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
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.
A dialogue
[. .]
Where am I supposed to go?
[. .]
According to Amalie they’ve seized control of both banks of the Chaineau and are advancing up the Grande Anse.
[. .]
But I’ve never been over the water—
[. .]
Where am I supposed to go, and what I am to do when I get there?
[. .]
What am I supposed to do when I get there?
[. .]
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.