Counternarratives (14 page)

They were instructed in deportment: modesty, charity,
gentility. The nuns usually accomplished this through positive reinforcement and
penance, though they turned to more forceful methods when needed, for not only
sunlight gilds the marigold. The curriculum consisted of the practical arts, as
well as courses in basic theology, introductory mathematics, and French and
Latin grammar. Only amongst themselves did the girls speak English. They were
taught to sew, weave and darn; appraise the quality of materials and goods and
be judicious; to bake, cook simple meals and supervise more elaborate ones; to
conserve household resources for times of need; clean and oversee workers to
ensure a proper home; preserve produce and meats; and propagate a sustaining and
decorative garden. Like Eugénie, several of the girls were from border or
Southern states and had brought a slave girl or woman. The nuns permitted these
bondswomen to receive a minimal instruction, in French, in order to follow along
in the recitation of the Bible and prayers, during the thirty minutes of repose
after the Sunday Mass.

SELECTED RULES
(printed and bound at
the Convent of Our Lady of the Sorrows)

• 7.
  Girls shall not take the Lord's name in vain
  or utter any blasphemy, nor repeat any calumny against or concerning the
  Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.
  
• 8.
  Girls shall not dishonor or disrespect the
  Blessed Sisters or their fellow students.
  
• 9.
  Girls shall not gossip or engage in idle or
  slanderous discourse.
  
• 10.
  Girls shall not promenade around the Convent
  or its grounds as if on display, nor journey about the Convent or its
  grounds unsupervised except in groups of three (servants shall not count
  toward the total).
  
• 11.
  Girls shall not under any circumstances
  venture into the village of Hurttstown without the escort of a nun and a
  townsperson.
  
• 12.
  Girls shall not send notes or communicate
  with or enter into any written intercourse with residents of the town.
  
• 13.
  Girls shall avoid all license and
  provocation, in thought and deed.
  
• 14.
  Girls shall treat all of God's creatures,
  even those of the lowest station or caste, or of the smallest size, with
  love and respect, for whatsoever they do to the least of His brothers, that
  they render undo Him.
  

After only several weeks Eugénie found the
routine intolerable. She bridled at the endless carousel of classes, courses in
domestic arts and etiquette, prayers in the chapel, and labor. As in all
convents, the greatest practical evil, after apostasy, was idleness. She had
been neither pious nor obedient under more favorable circumstances, and she
lacked any foundation for managing the conditions at the convent, which offered
her no means for fostering personal happiness. She was inattentive in class,
insolent to her superiors, indifferent in chapel, and at all times indolent, in
the manner she'd witnessed since childhood among women of her class and which
would have been suitable under the dictates of a different and vanished social
order, which is to say, normal circumstances. Under her requisite mud-brown
frock, which covered her wrists and boots, she sometimes secretly wore a lace
shift pilfered from her late mother. Although the nuns forbade any forms of
physical adornment, she would sometimes apply carmine blush, which she hid in a
tin box below a loose paving stone in the dormitory floor, to her white cheeks
after sundown.

Eugénie had always mistaken Carmel's dutifulness for
devotion. Now she saw her slave as her primary means of emotional support, so
she was initially kind and solicitous, assisting Carmel in making her bed and
plaiting her hair, though she quickly tired of extending herself in this manner,
and reimposed their longstanding hierarchy. She subjected Carmel to tirades
about the food, the heat, the difficulty of the coursework, the chilliness and
poor French and comparatively low stations of the other girls, and about her
aunt's and uncle's unremitting cruelty in having sentenced her to this fate.
Carmel stood at the side of Eugénie's bed, staring at her mistress and awaiting
an order, thereby giving the impression of agreement.

Carmel's true enthusiasm lay in Eugénie's books, from
which she devised her own curriculum. She enjoyed the ecclesiastical Latin,
which she learned to read and write; she had already begun assimilating the
rudiments of English, as well as French grammar, during her Maryland sojourn,
and spent part of her free time perfecting them. During the convent meals on
Saturdays, which the schoolgirls themselves were required to serve, and the
periods before evening prayers and lights-out, Carmel worked her way through the
Bible, the Catechism and The Martyrology; she used her readings to wordlessly
tutor Eugénie, who could not be bothered to open a book unless she was in class.
She usually wrote out Eugénie's lessons, while the white girl lay on her bed
under the flickering lantern light and whispered rambling monologues, half truth
and half apostatic fantasy, on her exploits earlier in the day, in Maryland, in
the capital. Eugénie claimed to have been courted by a banker; proposed to by a
prosperous trader, as well as a sitting Senator; and to have slept overnight in
a rooming house of dubious repute not far from the White House. She claimed to
have slipped away and combed the streets of Hurttstown, which she pronounced
nothing more than an overgrown sty, and to have explored the woods and valleys
near the Indian encampments. Carmel accepted these tales without astonishment,
committing them to memory, and when she could find pen and paper, sketched some
of them out, concealing the papers in a gash in her mistress's straw mattress so
that the nuns could not easily find them.

In general, Carmel found her routine bearable,
since it gave her numerous breaks from Eugénie and opportunities to experience
the world, even if that world was the severely restricted space of the convent
and of her required duties. She enjoyed her own weekly, half-hour Catechism
sessions with the nuns, which allowed her to expand her grasp of grammar and
rhetoric, and the periods of common-work, during which the other slave girls and
women, under the supervision of one of the sisters, sometimes convened to
undertake joint projects.

Carmel had grown accustomed to isolation and solitude at
Valdoré and valued every moment away from Eugénie as an opportunity to learn and
cultivate herself. No matter; the other slave girls took offense at the fact
that she did not sleep in the cramped and spartan quarters out back with them,
not realizing that her mistress had demanded special dispensation on her behalf.
They took offense at her height, which stamped her with an Amazonian air; at her
self-possession, which they read as arrogance; they took offense at her
bookishness, which struck them as pretentious; they took greatest offense at her
unbreachable silence. Almost to a person, they read this as a white contempt;
her unassimilable refusal to communicate in a sensible way defied their sense of
shared suffering and solidarity. All of them maintained their distance,
gossiping about her constantly, spreading stories, when possible, to the few
slaves in town: she only spoke when casting spells; she was actually a zombie;
she might not really be a female at all. She responded by focusing more intently
on whatever task was at hand, to the point that some of the nuns thought her the
very model of industry and dedication.

After the first month, Eugénie spent her free time
developing affections for classmates. She was devoted to a skinny, raven-headed
girl from Bardstown, Kentucky, but dropped her for the polished admiral's
daughter from Delaware, before heedlessly pursuing another recently arrived
young white woman from Vincennes. Eugénie had Carmel write out long, passionate
notes to each, slapping her hands when she miswrote, before ordering her to burn
them. After lights out, Eugénie would practice her affections upon Carmel, who
usually concentrated as completely as possible upon a text she had memorized
that morning or a drawing that she'd been working on, until her mistress tired
and fell asleep, at which point she would get up and draw for an hour by
candlelight on scraps of paper she had salvaged furtively from the printing shop
earlier in the day.

Carmel's drawings

Her mother serving as a lookout in the banana trees along the
road to Valdoré—Christ on the mountain top—Christ among a crowd of rebels,
giving a sermon on the banks of the Grand'Anse—Ruth—her father at the Francis
homestead on the Potomac—General Napoleon and president Jefferson chatting on a
Washington street—M. Nicolas reclining between the thighs of Alexis on a divan
in the library at Valdoré—Jacinthe standing above the Christ child's manger—an
exterior of the convent after a heavy snowfall—St. Benedict the Moor—
INRI
in the outline of a fish (repeated until it covers
the tiny square of vellum) —Africans genuflecting in the chapel at Valdoré—Saint
Monica—Kiskeya—General Dessalines on his black-throated horse in the main street
in Jérémie—the Mermaid-Divinity La Sirène—tous les loas—Mam'zabelle standing
over a shallow pit behind the slave quarters as her mother solemnly drums on the
maman—her father in the whale's throat—in the Cuban dog's—a circle of Chickasaws
building a fire—micha ai illi aiokhlileka okfah kia ak ayah mak osh—her young
mistress recumbent as an odalisque on a filthy pallet in an Alexandria rooming
house—a map of the surrounding area—the county—a map of Kentucky and Illinois
territory—a map of

Eugénie's second assigned rotation required her
to assist one of the novices in arranging, labeling and packing up pamphlets,
printed on the convent's press, as well as sundry dry goods in the storehouse.
These included fruit and vegetable preserves, votives and other religious
artifacts, such as rosaries, which Rochelle in her free time created, which were
then sold through peddlers to Catholics living further south and west beyond the
Northwest and Louisiana territories. The nuns also brewed their own spirits from
harvested apples and berries, though they kept these for personal use, as they
dared not provoke the temperate among the townspeople. A young carpenter from
Gethsemane named Jacob Greaves, nephew of Reverend White, who had helped the
nuns construct their still and oak casks, was again on the grounds to build a
new annex to the storehouse. It did not take long, Carmel quickly noted, for
something indistinct to begin spinning between Eugénie and Greaves, like a
thread of freshly blown glass: brittle chatter, sly and expressive glances, a
note catching in the throat for a second too long. No one else around them
noticed a thing. Carmel detected periodic upswings in her mistress's mood, and
Greaves's name surfacing more than once in Eugénie's monologues to her.

The late fall began its collapse into winter. Each night
the hearthless bedchambers chilled like tombs, and the nuns, to maintain a
proper atmosphere of asceticism, permitted only one heavy wool blanket and
quilted eiderdown per girl. The conditions only magnified the hardship for
Carmel, who half-slept on a low cot, bundled in her clothes and her mistress's
cape. Eugénie had become increasingly distant, moving about as if in a dream, to
the extent that she often appeared to forget that her slave girl was even in
attendance. On certain nights after lights out, Carmel would hear her slip away,
as she had done in Washington, though she always returned before dawn. Once she
reappeared with the fragrance of apple wine on her breath; another with her
woollen shift's back blackened with peat. One thing she rarely forgot was to
have Carmel artfully pack her bed with a sack of rags and place her bonnet at
its head, in case the nuns conducted a room check. She swore the slave girl to
silence—she was not to reveal anything, not even in confession, though this was
unlikely since Carmel bore on her conscience none of her actions on behalf of
Eugénie's schemes; she was only carrying out her duties as commanded. In any
event as far as she knew none of the priests who visited periodically accorded
slaves that rite.

Carmel usually spent the immediate half-hour or so
after her mistress's departures at her favorite pursuit. She had completely
filled one of the spare handbound diaries that Mrs. Francis had sent her niece,
and was now beginning another. The mattress could no longer hold all of her work
including the books, so she began concealing them beneath the false floor in her
mistress's trunk. She hid her tin thimble, which served as an inkwell, and the
old quills she'd collected from the convent's scriptorium in the corner behind
her pallet. None of the regular, official inspections of Eugénie's room had
uncovered either.

On the last night of October, a severe chill settled in,
then a light rain began falling. Eugénie vanished not long after evening
prayers. Carmel, who for a week had been feeling alternately restless and easily
peeved, had wanted to show her that earlier that day she had finally passed into
womanhood. Since Eugenie was gone, however, she readied her mistress's bed, but
noticed that the sack of rags, along with several pieces of Eugénie's clothing,
were missing. She'd put the clean laundry away and balled up two petticoats to
fashion a sleeping body. Once she'd tucked it in, she fished out her book, her
quill and her drawing book, and returned to a drawing she had been working on,
depicting the meadow, spread out like a sheet of lodencloth, behind the convent.
Though she had only black ink, she found herself wanting to work in color and
envisioning other methods for realizing her fertile imagination, such as
embroidery and painting. The nuns would forbid either option unless she were
depicting religious scenes. The white rain, rhythmically painting the
windowpanes, began to lull her. The room assumed a strange and heavy dampness.
As she started to crosshatch a poplar tree, her eyes rolled into the ceiling. On
a blank page was drawn a rough map of the region, labeling the convent, the
nearby town, the brown scythe of the Tennessee. Halfway through
Gethsamane-Hurttstown, a line, but abruptly it broke off. Instead the quill
punched in wavy lines, some of which gouged the paper; these stretched from the
center of the river all the way across the town itself. Her fingers began moving
more and more rapidly, drawing the waves automatically, until she bowed the
quill completely back, nearly snapping it. Spent, her forehead veiled with sweat
and her eyes still cycling, she trembled, unsure where she was, but out of habit
tamped the wick so as not to arouse the nun conducting that night's inspections.
She slid the book, under the bed, and—