* 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.