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Written by 
- Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon
- On Sale: March 21, 2006
- Price: $24.95
- ISBN: 978-0-375-42364-2 (0-375-42364-8)
about this book
"I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom" —from a folk song adaptation of a poem by Mahmud Darwish
Born on a sugar cane plantation south of New Orleans in the early 1800's, Moinette is the daughter of an African mother and a white father she never knew. Her mother cares for the plantation linens; Moinette is a servant to the master's daughter, Cephaline, doing her hair and applying beauty treatments to her skin. Cephaline must make a good marriage, which doesn't begin to interest her as much as her lessons and books; and in snatches, at her side, Moinette silently begins to satisfy her curiosity about the world.
Along with the alphabet and anatomy, Moinette learns that she is property, and that her sang melee—mixed blood—identity alone is a salacious promise to men. When Cephaline dies, Moinette is sold to another owner; she is 14, with nothing but coffee beans and a few clothespins in her pocket. She longs to return to her mother, but few slaves who run ever escape without being recaptured, and when they return they are branded or killed. Still, she starts collecting the corn kernels that will sustain her as she begins a terrifying, magnificently realized journey.
Joyce Carol Oates has called Susan Straight "a writer of exceptional gifts and grace." In A Million Nightingales, her voice becomes Moinette's: bright, rhythmic, observant—and altogether captivating. She tells of the black bayou waters rising in the rain, the gray moss that hangs from trees and fills mattresses, and the knocking cut and whisper slash of the sugar cane harvest. She also observes the cultures that jostle and compete around her—French, English and American, as well as Native American, Congolese, and Bambara. They emerge in an astonishing gallery of memorable characters, including slaves and shopkeepers, ladies and lawyers, carpenters and slave catchers. Their voices mingle in a resonant evocation of an early American world where so many of the troubling paradoxes at the heart of our society were born.
It is a world of brutality, sexual violence, and loss—yet one where the bonds of love and the rewards of freedom can mean all the more. Through Moinette's journey from slavery to ownership of a boarding house in the city of Opelousas and a gathered family of her own, Susan Straight has written an uncommonly rich and suspenseful novel. And in its fresh consideration of the past, A Million Nightingales also shines bright light on the present.
"A Million Nightingales joins a growing literature on the mixed-race experience in America, from Danzy Senna's picaresque Caucasia to Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Straight has given this body of work a historical foundation, a point of reference in the past. But her novel is, besides, a powerful and moving story, written in language so beuatiful you can almost believe the words themselves are capable of salving history's wounds." —Megan Marshall, The New York Times Book Review
"Radiant….unforgettable, a classic haunting story of love, tragedy and perseverance.” —Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald
"Audacious...The reader need not be anxious, as I was briefly, that this is another inspiring tale of a fearless woman's triumph over evil. The great strength of A Million Nightingales is Straight's unsentimental apprehension of the no-win system that was slavery, and the subtle ways it was designed--intelligently designed--to pervert every natural feeling, every impulse of generosity, of community, of familial loyalty." —Valerie Martin, The Chicago Tribune
"An extraordinary achievement, fascinating, horrifying, disturbing, a tribute to the power of the human spirit. It lingers in the mind, unfading, haunting."—Shirley Ann Grau, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Keepers of the House
“In all of her resonant and uniquely American fictions, Susan Straight has given voice to characters whose struggles for dignity and love have been fought on the twentieth-century battleground of race; with A Million Nightingales, the story of a girl born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, she digs even deeper into our common ground. It is love and humanity, not race, that ultimately gives such wrenching power to A Million Nightingales–a beautiful, redemptive novel.” —Kate Moses, author of Wintering
“A Million Nightingales is an amazing novel. Even as Susan Straight has sounded her trademark theme of filial love, even as she's given us another heartbreaking plot of separation and resolute struggle for reunion, she has taken us back to one of the most fascinating, contradictory and complicated settings in the American past. No cultural historian has more accurately revealed the laws, customs, beliefs and language of Ante-bellum Louisiana. No other novelist has used the cultural realities to motivate characters that seem more real, a story that is more affecting. While the story of Moinette could have only happened in that place and time, Straight has not only made it feel real there and then, but made it connect with here and now.”
—David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident
“From the first beautiful sentence of A Million Nightingales, I felt transported to world as vivid as the one outside my window. Susan Straight tells the story of slavery in 19th Century America in the powerful voice of a young slave girl, Moinette, a keenly intelligent observer and indefatigable human being. Moinette is one of those rare characters who enlarges both our sense of history and our humanity. This is an unflinching and beautiful novel, Straight's strongest work to date.” —Judith Freeman, author of Red Water
"Poetic but fierce, A Million Nighingales is Susan Straight's most ambitious—and successful—novel yet." —Vendela Vida, author of And Now You Can Go
