Status Updates From A Million Nightingales

"I couldn'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 father into the pools below my eyes, and the quill could come away stripped bitter like a white needle."

"The other man, the factor, tied a small rope around my raw wrist. I pulled my shoulders in, like a cape. The men were everywhere - - their eyes went to my face, my dressfront."

"I cried until my dress was wet as if we'd washed it. "

"I listened while lost to everyone's sight in the long hallway where the floor gleamed like a molasses river and the portraits on the wall stared at one another and not down at me."

"I entered the house like a fly, when I was eight, ten and twelve. I landed to each room long enough to deliver clothes, to clean shoes with blackening, to touch a few tables and the closets with my fingers while I put away linens."

Now that I had turned fourteen, I had to stay in our room or in the clearing. "We too far south from New Orleans, and Lafitte men come up the river from the bayou. Look for someone to sell. They see you, they take you fast."

My mother said, "You stay here where I see you all the time."

[Tretite] had belonged to Madame Bordelon since she was twenty, she told me, and was never allowed to marry. "She don't want me distract by no man or no baby. Then I couldn't cook so perfect. (...) I had the man once when I was sixteen, and too much trouble. My house is my house. My fire is my fire."

"Aren't you tired? Why sleep in the chair? Not the bed?"

"Because then I would be comfortable,. Lying down on the bed is like flying. I couldn't get up if I felt like that all night."

I looked at the wool blanket over the empty place that was mine. "Comprends?" she whispered, staring at me. "It is frightening to be so rested."

I nodded, but I didn't understand.

"She prayed in French, and African words crept in. Words I knew she had learned from her mother, but words she never said to me. She prayed to all the gods, of water and earth, and to God above, mon Dieu, that I would be healthy in the morning, alive all day, protected until the next night, when she could ask again. "

I couldn't run. Every tree was bare, every bayou low and dank. Every morning for weeks, the sun came through the shutter cracks like silvery ice. I couldn't measure the distance--two days on the river north from Azure to New Orleans, two days from there to Lafitte's place, and four days north on the Atchafalaya and bayous to Rosière.

How many days by foot?

"You don't sleep! You don't go outside! The Auzenne girls ride every day and make bouquets for the parlor. They have the flush of health. You are always reading and making yourself nervous."

Céphaline said evenly, "You are nervous. I am reading."

These were Grandmère Bordelon's husband's books, from France. I touched the spines.

I had slept away from her only once. I curled on my side and saw everything in the cleaning. My mother's skirt, near my face when I was small, a bleach spot like a cloud in a black sky. Shiny pink scar on her forearm from a burn. Cast-iron pots, with craters like healed skin. Clothespins lined up to dance in the sand. Washboard silver but veins of rust like washboard blood.

In late summer, I collected the moss with the same long poles we used to knock down the pecans in fall. I waved the pole around in the gray tangles and pulled them down from the oaks on the land beside the house, not far from the clearing where we washed and sewed.

10 books done as of this year 2/3/2022. Decided to grab a book outside the authors that I’ve been reading. Appropriate book for Black History month.