A Million Nightingales (27 page)

If I died, Fantine would be his mother, Francine his sister, and they would love him. No one would have left him. He would leave, someday, if he were sold, but he wouldn't leave me, as I had disappeared from Mamère without a last touch.

His mouth had fastened onto my bare shoulder that last day as he butted his head against me. His gums were hard and hot.

With a needle, I opened the scars on my wrist. The blood pooled as fast as before, on the boat. Scars didn't hinder the blood. I made a hole in one of the burn marks from Pélagie's curling tongs. Dark as a coffee bean. My mother wouldn't have killed
herself, after my birth. My mother was not of the tribe who drank blood, but once the liquid no longer trembled, once it turned darker in preparation to become blood no more, I took it in my mouth.

No tribe.

In the morning, in the narrow backyard in Opelousas, I built a fire under the black washpot. My washline stretched between two chinaberry trees. The dawn showed hundreds of chinaberries dangling like tiny suns from the black branches. I hung Msieu Antoine's white shirts with their purplish cuffs.

The milk dried on my dressfront, like all liquids from our bodies, and then turned to dust on my skin and flew into the air, to be washed into the earth behind this house.

“How old is she?”

“Seventeen.”

“My God.”

“Oui.”

“Worth every dollar.”

The pause let me know he smiled. “Oui.”

I would believe in money. The only thing there was.

Céphaline had known. Pélagie had known. My mother was wrong. The only reason to breed was to transfer money from body to body. The transfer pattern on the cloth let the dye bleed into the threads.

He would breed with me and sell my daughters.

But another day passed, and still he didn't touch me.

Only with the words that floated toward me in the kitchen from the men who sat in the office or dining room or stood at the front door.

“A virgin?”

“He says no.”

The silence was a shrug.

“I heard in New Orleans you can get them young or pretend.”

“Pretend?”

“Remove the hair. All of it.”

I could own nothing. Not even hair. If Msieu Antoine chose, he could remove every hair. If he chose, he could decorate my skin with burns and brands and ink. Every morning, he refilled the inkstand. His cuffs were blotted with ink.

“Msieu Antoine.”

He looked up, surprised that I had spoken first. “I will make a special cleanser for your cuffs if you give me the money for the dry goods store.”

If he thought I would run, he would never hand me coins or let me walk to the store.

He laid coins on the desk without looking up. His fingers did not touch mine.

The buildings were taller than high cane, and the alleys wider than the rows.

I found Bayou Carron, where one of the peddlers said he sold moss. I was free. At the muddy track along the low water, shacks on stilts leaned over the ditch. A man urinated into the stream from his porch. A trapper. He stared at me as the yellow drops flew into the air.

All these days waiting to leave the house and find water, but that was another child's dream. This water couldn't carry my body, or my prayers.

A child would throw herself into the water, into any water, and pretend that walking along the bottom, with the spirits her mother had told her about, would carry her back to that mother. A mother would never be so selfish.

But my son was with Fantine. I was alone. I spat into the water and watched the map of my saliva float.

My marks, on my body—the tattooed
M
, the coffee beans. My fingers pressed the scars. Mamère had not raised me to live as a coward. I left the idea of death, or running, in the liquid that was all of ours.

The coin was in my fist, inside my apron pocket. I walked toward the dry goods store.

———

It was easier to believe in the money than anything else. I could hold it and count it and hide it and move it. The money would not help Jean-Paul. A slave could not buy a slave. But in my hands, the coins were not Msieu Antoine's any longer. The money—bits and wedges of silver tied into my tignon and hidden in a new place every day, in the dirty laundry, in the tin box of coffee beans, in the yard under a flat stone where the bluing and wash water made the earth rank and soft—the money would help me learn how to get my son.

The silver reales and Mexican pesos and gold coins kept me alive.

Each day when I stepped onto the wooden sidewalk, something moved in me that took days to define. The words Cépha-line blurted with her hands held up in the air after she had put together a long string of numbers. “Not elation,” she told her governess. “Satisfaction mixed with calculation.”

Past storefronts and cottages, my feet moved in a pattern of my own calculation. Somewhere outside Opelousas, Hervé Richard fashioned armoires and chairs. But I had not seen him.

My task was to buy necessities.

Msieu Antoine burned candles most of the night, writing letters. He drank coffee all day. He ate bread. He liked salt.

The patterns of my feet were only interrupted by the men who spoke from doorways, from the road, from horses. The French kept their voices quiet; the Americans did not.

“Have you been trained to use your mouth?” “Who is your master?” “Do you work for Jeanne Heureuse?” “I don't have to pay if I catch you somewhere in the dark, sweet.” “Tell Heureuse I want you next time. Damn you, don't walk away. Goddamn French slaves need to understand Americans don't tolerate it. I'll catch her and teach her to listen.”

French clerks, Irish ditch diggers, German farmers—but the worst were the Americans. New planters, lawyers, speculators, boat captains.

My glances were careful and sideways at the women, never their faces so they wouldn't demand that I be whipped. Creole
wives of planters, their dresses preceding them from the carriage, their curls gathered like fat black worms at their cheeks. The back of a neck white as flour, but downy black hair like a fairy spine. Acadian women in bonnets and homespun, lips thin as wires, hands browner than mine when they sold fruits and vegetables from baskets.

But the men were everywhere, touching my cheek if no one looked, sliding their hands under my sleeve, shouting at me on the street.

I made my ears underwater.

“Jeanne Heureuse!” a man yelled once, and tore at my sleeve to turn me around. Then he laughed and said, “You must be her daughter. Look just like her. But I'd have to see you naked to know for sure.”

She owned three women, the men in Msieu's office said, their cigar smoke tendrils like white vines. She was a mulâtresse who lived outside town in her own house, who had become free and made her name “Happiness” because that was the service she provided. Each of her girls had a task.

Were their mouths full of cloth or fingers or their own hair?

The three women were draft animals, with papers. Not cows; if they had babies, that milk couldn't be sold. Maybe Heureuse wanted more babies, lighter and lighter, but only girls.

Not boys. Quadroon boys weren't useful for anything. Animals of inconvenience. Their passages were not useful to anyone, and their faces only remembrances of something no one wanted to see.

Even though the milk had somehow disappeared into my body, strange twitches still moved in the looser skin of my belly. Where Jean-Paul had lain curled. I didn't know what my brain felt.

On Sunday, Msieu Antoine went to Mass, and I went also to ask God about my son.

I walked behind Msieu Antoine. We passed the courthouse, the building where he went daily, where all lives were decided on paper, and the spire of the church where we headed, where all lives were decided by the sprinkling of water and rush of smoke.

We passed the dressmaker's—a piece of glass, a sign over a doorway. Mode de Paris. A silk gown, draped and ruched, hung there. Ostrich feathers sprang from a hat.

Glass was made from sand, Céphaline had said. Sand burned and melted by fire. Pélagie had wanted glass. Msieu Lemoyne's house had burned to the ground and made ashes, and Mamère cooked ashes down to lye for soap.

The glass was cold. My finger made a mark on the window.

From the back pew reserved for slaves, the smoke of the incense was faint. Madame de la Rosière had babies baptized, with water on their heads, and grown men from Africa. Jean-Paul, Francine, and two other new babies had been daubed with the holy water by the priest when Pélagie had lain in the parlor, her hands on her chest, over the wounds covered by silk.

Amadou was baptized by Gervaise in the ciprière, with the black water where they lived. Sophia might never see him again.

I had not felt God since I lay in the dark watching my mother pray.

That night, holding my clothespins, I prayed. I had nothing of Jean-Paul. His hair was not long enough to cut. I had bitten off his fingernails and spat them into the dirt.

I didn't feel one God but prayed to the gods of all the water, the bayous and Barataria and the Mississippi, the water in my mother's washpot, the saliva and tears in our skulls. I imagined God inside everything that shone and trembled.

Should I love my son? And my mother? Would Msieu Antoine—who seemed alone in this world with no wife, brothers, or parents of his own—ever go to New Orleans? Would he let me see my mother?

The embers crumbled. I wanted to see Jean-Paul, before he could speak and call someone else's name.

I knew now what my presence accomplished, what no other presence could.

I was in the imagination of all the men who came to this office, to this building, even those who never entered the door.

They saw me there, my body working even after the cooking and sewing and cleaning were finished. My body under Msieu Antoine's, my mouth open in pleasure or pain or fear, my hair tangled in his elbows. And my mouth closed in the morning.

An elderly man named Msieu Césaire stayed in the office one day while Msieu Antoine went across to the courthouse. For days, they had been meeting about the sale of an entire estate in Arnaudville. I heard his name constantly: “What does Césaire think? He's still the wealthiest Creole in Opelousas. Césaire's grandmother came here with a land grant from the king.”

Msieu Césaire told me to stand before him. Then he lifted my dress hem with his cane, until the fabric edge was near my own eyes.

He examined me for some time. My linen pantaloons, discarded by Pélagie long ago, were attached to my thighs with sweat.

He dropped my hem and said, “You are wearing underclothes. That is foolish. An impediment. You should be prepared to lift your dress at any time, if that is your purpose.” He dismissed me by moving the cane across my spine and pushing me toward the door.

The next day, Msieu Antoine said, “You are not a daughter of joy, but your very existence makes men think of particular joys.”

Was I meant to acknowledge this, while gathering discarded ink-stained pages from the floor?

“It is assumed that your status is concubine.” His mouth was not the kind that smiled upward; when he was amused, his lips drew back and made two hollows in his cheeks, above his moustaches.

I had to learn how much was allowed. “I do not know that word.”

He drew his lips back again. “The origin—maybe Chinese. Another term for mistress. The woman who performs the duties of marriage but without the official legal sanction. With no papers.”

When he said the word
performs
, drawing it out to make it not true, he sounded almost like Msieu Vincent before he drew the gun.

“Everyone has papers.” The words fell from my mouth.

Msieu Antoine was not angry. He was amused again. “Every human and horse, it is said.”

“Dogs.”

“Yes.”

I put the silver coffee urn on its small brazier, the same kind that heated the curling tongs every morning in Pélagie's room. “Madame Pélagie was killed because of papers.” Was I allowed to speak of actual events or only amusing generalities?

He finished his coffee and said, “Come this way into the office.”

He showed me the pages, the ink, the seals, the letters and contracts. “Do you see all these transactions?” He bent his face under mine until I had to see his eyes. His eyelashes were like small paintbrushes. I didn't allow myself to flinch but looked into the black spots of his vision.

“Yes,” I said.

Finally he nodded. “Madame Pélagie was killed because of money and paper and desire.”

He was a man. He didn't understand. Not desire. Desire was too sentimental. Besoin. The mere need for the passage.

“The assumptions will be convenient for both of us. It is clear to me that you were not trained in the arts of physical love. I see no avarice or desire in your bearing.”

Did he see besoin? I wanted my mother and my son.

“Do you understand? I want you to be accommodating if you are asked about your duties. Domestic pleasures of all kinds. Right now, my satisfaction lies completely in the smooth running of this house.”

He looked down to end the conversation. I moved around the desk, collecting blotter paper and bits of sealing wax. He did not know I could read.

The pages were covered with ink spiders crawling across in Msieu Antoine's curling, slanted hand. He wrote down events to make them official. Marriages, births, deaths, transfers of property. Sales.

Estate of the Widow du Plantier. Lartigue—Creole nègre, 45— 850 piastres. Charité—Creole négresse, 20—450 piastres.

If he did not write them down, they did not exist.

My name was written on three pieces of paper now. Azure, Rosière, and here, in this room somewhere. My mother's name had only been written once. My son's name remained in Msieu de la Rosière's office.

Msieu Antoine moved his pen over the paper. I looked into his face again. He was writing. His mouth burrowed into his cheek on one side as if he chewed on that part. His hair was black, and his left fingers lined up on the paper as his right hand wrote.

Long ago, he had written letters to someone he missed. I had seen them in the garçonnière. He missed the woman's fingers in his. He had loved someone else. Was he waiting for that woman?