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?”