Ebba Simone’s Reviews > A Million Nightingales > Status Update

"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."

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. "