by John Keene
Sr. François Agnès concluded her conversation and called me over, telling me that I should wrap up my sewing and attend to Miss Eugénie, who would be finishing her breakfast and heading to class. I ascended the stairs slowly, as I had of late ceased to move with dispatch, unless it was absolutely necessary. Since the incidents of several weeks ago, Eugénie, recognizing the changes in my behavior, had responded accordingly. She no longer expected me to wash with her waste water; she took good care not to hand her comb to me in expectation that I would run it through her hair, or point to her chamberpot unless I was ready to touch it. In the hallway I saw Marinette; she was sweeping, but paused as I passed, and greeted me with her eyes. I replied in kind. The main floor was otherwise quiet; I imagined the sisters were either in the refectory or the chapel or downstairs, or otherwise occupied. At the stairwell to the next story, I saw Ayidda polishing the banister; we exchanged fulsome waves. The stairs themselves seemed to melt as if wax under my feet; it took me a while to reach the bedroom.
Eugénie was not there. I had already made my bed so I fiddled a bit with hers. I bundled her dirty clothes up and, exerting no real effort, lined her books up on her desk. She had forgotten to cork her ink bottle, to put her nibs away, to grab her writing book for class. I thought of taking it to her but decided not to. I set the main lamp outside our door so that it could be refilled for the evening, lazily brushed her shoes and beat out her pinafore, then closed up the room. This floor also was mostly quiet, though in the large room at the end, I knew, the class was unfolding. Behind me someone was padding quickly, and I turned to see Diejuste gathering up my lamp; we parried smiles. I proceeded down the hall until I reached the door of the class, which stood slightly ajar. All four of the white girls sat in a row at the first table, Eugénie on the end nearest me. I could hear Sr. Alphonse Isabelle’s voice rising and falling like a rattle. I stared at Eugénie until she was compelled to look in my direction, though by the time she, and the girls beside her, would have done so, I was already on my way back to the sewing room.
On duty
What is duty?
His maister had not half his duetee. (Chaucer)
Wherefore duty?
We have done that which was oure duetye to do. (Luke xvii.x Tyndale’s Bible)
What duty is due us?
To do one’s duty thoroughly is not easy in the most peaceable times. (Pattinson)
Whither duty?
No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. (Fanon)
The summer heat grew ever more tropical, provoking fainting spells and transforming the upper floors of the convent to a kiln. By late June, the nuns canceled all activities for the white girls and themselves, save prayer, from midday to the early evening, that could not be undertaken in the basement. We thus rose just before dawn, before the the sun broke, to fetch water, empty chamberpots, clean, cook, cultivate the garden, move all unused tools and implements, including a store of gunpowder, indoors, prepare whatever else was required for the white girls, and assist the sisters as they saw fit. The religious class moved into the sewing room, which had been my refuge, and I and Sr. François Agnès moved to a smaller room down the hall, a large closet really, which had been used for storage. It was far more cramped, but cool and peaceful, and as she assembled or disassembled garments, knit, embroidered, and darned, I worked on what I had at hand and tried to let my mind float free of everything around it.
Though I still read just before going to sleep and maintained my journal, my entries now tending towards a brevity so extreme that sometimes only a word or two, at most a sentence, resonant for my memory and me alone, would suffice, and I filled whatever space remained with minute line drawings of my fellow bondswomen, of the animals, of the grounds; and with caricatures of the nuns, the white girls, and the glimpses I had gotten of the townspeople and of the convent’s visitors, including the Reverend White’s son Job Jr., whom the nuns had contracted to repair damage caused by the rainstorm, to the front portico and to re-wash, in white, limed paint, the entire façade, I seldom undertook the more elaborate drawings that had been my regular practice since arriving with Eugénie, though from time to time I would extract the journals in which I’d drafted them, documents I kept carefully hidden in a storage space underneath the head of my cot, which I had dug out over a period of months and re-covered with a large paving stone, to review them, usually with a bit of bemusement at the queer constellation of imagery and signification that I had developed—what on earth or in the heavens had I been thinking?—and with admiration that, despite all the constraints I had faced, from lack of materials to disapproval to potential punishment, I had produced so much and, I was not unashamed to say, of such a high quality. Of course no one else beyond Eugénie knew, and even she was unaware of the full extent of my efforts, not that she would have been able to appreciate them anyway. Sometimes I had the thought that I should share this work, at least with the bondswomen, but I decided that I would wait until I was surest the right time had come, and undoubtedly, it had not.
My other mode of drawing had not made an appearance for some time before nor once since the last and most egregious set of incidents, and it struck me that perhaps I was outgrowing my youthful lack of control, that I might be shedding whatever tether held me to realms which, despite the otherwise deepening clarity of my perception of the worlds around me, stayed still so concealed. In terms of my own will and gifts, I had begun to figure out ever more about how to initiate the night visits with my mother, summoning the door before my eyes, though I had not yet found the right key, among the many arrayed before me, that would open it; and as for whatever lay on the other side of those drawings, with their arsenals of augury and admonition, I had not yet developed a theory of knowledge by which to understand them. Or rather perhaps I had, but lacked a language to characterize and describe them. It struck me that the spells and the drawings themselves might be a language, but this seemed so exploratory and fantastic, that I set aside further consideration of it, and instead reflected, when the thought struck me, on the process of my experience and practice of those episodes.
The air, though cool, was heavy; the room, lacking any windows, hunkered near to darkness. Sr. François Agnès, having begun to tell me how “Hell had come to St. Francis,” the “embrace of the tropics had forced the relaxation of the convent’s routines” and that “this was, pains seize St. Agatha, the sort of liberalization one would never see in the Low Countries,” had promptly tumbled off to sleep, her snoring gradually filling the room like water finding its level. I stood and decided to make a round, to see what was going on, and responding, if I were questioned, that I was on my way to one of my tasks, which, to be truthful, was the truth. As I often now did when I wanted to pass unnoticed from one part of the convent to another, I imagined myself the shadow I had been at Valdoré, where no white person, save Eugénie, had ever seemed capable of seeing me. Had M. Nicolas de L’Écart ever noticed my presence? Had M. Olivier? Had his wife? For that matter even the bondspeople had rarely seemed to register when I stood among them. I wondered where most of them now were, the ones who had successfully escaped Valdoré’s vise, France’s visible and invisible chains.
I glided along the wooden floors without a single creak. As usual I wore no shoes; my hem floated off the ground; my pace was slow enough that I might even have gotten behind time itself. The heat seemed to form a curtain through which I had to press myself, though I did so with a minimum
of effort. In the sewing room all the white girls save Eugénie had stretched out on cots, and were sound asleep, as was Sr. Charles Thérese, who slumped over the table, the books arrayed about her like an archipelago. Quiet preceded me down the hall; near the kitchen, I could hear the gentle snoring of Rochelle, who had, I imagined, fallen asleep with the soup on boil, its aromas of barley and sage wafting through the door’s slit. I roused her, by means of a thought, and the snoring ceased. Presently I heard wood against metal, and the beginning of a soulful melody she routinely sang.
Upstairs, on the main floor, the heat was stronger still, though I could smell the outdoors blowing in through windows open on the building’s backside. My girls were seated in the refectory, on the floor against the back wall, their heads nodding in near-silent slumber. I did not want them to encounter any problems, so I woke them without entering the room, and could hear them stirring, as if to return to their duties, or at least to the semblance thereof. Across the hall I peeked in the chapel, where the Mother Superior, Sr. Alphonse Isabelle, and Sr. Charles Thérèse were curled into their chairs, the Holy Virgin Mother beaming down upon them, their books in their laps, their ivory guimpes and dun scapulars undulating rhythmically, their veils tousled over their shoulders like loose hair. For a second I drew the statue’s gaze to my own, then proceeded on toward the back porch, which led directly onto the gardens and the fields. There was a low buzz, as if people were talking but wishing hard not to be heard. Through the open door and through a large pane I could see Hubert, a kerchief on his head, toiling away with a hoe.
As I approached the doors the voices became more distinct, but I saw no one in the room. Crossing the threshold, I approached the window in which Hubert’s dark shirtless back and kerchiefed crown bobbed, like a millpiece, and I paused only when I reached the glass, which gave off heat as if it were molten. The voices were now clear, and clearly in French, behind me. I turned around to see the brown, hooded cassock of Fr. Malesvaux hunching over something fast against the wall. I hid myself beneath the table beside me, though given his lack of reaction, he evidently had not seen me. He shifted the angle of his cassock and from behind it emerged Eugénie, her face flushed, her hair plastered to her head. Both her pinafore and Fr. Malesvaux’s gown, I could now see, were soaked through. The two struggled, in silence, he holding her wrists tightly and saying without saying in two weeks in two weeks while trying to extricate himself, she responding you don’t understand you don’t, until finally he caressed her face, her hair and hurried out the door.
Eugénie stood alone, against the wall, looking as if she wanted scream or cry, but knowing better. I thought of calling attention to myself, but I decided instead to observe her. For a while she remained in the same spot, alternatively despondent and elated, occasionally looking toward the window and the outdoor scene above me, intermittently at the skirt of her pinafore, which she ruffled and smoothed. Her thoughts were cycling so swiftly and dully through her head she would not been able to articulate them had she tried. She bent down and raised a discarded shingle, fanning herself for a while, until I grew tired of the episode, whose overall meaning had grown clear to me, and drew her eyes in my direction. She froze. She could not see me, of course, and peered all around her, as if I had placed my gaze throughout the room. She glanced at the table behind which I knelt, and after taking one step in my direction, she wheeled on her heel and fled down the hallway.
I resumed watching Hubert for a while, until he broke to head to the well, where I spotted Job White Jr. refreshing himself from the bucket. At this point I also left the closed portico and headed back to the basement.
A dialogue
[. . .]
I refuse to think of them as wasted opportunities to save myself, but rather as stages in my careful process of preparation.
[. . .]
I am more than ready and willing to take action.
[. . .]
I think I have finally come to understand your logic.
Have I ever had a vision of Hell, that place to which this faith—in whose intimate and suffocating grasp I have passed the last few years of my life—and to which Eugénie, from our very first days together in Saint-Domingue, had constantly threatened the Heavenly Father would consign me? I have not. Or rather I have, but yet never have I devoted more than the bare minimum of my interest to it. I know the Hell of the Gospels and le catéchisme, the sermons of Fr. Malesvaux and other priests, the tuition and exams of Srs. Charles Thérèse and Ambrose Jeanne. I have pictured it, perhaps I have even drawn versions of it, though it has never meant anything more than the illustration of an exercise, a foreign mote of knowledge, to me. Have I however lived a form of Hell, lived in one, or perhaps several? Most certainly, and perhaps am in one now.
Of course there are Hells and there are hells, which is really a statement of banalities, for there are degrees of horror, of horrors, which we all witness and live through, sometimes directly, often indirectly, and it is the immediacy of horror, its sublimity and our incapacity even to reflect upon it, though we may indelibly remember it, that shapes our sense of what a particular hell, or Hell itself, may be.
The word itself had begun to foam, like spittle, on Eugénie’s lips every time she eyed me, though she did not dare utter it, or cast a single aspersion in my direction. Instead, as the weeks crept forward through the infernal heat, she crept with utmost care around me, taking care not to offend me even in the slightest, as if she could tell, though I would not have deigned to tell her, that the departure of Diejuste and Ayidda, whose superintendents had finally been fetched home by their parents, opened a hole in my affections. We had not grown as close as I liked, but we nevertheless passed increasing amounts of time in each others’ company, Diejuste’s bright humor and wit clarifying as we sat and packed crates of pamphlets, Ayidda’s skill at producing seemingly insignificant signs that needed only the right person to decode them providing me with an intellectual and spiritual workout of the kind I had not encountered before. I woke one morning, after a troubled sleep, with a severe headache, a novelty for me, and when I reached the refectory, I saw that there were two fewer white girls at the table and knew instantly that early that morning, Josephine and Mary Margaret, with Diejuste and Ayidda in tow, had gone. That left only Marinette, whose temper was still occassionally a challenge, as a companion, though we seldom found ourselves together for long.
As we passed in the hallways we would share thoughts, ideas, dreams: she longed first of being manumitted and going to live in Washington, where she had relatives and where she had been born, though she’d been sold off when the first estate to which she had belonged had been divided, at the death of its owner. Phedra, it turned out, was not her sister by blood, though they had been raised together as if they were. She had never heard of Ayiti. She also did not know much French beyond what she had picked up during her short stay, and no Kreyòl or Latin at all. I tried my best, in the slots of time alotted to us, to rectify that. Her temper, she realized, was like the wick of a lamp too often turned to its brightest setting, and though she had cause, as we all did, she was learning, striving, to lower it. We tried to arrange a time in which I might show her my drawings, but Annie Lawrie, who like Eugénie had been left in the nun’s care, was now demanding as much of her time, if not more so, as Eugénie had previously required of me.
One night following a day so hot that it appeared to have scorched much of the foliage to a brown fur, I woke to hear Eugénie creeping
past my bed. The room was black as the moment before a nightmare. She no longer bothered to force me to pack her sheets in her absence; everyone in the convent was usually so drained by the heat that they slept as if drugged. I turned over on my side, away from her, and tried to go back to my dream, in which Phedra and I were slowly walking across the river, but I could hear the white girl fumbling through my papers, so I sat up, as quietly as possible. What was she looking for? She tossed several things into a cloth sack, replaced the floor stone and bustled out of the room. When I was sure she was halfway down the hall, I trailed her.
She advanced through the darkness more quickly than I would have imagined, but I could still make her out. She was, I knew, going to meet with Fr. Malesvaux, perhaps to show him my handiwork, though to what purpose I could not foretell. Perhaps she now bore his child, and she was planning yet again to run away, this time with him. Let her go with him, I would not try to stop her, I had plans of my own. I was curious, however, about why she had taken my art. She made her way not to the first floor’s rear portico, where I had seen them before, but continued upstairs, to the attic, moving almost soundlessly and without a single stumble, which made me realize that she probably had practiced and traced this route multiple times. At end of the hall, however, I could hear a din, almost imperceptible but enough to gain my attention, coming from the direction of the town. I pulled back one of the velvet curtains to see what was going on. There were tiny pinpricks of light flaring from Gethsamane, but intermittently. Nothing, at least from this distance, was clear.