by John Keene
Olivier de L’Écart, like his brother, had been raised in the provincial milieu of southwestern Saint-Domingue, and educated in Paris. He had supported the King’s laws and penal codes across the new world colonies through his advocacy, and now his late brother’s slaves were his own. He nevertheless was a man of feeling; he had always maintained a strong inner revulsion towards absolutism and the dominance of the aristocratic estate over the others. In the tome-lined safety of his library in Philadelphia he had even cheered those who had forced the royal hand on the tennis courts of Versailles, and later seized the state outright. He aimed at some future stage in his life to resolve this contradiction, though he had grasped at an early age that law presented the best compromise. That the cause of equality, or liberty, seen in another way, had culminated in brutality and the militarism of Napoleon, however, just as Sainte-Domingue also had degenerated into its own terror, did not surprise him. The rhetoric of the Enlightenment was a more powerful stimulant than that which had enriched his family, because equality, he had more than once penned in his journal, was the proper guiding principle, though in practice it required severe restraint: “As distant as heaven is from the earth, so is the true spirit of equality from that of extreme equality . . .” (Montesquieu).
Upon learning of his brother’s death, de L’Écart planned to dispose of the estate as quickly as possible. He was not unamenable to selling it to one of the local propertied mulattoes, since he had known several of them since childhood and foresaw that ultimately much of the island would end up as scraps in dark palms. His wife, however, pushed him to identify a buyer first from his own station, or at least from any Frenchman who could post a bond. It would, in any event, be sold. The capture just months before and the subsequent death of L’Ouverture, who had cooperated repeatedly with French aims only to see his loyalty betrayed convinced de L’Écart that quite soon, the blacks, now awakened to their fate, would hereafter consent to be betrayed only by blacks. As his parting act and as a gesture of his magnanimity, a virtue in which he took considerable pride, he also planned to emancipate whatever slaves were still at Valdoré.
Before departing for Jérémie, Olivier de L’Écart shipped most of his personal effects forward to the home he had purchased in Georgetown, as he intended to resume his law practice in the new capital of the United States. He had also thought of sending his daughter on to the United States, but his wife insisted, despite the perilous situation in major portions of the colony, that the family not be separated, as the sapling flourishes best in the forest. He did not bring the few servants who also belonged to his ménage, despite his wife’s request that he do so. From what he recalled during his last visit several years before, there was still a small but loyal cohort on the plantation, which would suffice for the purposes of his scheme.
Grace de L’Écart was not so eager to dispose of Valdoré. She imagined the possibilities of society in Washington to be promising, especially given her familial connections, but she had also dreamt of becoming a plantation mistress, a role for which her upbringing had most thoroughly prepared her. As it was, she had had to endure the snobbishness of the créole planters and their spouses, and the vulgarity of the government functionaries and the rich traders, as a barrister’s wife; though her husband possessed both wealth and prestige, and was of the landed colonial classes, even adopting the de, as became his father’s right by the King’s quill-strokes, he had spent his adult life among this sphere essentially landless and in the service of a government in Paris whose aims had long been held in mistrust.
Given this new change of fate, she was thus quite willing to endure Valdoré’s oppressive tropical heat and the summers of fever-bearing mosquitoes, which, her husband had once joked to her, were the colony’s true masters. She was also ready to take reins over her own retinue of slaves, even if the blacks of Saint-Domingue had tasted freedom and would only return to their prior condition at penalty of death. If it meant a life among French-speaking whites with airs and mulattoes grown so presumptuous as to declare themselves on equal footing with their former masters, she would weather it.
As soon as he had planted his trunks in the main salle and inspected the house and near grounds, de L’Écart deputized three of the male slaves that remained to serve as personal guards. A ricketed hunchback of about 16, named Beauné or Boni, whom he found sleeping in the stables, was to guard his wife and daughter; the second, Alexis, his brother’s former groom, who moved through the house as if it were his, was to accompany him at all times; and the third, the middle-aged Ti-Louis, whose right hand had been lopped off at some point in the past, was charged with guarding the grounds. De L’Écart then rode off to the town hall in Jérémie.
In the meantime, Madame de L’Écart had Ti-Louis gather the remaining female slaves. There were four—Amalie, who tended the few remaining animals and the garden—she was Alexis’s sister, and, younger than him, in her late 20s; Joséphine, an elderly woman who was deaf and partially blind; Jacinthe, another elderly woman of regal bearing who could barely cross the room; and the long-legged, mute creature named Carmel. The Madame immediately set Amalie and Josephine to cleaning the ground floor, while directing Carmel to the upper storeys. The ungainly, very black woman-child who could not talk particularly unnerved her.
When the tasks were underway, Mme. de L’Écart scoured the pantry. The shelves contained half a dozen pulpy mangoes and sabrikos, three furred malangas, a stalk of blackened bananas, covered bowls of horse chestnuts, wormy meal, jerky, numerous tins that had been emptied of their spices and nearly empty jars of English preserves, and a circle of hard, heavily molded cheese. Roaches wove a sepia tapestry on one shelf, ants another on the floor. Jacinthe, who had never labored in the de L’Écart kitchen, was told to prepare a proper supper for the family. Mme. de L’Écart did not trust that the slaves would not attempt to poison her, but she was certain, based on her quick review of them, that the elderly Jacinthe had the most to lose by destroying the source of her sustenance. Still, she stood watch in the kitchen until the meal was complete.
Carmel brought her tureen of lukewarm water, frothened by lye shavings, several large palms and a handmade broom, up to the front guest bedchamber. She had tied several washrags around her wrists. The room like many on the upper floors lay shrouded in old sheets, smelling of woodrot and disuse, so it must be cleaned in order for the daughter of the new Monsieur de L’Écart to sleep here. One of Carmel’s charcoal tableaux, though not as fantastical as the one in the master bedroom, covered the largest wall. She looked right past it. She raised the window and opened the shutters, then hauled the Tunisian carpets onto the sash overlooking the balcony. As she began to pummel the ends of the rug with the broom handle, a nasally voice snapped from the closet: “Girl.”
Carmel instantly stopped cleaning the carpets and turned around. Before her stood the white girl she had seen earlier, her shoulder-length, greasy, hay-colored hair falling in green grosgrain-ribboned braids behind her ears; her eyes, beads of cooled nickel, floated above her hawkish nose. She wore a pale green short-waisted dress of lawn, with a matching green girdle cinched by a darker green silk bow that set off her growing bosom. It had been years since Carmel had seen a young white woman on the grounds of Valdoré, let alone in such a brilliantly colored dress. She clenched her fist around the broom handle, and took a step to the side.
“What is your name?” the white girl asked, in melodic French.
Carmel mouthed her name, though no so
und emerged. She wanted to resume her work, but the white girl circled, observing her closely. She paused, leaning close enough to Carmel that her nose momentarily touched the enslaved girl’s cheek. Carmel froze.
“I know your name. This is my father’s plantation now. But he’s going to sell it.” She smiled conspiratorily. “We’ll be leaving for Georgetown, where I was born. Father has a house there too. I’ll have to have a handmaid, Mother says. Tu restes avec moi.” She perched on edge of the high canopy bed, wheeling her legs about. “I had one in Santo Domingo named Carolina.” Carmel nodded. “She would sass Mother all the time, the black witch, but Father doesn’t believe in whipping Negroes. But that’s not a problem, because you can’t sass me.” She then said several things in a language Carmel did not understand, and laughed.
“You don’t seem lazy, though,” she continued. Carmel returned to battering the carpets. The white girl grabbed her shoulder and wrenched Carmel towards her. “Can you keep secrets?”
Carmel, unsure how to respond, nodded a second time. The white girl looked her over once more, and said, “Of course you can, how could you tell? My name is Mademoiselle Eugénie. But that’s not a secret. I’ll have to figure out a way to teach you to understand English soon. Then I’ll share a few with you.” She bounded out of the room just as Boni poked his head in. Carmel splashed lye soap water onto the pine floorboards, and untied one of her wrist-rags to start scrubbing. Through the window wafted the faint scent of burning cane.
Within several fortnights, Olivier de L’Écart had identified a potential buyer for the property, a creole speculator who lived in town. The price was a robbery. The rebellion had yet to fully turn to the blacks’ favor, but they now controlled large stretches of the colony from the border with Santo Domingo all the way to Jacmel, and where they held sway their administration was as vengeful as that of the French. In fact, reports of the slaughter of whites were as common as the fires from distant plantations painting each night’s sky. De L’Écart set about settling his brother’s chief debts, hired an agent to handle the remaining fiscal and land matters, sent trunks on to Washington, and purchased passage for his family. Although his original plan was to free the slaves—because he was finally ready to take a radical step not just in mind but in action—his wife suggested that because there were so few still at Valdoré, they be included as part of the estate to bolster the price. She also wanted him to retain several for their personal use. They would be keeping Carmel because Eugénie must not be left without an attendant of her own.
In fact, Eugénie so dominated Carmel’s waking hours that she was unable, at least for the first few days, to do anything but serve the white girl. Eugénie followed her everywhere, continually demanding her assistance in everything, ordering her around and insisting that Carmel play games with her, often in the midst of the slave girl’s required tasks. She taught Carmel to deal cards and comprehend the Spanish cursewords she had picked up in Santo Domingo. Or she practiced her amours with her servant, cuddling and caressing the younger woman, commanding her to brush and braid and unplait her pale hair, showering her with a level of attention Carmel had never experienced. In this way, to Eugénie’s way of thinking, an understanding took root between them.
Within a few weeks, Carmel and Eugénie had developed a means of communication consisting of hand and facial gestures that only they could comprehend. When Carmel couldn’t make herself clear in this rudimentary pantomime, she mouthed the words in her version of French. As she brushed Eugénie’s hair, Carmel would intermittently pause to stand before her mistress to pantomime brief tales about Nicolas de L’Écart, her late parents, the other slaves and their escapes, the various battles in the mountains, the rebel outposts in the nearby hills and mountains, the British sailors who had seized the port, and the waterlogged, mutilated bodies she’d discovered up on the banks of the Grand’Anse—none of which interested Eugénie.
The white girl only wanted to know who had done the drawings that covered many of the walls. Their crudeness of execution, substandard media and haphazard placement all about the house were proof, as Fr. Malesvaux had stated in the library one evening as Eugénie played a pleasant minuet in a corner of the room, that, contrary to Monsieur de L’Écart’s appraisal that the images had been created by one of the penniless graduates of the École des Beaux Arts circulating in the colony’s formerly flush days, that the artist had received no formal training and was evidently a Negro mimic of the usual sort, but the exacting and strange details, marked by jarring juxtapositions of nefarious symbols, such as snakes, rainbows, hatchets, fish, coffins, swords, and unidentifiable abstractions, showed that their creator possessed an inestimable capacity for evil. Her father was less convinced of the drawings’ maleficence, though the large, wildly sketched figure on the cellar wall depicting an image of a man he took to be his late brother did unnerve him, and so he followed his wife’s counsel.
“If the fox be unseen
though his scent fills the air,
the glen is dangerous
for more than the hare.”
Monsieur de L’Écart and his wife slept armed in the small guest bedroom across from Eugénie’s, at whose door stood Ti-Louis, his machete at his side. Alexis was now the house sentry. It was only a matter of time, Eugénie had overheard them saying and told Carmel, before the ex-slaves, led by some houngan, fulfilled the end of some prophesy with the last of these de L’Écarts.
Carmel had often thought about flight and knew the hilly terrain near Jérémie, as well as the coastal route towards Cap Dame-Marie. But what would her prospects be? What if she encountered French soldiers, or one of the fighters who had slain her mother, or insurrectionists who believed she ought to die solely because she already had not fled, or pledged to one faction or the other? She had no way to argue her position in the face of a bayonet or barrel, let alone some soldier’s unbuttoned . . . Amalie, who had spoken with refugees from neighboring plantations, told of horrific murders: by Rochambeau’s troops, by the rebels, by enraged petits blancs who now saw no place for themselves in the new system. Carmel did not distrust her fellow slaves, but she also perceived that because of her mother’s particular history, they’d kept their distance from her such that there was almost no possibility of deeper ties.
Olivier de L’Écart scheduled the first Friday in August 1803 to ride down to Jérémie to notarize the contract of sale and transfer the deed. The next day the family, with Alexis, Jacinthe and Carmel in tow, would board la Pétite Bayadère, a frigate bound first for Cuba and then for the United States. Carmel thus spent all of Thursday draping what furniture still sat in the house and packing away all of Eugénie’s personal effects. She had stowed her own possessions in a flax sow’s ear.
The de L’Écarts sat down in the dining room to eat their supper. Olivier de L’Écart had never avoided discussing the grave state of affairs across Saint-Domingue in front of his daughter, so now he broached the topic of the uneven French campaign and the rumors of Dessalines’ planned treachery against his former masters. Several plantations to the southwest had already been razed, their owners tossed into the Bourdon, while the French forces were again massacring rebels in the north. The goal of the masses was to tear the white out of the Tricolor. His wife chattered peevishly about the lack of correspondence from Santo Domingo. Reason, unlike the oleander, cannot take root where the soil is poor. Eugénie ignored both of them, slipping away from the table when neither was watching.
As
soon as Carmel finished assisting Amalie in the dinner service, she descended to the cellar to wash down its floor and recount the casks of wine and rum, which she had swaddled in straw for their journey. Suddenly, she felt dizzy, and then a loud voice overwhelmed her ears, as if filling them with a command. She fished a lozenge of coal from the bin. Down the center of the limed wall in front of her she drew a series of wavy double lines. Atop them she etched a formless mass, into which she set what quickly materialized as Valdoré. Her hand was moving so quickly she could barely control it. All around the estate’s grounds, she drew what she initially took to be mountains, though they looked more like arrowheads. After a few minutes she had covered both sides of the road with a hundred of the serrated peaks. At the base of the wall, she drew two horses, atop one of which sat Alexis, then another horse, with no mount. Beside him lay a thin, whiskered white man. Her hand traversed the wall so rapidly that her entire body was shaking. Over the horses’ feet she drew a boat, a coach, two white female figures; around them still more triangles such that whole sections of the wall appeared to move outwards as if in three dimensions. At the very bottom she scrawled TOUT, then crossed out both Ts. OU. Her fingers cramped, loosing the nugget. She felt so spent she fell to her knees, but as soon as she recovered she doused her lantern and fled upstairs.