by John Keene
Carmel’s father, Frédéric-Kabinda, a quiet, meditative man, had been stolen across the Atlantic in his ninth year. He had lived his entire life since then at Valdoré, first working in the groves until Nicolas de L’Écart happened upon a makeshift safebox he had cobbled together from scrap mahogany, after which he was apprenticed to a polymathic Mandinkean artisan on the neighboring estate of the Comte de Barcolet. Frédéric-Kabinda, known by other names to the enslaved from his region, eventually learned to craft metal grills and finials, carve and fashion furniture from any type of wood, blow small glassware, and above all paint; eventually he was commissioned to repaint the entire exterior and interior of the nearby de Barcolet estate’s main dwellings. Over the period of a decade, he decorated the walls of the manor house’s dining and visiting rooms, upper parlor, ballroom, and sunroom with a series of murals of the Burgundy countryside that merited praise as far away as the capital, Cap François, and the Spanish administrative center at Santo Domingo.
So refined did visitors to Valdoré find Kabinda’s sense of composition and line that Nicolas de L’Écart eventually agreed to hire him out to the local gentry. In early 1801, while returning from working on a ceiling portrait of colonial nobles at a neighboring plantation, he was seized and pressed into service by one of Valdoré’s former residents, a mixed-raced commander affiliated with the French; to this man it was inconceivable that someone of such aesthetic gifts could ally himself with the black hordes. Because of his metalworking skills, Kabinda was set to crafting knives, small armor and shot. He was also forced to sketch maps, battle scenes and caricatures for his fellow soldiers’ amusement. His repeated attempts to escape to Valdoré were unsuccessful. During a counterattack against the rebels at Les Cayes, one of the Cuban attack dogs imported by the French turned on him, opening his throat, with the precision of a masterly brushstroke, in one bite.
Carmel’s mother, Jeanne, was also known as la Guinée (Ginèn). From early girlhood she had been in the personal staff of de L’Écart’s mother until the elder woman’s death from poisoning a decade before, after which she joined the estate’s general domestic staff. In her spare time she was said to practice divination, and later, as the systems of social control disintegrated, she increasingly served as a translator and courier for several groups of insurgents headquartered near the south coast. She had learned her divination skills from her mother, Gwan Ginèn, as she had from hers, and had performed it when necessary and without de L’Écart’s knowledge, as a secondary mode of manor religion and justice. Most of her fellow slaves therefore gave her a wide berth, though it was widely recognized that she seldom put her gifts to malevolent uses. Just days after her husband’s death, she too fell, in factional fighting near the Spanish border. Her final utterance, according to the account of a fellow rebel from Valdoré, was a curse on all who had even dreamt of betraying her.
When Olivier de L’Écart returned to Valdoré, Carmel was twelve years old. She stood just over five feet tall, and like her father, possessed milky brown eyes that always appeared to be half-shut, as if she were on the verge of falling asleep or weeping. A shy and reticent child, she wore the same raggedy calico shift over her gossamer frame every day, her waist like her head wrapped in faded crimson Indian cloth, her lone thin snakelike braid concealed beneath her turban’s sweaty folds. None of the bondspeople still present—nor her master Nicolas de L’Écart, for that matter—could recall having ever heard her utter a single word. Many whispered that her mother had either cut out her tongue or cast a spell on her so that she would not reveal what she had witnessed either in the womb or at any second in her presence thereafter.
Since her seventh birthday Carmel had assisted in the cultivation of the coffee plants and the vegetable gardens during the growing months, and then during the harvest and market period in picking, drying and sorting the beans for the mill. Each day when she had completed her chief tasks, she joined the crew that gathered what remained of the withered coffee fruit for use in salves and tonics after the baggers collected the beans; the de L’Écarts had acquired a royal patent to sell some of these concoctions, properly packaged, to the poor whites and the free mulattoes across the island. Like many of younger females, Carmel had intermittently been reassigned to the housekeeping and serving staffs during the period running from Advent to Pentecost so that her master could entertain visitors, especially from the neighboring islands and the home country, in the grand style.
By the turn of the new century, however, L’Ouverture had sunk those once halcyon days far into the sea’s black depths. The plantation again began bleeding workers, which soon left its fields fallow and the entire property susceptible to attack. Nicolas de L’Écart, who’d lived his entire life among Blacks and had little confidence that they could completely overthrow French rule, refused to emigrate. Instead, he pressed all his remaining able-bodied males into patrols, meanwhile dedicating the healthy adult females into what remained of coffee cultivation. Carmel and another female under 15, Albine, were assigned full-time domestic duty. They patched sheets, tablecloths and draperies, washed clothes and windows, walls and floors, husbanded tallows, candles, oils and spices, and kept strict count of the table services, silverware, china and crystal—there was little hope, except by shipping them to vaults in France itself, of securing jewels or precious metals, which vanished on a daily basis.
After even more slaves, including Albine, stole away or were killed by marauders, Nicolas de L’Écart, who was highly reputed for keeping his charges in line, sold off to American brokers a particularly troublesome quartet who’d hatched an assassination plot against him and neighboring planters. As a result, Carmel’s responsibilities expanded to include maintaining full casks of rainwater in the event the insurrectionists or vandals set fires to or near the manor house, and verifying the other remaining slaves’ reports on all departures and arrivals. She also had to feed the dwindling supply of chickens (their eggs were pilfered before she could reach the coops), and milk whatever cows and goats had not been carted off or carved up.
Up until this point de L’Écart had not really noted her presence, considering her no more extensively than one might remember an extra utensil in a large hand-me-down table service. He remembered having lashed her once—or thought he remembered he had—along with all of the other slaves under forty, upon finding ten gold pieces missing from his library safe, but the fact that she was female, along with her customary silence, ensured that she did not otherwise command his attention. After he survived his third attempted poisoning, however—and personally shot the chief conspirators, an elderly cook named Mé-Edaïse whom he had misbelieved to be too old to be caught up in the Negro frenzy, and her son, Prince (called by his fellow servants Bel-Aire, for the enchanting aura he left in his wake), his driver—he assigned the cooking responsibilities to Carmel and required her to taste his food before it touched his lips. Her skills were rudimentary at best, but at this point in the maelstrom of political and social disintegration, cuisine was the last thing on de L’Écart’s mind.
THE ROLE OF DUTY
Under the circumstances, are there any benefits to dedication, devotion, honor—responsibility? What, in this context, is the responsible action? Is it even possible to invoke a rhetoric of ethics? Only repetition produces tangible benefits, which include the stability of a routine (however precarious) and the forestalling of longer term considerations that might provoke the following emotions: fear, indecision, paralyzing despair. In the absence of
a stable context, the question of ethics intrudes. What kinds of responsibility? The maintenance of the established order, that is: labor. What is the non-material or spiritual component? In the private sphere: to the ancestors, their memory, to the elusive community of the self and its desires—constancy or consistency. What if these are in conflict?
During her rare moments of respite, when she was not identifying new hiding places in the event French troops or their black deputies or enemies commandeered the estate, or scavenging meals for herself from the waning crops and provisions, Carmel would spend her free moments drawing. She had access neither to blank paper nor ink, nor any of the other usual artistic implements. Instead, she would sketch elaborately detailed figures or images in the dusty banks of the Grand’Anse, etching them with sharp tipped branches or scraps of tin on tree boles, tracing chits of charcoal across swatches of old gazettes or in the end pages of the gilt-edged, uncut, and long unopened leatherbound books that lined the shelves of Nicolas de L’Écart’s library. Her imagery ranged from the plantation itself to the seascapes and hill-ringed plains around Jérémie, to imaginary realms she conjured from book illustrations, dreams, nightmares, and her rare night visitations with her late mother. She often drew detailed pictures of her parents, the other plantation slaves, and the hierarchy of angels and saints, for she had been baptized into the Roman Church, and her father had sculpted half a dozen wooden sacred reliefs that encircled the sanctuary of de L’Écart’s limestone chapel. She sometimes transposed these with figures, such as loas and spirits, from the folkloric accounts she had heard from her mother and other elders, often depicting them in colloquy in the images’ foregrounds. Although she had never been taught to read or write, she would add to the bottoms of her pictures verbal fragments, names and words she came across or invented.
After her master began to spend long periods of time away from Valdoré coordinating the efforts of the local militias with the French troops to patrol the western end of the peninsula on which Jérémie sat, she took mahogany charcoal sticks to the mouldering wallpaper and paled, cracked walls of the manor house’s numerous unvisited rooms. She was careful not to be caught drawing by any of the other remaining slaves, a risk that diminished as their numbers steadily fell. Often in the middle of her creative process she would remind herself that she needed to break away to make tributes and create protective or curative powders and oils, as she had seen her mother do, in case the plantation was attacked or her master discovered her handiwork, but she would then fall back into her reveries, ending only at the point of exhaustion.
When at Valdoré, Nicolas de L’Écart was too preoccupied to notice the slavegirl’s peculiar gifts. More urgent concerns beset him: in addition to holding onto his plantation, even in its advanced state of neglect, and serving as one of the leaders of the area’s civil defense, he was engaged in a pitched battle with what remained of the municipal bureaucracy to clear several incorrect tax judgments and collect monies that were owed to him. He could usually be found in the main salle, where he met with the ever-waning cadre of his fellow planters or Army representatives, or in his library, poring through his financial records, or in the cool cellar chapel his father had built, his favorite manservant and groom, a tall, slender, muscular homme de couleur man named Alexis, praying beside him, sometimes under the tuition of one of the few priests still circulating in the district, the young, intrepid Fr. Malesvaux. Frequently the trio slept together there, loaded muskets at de L’Écart’s and Alexis’s sides.
De L’Écart, in short, was holding out for the restoration of the prevailing order. As soon as the governor—General Rochambeau—or another French leader suppressed the hordes and reclaimed the colony—whether or not France and Britain signed a peace—de L’Écart aimed to acquire a slew of new, well-broken slaves to rebuild his patrimony. Both Leclerc and Napoleon had promised not only the rounding up and return of all fugitives, but the complete resumption of bondage. There is order, and there is the order. For more than three decades Nicolas de L’Écart had been one of the prominent grand blancs in the South District, administering the estate that his grandfather, Lézard L’Écart, an indefatigable naval mechanic in the employ of the French crown, had established at the end of the long reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King. While de L’Écart found it inconceivable that Napoleon’s forces would fall to unlettered gangs and maroons, in the event that the blacks did triumph, he had nevertheless drawn up plans to depart for Santiago de Cuba, where he had purchased a large plot of land for coffee cultivation. Were things to reach that nadir, he planned to take only Alexis and several of his able-bodied adult male slaves, and as many of his possessions as he could fit into several large carriages. He was determined not to leave the world under conditions substantially reduced from those in which he entered it.
One morning in mid-summer 1803, after the British bombardment had abated, Nicolas de L’Écart rode west with Alexis to attend the funeral and auction of his cousin, Ludovic Court-Bourgeois-L’Ecart, a fellow coffee planter, whose estate, Haut-les-Pins, perched high above the coastal town of Cap Dame-Marie. Court-Bourgeois-L’Écart had perished after a bout with the creeping fever, and the news of this turn of events, along with the murder of several neighboring planters—and in spite of the French Negro ally Dessalines’ campaign to return escaped slaves to their plantations, which was succeeding on estates near Mirogoâne and Jacmel—had finally convinced de L’Écart that he should depart for Cuba. As he and Alexis headed east, cannonade shredded the hills in the far distance.
The night before, de L’Écart had abruptly ordered Carmel to prepare his emergency trunks. As per his orders, she filled them with freshly scrubbed and sun-bleached ticking; sheets and pillowcases; towels; several cotton nightshirts; a month’s change of gentleman’s wear, including scarves, cravats, city shoes with brass buckles, as the gold and silver ones had already been stolen; an oilcloth cape; an overcoat of boiled wool; two horsehair wigs with sanitary powder; several boxes of French lavender soap; a writing set (without embossed stationery); a cube of wax with the de L’Écart seal; several shell combs; two straight razors, a strop and a whetstone; fragrant honey soap; a square of lye; a mother-of-pearl-edged mirror; a deck of playing cards; several bags of gunpowder; the engraved, amber-handled pistol and leather holster; a box of lead roundballs; a briar pipe with a tin of Santiago tobacco; a tinderbox and wrapped wicks; Alexis’s favorite toy, a palm-sized Mexican rubber ball; another large carved and polished rosewood implement, like an arm-length squash, that smelled vaguely of the outhouse; and the Latin Bible de L’Écart had purchased during his year in the Roman seminary.
About her own fate, he said nothing.
While taking a break to begin supper for her master, Carmel felt a strange and powerful force, unlike anything she had experienced before, seize her. As if she were in a trance, she rose and staggered down to the cellar where she found a small stub of coal, and then as if pulled back up by an invisible cord, rushed to de L’Écart’s second-floor bedroom. She had the sensation of wanting to cry out, as if someone were twisting the sounds out of her throat, though she knew no sound would issue. On the buttercream-and-buttercup covered wall facing his bed, whose chief additional adornment beyond a crucifix was waterstains, her hand took over.
What Carmel draws
A road winding along the Grand’Anse through the hills above Jérémie, which she covers with such dense and darkened foliage that she gouges the surface of her father’s mural. A white horse, astride which si
ts a tall, gaunt black man, wearing a field cap, a workshirt, and breeches. He carries a musketoon slung over his back. Alongside this rider and horse, another horse, black, its teeth bared and its reins swooping upwards but unheld, forming an arch. It bears no rider. Instead, high above it, a saint—no, a Frenchman, short and lean in the hips hangs upside down, a cocked hat still on his head and his hands extended as if he were diving. A pair of pince-nez hover before him. She adds clouds, a moon, and beneath the respective white and black steeds the block-lettered names LXI and MONS, before crossing out the second one: MONS.
When she finally drops the black nub, Carmel is too drained to wash the wall or hide. She returns downstairs and falls dead asleep beneath the kitchen table.
Nicolas de L’Écart did not have an opportunity, however, to view her creation. As he and Alexis returned via a road that descended through a hilly pass above the Rivière Chaineau, a band of rebels shot up out of the ground before him. He reached for his flintlock, which he always kept loaded, and cocked it to fire, but before he could, his horse reared, hurling him into a deep and jagged crevasse. An insistent bachelor with no issue, his estate by will and law passed into the hands of his younger brother, Olivier.
From 1780, Olivier de L’Écart had practiced law in the kingdom’s colonial centers. In his private hours, he conducted studies on boundary and treaty disputes, producing a monograph entitled On the Legal Matters Pertaining to the Royal Survey of the Antillean Islands in 1785, as well as various pamphlets on related topics. In the autumn of 1789, as the revolutionary clouds massed in Paris, he went to New York to advise the French delegation on its negotiations with the new American republic. By the coup d’état of 1792, he was in Philadelphia, where he successfully sat for the bar. By the 11th Germinal, he was again assisting French diplomats, this time in Santo Domingo, with the civil ramifications of the Consulate’s proclamations; when he learned of his brother’s death, he had lived there for exactly two years. His American wife, Grace, came from an old Anglo-Catholic family that owned extensive tobacco plantations in the Maryland Tidewater. Their only child, a daughter, Eugénie, was nearly fourteen.