Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Together they were my family for five months.

The show told the story of a young woman’s escape from captivity — mine. I played the Settler’s Daughter, adopted by the Cajun Maidens after having been “captured by the Indians and raised in their wild ways.” It was said I could fire a bow and arrow or a rifle, track an animal through the woods, and while I’d lost my English living among the Indians, I could still sing one song, a song my mother taught me, which I came out and sang in a round at the end.

By appearance, I am often thought to be Bohemian or Italian, though sometimes French, English, or Scandinavian. As a girl, I was slender, small, but with a large head and features — large brown eyes, dark red hair nearly brown. Any kind of beauty I had seemed to me to be in my hair, and when I wore it bound close to my head in braids, it was like a secret.

The Settler’s Daughter was a part invented by the show boss — he’d gone looking for one to replace the girl who’d left. I never knew her, and no one ever spoke of her. The story he invented he’d adapted for me because there was no other way to explain that this girl he’d found in New York could sing but not speak.

I was silent because I believed I was damned. I was sure I was a foul liar before God, a girl who’d tried to invent a miracle, and He’d taken my whole family except me to show me what He thought of me.

The one song I sang, I believed, was all that the Lord had left me. It was the song my mother had loved to hear, the one noise I thought He’d let me make and live. As for why I joined, it was because I could do this and, I swore, only this until I had been safely returned to my mother’s people, her family in Lucerne.

When I arrived in Paris, I thought I’d nearly made it there.

The girl I was when I arrived in Paris, she came believing herself cursed as well. If my voice really was cursed, I was sure it was that one, somehow still with me all these years.

She is coming for me out of the dark, the girl I once was. She hasn’t spoken in years past remembering. I can’t tell you her name and she won’t, either. Not for shame at my family’s modest origins — I became something they couldn’t imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become. They would not be proud of me.

I never belonged to them, though they tried.

To truly tell you my story, we start not with the Settler’s Daughter, then, but the one before her, the one who hid inside her, who walked down to the pier, where she found a tent full of horses and music that took her in.

§

My invented miracle began as a prank. It was only to punish my mother for punishing me.

I was the child of a Scottish father and a Swiss mother who’d met when they came to settle America for God, Methodist settlers, farming the new state of Minnesota. My father received his plot in 1862, given land in the Homestead Act, and we moved from Ohio, even as the Dakota War began that summer, and the Civil War burned the lands farther east.

It could have been my fate to have lived out the story I would later perform, but instead, we passed these conflicts strangely unharmed, so much so that my mother and father said we were blessed, and so I was allowed to grow up to be a girl approaching the age of my Confirmation and First Communion in the summer of 1866.

I was a tomboy, to the despair of my mother, whom I loved. While the singers I knew were studying in convent schools, I was chasing storms on our horses and drinking the rain. To prepare me, and to tame me, my mother tested me on my Bible subjects, the names of the apostles, the trials of Jesus, the story of creation, and when she was done, said, Well, I’m glad you at least know the name Jesus.

No other God before me, my mother quoted to me. Do you think when your time comes and you appear before the Lord, He’ll want you to sing? That He’ll forgive all the rest?

It was, in fact, what I was sure was true.

I loved to go to church with her, but it was only to sing the hymns. This little church was my first theater. When the time came to sing, I was the very picture of an eager Christian, standing first out of the whole congregation, hymnal open, waiting impatiently for the pastor’s wife to pick out the refrain on the church’s piano. But when the singing was over, I’d sit numb for the rest of the service until my mother pulled my sleeve to show we were leaving. As we left, the congregation would come to say to her what a voice I had and wasn’t she so proud of me. And I would glow beside her, beaming at her, waiting for her to be proud of me. She would sometimes reach out and tuck my hair behind my ears if it had come loose.

I loved my mother but I did not love God. For reasons unknown to me still, I’d never quite taken to the idea of God. At this age I could only imagine the words we said in church going off into the empty air. In the presence of my mother’s assertions about the Lord, I tried to assume the same gravity that everyone around me had, but whenever I said Lord my God, I never believed it and knew myself to be a liar.

I did it only because I loved her, but I was not sincere, and she could tell, and so it dismayed her, and she punished me as proud.

The next Sunday, after my failure at my Bible test, she met me at the door with a piece of black ribbon and velvet, and she tied them in place over my mouth.

You’ll wear this today and think of how, when you know what you should know as a proper Christian, you can sing in church again, she said, and pushed my hair back into place around the collar of my coat. Your voice is a gift from God, and it deserves to be treated with respect — as does the Lord.

As we climbed down from our buggy in the yard by the church, the other members stared, but my mother had told her friends of her plan, and they quickly murmured the story to those who didn’t know, so that no one asked me about it, not even the pastor when I shook his hand at the door. I noticed he threw occasional anxious glances my way, but my mother’s stern regard seemed to quiet him.

I’ve perhaps made a mistake in telling you it’s a gift, this voice of yours, my mother said to me, as she removed the ribbon gag at home and folded it into her sewing kit. But it’s a test as well. There’s no gift like yours without a test.

The weeks leading up to the ceremony drifted by with a terrible slowness. Each Sunday I made my way past the staring children and sat out the service; each week I sat at the table with the prayer book at home and recited the prayers to my mother as she cooked dinner, as if I were praying to her. As if she were the angry and vengeful God, her back to me while she tended to the fry pan.

Unlike God’s, her replies to my prayers were straightforward. Very good, she’d say. Again.

And then, mercifully, the long-awaited day came. I dressed in a new dress; I appeared in the church as I once had, my mouth uncovered. I stood before the pastor and repeated the prayers in a steady voice. And then he said, Body and blood of Christ, and he dipped the bread in the wine and put it on my tongue.

And then it was done.

I went back to my seat next to my family, as the pastor’s wife made her unsteady way through the introit. I turned to see my mother, her head bent low but her eyes on me, and my father smiling. But my brothers, they stared at me as if my troubles might come for them.

I took the hymnal, flipped it open, and began to sing. I hadn’t sung in so long, the noise of my voice startled me, but it was there, not only undiminished, but perhaps even changed into something more powerful than before. I wanted more than anything to use it, but instead I held it back, tightening my throat slightly. I made a deliberately thin, weak noise that blended quietly, like the noise of another girl.