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.