Eugénie was not there. I had already made my bed so I fiddled a bit with hers. I bundled her dirty clothes up and, exerting no real effort, lined her books up on her desk. She had forgotten to cork her ink bottle, to put her nibs away, to grab her writing book for class. I thought of taking it to her but decided not to. I set the main lamp outside our door so that it could be refilled for the evening, lazily brushed her shoes and beat out her pinafore, then closed up the room. This floor also was mostly quiet, though in the large room at the end, I knew, the class was unfolding. Behind me someone was padding quickly, and I turned to see Diejuste gathering up my lamp; we parried smiles. I proceeded down the hall until I reached the door of the class, which stood slightly ajar. All four of the white girls sat in a row at the first table, Eugénie on the end nearest me. I could hear Sr. Alphonse Isabelle’s voice rising and falling like a rattle. I stared at Eugénie until she was compelled to look in my direction, though by the time she, and the girls beside her, would have done so, I was already on my way back to the sewing room.
On duty
What is duty?
His maister had not half his duetee. (Chaucer)
Wherefore duty?
We have done that which was oure duetye to do. (Luke, Luke xii. f. xcviij Tyndale’s Bible)
What duty is due us?
To do one’s duty thoroughly is not easy in the most peaceable times. (Pattinson)
Whither duty?
No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. (Fanon)
The summer heat grew ever more tropical, provoking fainting spells and transforming the upper floors of the convent to a kiln. By late June, the nuns canceled all activities for the white girls and themselves, save prayer, from midday to the early evening, that could not be undertaken in the basement. We thus rose just before dawn, before the the sun broke, to fetch water, empty chamberpots, clean, cook, cultivate the garden, move all unused tools and implements, including a store of gunpowder, indoors, prepare whatever else was required for the white girls, and assist the sisters as they saw fit. The religious class moved into the sewing room, which had been my refuge, and I and Sr. François Agnès moved to a smaller room down the hall, a large closet really, which had been used for storage. It was far more cramped, but cool and peaceful, and as she assembled or disassembled garments, knit, embroidered, and darned, I worked on what I had at hand and tried to let my mind float free of everything around it.
Though I still read just before going to sleep and maintained my journal, my entries now tending towards a brevity so extreme that sometimes only a word or two, at most a sentence, resonant for my memory and me alone, would suffice, and I filled whatever space remained with minute line drawings of my fellow bondswomen, of the animals, of the grounds; and with caricatures of the nuns, the white girls, and the glimpses I had gotten of the townspeople and of the convent’s visitors, including the Reverend White’s son Job Jr., whom the nuns had contracted to repair damage caused by the rainstorm, to the front portico and to re-wash, in white, limed paint, the entire façade, I seldom undertook the more elaborate drawings that had been my regular practice since arriving with Eugénie, though from time to time I would extract the journals in which I’d drafted them, documents I kept carefully hidden in a storage space underneath the head of my cot, which I had dug out over a period of months and re-covered with a large paving stone, to review them, usually with a bit of bemusement at the queer constellation of imagery and signification that I had developed — what on earth or in the heavens had I been thinking? — and with admiration that, despite all the constraints I had faced, from lack of materials to disapproval to potential punishment, I had produced so much and, I was not unashamed to say, of such a high quality. Of course no one else beyond Eugénie knew, and even she was unaware of the full extent of my efforts, not that she would have been able to appreciate them anyway. Sometimes I had the thought that I should share this work, at least with the bondswomen, but I decided that I would wait until I was surest the right time had come, and undoubtedly, it had not.
My other mode of drawing had not made an appearance for some time before nor once since the last and most egregious set of incidents, and it struck me that perhaps I was outgrowing my youthful lack of control, that I might be shedding whatever tether held me to realms which, despite the otherwise deepening clarity of my perception of the worlds around me, stayed still so concealed. In terms of my own will and gifts, I had begun to figure out ever more about how to initiate the night visits with my mother, summoning the door before my eyes, though I had not yet found the right key, among the many arrayed before me, that would open it; and as for whatever lay on the other side of those drawings, with their arsenals of augury and admonition, I had not yet developed a theory of knowledge by which to understand them. Or rather perhaps I had, but lacked a language to characterize and describe them. It struck me that the spells and the drawings themselves might be a language, but this seemed so exploratory and fantastic, that I set aside further consideration of it, and instead reflected, when the thought struck me, on the process of my experience and practice of those episodes.
The air, though cool, was heavy; the room, lacking any windows, hunkered near to darkness. Sr. François Agnès, having begun to tell me how “Hell had come to St. Francis,” the “embrace of the tropics had forced the relaxation of the convent’s routines” and that “this was, pains seize St. Agatha, the sort of liberalization one would never see in the Low Countries,” had promptly tumbled off to sleep, her snoring gradually filling the room like water finding its level. I stood and decided to make a round, to see what was going on, and responding, if I were questioned, that I was on my way to one of my tasks, which, to be truthful, was the truth. As I often now did when I wanted to pass unnoticed from one part of the convent to another, I imagined myself the shadow I had been at Valdoré, where no white person, save Eugénie, had ever seemed capable of seeing me. Had M. Nicolas de L’Écart ever noticed my presence? Had M. Olivier? Had his wife? For that matter even the bondspeople had rarely seemed to register when I stood among them. I wondered where most of them now were, the ones who had successfully escaped Valdoré’s vise, France’s visible and invisible chains.
I glided along the wooden floors without a single creak. As usual I wore no shoes; my hem floated off the ground; my pace was slow enough that I might even have gotten behind time itself. The heat seemed to form a curtain through which I had to press myself, though I did so with a minimum of effort. In the sewing room all the white girls save Eugénie had stretched out on cots, and were sound asleep, as was Sr. Charles Thérese, who slumped over the table, the books arrayed about her like an archipelago. Quiet preceded me down the hall; near the kitchen, I could hear the gentle snoring of Rochelle, who had, I imagined, fallen asleep with the soup on boil, its aromas of barley and sage wafting through the door’s slit. I roused her, by means of a thought, and the snoring ceased. Presently I heard wood against metal, and the beginning of a soulful melody she routinely sang.
Upstairs, on the main floor, the heat was stronger still, though I could smell the outdoors blowing in through windows open on the building’s backside. My girls were seated in the refectory, on the floor against the back wall, their heads nodding in near-silent slumber. I did not want them to encounter any problems, so I woke them without entering the room, and could hear them stirring, as if to return to their duties, or at least to the semblance thereof. Across the hall I peeked in the chapel, where the Mother Superior, Sr. Alphonse Isabelle, and Sr. Charles Thérèse were curled into their chairs, the Holy Virgin Mother beaming down upon them, their books in their laps, their ivory guimpes and dun scapulars undulating rhythmically, their veils tousled over their shoulders like loose hair. For a second I drew the statue’s gaze to my own, then proceeded on toward the back porch, which led directly onto the gardens and the fields. There was a low buzz, as if people were talking but wishing hard not to be heard. Through the open door and through a large pane I could see Hubert, a kerchief on his head, toiling away with a hoe.