
Deus
was God.
Corpus
was body. Doctor Tom said corpse was a dead body. I told my mother the word
Deus.
Her voice was low and harsh in her throat at night, when she prayed over her altar, her piece of cloth from her own mother. When she prayed to keep me alive.

I was alive. Msieu would hand me dried corn without looking up, keeping his eyes on his papers with their scratchy black lines of ink. I was not a corpse. I was alive. She wanted me to be safe. She didn't know if I was alive or safe or a corpse.

Mamère prayed to find out the name, the place. She prayed to the same gods. She was patient. She had to be patient.

Sophia stared at the pile of meat and the knife.

When Madame's voice had finished, silence hung in the air until we moved our feet.

If your name wasn't in the book—for not finishing your work, for talking out of turn, for sleeping in your chair or by the fire when Baillo heard snoring from the wrong room when he passed
by on his horse and he poked open your shutters with his long stick to see where you were—you got a piece of meat. Salt pork in square chunks, sometimes bacon, sometimes strange pieces of a pig's body. Corpse.

Dried corn. Molasses in a wooden bucket.

Sophia ate all her meat on the first afternoon, while we washed our clothes. She boiled it with dried peppers she kept in a bag or fried it until the fat spit. Every time we hung up a dress, she took another bite of her meat until it was gone. Her eyes were focused far away while she chewed, and when she handed small pieces of the meat to Fronie, she looked at the trees.

I remembered my mother slipping pieces of dried meat into her mouth while we washed, remembered the splinters of flesh she worked with her teeth. She gave me the fresh and she ate the dried.

Fronie said one Sunday, “I don't like the fat.”

Sophia glared at her. “Fat good for you. So you don't be cold.”

Fronie glared back defiantly and said, “Warming up now. The sun staying into night. I'm not cold.”

Sophia whispered like wire cutting through wood. “When you a baby, I chew meat and put it in your mouth. So you grow. You eat this piece even if I want it. You don't be kind. Kind don't work.”

She saw me watching and said, “Look at Moinette. Used to eat plenty meat where she come from. Meat from the msieu. Your father, no? Plenty meat. Your mother, she chew meat for you, no?”

I stared into Sophia's eyes, flat and black like iron nailheads pounded into her forehead.

She folded her arms, her elbows pointed sharp at me. I had felt them so many nights to move me from the fire. “You sang mêlé. No other sang mêlé here. You miss your place where your father treat you good. You très jolie.”

I said nothing. She accused me of beauty. Mamère would keep her words on her teeth, with the coffee beans.

“Make a new place here or keep a old place in your head. Only two choice,” she said now, her voice softer.

One night, when Sophia was outside, Fronie said that they
used to live on another place, and her father had died, and all she remembered was her mother breaking dishes to cover the grave. “She break em special,” Fronie had whispered. “Not wooden dish. China dish, with red trim. Two of em. Crack crack. I remember. I was scared.”

The Africans passed by carrying wood. They kept their place in their heads, they hadn't made a place here, because twice the one named Gervaise had refused to understand orders in French, and he was put in stocks. No food, no water, no clothes. He whispered to himself all night in African. We could hear him through the shutters.

Msieu didn't whip. Baillo locked the people naked in stocks in the center of the street, under the bell tower, and they had to sleep and pee where they knelt.

One night, I came back late from the privy, and Athénaïse knelt beside Gervaise. Athénaïse spoke that word that meant me, and he spit in the dirt near the stocks. I said, “I don't speak African.”

Gervaise—head floating in the dark before the pale wood. The heads on the pikes. I could say my mother's words—
ni
and
faro
and
dya.
But these men were Congo, Sophia said. They didn't believe in the same spirits.

On Sundays, the men moved the privies and shoveled dirt and lime over the pits, and our smell went inside Msieu's earth to move with the rain into his fields.

The skin on my palms was raised with calluses. I could see all the tiny lines on the calluses, like pillows with fancy stitching. Around my fingernails, the skin was hard and dry, torn from the cane and the hoe. It was easy to find a loose piece, to worry it.

Loose thread—pull it and ruin the shirt. Pull it and naked the man, Tretite said one night, when Mamère was sewing for her.

I caught the tag of skin between my front teeth—like a rat— and pulled gently until blood welled. It didn't hurt, not along the nail where the skin was tough, but when the strip tugged into the corner, the skin resisted. I cut the base of the shred with my teeth.

I chewed on the meat for a long time. I took it from my tongue
and examined it—the dull skin had been dry and hard but now was translucent from my saliva. Saliva. Why do we have that? Céphaline used to ask Doctor Tom. All that liquid. Tears and perspiration and saliva and—excretions. I couldn't remember his answer.

My skin—a splinter of hardtack, like the men had eaten on the boat that delivered me here. My skin was gold on my body, but now this sliver was white as bone. How did saliva take away the color? How did the river turn drowned bodies of slaves white, as Christophe had said, but all our washing did not?

I swallowed the softened meat. Now it entered my stomach, my blood, and some of it went back to nourish my fingers.

Our excretions were inside this cane. We pulled the long pieces from the matelas, the cane piled last year for seed, and then the men cut them into joints. We dropped the green bones into the furrows, so that we could eat the molasses we would make and drop our own leavings in another hole.

Each field had a place for our leavings—one tree inside the edge of the woods, marked with a whitewash stripe. But I knew not to run from the fields. There would only be the ciprière, swamp and animals, and then more land, roads on which people would pass. I could never walk all the way to Azure. I would have to go by water. Find a boat and push my body down the bayou. South. Back to Barataria and trade my body for passage. I leaned against the tree. Just as it was at Azure—drop cane into the furrows, cover it over, wait for rain. Rain would fill up the bayous again, make them passable. Water from the sky to grow the grass. Then we would cut out the bad grass with the hoe, let the good grass grow. Grass from India. Grass from India, people from Africa, dishes from France. They came by ship, over the ocean and river and bayou. Anything that came one way could go back.

I kept my hands down. I used my eyes and never my mouth unless someone asked me a question, and all my words—from Mamère and Céphaline, from Doctor Tom, from Tretite and Eveline,
and the words I heard that night in the indigo woods—all those words—
besoin, lime, dahlia, bagasse, scapula, womb, iris, octoroon
and
sacatra, ni
and
faro
—stayed behind my breastbone. My heart was a small muscle. All the words swam around it inside my blood, but I knew my heart was only meat for another animal.

One night, Sophia stayed awake long after she had sent me to the other room. The hooves passed. The door opened quickly, and feet slid along the wood floor. A bag dropped onto the table. No rattle—something soft inside the bag. A sharp intake of breath. The breath drawn inward the way someone does before blowing out onto the fire to redden the coals. But no breath huffing out.

I slid around the wall to the doorway. Sophia's feet were small and bare, wide from each other, her knees like little faces just below her uplifted skirts. The man hid the rest of her from sight, moving against her, against the wall. But I recognized his back. Gervaise. His back, with bones like hatchets under the skin when he rowed the boat. The hatchets moved now when he steadied himself against Sophia and the wall, pushing, pushing.

In the morning, when I made the fire, four small birds were roasted in the coals. Sophia came quickly, her eyes hard. She said, “Wait for I portion that. Don't you touch.”

I didn't. She woke everyone and gave us each a small bird leg, then Fronie a breast. “Where you get these?” Fronie asked.

Sophia looked outside at the still-dark sky. She knew people could smell meat in the smoke. “A man got traps, in the trees.”

“What you give him?” Fantine smiled.