A Million Nightingales (37 page)

“You are not a dog. You are going to be a man.”

“A dog barks. A man speaks.”

“A man who looks like you must speak carefully.”

“There are no other men who look like me.”

My heart rose behind its bone. “Yes, there are. In Paris. Madame Lescelles's son lives in Paris. There are men who look like you, and they go to school. When you are fourteen, you will go to Paris. Then you can speak as you wish.”

But he continued to speak as he wished every day.

“You hear him,” Tretite said one summer night, snapping green beans, her fingers still quick, her glossy chin rounder each year, like an apple resting under her lips. Her eyes were smaller, the apple seeds. Jean-Paul and David made a puddle in the yard, floating paper boats on the water. “If you were still in le quartier, you wouldn't see him to worry about him. He be in the field or the barn.” She pinched off a dangling stem. “But you hear his mouth. Là. Too funny for a boy.”

She was right. He couldn't be silent. He spoke in front of me
now, because he had to. “Madame Richard has an egg in her throat. It moves up and down so fast that the chick must escape one day.

“That man's coat is the color of the slime in the horse trough. It was black and then green, and now it can't decide. There is no name for it.”

“Oh?” Tretite said. “What other name beside dark green?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Moss. Pine. There is turquoise. A stone. Sometimes it is very dark. I have seen a ring with that stone. There is winebottle green. A man wore a coat that color one day. He was from New Orleans. The nice clothes are from New Orleans.”

His eyes moved rapidly from me to Tretite. His voice was not false now. He was not cheerfully repeating anything.

When he was ten, he could not sleep in our room any longer.

He was nearly as tall as me. He had outgrown his pallet three times, and another rope bed wouldn't fit into the room. Though Tretite slept in her chair, Jean-Paul was too old to lie beside her when she did rest in her own bed.

He needed his own place for his treasures. Msieu Antoine had seen Jean-Paul's piles in the kitchen—cloth scraps and tea tins and cigar boxes for boats and sails. In the yard, Jean-Paul had wood and tins of paint and hemp for rigging.

They'd begun to make bigger boats, he and David. They'd even flooded a corner of the yard with water to test the boats, and the new neighbor next door, another lawyer, had complained to Msieu Antoine that they'd damaged his fence.

“A boy have to sleep in the garçonnière,” Tretite said. “Have to be apart from maman. Have to learn his task.” She poured bacon grease into the tin, and the molten fat turned white in the cold.
“Your
maman—she teach you to wash and sew, but one night she say to me, How I know? Moinette go with les blancs, how I know what to show her?”

Jean-Paul's figure, squatting near the puddle, wavered and blurred. “Why are you telling me this?” I wiped my eyes, and the grit from the beans hurt.

“Let him work with David. Take the letters to the courthouse, the papers to the men. What you teach him here? Sweep and serve the table and watch you sew? That not a man.” She stood up.

I went outside to the shed, a small brick building that kept our wood dry and my washpots and tools from rusting. I hadn't opened the shed for nearly a year, since Jean-Paul was old enough to haul things from here to the yard or kitchen.

Could it be made into a room for him? There was only a tiny window, covered with cobwebs. When I pulled open the door, someone was breathing inside.

Jean-Paul and David came running at my screams. “Maman! He won't hurt you! He won't!”

An Indian slept beside the wood, rolled in a blanket so dirty the leaves and ashes looked like fur. His face was covered with a black hat, but the light made him twitch, and he sat up abruptly.

Red trade cloth in my mouth. It was Joseph. From the ciprière.

His eyes were filmed with alcohol. Waxed black buttons. He peered at me and pulled himself up, holding on to the woodpile.

“Maman. We knew he slept here, but we didn't want to tell you.” Jean-Paul's fingers pulled at my sleeve. “When he brings the wood, I give him half the money you give me, and food. He likes it here.”

Joseph said nothing. “What do you do with the money?” I asked Jean-Paul.

“Buy candy with David. Or canvas for our boats. Paint.” He did not say he was sorry. He curved his mouth. “He saw us sailing our boat on Bayou Carron one day. He showed us his pirogue. But now it is gone. Maybe it was stolen. But he cannot talk.”

Joseph could hear. He didn't move his eyes from mine.

Jean-Paul said, “I never say anything mean about his clothes, and he never says anything mean at all.”

“This is not a joke,” I told him sharply, but he pulled my ear to his lips.

“He is not a pet. He has half a tongue. He showed me. The other half is gone. He is a fantôme, like Tretite said, from the woods. He will not harm us. He makes boats.”

Joseph did not open his mouth. He walked out the back gate and down the alley, pulling his hat low over his forehead.

“Jean-Paul, this is not our house. It belongs to Msieu Antoine. He could become so angry about this, he might send you away.”

“I belong to you,” Jean-Paul said. “You won't send me away.”

His voice was serene. Genial. He went back inside with Tretite.

Half a tongue. The alley was bare, no summer vines, just wooden fences and gates. Why had Joseph left the ciprière camp? Where was his sister? Had the white man cut out Joseph's tongue?

I leaned my back against the brick. Joseph and his sister had sold me for gold. Now he was one of the drunken bodies we stepped around in the alleys or the square.

And my son had been to Bayou Carron, where I had not thrown my life away. He was a child, but not a child. He was not mine every moment of the day, as I had been my mother's, in the clearing.

“Jeanne Heureuse dead,” Charité whispered to me when she came to the back door with her basket of sweet potatoes. “Someone put the belt around her neck and pull. The other girl in the house say she hear a man call Jeanne English words.
Mongrel cur.
Then he disappear.”

Sweet potatoes heavy in my fingers. Rough skin and dirty eyes.
Mongrel cur.
Who had said those words? Not mule. Not mulatto. All these years, I had never seen her. She looked like me.

“Who will bury her?” I asked Charité.

“Say her girl send the body back to New Orleans. Say a mama there and five sisters.”

“All this time?”

Charité nodded, lowering her voice. “She the oldest, send to work Opelousas. Just her job.”

All day I thought of her. How old was she? She owned one girl, sometimes two or three. Where would they go?

I cleaned the coffee tray. When the men left the office for the courthouse, Jean-Paul said, “Msieu Césaire has white goose
wings growing from his cheeks, but the hair in his nostrils is still black. How is that possible? You told me our skulls are full of cartilage.”

“Hush,” I told him.

“He hates us,” he whispered.

“Hush!” I said.

Msieu Césaire hated Mr. Greene.

He and Madame Richard and others tormented Mr. Greene in offices and dining rooms and courthouse halls. Msieu Césaire, the tiny man who had lifted my skirt with his cane, stared at Jean-Paul with baleful eyes. He cocked his head at Msieu Antoine to ask, “You buy that one or make him?”

His whiskers were like goose quills.

“I do not see you at Mass,” he said to Mr. Greene while I left coffee the next morning.

“I worship elsewhere.”

“You are a Jew.”

“It is difficult to worship in Opelousas.”

“In the original Code Noir, in 1724, the first article decreed that all Jews must leave the colony or become Catholic.”

“I have read the article. It was written nearly one hundred years ago.”

“This is a Catholic parish.”

“This is an American state.”

“The Code Noir was the law.”

“The Black Code. But I am not black.”

“You are a Jew. I don't do business with Jews, and my friends don't do business with Jews.”

Msieu Antoine could not make Mr. Greene stay. “The fever, the people, the swamps, the intolerable heat. The utter intolerance and lack of ideas. It is preferable to you that these Creoles think you have fathered a slave than to believe I worship differently.”

“There are others to do business with us.”

“No. No. I cannot live this way. Never.”

———

But we had to live this way.

“You and your son could accompany us to Paris.”

I sat at the table for only the second time in my life. Accompany to Paris. Back when I was sixteen and thought I would swim home. Now this was my home. This brick building would never burn. My papers were in a metal box.

“I have no trade in Paris. We will run the boardinghouse for you and put the money in the bank. You will return in a year? You will decide then what to do?” My eyes were level with Julien Antoine's. His eyes were surrounded by a burst of lines, like etchings on a fine table.

“Yes, although it is doubtful given Jonah's feelings that we would return for long.”

“Then we will make a pact. When Jean-Paul is fourteen, we will send him to school in Paris. Like the son of Madame Les-celles. Paris is better for sons who look like mine.”

He was sleeping now in the shed. I crossed the dark yard, holding the poker. Joseph often slept outside, against the back wall of the shed, near the woodpile. But perhaps someone was with him—a trapper or a drunk. Tonight, no one was there.

Jean-Paul's mouth was open. He lay on the rope bed. A crate for a desk. A square of hemmed brocade over the tiny window. I sat in the chair until he awakened.

I never began with a word for a lesson, as my mother had. He began everything. He liked words but wasn't interested in writing. When he was a baby, I spent all my time imagining my absence, but now that he was half grown, I imagined nothing. There was only each day, the food and money and dirt there had always been.

He said when he was twenty-one, he would own a store. Tailoring and fabric and notions. He liked that word. “And I will marry Francine. She will sit behind the counter, like Madame Lescelles. With a tignon of purple. She loves purple. Like the wild iris in the ciprière.”

The following week, after Julien Antoine drew up papers naming me the manageress of the property, I asked him about Jean-Paul. “He is indentured to you.”

He was sorting outdated papers for burning. Upstairs, Mr. Greene was moving trunks. “I have given that some thought,” he answered. “You don't know me at all by now? You think that I would be so careless?” He showed his palms to the ceiling. “The indenture will be nullified, Moinette. He is twelve years old now, oui? He needs a trade.”

The circles of candlelight wavered on the windows against the blackness outside. “What kind of trade does a boy take when he loves cloth? Boats? Not coopering or carpentry or bricklaying?”

Jean-Paul was taller than me, but just as slight. His fingers were narrow and long and moved the needle in and out of fabric as quickly as a bird dipping its beak into water. His hair was a shelf on his head, combed from a side part, with only four wide waves toward his left ear.

The boarders looked at him with a mix of curiosity, when he took their boots in the evenings, and confusion when they happened to see him holding a bolt of brocade. He sewed in our bedroom, with the door propped open and his long table set up between the beds.

How did he know how to pleat the drapes perfectly to fit the brass rings? He stacked the rings and played with the colors of the cloth. He made boats from cypress brought by Joseph, hollowed out and carved and fitted with elaborate sails and riggings, which he sold to Madame Lescelles for her store.

The curtains and drapes she sold to wives who thought the décor had arrived from Paris. Green silk folds with appliqués of bronze leaves, slanted as if falling.

“Moinette,” Msieu Antoine said, distracted by a box of contracts. “Men were unhappy with Jonah Greene and with me, for not marrying one of their daughters, for not drinking with them, for not being who we should have been. And you understand me fully.”

I nodded.

“You should apprentice your son to François Vidrine, the upholsterer. He lives near Grand Coteau. I will have a message sent to him before we leave.”

———

The second man to buy my son's body only glanced at his hands and nodded. He was French, old enough to have dark gray moustaches and an old-fashioned queue at the back of his head, the hair like a small tail.

The papers in the courthouse read: “Jean-Paul Antoine, age 11, quadroon slave of Moinette Antoine, is hereby indentured to François Vidrine, Grand Coteau, for the term of nine years, for the sum of $900, to be payable in equal installments each year.”

A different book. So many pages. Slaves and horses and hogsheads of sugar. He was owned by me because I couldn't free him yet. Nine years. If Msieu Antoine came back in one year or two, and thought he should take Jean-Paul to Paris, he said it would be easy to cancel the indenture.

“I am going with Msieu Vidrine. The cousin of the doctor,” Jean-Paul said. He sat near the trunk I had bought for him.

“You are to work for him. You are not sold.”

“I am not free.” He smiled.

“You are only called a slave because of the law. Words on paper, Jean-Paul. Do you understand? You belong to me.”

“David is a slave. You bought him.”

“Jean-Paul.”

“When I am free, and I have money, I will buy Francine. I will marry her, and David will buy someone to marry, too.”

He was still a child.

“When you are finished learning the trade, I will have bought this house from Msieu Antoine. He might not return here to live.”

“My father.” His soldier-coat eyes were fixed on mine.

“The house will be mine.” I pulled my shawl tight around me.

He would be a free man of color, when he was twenty-one. He would have the bottom floor of this house for himself. His own window. His name painted. Chairs and sofas. Curtains. No one could object to curtains made by a free man.