Counternarratives (10 page)

The status of the ancient Faith differed on the eastern
shores of the Mississippi and its southerly tributaries. A convent and school,
established at the turn of the nineteenth century, are referred to indirectly in
the records of His Holiness Bishop John Carroll of the Diocese of Baltimore,
whose curacy extended at that time to the far western frontiers of the virgin
Republic's lands. A specific reference may be found, however, in the personal
papers of Fr. Auguste-Marie Malesvaux, a native of Saint-Domingue, whose
evangelistic labors encompassed the Spanish and later French territories from
Louisiana as far north as the Great Lakes. Malesvaux offers brief notations on
the convent and school, which he asserts were the first in this region. Flemish
Nuns of the Order of the Most Precious Charity of Our Lady of the Sorrows
established both near the village of New Hurtts­town, in this frontier
region of western Kentucky, in 1800. Because the convent and school suddenly
vanished without a trace, and within several years the order itself disappeared
as well, and as the nearby non-Catholic settlement suffered through a series of
calamities before dwindling to near-extinction until its reestablishment in
1812, no other definitive records of this foundation remain.*
It was not until the Reverend Father
Charles Nerinckx, the native of Herfe-

*   Carmel was the lone child among the handful
of bondspeople remaining at Valdoré, the coffee plantation to which Olivier de
L'Écart returned in late July 1803. The estate, over which his elder brother
Nicolas had presided for more than two decades, clung like a forget-me-not to
the cliffs high above the coastal city of Jérémie, west of the Rivière
Grand'Anse, in the southern district of the colony of Saint-Domingue. Nearly all
of Valdoré's able-bodied bondswomen and men, who at the height of the estate's
prosperity numbered more than one hundred and twenty-five souls, had fled or
been slain during the successive waves of liberation, revolt and retribution
that had convulsed the colony since the first flash of rebellion in France. By
edict of the Revolution, they had already been freed, first across the sea and
on these shores again by Sonthonax's pen, against Nicolas de L'Écart's and the
other plantation owners' wishes. Then under the threat of Napoleon's guns they
had been captured or forced to return to Valdoré, and just as soon, many had
swiftly escaped—parents, children, all—into the surrounding green maze of
forests, hills and mountains, eventually joining or merging into the various
rebel fronts, including those led by the leaders Plymouth and Macaya, that
coursed throughout the long dagger of peninsula upwards into the Artibonite
Valley. Others nevertheless had pledged their futures and future freedom to the
Tricolor's military in its repeated campaigns to reclaim what had for years been
France's Caribbean mint.

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.