Counternarratives (11 page)

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.

The night before, de L'Écart had abruptly ordered Carmel
to prepare his emergency trunks. As per his orders, she filled them with freshly
scrubbed and sun-bleached ticking; sheets and pillowcases; towels; several
cotton nightshirts; a month's change of gentleman's wear, including scarves,
cravats, city shoes with brass buckles, as the gold and silver ones had already
been stolen; an oilcloth cape; an overcoat of boiled wool; two horsehair wigs
with sanitary powder; several boxes of French lavender soap; a writing set
(without embossed stationery); a cube of wax with the de L'Écart seal; several
shell combs; two straight razors, a strop and a whetstone; fragrant honey soap;
a square of lye; a mother-of-pearl-edged mirror; a deck of playing cards;
several bags of gunpowder; the engraved, amber-handled pistol and leather
holster; a box of lead roundballs; a briar pipe with a tin of Santiago tobacco;
a tinderbox and wrapped wicks; Alexis's favorite toy, a palm-sized Mexican
rubber ball; another large carved and polished rosewood implement, like an
arm-length squash, that smelled vaguely of the outhouse; and the Latin Bible de
L'Écart had purchased during his year in the Roman seminary.

About her own fate, he said nothing.

While taking a break to begin supper for her master,
Carmel felt a strange and powerful force, unlike anything she had experienced
before, seize her. As if she were in a trance, she rose and staggered down to
the cellar where she found a small stub of coal, and then as if pulled back up
by an invisible cord, rushed to de L'Écart's second-floor bedroom. She had the
sensation of wanting to cry out, as if someone were twisting the sounds out of
her throat, though she knew no sound would issue. On the
buttercream-and-buttercup covered wall facing his bed, whose chief additional
adornment beyond a crucifix was waterstains, her hand took over.

What Carmel draws

A road winding along the Grand'Anse through the hills above
Jérémie, which she covers with such dense and darkened foliage that she gouges
the surface of her father's mural. A white horse, astride which sits a tall,
gaunt black man, wearing a field cap, a workshirt, and breeches. He carries a
musketoon slung over his back. Alongside this rider and horse, another horse,
black, its teeth bared and its reins swooping upwards but unheld, forming an
arch. It bears no rider. Instead, high above it, a saint—no, a Frenchman, short
and lean in the hips hangs upside down, a cocked hat still on his head and his
hands extended as if he were diving. A pair of pince-nez hover before him. She
adds clouds, a moon, and beneath the respective white and black steeds the
block-lettered names
LXI
and
MONS
, before crossing out the second one:
MONS
.

When she finally drops the black nub, Carmel is too
drained to wash the wall or hide. She returns downstairs and falls dead asleep
beneath the kitchen table.

Nicolas de L'Écart did not have an opportunity,
however, to view her creation. As he and Alexis returned via a road that
descended through a hilly pass above the Rivière Chaineau, a band of rebels shot
up out of the ground before him. He reached for his flintlock, which he always
kept loaded, and cocked it to fire, but before he could, his horse reared,
hurling him into a deep and jagged crevasse. An insistent bachelor with no
issue, his estate by will and law passed into the hands of his younger brother,
Olivier.

From 1780, Olivier de L'Écart had practiced law in the
kingdom's colonial centers. In his private hours, he conducted studies on
boundary and treaty disputes, producing a monograph entitled
On the Legal
Matters Pertaining to the Royal Survey of the Antillean Islands
in
1785, as well as various pamphlets on related topics. In the autumn of 1789, as
the revolutionary clouds massed in Paris, he went to New York to advise the
French delegation on its negotiations with the new American republic. By the
coup d'état of 1792, he was in Philadelphia, where he successfully sat for the
bar. By the 11
^th
Germinal, he was again assisting French diplomats,
this time in Santo Domingo, with the civil ramifications of the Consulate's
proclamations; when he learned of his brother's death, he had lived there for
exactly two years. His American wife, Grace, came from an old Anglo-Catholic
family that owned extensive tobacco plantations in the Maryland Tidewater. Their
only child, a daughter, Eugénie, was nearly fourteen.

Olivier de L'Écart, like his brother, had been raised in
the provincial milieu of southwestern Saint-Domingue, and educated in Paris. He
had supported the King's laws and penal codes across the new world colonies
through his advocacy, and now his late brother's slaves were his own. He
nevertheless was a man of feeling; he had always maintained a strong inner
revulsion towards absolutism and the dominance of the aristocratic estate over
the others. In the tome-lined safety of his library in Philadelphia he had even
cheered those who had forced the royal hand on the tennis courts of Versailles,
and later seized the state outright. He aimed at some future stage in his life
to resolve this contradiction, though he had grasped at an early age that law
presented the best compromise. That the cause of equality, or liberty, seen in
another way, had culminated in brutality and the militarism of Napoleon,
however, just as Sainte-Domingue also had degenerated into its own terror, did
not surprise him. The rhetoric of the Enlightenment was a more powerful
stimulant than that which had enriched his family, because equality, he had more
than once penned in his journal, was the proper guiding principle, though in
practice it required severe restraint: “As distant as heaven is from the earth,
so is the true spirit of equality from that of extreme
equality . . .” (Montesquieu).

Upon learning of his brother's death, de L'Écart planned
to dispose of the estate as quickly as possible. He was not unamenable to
selling it to one of the local propertied mulattoes, since he had known several
of them since childhood and foresaw that ultimately much of the island would end
up as scraps in dark palms. His wife, however, pushed him to identify a buyer
first from his own station, or at least from any Frenchman who could post a
bond. It would, in any event, be sold. The capture just months before and the
subsequent death of L'Ouverture, who had cooperated repeatedly with French aims
only to see his loyalty betrayed convinced de L'Écart that quite soon, the
blacks, now awakened to their fate, would hereafter consent to be betrayed only
by blacks. As his parting act and as a gesture of his magnanimity, a virtue in
which he took considerable pride, he also planned to emancipate whatever slaves
were still at Valdoré.

Before departing for Jérémie, Olivier de L'Écart shipped
most of his personal effects forward to the home he had purchased in Georgetown,
as he intended to resume his law practice in the new capital of the United
States. He had also thought of sending his daughter on to the United States, but
his wife insisted, despite the perilous situation in major portions of the
colony, that the family not be separated, as the sapling flourishes best in the
forest. He did not bring the few servants who also belonged to his ménage,
despite his wife's request that he do so. From what he recalled during his last
visit several years before, there was still a small but loyal cohort on the
plantation, which would suffice for the purposes of his scheme.

Grace de L'Écart was not so eager to dispose of Valdoré.
She imagined the possibilities of society in Washington to be promising,
especially given her familial connections, but she had also dreamt of becoming a
plantation mistress, a role for which her upbringing had most thoroughly
prepared her. As it was, she had had to endure the snobbishness of the créole
planters and their spouses, and the vulgarity of the government functionaries
and the rich traders, as a barrister's wife; though her husband possessed both
wealth and prestige, and was of the landed colonial classes, even adopting the
de
, as became his father's right by the King's quill-strokes, he
had spent his adult life among this sphere essentially landless and in the
service of a government in Paris whose aims had long been held in mistrust.

Given this new change of fate, she was thus quite willing
to endure Valdoré's oppressive tropical heat and the summers of fever-bearing
mosquitoes, which, her husband had once joked to her, were the colony's true
masters. She was also ready to take reins over her own retinue of slaves, even
if the blacks of Saint-Domingue had tasted freedom and would only return to
their prior condition at penalty of death. If it meant a life among
French-speaking whites with airs and mulattoes grown so presumptuous as to
declare themselves on equal footing with their former masters, she would weather
it.

As soon as he had planted his trunks in the main
salle and inspected the house and near grounds, de L'Écart deputized three of
the male slaves that remained to serve as personal guards. A ricketed hunchback
of about 16, named Beauné or Boni, whom he found sleeping in the stables, was to
guard his wife and daughter; the second, Alexis, his brother's former groom, who
moved through the house as if it were his, was to accompany him at all times;
and the third, the middle-aged Ti-Louis, whose right hand had been lopped off at
some point in the past, was charged with guarding the grounds. De L'Écart then
rode off to the town hall in Jérémie.

In the meantime, Madame de L'Écart had Ti-Louis gather
the remaining female slaves. There were four—Amalie, who tended the few
remaining animals and the garden—she was Alexis's sister, and, younger than him,
in her late 20s; Joséphine, an elderly woman who was deaf and partially blind;
Jacinthe, another elderly woman of regal bearing who could barely cross the
room; and the long-legged, mute creature named Carmel. The Madame immediately
set Amalie and Josephine to cleaning the ground floor, while directing Carmel to
the upper storeys. The ungainly, very black woman-child who could not talk
particularly unnerved her.

When the tasks were underway, Mme. de L'Écart scoured the
pantry. The shelves contained half a dozen pulpy mangoes and sabrikos, three
furred malangas, a stalk of blackened bananas, covered bowls of horse chestnuts,
wormy meal, jerky, numerous tins that had been emptied of their spices and
nearly empty jars of English preserves, and a circle of hard, heavily molded
cheese. Roaches wove a sepia tapestry on one shelf, ants another on the floor.
Jacinthe, who had never labored in the de L'Écart kitchen, was told to prepare a
proper supper for the family. Mme. de L'Écart did not trust that the slaves
would not attempt to poison her, but she was certain, based on her quick review
of them, that the elderly Jacinthe had the most to lose by destroying the source
of her sustenance. Still, she stood watch in the kitchen until the meal was
complete.