Counternarratives (12 page)

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 sound 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.

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