by John Keene
Eugénie found her lying by the side of her bed, and slapped her. Carmel instantly sat up. “What were you doing?” Eugénie demanded. She glanced at her unbound trunks. “Don’t think because Uncle Nicolas is gone you can get away with anything.”
Carmel rose and picked up a length of hemp. She saw that her palms were black and wiped them on her apron. She was trembling but began to wind the rope around a trunk. Eugénie reclined on her bed.
“Mother says the French are dying like horseflies,” she said. “Did you know they also get the fever in Georgetown too?” Carmel finished one knot and began the next, without glancing up at Eugénie, who had crawled under the covers. “Father is going to write a book about this plantation. Are you listening? Here’s a secret: in Santo Domingo I had an admirer. He was a creole boy in the seminary there.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Actually I had two. The second was the uncle of my tutor, Madamoiselle Rossignol. That’s why Mother dismissed her.”
Carmel kept tying. Although she had considered telling Eugénie about the drawings, she thought better of it. She wound rope around a long, knee-high case that had once held hat presses for Monsieur Nicolas. She couldn’t remember what she had packed in it just hours earlier.
“Oh, stop that,” Eugénie said with annoyance. She climbed out of bed and snatched the rope from Carmel’s hand. “Busy, busy. My last handmaid could sing, did you know that? Don’t you have any talents?” Carmel remained frozen, quivering. Eugénie pushed her toward the door. “Draw my bathwater, girl,” she groaned. “Can’t you see I’m tired?”
The role of duty
“It is true that it has been said of blacks through the ages that ‘they don’t work, they don’t know what work is.’ It is true that they were forced to work, and to work more than anyone else, in terms of abstract quantity.” —Deleuze
Within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance and cunning?
The next morning de L’Écart rode down to Jérémie with Alexis at his side. He wore his holstered pistol and carried one of his brother’s rifles, while Alexis carried only a well-honed machete and a pike. Meanwhile at the dining table Mrs. de L’Écart wrote missives to her mother and dearest cousin, who was married to a planter living outside Savannah, and with whom she often commiserated by letter. Eugénie pretended to browse through an illustrated copy of Aesop’s Fables while her mother was occupied, but eventually she invented solitary card games till she grew bored. She then tracked Carmel, who had continued to clean the house and pack up goods.
By late afternoon, neither Monsieur Olivier nor Alexis had returned, though Mme. de L’Écart affected not to show concern in front of her daughter. She ordered Carmel to find Boni or Ti-Louis and have either venture into town for news. Or Amalie, who had grown increasingly inattentive. This task provided Carmel with an opportunity to shake loose of Eugénie. But her search of the house, the near grounds, the gardens, the sorting house, the stables and barns produced neither man. Nor could she find Amalie, whom she had seen that morning preparing the day’s supper, a spiced squash soup, nor Jacinthe. Their absences filled her with unease. She went out to the mostly deserted slave quarters, which sat on an undulating ridge to the west of the house, away from the river; she had not visited them since the de L’Écarts moved in. There she encountered Joséphine, sitting on an overturned milk bucket in front of her shack, gumming a charoot. Carmel mimed a query to Joséphine, asking if she had seen any of the other servants or knew where they where or what was going on. The old woman offered only a smirk in reply, a grayish-blue question mark of smoke unfurling above her head.
Carmel ran back to the house. She mimed to her Mistress that she could not find any of the other servants, except Joséphine. Mme. de L’Écart, who was disposed to ignore slaves’ histrionics, ordered the girl to set places for herself and Eugénie, then complete her tasks. She planned to have a glass of rum with her bowl of soup, read, and wait for her husband to return.
Carmel returned to the cellar. She paused in front of her drawing. The mountains—or whatever they were—appeared to leap from the limestone wall towards her. The image as a whole churned her stomach, yet she could not pull away. Suddenly, she felt fingers clasping her wrist.
Concerning the image
What does it mean, Eugénie calmly asks Carmel, I watched you cover this wall last night. She pulls Carmel close to the wall. Why did you do this? Carmel sluggishly shakes her head. Who told you to do this? Carmel shakes her head again. I don’t believe you—
Eugénie approaches the image and studies it, touches it. She swipes her finger through one particularly dark, iridescent region, stopping on the male figure laid out just above the OU. She wrenches Carmel’s wrist. Carmel is silent, she doesn’t know.
Answer me! Carmel, though still unsure, considers her earlier experience of the drawing with M. Nicolas, and tries to mime what she lacks the gestures for: they are going to TEAR THE WHITE OUT.
Still holding Carmel’s wrist, Eugénie ran upstairs to alert her mother that a terrible plan was afoot. Madame de L’Écart sat at the dining room table, her dinner bell, her untouched bowl of soup and several of her late brother-in-law’s meticulously detailed catalogues of purchases stacked in front of her. She had regularly strived to break her daughter’s tendency toward theatrics, so she ordered Eugénie to choose between her supper or her room. The daughter repeated herself, a murderous plan was underway. She had no appetite. Mme. Lézard de L’Écart dismissed both girls and, despite the indelicacy of reading during dinner, returned to her book.
As Eugénie, still tugging Carmel, made her way upstairs, she glimpsed through the kitchen window the surrounding hills, which were glowing like an amphitheater at a night carnival. Without a second thought, she ordered Carmel, who also saw the lights rising just to the east of the plantation, to get them safely to the quay.
A dialogue
[. . .]
Where am I supposed to go?
[. . .]
According to Amalie they’ve seized control of both banks of the Chaineau and are advancing up the Grande Anse.
[. . .]
But I’ve never been over the water—
[. . .]
Where am I supposed to go, and what I am to do when I get there?
[. . .]
What am I supposed to do when I get there?
[. . .]
With Eugénie holding the rifle that both girls knew first Nicolas and then Olivier de L’Écart always kept loaded, Carmel entered the library and stuffed the family’s important papers in a leather satchel. In the dining room, they found Mme. de L’Écart lying on the carpet, retching. Carmel kneaded her stomach to speed the vomiting, then fetched a pitcher of vinegar water, which she poured down the agonizing woman’s throat.
With Eugénie pressing the gun to her back, she raced upstairs and packed a large sheet with two changes of clothes and toiletries for both of her mistresses, to be loaded in the small, flatbed wagon that sat unused in the meadow near the stables. Carrying the knotted sack under one arm, she returned to the library and guided Madame, white as chalk and barely able to stand, to the wagon. There was only one horse in the stables, a swaybacked nag, which Carmel bridled and hitched as she often had witnessed Alexis do. With the mistresses hidden under a tarp that M. Nicolas had kept in the wagon for a similar purpose, she cocked the rifle, which Eugénie had only grudgingly handed to her, lifted the rei
ns, and galloped off towards the byroad that tracked the Grand’Anse.
What Carmel remembers: nothing of the ride beyond the stench of burning coffee and bush. Not the dizzying descent down the path beside the treacherously churning Grand’Anse. Not the call of the lambi reverberating through the foliage. Not firing once into the darkness, nor the blunderbuss’s powerful report. Not Eugénie’s intermittent shrieks from beneath the rug under which she and her ill mother lay. Not the manor house erupting behind them like a immense gladiolus. Not even Monsieur Olivier de L’Écart staring up at them from the grave of the underbrush, his gaze as it met hers as impassable as a collapsed bridge, when the wagon swerved onto the main road into Jérémie.
Of the drawing, only what she now realized had covered the wall’s expanse: flames.
A year and a half after the establishment of the Haitian state, the orphan heiress Eugénie Mary Isabelle Margaret Francis de L’Écart had yet to settle in at the tobacco plantation of her maternal uncle, Colonel Charles McDermott Francis, outside Washington. Neither Colonel Francis, who had readily taken in his late sister’s child, nor his wife had so far proved capable of dealing with Eugénie, who, they both believed, had yet to recover from the depredations she had endured in the slave colony. Under a different scenario, they might have recognized that she was entering the full bloom of an innate rebelliousness not unlinked to the one she had just lived through. Like a weed, Eugénie’s libertine attitude was beginning to take hold among the Francis’ own two adolescent daughters. In addition to her repeated disappearances and her inappropriate behavior at social gatherings, there was a near-scandal involving an immigrant day laborer on the Francis estate. As it stood, there was no possibility of marrying her off, without adequate finishing, to a respectable young man among the local Catholic families. Colonel Francis therefore decided to send Eugénie to a convent school out west, where he and his wife hoped the nuns might instill in her not only discipline but also encourage her domestic talents and cultivate her reacquaintance with the basic social graces.
In the late summer of 1806 Eugénie de L’Écart entered the Academy of the Sisters of the Most Precious Charity of our Lady of the Sorrows, near the village of Hurttstown, Kentucky. The small and élite order had originated in southern Wallonia in the waning years of the Counter-Reformation. It was known for its industry and thrift, as well as for its effectiveness at spiritually molding young women of means. When the Directoire’s gendarmes targeted the order in 1797, the nuns dissolved the convent, fleeing first to the Netherlands and then on to Spain, where they established a new foundation. A handful of members, however, envisioned great potential in the young American republic, with its guarantees of religious liberty against the ravages of reason, and after a brief sojourn in the city of New Orleans, established a convent and school in the far western corner of Kentucky in 1800.
The convent consisted of six nuns and novices, with eleven girls living as boarders at the school, and a trio of enslaved people, a young woman, Rochelle who attended to the nun’s needs, and two older men, Hubert and Moor, who served as groundsmen, guards, grooms, and general factotums. The convent’s estate comprised what had once been a large whitewashed mansion, in a rough version of the new Federal style, with a similarly designed carriage house and outlying buildings, as well as the extensive grounds—all partly constructed on the site of an Indian burial mound—of one of the region’s first white settlers, the farmer, soldier and land speculator Joseph Hurtt, a native of Maryland who had fought against the Shawnees in the final battles of the Revolutionary War. When he succumbed to pleurisy at the turn of the century, his childless widow, whose mother had studied with the nuns on the continent, promptly donated what remained of the estate south of the creek to them before repairing to the federal capital.
The Tennessee River separated the convent’s spur of one hundred and twenty-two acres from Chickasaw territory to the south and west; a steep hill and valley, interlaced with woodlands and traversed by a rocky road which abutted a wide, bridged creek, the grounds enclosed the entire length of their perimeter by a high, stiled fence, separated them from the miniscule, hardscrabble town of Gethsemane, which was also known as Hurttstown, to the north and east. There were no Roman Catholics among the townspeople. They consisted primarily of migrating Virginians from the Piedmont region who had intermarried with a small band of pioneers from the lower Ohio River and Big Sandy River valleys. Less than a handful held slaves; there were no free Negroes in the town. Most of the Gethsemane residents, touched by the religious revivals racing like wildfire from the Atlantic, were quite suspicious of the brown-habited, French-speaking nuns, who now not only occupied the largest share of what remained of the one great estate in the area—the rest having become Hurttstown itself—but also ran a school that did not admit the locals, though none of the elders of Hurttstown believed, in any case, in the education of girls. The Reverend Job White, pastor of the United Church in the town and variously mayor, vice mayor, councilor, and sheriff, was known to inveigh regularly against the advances of the Popish virus, which had given Indians airs and the false promise of equality. The nuns lived and functioned, then, in a low-grade state of siege.
The first Catholic evangelization attempts in the area near Gethsemane, to the indigenous people and the whites, around 1797, by a French-speaking missionary priest from St. Genevieve, Missouri, had been rebuffed with violence. An effort two years later by two Dominican friars from New York to raise a chapel along the creek had ended in their flight from the town at dawn. The nuns, aware of this history, proceeded with great care, taking every opportunity to maintain a provisional truce they had established with the townspeople, and refraining from any direct outreach to the Chickasaw. The sisters in fact did not themselves visit the town without the accompaniment of at least one local who periodically worked on the convent’s grounds, and one of their black manservants.
The convent’s Mother Superior, Sr. Louis Marie, a formidably tall woman whose habit always smelled of lye, was of the mind that the greater threat lay not in the gospels of finance, freemasonry and Protestantism, which were preponderant in America, but in that other dangerous product of the post-Reformation age, excessive liberty, poisoned by rationality: what, after all, had provoked the savagery that had clotted the streets of Paris with royal blood? What had brought nearly all of the great European kings and queens, divined by God, so low, and elevated the sons of merchants, with their abstract doctrines of progress, and the new, utterly alien secular order? All of the girls were required to develop the Christian aspects of their character by living austerely and working in rotation in the convent’s workrooms, kitchens, and on its small farm and printing press, which produced pamphlets to spread the Word, and the world it might help to maintain, far and wide.
They were instructed in deportment: modesty, charity, gentility. The nuns usually accomplished this through positive reinforcement and penance, though they turned to more forceful methods when needed, for not only sunlight gilds the marigold. The curriculum consisted of the practical arts, as well as courses in basic theology, introductory mathematics, and French and Latin grammar. Only amongst themselves did the girls speak English. They were taught to sew, weave and darn; appraise the quality of materials and goods and be judicious; to bake, cook simple meals and supervise more elaborate ones; to conserve household resources for times of need; clean and oversee workers to ensure a proper home; preserve produce and meats; and propagate a sustaining and decorative garden.
Like Eugénie, several of the girls were from border or Southern states and had brought a slave girl or woman. The nuns permitted these bondswomen to receive a minimal instruction, in French, in order to follow along in the recitation of the Bible and prayers, during the thirty minutes of repose after the Sunday Mass.
SELECTED RULES (printed and bound at the Convent of Our Lady of the Sorrows)
7. Girls shall not take the Lord’s name in vain or utter any blasphemy, nor repeat any calumny against or concerning the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.
8. Girls shall not dishonor or disrespect the Blessed Sisters or their fellow students.
9. Girls shall not gossip or engage in idle or slanderous discourse.
10. Girls shall not promenade around the Convent or its grounds as if on display, nor journey about the Convent or its grounds unsupervised except in groups of three (servants shall not count toward the total).
11. Girls shall not under any circumstances venture into the village of Hurttstown without the escort of a nun and a townsperson.
12. Girls shall not send notes or communicate with or enter into any written intercourse with residents of the town.
13. Girls shall avoid all license and provocation, in thought and deed.
14. Girls shall treat all of God’s creatures, even those of the lowest station or caste, or of the smallest size, with love and respect, for whatsoever they do to the least of His brothers, that they render undo Him.