'Million' shows slavery's reality

"A MILLION NIGHTINGALES," by Susan Straight, Pantheon, 340 pages, $24.95.

Using careful historical research as a background, Susan Straight has created a beautiful, masterful novel about the fictional Moinette, daughter of an African mother and a white father she didn't know.

Moinette's voice is the one the reader hears in "A Million Nightingales," as she grows up in early 19th century Louisiana, takes care of the needs of the master's daughter, listens in on her lessons — and then is abruptly sold at 14 and taken away from her mother.

It is devastating to this beautiful young girl who leads the incredibly oppressive life of a slave — not just because of her long hours of hard work, but also because of her almost continual bouts with sexual abuse at the hands of evil men. She determines early on that she must have freedom, and so she displays an extraordinary ability to survive in a world that abuses her because she is a slave and because she is a woman.

This may be the most insightful book yet written from the point of view of a woman in slavery. The powerful title comes from the character Jonah Greene, the partner of Moinette's master Antoine, who said, "I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom. My grandmother knew someone who sang that. So always someone is not free."

Through the author's study and skill, the reader is exposed to Code Noir (The Black Code) first issued in 1724 which mandated the behavior considered acceptable by blacks in a white society — which not only asserted the inferiority of blacks but banned Jews from Louisiana.

The reader discovers how distressed slaves were then separated from mothers or children — and how emotionally affected they were when they tried to buy their sons or daughters. Straight uses her ability with words both to describe the life of a slave and to render feelings and yearnings from the inside. She succeeds to a remarkable degree in depicting the realities of slave life — using the vernacular of the time.

In a novel, Straight has accomplished what few historians of slavery have been able to do — to show slavery close to the way it was, to give the reader unparalleled insight into the workings of the slave's mind. This book is so good it should be used in American history and literature courses as an aid in understanding the antebellum South.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com