Motherless child

IN her fifth novel, “A Million Nightingales,” Susan Straight tills a particularly dark and shameful patch of American history by focusing on one human being. Set in early 19th century Louisiana, the book tells the story of a slave girl named Moinette, who, at 14, is sold by her first owner and cruelly wrenched from her mother, whom she may never see again. Her new owner hasn’t even allowed her to say goodbye. Moinette lies in the cargo hold of a boat, simultaneously missing her mother and empathizing with the pain the older woman must be suffering: “I pushed my face into the sleeves of my dress to smell my own hair, and my mother’s soap. Back at Azure, my mother’s tears dripped onto herself. Not onto me.”

The idea of children being separated from their mothers is heart-rending, and it’s a theme Straight has explored before, most notably in her 2001 National Book Award finalist “Highwire Moon.” In that novel, an illegal migrant worker living in California is picked up and sent back to Mexico -- she’s unable to convey to officers that her 3-year-old daughter is waiting for her in her car. Twelve years after this cruel separation, that daughter, now pregnant herself, sets out to find the mother she barely remembers, even as her mother searches for her too.

“A Million Nightingales” is a far more ambitious book, although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better one. Straight has always had a sense of the way the past threads forward to the present: The 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Okla., an event that doesn’t have the weight it should in American history, figured prominently in her 1996 novel “The Gettin Place.” But “A Million Nightingales” goes even further, wearing its painstaking research on every page. Reading it, we learn about old folk recipes for cloth-whitening compounds and boot blacking; we also get a sense of the intricacies of the Code Noir, a set of rules instituted in 1724 to regulate slave ownership in the then-French colony of Louisiana. In fact, like “Highwire Moon,” “A Million Nightingales” includes a glossary of terms, so if you have no idea what a tignon might be (it’s a head scarf worn by women of color, free or slave, mandated by a 1786 law), you’ll know where to look.

The only trouble with thorough research is that, although it proves a level of commitment on the part of the writer, it doesn’t necessarily give a book more emotional depth -- or enhance the power of a writer’s prose. “A Million Nightingales” is a highly detailed novel, the kind of work that reminds you, page by page, of how much sweat and toil the author has put into it; you may almost feel guilt-tripped into liking it. The subject matter alone is a lightning rod for any reader’s compassion: This is a slave girl, a young woman born into a life of cruelty and injustice. She’s taken from her mother just when she needs her most. She’s raped before she has any real understanding of sex. You’d have to be a monster to feel nothing for her.

The further you get into “A Million Nightingales,” however, the more you realize that slavery isn’t the only prison here. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Moinette has learned to read and write. But if this adds nuance to her character, sometimes Straight (who tells the story in Moinette’s words) constricts her heroine within webs of phrasing so self-conscious that we can forget we’re in 19th century Louisiana and believe, instead, that we’re sitting in on a writer’s workshop. One character’s “wrist bones moved like peach pits under the skin.” Another’s “breath rasped like the nutmeg on a grater.” A circumcised penis is referred to as a “bare purple bulb.” At one point, after Moinette has fled through the woods -- her mistress has just died, and she fears she’ll be sold, or worse -- she declares: “My voice broke, my throat coated with ice and musk.”

The sentences in “A Million Nightingales” have been polished to a highly impressive gloss, the sort of gleam that often wins literary prizes, or at least acclaim. But while all good writers polish, the light thrown off by their language is supposed to illuminate, not glare. There are places in “A Million Nightingales” where we wonder what Moinette really sounds like. In an attempt to draw power from the simplicity of Moinette’s voice, Straight often makes that voice feel like a conceit. When it comes to sex, for instance, Moinette knows, as her mother has told her, that there are “four lips ... [t]wo on your mouth, two under your dress.” Elsewhere she reflects, “All the sugar was loaded for New Orleans, where everything was sold.” And then she adds, “Under my dress was worth money.” Yet if Straight is trying to map the contours of Moinette’s innocence, she just makes her sound coy.

That’s unfortunate, because Straight clearly loves Moinette: This isn’t a case of a writer being so engaged by the sound of her own voice that her characters are left in the dust. If anything, Straight has worked hard -- perhaps too hard -- to do Moinette justice.

And the story she’s cooked up for her heroine isn’t a dull one. Moinette suffers plenty of mistreatment, but her triumph is that, by sheer force of will, she keeps her dignity intact. “A Million Nightingales” recounts Moinette’s life from adolescence to old age (or what constituted old age in the 19th century) and doesn’t lack for clever, engaging twists. One of Moinette’s owners, Madame Pelagie, a fashionable Frenchwoman transplanted, unhappily, to Louisiana, harbors a secret past that comes to light with the shots of a pistol. And when Moinette is bought by a lawyer named Msieu Antoine, she has no idea what’s in store for her. His designs on her seem devious at first but ultimately are revealed to be something else entirely.

“A Million Nightingales” strives to be a serious work; Straight is interested in drama, not melodrama. This is a story about triumph over adversity, but it’s also one that understands the distinction between magnanimous kindness and its far less showy cousin, basic human decency. Once you get past the anxious writerliness of Straight’s prose, there’s something refreshingly down-to-earth about her approach to her material: She mistrusts authority figures, and she doesn’t hesitate to question the goals and motives of the established order. She vests Moinette with the same kind of dangerous courage, even as she knows that fictional characters sometimes have more at stake than real human beings do. But though it’s heresy to say so in literary circles, there’s honor in honest historical melodrama, in books like “Gone With the Wind” and Kathleen Winsor’s “Forever Amber.” “A Million Nightingales” might be a more effective, more vital novel if it weren’t striving so hard for respectability.

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From A Million Nightingales

A crime against God, to run, to die. Where was she, my mother? She believed in her own gods.

I saw her face, her lips folded upon themselves, her brows glistening with sweat like tiny jewels where the moisture caught in the small hairs. I laid the green bones of seed cane in the rows, all day. A thousand thighbones. I pushed the earth over them with the hoe and followed the cart back to the matelas for more cane. The square pile of seed cane was like a raft, floating in the first field, where the men had piled it during the harvest last year.

The cane in my hands was so hard, like a femur, that I couldn’t imagine how it would grow. But each joint was already swollen, where the new stalk would sprout. Grass. Sugar. Blood. Bones. I was dizzy when I bent and moved down the row.