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.
De L’Écart, in short, was holding out for the restoration of the prevailing order. As soon as the governor — General Rochambeau — or another French leader suppressed the hordes and reclaimed the colony — whether or not France and Britain signed a peace — de L’Écart aimed to acquire a slew of new, well-broken slaves to rebuild his patrimony. Both Leclerc and Napoleon had promised not only the rounding up and return of all fugitives, but the complete resumption of bondage. There is order, and there is the order. For more than three decades Nicolas de L’Écart had been one of the prominent grand blancs in the South District, administering the estate that his grandfather, Lézard L’Écart, an indefatigable naval mechanic in the employ of the French crown, had established at the end of the long reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King. While de L’Écart found it inconceivable that Napoleon’s forces would fall to unlettered gangs and maroons, in the event that the blacks did triumph, he had nevertheless drawn up plans to depart for Santiago de Cuba, where he had purchased a large plot of land for coffee cultivation. Were things to reach that nadir, he planned to take only Alexis and several of his able-bodied adult male slaves, and as many of his possessions as he could fit into several large carriages. He was determined not to leave the world under conditions substantially reduced from those in which he entered it.
One morning in mid-summer 1803, after the British bombardment had abated, Nicolas de L’Écart rode west with Alexis to attend the funeral and auction of his cousin, Ludovic Court-Bourgeois-L’Ecart, a fellow coffee planter, whose estate, Haut-les-Pins, perched high above the coastal town of Cap Dame-Marie. Court-Bourgeois-L’Écart had perished after a bout with the creeping fever, and the news of this turn of events, along with the murder of several neighboring planters — and in spite of the French Negro ally Dessalines’ campaign to return escaped slaves to their plantations, which was succeeding on estates near Mirogoâne and Jacmel — had finally convinced de L’Écart that he should depart for Cuba. As he and Alexis headed east, cannonade shredded the hills in the far distance.