{"product_id":"a-million-nightingales-isbn-9781400095599","title":"A Million Nightingales","description":"From National Book Award finalist Susan Straight comes a haunting historical novel about a Louisiana slave girl's perilous journey to freedom.Daughter of an African mother and a white father she never knew, Moinette is a house maid on a plantation south of New Orleans. At fourteen she is sold, separated from her mother without a chance to say goodbye. Bright, imaginative and well aware of everything she risks, Moinette at once begins to prepare for an opportunity to escape. Inspired by a true story, \u003ci\u003eA Million Nightingales\u003c\/i\u003e portrays Moinette’s experience–and the treacherous world she must navigate–with uncommon richness, intricacy, and drama.“Powerful and moving. . . . Written in language so beautiful you can almost believe the words themselves are capable of salving history's wounds.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Radiant. . . . Unforgettable, a classic haunting story of love, tragedy and perseverance.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Miami Herald\u003c\/i\u003e“Moving. . . . Lush passages drip like Spanish moss from Straight's proseÉ[she] writes with nuance and insinuating grace.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e“Intelligent and heartbreaking. . . . Celebrates the individual's power to create a personal freedom within the most rigid social order.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Portland Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSusan Straight's \u003c\/b\u003enovels include \u003ci\u003eI Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBlacker Than a Thousand Midnights\u003c\/i\u003e, T\u003ci\u003ehe Gettin Place \u003c\/i\u003eand H\u003ci\u003eighwire Moon\u003c\/i\u003e, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in \u003ci\u003eHarper's\u003c\/i\u003e, Salon.com, T\u003ci\u003ehe Los Angeles Times Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, T\u003ci\u003ehe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, and on NPR's \u003ci\u003eAll Things Considered\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as in women's magazines such as R\u003ci\u003eeal Simple \u003c\/i\u003eand F\u003ci\u003eamily Circle.\u003c\/i\u003e Her short stories have appeared in \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney's\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eZoetrope\u003c\/i\u003e, among other publications.  Among her honors and awards are the California Book Prize, a Lannan Foundation Award, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and a Best American Short Story Award. Straight was born in Riverside and lives there with her three daughters.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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I couldn’t take the moss from the two oaks in front of the house, where  the windows faced the river, because Madame Bordelon liked   to look at that moss. It was a decoration. She watched me from the window  of her bedroom. Everything on the front land at Azure was Madame’s, for  decoration. Everything in the backlands was Msieu Bordelon’s, for money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And me—she stared at me all the time now. She stared at my hair, though  she couldn’t see it. My hair was wrapped under the black tignon my mother  had made last year for me, when I turned thirteen. I hated the weight on  my skull. My hair was to be hidden, my mother said. That was the law.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The cloth at my forehead felt like a bandage. Like it was holding in my  brain. A brain floated in Doctor Tom’s jar, in the room where he always  stayed when he came to treat Grandmère Bordelon, for her fatness, and  where he stayed now to treat Céphaline, for her face. The brain was like a  huge, wrinkled, pale pecan. One that didn’t break in half. Swimming in  liquid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When I came for his laundry, he sat at the desk and the brain sat on the  shelf, with the other jars. He said, “You can hold it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The glass was heavy in my hands, and the brain shivered in the silvery  water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I bought that brain in 1808, yes, I did, and it’s been two years in the  jar after spending several years inside a skull. You seem unafraid to hold  it or examine it, Moinette,” he said in English. He was from London, and  his words made his thin lips rise and twist differently from Creoles.  “Your lack of fear would indicate that your own brain is working well.”  Then he returned to his papers, and I took his dirty clothes away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How could brains be different? I measured heads the same way Mamère had  taught me to measure a handful of fat to throw in the pot for soap,  cupping my palm; the heavy handful had to reach the second bend on my  fingers. The other side of knuckles—the little pad of skin like oval seed  pearls when a person held out a hand to get something. I stared at my  palms so long, clenching and straightening them, that Mamère frowned and  told me to stir the soap.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At the edge of the canefield when the cutters were resting, I hid myself  in the tall stalks and fit my bent fingers over their heads. The grown  people’s heads wore hats and tignons, but the skulls were nearly all the  same size under my curved hand. It was not exact, though. I made a loop of  wire from a scrap and measured Michel’s head when he was in the cane. He  was a grown man, same as Msieu Bordelon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The cutters held very still when they rested. Their backs were against the  wagon wheels and the trees.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When I took clean laundry to the house, I stood near the dining room and  quickly measured those heads at the table. The same loop for Msieu’s head,  the only time he didn’t wear his hat, while he was eating.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All our heads were the same size according to our age and sex: mine and  Céphaline’s, Mamère and Madame’s, the men cutting cane and Msieu  Bordelon’s. Under their hair, all their skulls were the same, and so the  pecan brains floating inside that bone would be the same size unless the  head was wrong, like Eveline’s baby who died. The baby’s head was swollen  like a gourd grows in summer when it’s watered too much and then splits.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By September, I pulled down the last moss from the side-land oaks. They  were the most beautiful to me. Their branches lay along the earth so that  I could walk on the bark. The bark was almost black, damp under my bare  feet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I could hear the field people working in the cane near here, when someone  shouted or laughed, the hoes hitting a rock now and then. They were  weeding the rows. The cane was so tall, everyone was invisible. I piled  the moss on the little wagon we used to take laundry back and forth from  our clearing to the house. I pushed down the springy gray coils with my  palms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the bell rang for lunch, I pulled down one more dangling clump, and  then Christophe was behind me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Boil it and kill it and then it look like your hair. Then I sleep on it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He hated me now. He had always pulled my hair when we were small, but now  that he was sixteen, he hated me. His hair was damp and separated into  black pearls on his head, from the heat. His faded black shirt was white  with salt around the neck. We wouldn’t get new clothes until Christmas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He held up his torn sleeve. “I got a girl on Petit Clair. She sew it. You  useful for nothing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I shrugged. “We can’t sew for you. Only Bordelons.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He imitated me, shrugged much more dramatically. “Cadeau-fille,” he said.  Gift girl. He always called me that, adding, “Yellow girl only good for  one thing, for what under your dress. All you are. Don’t work. Don’t mean  nothing till he give you away.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Your head looks small,” I said, moving back so I could hook my fingers  into a circle, like the wire, and measure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But he moved forward and pushed my hand down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Somebody come for you soon. Just like your mother.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Close your mouth.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother had been a gift for one week, a nighttime present for a visiting  sugar broker from New Orleans. I was what she received. But Cadeau-fille  was not my name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I pulled the wagon down the path from the side yard toward the clearing  near my mother’s house. The moss had to be boiled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christophe followed me. He spoke low and constant, like a swarm of bees  hovering near my shoulder. He said he was a horse, at least pure in blood  and a useful animal. He said I was a mule, half-breed, and even a mule  worked hard. He said I was nothing more than a foolish peacock that les  blancs liked to keep in the yard to show people something pretty. Then he  said, “And the men, you are only there so they can think under your . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At the clearing, fire burned low under the pots, but my mother was not  there. I threw a bar of soap at him. I didn’t want to hear it again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He picked up the soap and threw it from the clearing. “Go in the cane and  get it. Then cadeau-mère can’t see you. You have to lift up your dress  when Msieu pick someone for you. Lift it up now. Hurry.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the heat and my anger, my eyes felt underwater. He’d told some of the  men I went in the cane with him. Just to let him look. The women had told  Mamère.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We’re all animals,” I said. “Hair and skin are like fur.” I had nothing  else to throw at him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He shoved me against the pecan tree where we hung our washline, and then  ran into the cane. The stalks shifted and then stayed still.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I found the soap. The bar was soft and wet from Mamère’s using it all  morning. I worked off the dust with my fingers, underwater.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother and I made the soap for Azure, and each bar was measuring and  stirring, to me. Christophe was a man, so he didn’t think about his  clothes being clean or the soap washing the cane juice from his hands. He  didn’t think anything except cane was work, and he hated my face and  especially my hair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My hair fell to my waist, in the same tendrils as the moss from the  branches, but black. But now no one ever saw it except my mother. On  Sunday nights, she washed it with soap made from almond oil and boiled  gourd, rinsed it in the washtub, and formed the curls around her fingers.  We sat near the fire. When my hair was dry, she braided it so tightly my  temples stung and covered it with the tignon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hair only protected my scalp. The thin cover protecting my skull. And my  brain. My hair was only a covering. Céphaline Bordelon’s hair, too, like  every other human.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But hers was thin and brown, her braid only a mousetail down her back. Her  eyes were bright and blue, and I knew inside her brain was perfect,  because she learned everything each of her tutors taught her and even  questioned the lessons. But her pale skin was speckled with crimson  boutons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Madame had to marry Céphaline to someone with money, and for weeks, she  had cried until her own blue eyes were rimmed as with blood. None of the  men who visited could see Céphaline’s brain. Only her face, and her hair,  and her mouth never closed or curved in a smile. Her mouth always talking,  arguing, reading to people from her books.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The moss was soft in my hands, in the basket. I liked to look at each  strand and feel the covering, like the velvet of Céphaline’s brown dress.  My mother would be angry if she saw me studying the moss. She wanted me to  boil it and lay it out to dry. It was not a lesson. It was stuffing. Every  fall, we made new bedding—this year, seventy-two pallets for slaves and  five mattresses for the Bordelons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      We lived between. Le quartier was one long street, houses lining the dirt  road to the canefields and sugarhouse, but a grove of pecan trees  separated the street from the Bordelons’ house. Tretite, the cook, lived   in the kitchen behind the house, and Nonc Pierre, the groom, lived in the  barn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But my mother’s house was in a clearing near three pecan trees at the edge  of the canefields. A path led from the main road to our yard. Madame  Bordelon could see us from her second-floor gallery, could see what color  clothes we hung, or whether we had washed the table linens, but she  couldn’t hear what we said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Under the trees, my mother spoke to me every day, but only when she had  something to teach me and only when we were alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      When I was young, I asked her the same thing many times, until I  understood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Mamère.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oui.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Who do I belong to?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Me.” She never hesitated. “You are mine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No one else?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not Msieu?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not God?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then she would pause. I watched her pour another dipper of water onto the  wood ashes held in a wooden trough over the big pot. The gray sludge  dripped into the boiling water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No,” she said then, stirring the lyewater. I knew to stay away. One  flying drop could burn the skin. Brown to pink. Pink and shiny-raised as  mother-of-pearl buttons on my mother’s forearm. Like she had sewn them to  her own skin, as if she had finished mending the Bordelons’ clothes and  then decided to decorate herself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No!” My mother’s voice rushed from her throat, harsh like she was chewing  coffee beans. “Here on earth, you belong to me. If you died, then you  would belong to God. Là-bas.” She lifted her chin to the sky above the  pecan trees. “Eh bien, I would die, too, because I would need to be—gone  with you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Gone?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “There. Not here. Là-bas—with you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I wouldn’t look up. I didn’t want to see that sky, là-bas. I looked down,  at the fire under the pitted black iron of the washpot, until   I could speak. “God would kill you, too? Because you let me die?” I  whispered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No!” My mother’s eyes were fierce and slitted under the tignon covering  her hair and forehead. The cloth had slipped up, so a stripe of gleaming  undusted skin showed above her brows. “God will not kill you, or me. No.  My only work here is to keep you alive.” She spat into the boiling water  and stirred; her arm disappeared in the steam so that I was frightened for  a moment. “This is not my work. This is how I pass the time while I keep  you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When I was small, and she said that, I would fling out my arms and spin  under the fine muslin cloth hanging to dry in the low branches of the  sweet olive. She had patched the torn mosquito netting from Madame’s bed,  sewing in newer, whiter muslin, and my mother’s work floated like tiny  clouds above me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother’s throat would calm again, and she poured more water over the  ashes, her face a mask under the sweat and dust. She took a turkey feather  from her apron pocket and dipped it into the bubbling lyewater. After a  few seconds, she pulled out the quill, like a stripped white bone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I watched the blue flame under the pot. “What is my work?” I used to ask,  before I understood that my work would be every moment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You wash and sew and be cautious. You do what I say, exactement.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “But I am a mule. I will carry things, no?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She turned with the feather like a toy sword. “What? A mule!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Christophe says I am a mule. And he is a horse. He is better.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “He is orphée. He is angry that you have a mother.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christophe was cutting cane already, living with three other men. I didn’t  understand the mule yet. I touched the clouds in the muslin and said idly,  “How would you get there? Là-bas? With God? With me?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother stepped away from the pot and wiped the gloss from her forehead.  “The way I do everything else,” she said, angry, and I took my hands from  the cloth and backed away. She spat lye steam from her mouth, fixed her  eyes on me, and didn’t smile. “Myself. I would do it myself.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      I believed her. I was all she cared about, except for the coffee she loved  so much she hoarded the beans inside a special tin in our room. She  counted the beans during the night, before she came to sleep, when she  thought my eyes were closed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But before she held them under her nose with her palm flat, her nostrils  almost touching the dark beans, she prayed, and I listened. She lit two  small candles, ones she kept hidden because we weren’t supposed to have  them. She made them for herself when we dipped all the others for the  Bordelons. She poured a sip of the day’s coffee into a tiny blue dish on  the washstand and laid one bean on a piece of cloth so blue   it was almost black. She put one gold piastre on the cloth, too, and a  circle of my hair braided like a bracelet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She glanced at me, and my eyes were closed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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 would ask again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When she was finished, she blew out the candles and laid them on their  sides next to our wooden plates, and they looked cold and small. Then she  put them with the cloth scrap, the bracelet of hair, and the piastre in a  pouch inside the kitchen safe, where we kept our spoons and cups. If  anyone ever came looking, they wouldn’t think that collection of things  was special to anyone. They might take the piastre, but they wouldn’t know  the rest was her church.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      She slept in her chair for much of the night. I would wake to see her  slumped against the rush backing, her right cheek propped on her bent  hand. The night was far gone, the fire lessened to ruby chunks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Toward morning, she would be beside me in the bed, her breathing rough  like the file rasp the men used to sharpen their cane knives. She woke me  before dawn, when she stirred the fire. She roasted her coffee beans in  the black pan and then ground them in the metal grinder she clamped to the  table’s edge. She poured boiling water on the coffee, in the dented pot,  which was one of the first things I ever remembered seeing as a baby. Then  she reached into her basket of rags for the tin cigar box. From inside,  nested in brown paper, she took out the hard cone of white sugar, which  glittered in the firelight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Green cane crushed and boiled and brown molasses drained out   and then the sugar bleached white and formed into a cone hard as a cowhorn  by some magic in some faraway place. Slaves had molasses, measured out in  pails during the week. Tretite, the cook, had stolen the sugar for my  mother weeks ago, in exchange for a white wedding dress. Only the  Bordelons had sugar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother cut two large pinches with the ancient sugar scissors. She  stirred the hardness into her coffee and opened the wooden shutters. She  stared out the window at the pink or gray of day, and her throat worked as  she swallowed the black.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The smell rose like bitter strong dirt. I didn’t understand how she could  drink that liquid, how she could chew the beans during the day. And once  when I said that, she told me her own mother used to chew something that  made her teeth orange. A nut or seed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “In Africa.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Did the nut taste good?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She shrugged. “Never taste it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You were in Africa?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I was little child on the boat. Only remember the boat.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “But how did she die? Your mother?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother lifted her chin at me, exactly as she did to Madame and everyone  else, and for a moment, she didn’t even see me before her. Her lips were  pressed together so tight they disappeared, and her face was like  something floating in Doctor Tom’s room, like the air was a silvery sharp  liquid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But then her eyes dropped back down to me, and without a sound of breath,  her bosom rose high and then fell.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “She die from the smell. Soldier blue. That indigo.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Today when she turned from the shutter, the sky was still dark. She put  her cup on the table and tightened her tignon. From the tin, she took out  my peacock plate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother had exchanged fine soap and cloth to a bayou trader for the  small plate. I was seven. She told me if I ate my biscuit or cornmush, a  whole world would appear underneath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A tree with dangling branches. A gate, and past it a river with a small  boat. And on the gate a peacock, his head crowned, his tail a dragged  flourish.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Faint voices rose all the way from the street. The work bell would ring  soon. She wrapped the cone of sugar in paper and closed the tin, against  ants and rats. Just then, someone tapped at the shutter, and my mother  whirled around with a look on her face as if she’d seen a snake.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nobody came unannounced to visit my mother. She went to see women in le  quartier, sometimes bringing favors for trade, but even Tretite the cook  always let my mother know beforehand that she was coming.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Marie-Thérèse,” an urgent voice whispered near the opened shutters.  “C’est moi.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Eveline. I propped myself on the bed. The sunrise was only a silver breath  over the trees. Two women stood at the door.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Eveline came inside, but the other woman, a stranger with scars high on  her cheeks, stayed in the doorway. “That monthly visitor come when I was  out in the field by Petit Clair,” Eveline said. “So far to walk my whole  dress gone.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother opened the bundle, and I smelled the blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Eveline sighed and looked over at me braiding my hair. “I know Moinette  get her monthly now, too. I know you have so much wash, Marie-Thérèse. I  bring you something from Michel for thanks.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She opened a cloth bag at her feet and showed the gleaming head of a duck,  its bill yellow green. Bone? Was a bill made of bone?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Her husband, Michel, trapped on the weekends and traded the rabbits and  birds. Eveline and Michel cut more cane than anyone else on Azure. Eveline  straightened again. She was round in the arms and face and stomach, from  all five children, she said, leaving behind their baby fat on her. But  Eveline’s neck was the most beautiful part of her, when she lifted her  head. Her throat was long and perfect as a vase with three etched lines of  decoration, three lines of paler brown skin from where she bent at the  cane all day and at her cooking all night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We come in so late. Say maybe a freeze coming. Can’t wash, and can’t  leave the dress in the house. That smell bring rats.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother winced. “I do it today,” she said. Then she lifted her chin  toward the doorway at the strange tall woman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Eveline said, “She new. Buy for the grinding. Want to see you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Eveline left, the new woman stepped inside and stopped politely. My  mother lifted her chin again, like she did to everyone. Her jaw and chin  were most of my mother’s language, how she slanted her face to indicate  anger or curiosity, how she raised that shelf of bone directly toward  someone to show she was listening.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The new woman’s face was narrow and dark, like Mamère’s, but her eyes were  surrounded by more lines. The two scars on each cheek were raised and  shiny as oval inserts of satin. She leaned against the wall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Just get here,” she said in English. “Me and my children.” She held up  four fingers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother nodded. “Speak little English, me. But she speak some.” She  moved her chin toward me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “M’appelle Hera,” the woman said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “ Marie-Thérèse.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hera’s eyes moved quickly from the bed to the chairs, from the washboards  hanging on the wall to the three mattress tickings we had finished sewing  last night, to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Someone leave you a bright hardship.” She studied the hair I hadn’t  finished braiding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mamère didn’t answer. She moved the mattresses toward the door. We had to  take them to the house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Him up there?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I bit my lips. Mamère hated this part, and so did I. When people saw us  for the first time, traders or new slaves or visitors to Azure, they tried  to establish who we were, where I had come from.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Non.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hera was quiet, having heard the anger in Mamère’s answer. She rubbed her  arms and glanced at my sewing. A sleeve of Céphaline’s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hera was staring at us. Seeing what we had. Measuring, the way humans  measure one another all the time, every minute. She wanted to see what we  looked like, what we owned, compare it to hers, think of how to get us to  give some, or take some, or trade something for her own room, on the other  side of Eveline’s. She had nothing, maybe. Or more than we did. No. Look  at her eyes. Like Madame Bordelon’s when she evaluated the carriages and  coats and china of other women.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then Hera looked at me again. “Your only?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother glanced up. “Take but one candle to light a room,”   she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hera nodded and rubbed her arms again. I could smell the blood from  Eveline’s clothes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mamère put down the washbasket with the black clothes and said, “Quoi  besoin?” She frowned at me. She wanted the English words.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What do you need?” I whispered, to both of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not me,” Hera said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What they need?” My mother meant Hera’s children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Say you sew.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother moved her chin up an inch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Say you trade.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She lifted her brows.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hera said, “My girl fifteen. She need a dress for the New Year. I hear he  only give black dress. She need pretty dress, to find someone and   set up.” She nodded toward me. “Mine ain’t bright, like that one.   How old?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Her tribal scars shone—she was from Africa, I knew. How old had she been  when someone cut her? Had her own mother done it? Cut open her daughter’s  skin?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Just turn fourteen,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not long,” Hera said. “Bright one like that, someone come for   her soon.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Long enough,” my mother said, her eyes slitting to nothing. She opened  the door. The sky was silver now, and Hera shouldn’t be walking outside  the quartier unless she walked in a line toward the canefields. “That bell  ring soon.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But Hera paused. “You think on a trade?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother inclined her head to the left, and I hoped Hera saw that meant  possibility.A Novel","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304365773029,"sku":"NP9781400095599","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400095599.jpg?v=1767720649","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-million-nightingales-isbn-9781400095599","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}