by John Keene
After only several weeks Eugénie found the routine intolerable. She bridled at the endless carousel of classes, courses in domestic arts and etiquette, prayers in the chapel, and labor. As in all convents, the greatest practical evil, after apostasy, was idleness. She had been neither pious nor obedient under more favorable circumstances, and she lacked any foundation for managing the conditions at the convent, which offered her no means for fostering personal happiness. She was inattentive in class, insolent to her superiors, indifferent in chapel, and at all times indolent, in the manner she’d witnessed since childhood among women of her class and which would have been suitable under the dictates of a different and vanished social order, which is to say, normal circumstances. Under her requisite mud-brown frock, which covered her wrists and boots, she sometimes secretly wore a lace shift pilfered from her late mother. Although the nuns forbade any forms of physical adornment, she would sometimes apply carmine blush, which she hid in a tin box below a loose paving stone in the dormitory floor, to her white cheeks after sundown.
Eugénie had always mistaken Carmel’s dutifulness for devotion. Now she saw her slave as her primary means of emotional support, so she was initially kind and solicitous, assisting Carmel in making her bed and plaiting her hair, though she quickly tired of extending herself in this manner, and reimposed their longstanding hierarchy. She subjected Carmel to tirades about the food, the heat, the difficulty of the coursework, the chilliness and poor French and comparatively low stations of the other girls, and about her aunt’s and uncle’s unremitting cruelty in having sentenced her to this fate. Carmel stood at the side of Eugénie’s bed, staring at her mistress and awaiting an order, thereby giving the impression of agreement.
Carmel’s true enthusiasm lay in Eugénie’s books, from which she devised her own curriculum. She enjoyed the ecclesiastical Latin, which she learned to read and write; she had already begun assimilating the rudiments of English, as well as French grammar, during her Maryland sojourn, and spent part of her free time perfecting them. During the convent meals on Saturdays, which the schoolgirls themselves were required to serve, and the periods before evening prayers and lights-out, Carmel worked her way through the Bible, the Catechism and The Martyrology; she used her readings to wordlessly tutor Eugénie, who could not be bothered to open a book unless she was in class. She usually wrote out Eugénie’s lessons, while the white girl lay on her bed under the flickering lantern light and whispered rambling monologues, half truth and half apostatic fantasy, on her exploits earlier in the day, in Maryland, in the capital. Eugénie claimed to have been courted by a banker; proposed to by a prosperous trader, as well as a sitting Senator; and to have slept overnight in a rooming house of dubious repute not far from the White House. She claimed to have slipped away and combed the streets of Hurttstown, which she pronounced nothing more than an overgrown sty, and to have explored the woods and valleys near the Indian encampments. Carmel accepted these tales without astonishment, committing them to memory, and when she could find pen and paper, sketched some of them out, concealing the papers in a gash in her mistress’s straw mattress so that the nuns could not easily find them.
In general, Carmel found her routine bearable, since it gave her numerous breaks from Eugénie and opportunities to experience the world, even if that world was the severely restricted space of the convent and of her required duties. She enjoyed her own weekly, half-hour Catechism sessions with the nuns, which allowed her to expand her grasp of grammar and rhetoric, and the periods of common-work, during which the other slave girls and women, under the supervision of one of the sisters, sometimes convened to undertake joint projects.
Carmel had grown accustomed to isolation and solitude at Valdoré and valued every moment away from Eugénie as an opportunity to learn and cultivate herself. No matter; the other slave girls took offense at the fact that she did not sleep in the cramped and spartan quarters out back with them, not realizing that her mistress had demanded special dispensation on her behalf. They took offense at her height, which stamped her with an Amazonian air; at her self-possession, which they read as arrogance; they took offense at her bookishness, which struck them as pretentious; they took greatest offense at her unbreachable silence. Almost to a person, they read this as a white contempt; her unassimilable refusal to communicate in a sensible way defied their sense of shared suffering and solidarity. All of them maintained their distance, gossiping about her constantly, spreading stories, when possible, to the few slaves in town: she only spoke when casting spells; she was actually a zombie; she might not really be a female at all. She responded by focusing more intently on whatever task was at hand, to the point that some of the nuns thought her the very model of industry and dedication.
After the first month, Eugénie spent her free time developing affections for classmates. She was devoted to a skinny, raven-headed girl from Bardstown, Kentucky, but dropped her for the polished admiral’s daughter from Delaware, before heedlessly pursuing another recently arrived young white woman from Vincennes. Eugénie had Carmel write out long, passionate notes to each, slapping her hands when she miswrote, before ordering her to burn them. After lights out, Eugénie would practice her affections upon Carmel, who usually concentrated as completely as possible upon a text she had memorized that morning or a drawing that she’d been working on, until her mistress tired and fell asleep, at which point she would get up and draw for an hour by candlelight on scraps of paper she had salvaged furtively from the printing shop earlier in the day.
Carmel’s drawings
Her mother serving as a lookout in the banana trees along the road to Valdoré—Christ on the mountain top—Christ among a crowd of rebels, giving a sermon on the banks of the Grand’Anse—Ruth—her father at the Francis homestead on the Potomac—General Napoleon and president Jefferson chatting on a Washington street—M. Nicolas reclining between the thighs of Alexis on a divan in the library at Valdoré—Jacinthe standing above the Christ child’s manger—an exterior of the convent after a heavy snowfall—St. Benedict the Moor—INRI in the outline of a fish (repeated until it covers the tiny square of vellum) —Africans genuflecting in the chapel at Valdoré—Saint Monica—Kiskeya—General Dessalines on his black-throated horse in the main street in Jérémie—the Mermaid-Divinity La Sirène—tous les loas—Mam’zabelle standing over a shallow pit behind the slave quarters as her mother solemnly drums on the maman—her father in the whale’s throat—in the Cuban dog’s—a circle of Chickasaws building a fire—micha ai illi aiokhlileka okfah kia ak ayah mak osh—her young mistress recumbent as an odalisque on a filthy pallet in an Alexandria rooming house—a map of the surrounding area—the county—a map of Kentucky and Illinois territory—a map of
Eugénie’s second assigned rotation required her to assist one of the novices in arranging, labeling and packing up pamphlets, printed on the convent’s press, as well as sundry dry goods in the storehouse. These included fruit and vegetable preserves, votives and other religious artifacts, such as rosaries, which Rochelle in her free time created, which were then sold through peddlers to Catholics living further south and west beyond the Northwest and Louisiana territories. The nuns also brewed their own spirits from harvested apples and berries, though they kept these for personal use, as they dared not provoke the temperate among the townspeople. A young carpenter from Gethsemane named Jacob Greaves, nephew of Reverend White, who had helped the nuns construct their still and oak casks, was again on the grounds to build a new annex to the storehouse
. It did not take long, Carmel quickly noted, for something indistinct to begin spinning between Eugénie and Greaves, like a thread of freshly blown glass: brittle chatter, sly and expressive glances, a note catching in the throat for a second too long. No one else around them noticed a thing. Carmel detected periodic upswings in her mistress’s mood, and Greaves’s name surfacing more than once in Eugénie’s monologues to her.
The late fall began its collapse into winter. Each night the hearthless bedchambers chilled like tombs, and the nuns, to maintain a proper atmosphere of asceticism, permitted only one heavy wool blanket and quilted eiderdown per girl. The conditions only magnified the hardship for Carmel, who half-slept on a low cot, bundled in her clothes and her mistress’s cape. Eugénie had become increasingly distant, moving about as if in a dream, to the extent that she often appeared to forget that her slave girl was even in attendance. On certain nights after lights out, Carmel would hear her slip away, as she had done in Washington, though she always returned before dawn. Once she reappeared with the fragrance of apple wine on her breath; another with her woollen shift’s back blackened with peat. One thing she rarely forgot was to have Carmel artfully pack her bed with a sack of rags and place her bonnet at its head, in case the nuns conducted a room check. She swore the slave girl to silence—she was not to reveal anything, not even in confession, though this was unlikely since Carmel bore on her conscience none of her actions on behalf of Eugénie’s schemes; she was only carrying out her duties as commanded. In any event as far as she knew none of the priests who visited periodically accorded slaves that rite.
Carmel usually spent the immediate half-hour or so after her mistress’s departures at her favorite pursuit. She had completely filled one of the spare handbound diaries that Mrs. Francis had sent her niece, and was now beginning another. The mattress could no longer hold all of her work including the books, so she began concealing them beneath the false floor in her mistress’s trunk. She hid her tin thimble, which served as an inkwell, and the old quills she’d collected from the convent’s scriptorium in the corner behind her pallet. None of the regular, official inspections of Eugénie’s room had uncovered either.
On the last night of October, a severe chill settled in, then a light rain began falling. Eugénie vanished not long after evening prayers. Carmel, who for a week had been feeling alternately restless and easily peeved, had wanted to show her that earlier that day she had finally passed into womanhood. Since Eugenie was gone, however, she readied her mistress’s bed, but noticed that the sack of rags, along with several pieces of Eugénie’s clothing, were missing. She’d put the clean laundry away and balled up two petticoats to fashion a sleeping body. Once she’d tucked it in, she fished out her book, her quill and her drawing book, and returned to a drawing she had been working on, depicting the meadow, spread out like a sheet of lodencloth, behind the convent. Though she had only black ink, she found herself wanting to work in color and envisioning other methods for realizing her fertile imagination, such as embroidery and painting. The nuns would forbid either option unless she were depicting religious scenes. The white rain, rhythmically painting the windowpanes, began to lull her. The room assumed a strange and heavy dampness. As she started to crosshatch a poplar tree, her eyes rolled into the ceiling. On a blank page was drawn a rough map of the region, labeling the convent, the nearby town, the brown scythe of the Tennessee. Halfway through Gethsamane-Hurttstown, a line, but abruptly it broke off. Instead the quill punched in wavy lines, some of which gouged the paper; these stretched from the center of the river all the way across the town itself. Her fingers began moving more and more rapidly, drawing the waves automatically, until she bowed the quill completely back, nearly snapping it. Spent, her forehead veiled with sweat and her eyes still cycling, she trembled, unsure where she was, but out of habit tamped the wick so as not to arouse the nun conducting that night’s inspections. She slid the book, under the bed, and—
Some time later, she felt something tugging at her hand and foot. Carmel momentarily fought back until she realized it was Eugénie, in the darkness, pulling her from under her bed’s wooden slats. Carmel could feel that the white girl’s hair and clothes, what few she wore, were completely soaked. Still partially asleep, she groped around the room for a spare blanket and patted her mistress dry. In utter darkness, she rolled her mistress’s wet garments up, pressing them into a corner, and slid the white girl into her nightgown. She stuffed the cape against the door and lighted a tiny tallow candle, which took a few minutes, since she had to orient herself to find her mistress’s trunk, in which they kept the tinderbox and a few votives. Once the flame spoke, Eugénie told Carmel of her adventure getting back to the convent: out of nowhere the heavens tore open and torrential rains fell. The sky thundered repeatedly, and then lightning struck as she was ascending the half-mile long road between the town and the convent. The path and the little bridge across the creek were swiftly and almost completely washed out behind her. Tree limbs, uprooted bushes and boles lay strewn like chicken bones down the surrounding hillsides. She had had to run as fast as she could to avoid being swept backwards by the downrushing water, which was falling as if a celestial dam had split. After hurdling the gate and crawling through the basement window she always used, she had peeled off her muddy boots, stockings, cloak, and dress in an alcove next to the coal room, bundled and hid them in a secret compartment in order not to leave footprints on the stone floor. She’d made her way to her bedroom in only her petticoat and undergarments. Exhausted, Carmel wanted to pacify her mistress and put her to sleep, so she embraced her and rubbed her back.
At that moment, the ringing of the alarm bell in the front hall broke the girls’ brief, silent spell. Outside the room, bare feet scurried along the stone floors. Then the two girls heard the Mother Superior’s voice shuttling towards them: “Mesdamoiselles, emergency assembly in the front hall!”
Carmel took her book and, as Eugénie searched for her robe, quickly hid it in the trunk. Both girls opened the door just as the Mother Superior’s hand pressed from the other side: “To the front hall, mesdamoiselles, immediately!” Eugénie and Carmel arrived to find all the other girls, the nuns and novices, a few of the workers, and the enslaved young women, in various states of night-dress, milling about.
The Mother Superior clapped her hands, and the girls formed their well-known rows. The head nun took a quick headcount, everyone was accounted for. She ordered the slave Hubert to check the cellar. Because the convent and its acres sat on high ground that drained into the creek and river, flooding in its buildings was unlikely, but she wanted to be sure. Before Hubert could report on the status of the cellar Moor was ordered to prepare cots in the upstairs library just in case. When they had gone, the Mother Superior described what Moor, who had served as sentry that night, had witnessed at the front gate: Clouds as huge as Hispaniola had anchored over the hill and town below, then burst forth with rains the likes of which he’d never seen in his entire life. As the river leapt its banks on the Gethsemane side, he’d rushed in to alert the nuns and the other slaves, so that they could bring the few field animals into the barn and secure the horses in their stables. Turning back in amazement at the ferocity of the unexpected tempest, he’d noticed a ghostly specter hurrying toward the gate, but by the time he’d been able to go back outside, it was gone. You must, the Mother Superior continued, now return to your rooms and stay there until morning prayers, but we shall each appeal to the Heavenly Father and Our Most Blessed Vir
gin to ensure that little harm is done to our neighbors. Ave Maria, gratiae plena, Dominus tecum. . . .
Carmel and her mistress returned in silence to Eugénie’s room. Carmel closed the door, and promptly dropped to her knees. She didn’t have a rosary, but she knew the sequence of devotions well. Eyes closed tightly, her body trembling, she launched into the Lord’s prayer in her head, in French. Behind her, she could hear her mistress pulling her blankets over her head as the rain unleashed its curses upon the glass.
At a morning assembly several days later, after the storm had dissipated, the Mother Superior delivered a short verbal report on the state of the convent and grounds. She pointed out that according to the male servants, nearly two dozen people in the town, whole portions of which still lay under an icy blanket, had drowned. In fact, while conducting a walking inspection Hubert had come upon the body of the convent’s factotum Jacob Greaves, grounded like a barge in the creek’s new banks at the base of the hill. A waterlogged sack of his clothes and a few personal effects moored at his side. Though the convent had received no notice, Carmel overheard one white girl telling another, it appeared as though he was quitting not only their employ at the convent but his hometown as well. The nuns, Carmel later learned, had wanted to attend his funeral in town, but they had been warned not to set foot on the other side of the river; nevertheless, when the next priest came through they would ask him to say a special Mass for Greaves and the other deceased, which included one of the old milk cows. The students and most of the nuns, who were quite fond of Greaves, erupted in tears. Eugénie bawled inconsolably. Carmel, standing at the rear of the room with the other bondswomen, many of whom were weeping too, stared at her mistress, who briefly turned around; her face had contorted into a wet, stone grimace. Turning away, the slave girl noticed that her fellow slaves, through their tears, were observing her, their expressions a mix of emotions shifting so rapidly she couldn’t fully grasp them. She trained her eyes on her bare feet until the Mother Superior had finished her remarks. After a recitation of the rosary, the girls were dismissed to prepare for supper. Carmel waited until the nuns, the girls and the other slaves had departed, then she returned to the room.