Counternarratives (13 page)

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.

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 reins, 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.