The Autobiography of My Mother

by Jamaica Kincaid

  I met Monsieur and Madame in the afternoon, a hot afternoon. They were that to me then—Monsieur and Madame. I met her first, alone; he was in a room by himself, in another part of their house, a room where he kept money which he liked to count over and over again; it was not all the money in the world that he had. When I first met Madame LaBatte, she was standing in the doorway of her nice house, the front doorway, with its nice clean yard full of flowers and piles of stones neatly arranged; to her left and to her right were two large clumps of plumbago with blue flowers still in the hot air. She wore a white dress made of a coarse cloth decorated with embroidery stitching of flowers and leaves; I noticed this because it was a dress people in Mahaut would have worn only to church on Sundays. Her dress was not worn out and it was clean; it was not in a stylish cut but loose, fitting her badly, as if her body was no longer of any interest to her. My father spoke to her, she spoke to my father, she spoke to me; she looked at me, I looked at her. It was not to size each other up; I did not know what she thought she saw in my eyes, but I can say now that I had an instinctive feeling of sympathy for her. I did not know why sympathy, why not the opposite of that, but sympathy was what I felt all the same. It might have been because she looked so much like someone who had gotten something she so very much wanted.

  She had very much wanted to marry Monsieur LaBatte. I was told that by the woman who came each day to wash their clothes. To want desperately to marry men, I have come to see, is not a mistake women make, it is only, well, what else is left for them to do? I was never told why she wanted to marry him. I made a guess: he had a strong body, she was drawn to his strong body, his strong hands, his strong mouth; it was a big wide mouth and it must have covered hers up whenever he kissed her. It swallowed mine up whenever he kissed me. She was not a frail woman when they first met, she became frail only afterward; he wore her out. When they first met, he would not marry her. He would not marry any woman. They would bear him children, and if the children were boys, these boys were given his full name, but he never married the mothers. Madame LaBatte found a way: she fed him food she had cooked in a sauce made up of her own menstrual blood, which bound him to her, and they were married. In time this spell wore off and could not be made to work again. He turned on her—not in anger, for he never became aware of the trap that had been set for him—he turned on her with the strength of that weapon he carried between his legs, and he wore her out. Her hair was gray, and not from age. Like so much about her it had just lost its vitality, it lay on her head without any real life to it; her hands hung at her side, slack. She had been beautiful when she was young, the way all people are, so beautiful when they are young, but on her face then was the person she had really become: defeated. Defeat is not beautiful; it is not ugly, but it is not beautiful. I was young then; I was young, I did not know. When I looked at her and felt sympathy, I also felt revulsion. I thought, This must never happen to me, and I meant that I would not allow the passage of time or the full weight of desire to make a pawn of me. I was young, so young, and felt my convictions powerfully; I felt strong and I felt I would always be so, I felt new and felt I would always be so, too. And at that moment the clothes I was wearing became too small, my bosoms grew out and pressed against my blouse, my hair touched my shoulders in a caress that caused me to shiver inside, my legs were hot and between them was a moisture, a sweet smelly stickiness. I was alive; I could tell that standing before me was a woman who was not. It was almost as if I sensed a danger and quickly made myself a defense; in seeing the thing I might be, I too early became its opposite.

  She liked me. This woman liked me; her husband liked me; it pleased her that he liked me. By the time he emerged from the room where he kept his money, to greet my father and me, Madame LaBatte had already told me to make myself at home, to regard her as if she were my own mother, to feel safe whenever she was near. She could not know what such words meant to me, to hear a woman say them to me. Of course I did not believe her, I did not fool myself, but I knew she meant them when she was saying those things to me, she really meant to say them. I liked her so very much, her shadow of her former self, so grateful for my presence, no longer alone with her prize and her defeat. He did not speak to me right away; he did not care that it was me and not someone else my father had asked him to accommodate. He liked the quiet greed of my father, and my father liked the simple greed in him. They were a match; one could betray the other at any time, perhaps at that moment they already had. Monsieur LaBatte was already a rich man, richer than my father. He had better connections; he had not wasted his time marrying a poor Carib woman for love.

  * * *

  I lived in this household, occupying a room that was attached to the kitchen; the kitchen was not a part of the house itself. I was enjoying the absence of the constant threat posed to me by my father’s wife, even as I could feel the burden of my life: the short past, the unknown future. I could write letters to my father, letters that contained simple truths: the days seemed shorter in Roseau than the days in Mahaut, the nights seemed hotter in Roseau than the nights in Mahaut. Madame LaBatte is so very kind to me, she saves as a special treat for me a part of the fish that I love. The part of the fish that I love is the head, something my father would not have known, something I had no reason to believe he wished to know. I sent him these letters without fear. I never received a direct reply; he sent word to me in the letters he wrote to Monsieur LaBatte; he always hoped I was getting along in a good way and he wished me well.

  My deep friendship, for it was that, a friendship—perhaps the only one I have ever had—with Madame LaBatte continued to grow. She was always alone. This was true even when she was with others, she was so alone. She thought that she made me sit with her as she sat on the verandah and sewed or just looked out with a blankness at the scene in front of her, but I wanted to sit with her. I was enjoying this new experience, the experience of a silence full of expectation and desire; she wanted something from me, I could tell that, and I longed for the moment to come, the moment that I would know just what it was she wanted. It never crossed my mind that I would refuse her. One day, without any preparation, she gave me a beautiful dress that she no longer wore; it still fit her, but she no longer wore it. As I was trying on the dress I could hear her thoughts: she was thinking of her youth, the person she used to be when she first wore the dress she had just given me, the things she had wanted, the things she had not received, the shallowness of her whole life. All this filled the air in the room we were in, the room in which was the bed she slept in with her husband. My own thoughts answered hers: You were foolish; you should not have let this happen to you. It is your own fault. I was without mercy, my condemnations filled my head with a slow roar until I thought I would faint, and then this thought came upon me slowly, saving me from doing so: She wants to make a gift of me to her husband; she wants to give me to him, she hopes I do not mind. I was standing in this room before her, my clothes coming off, my clothes going on, naked, clothed, but the vulnerability I felt was not of the body, it was of the spirit, the soul. To communicate so intimately with someone, to be spoken to silently by someone and yet understand more clearly than if she had shouted at the top of her voice, was something I did not experience with anyone ever again in my life. I took the dress from her. I did not wear it, I would never wear it; I only took it and kept it for a while.

  The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable. I was sitting, late one day, in a small shaded area behind the house, where some flowers were planted, though this place could not be called a garden, for not much care was applied to it. The sun had not yet set completely; it was just at that moment when the creatures of the day are quiet but the creatures of the night have not quite found their voice. It was that time of day when all you have lost is heaviest in your mind: your mother, if you have lost her; your home, if you have lost it; the voices of people who might have loved you or who you only wish had loved you; the places in which something good, something
you cannot forget, happened to you. Such feelings of longing and loss are heaviest just in that light. Day is almost over, night has almost begun. I did not wear undergarments anymore, I found them uncomfortable, and as I sat there I touched various parts of my body, sometimes absentmindedly, sometimes with a purpose in mind. I was running the fingers of my left hand through the small thick patch of hair between my legs and thinking of my life as I had lived it so far, fifteen years of it now, and I saw that Monsieur LaBatte was standing not far off from me, looking at me. He did not move away in embarrassment and I, too, did not run away in embarrassment. We held each other’s gaze. I removed my fingers from between my legs and brought them up to my face, I wanted to smell myself. It was the end of the day, my odor was quite powerful. This scene of me placing my hand between my legs and then enjoying the smell of myself and Monsieur LaBatte watching me lasted until the usual sudden falling of the dark, and so when he came closer to me and asked me to remove my clothes, I said, quite sure of myself, knowing what it was I wanted, that it was too dark, I could not see. He took me to the room in which he counted his money, the money that was only some of the money he had. It was a dark room and so he kept a small lamp always lighted in it. I took off my clothes and he took off his clothes. He was the first man I had ever seen unclothed and he surprised me: the body of a man is not what makes him desirable, it is what his body might make you feel when it touches you that is the thrill, anticipating what his body will make you feel, and then the reality becomes better than the anticipation and the world has a wholeness to it, a wholeness with a current running through it, a current of pure pleasure. But when I first saw him, his hands hanging at his side, not yet caressing my hair, not yet inside me, not yet bringing the small risings that were my breasts toward his mouth, not yet opening my mouth wider to place his tongue even deeper in my mouth, the limp folds of the flesh on his stomach, the hardening flesh between his legs, I was surprised at how unbeautiful he was all by himself, just standing there; it was anticipation that was the thrill, it was anticipation that kept me entralled. And the force of him inside me, inevitable as it was, again came as a shock, a long sharp line of pain that then washed over me with the broadness of a wave, a long sharp line of pleasure: and to each piercing that he made inside me, I made a cry that was the same cry, a cry of sadness, for without making of it something it really was not I was not the same person I had been before. He was not a man of love, I did not need him to be. When he was through with me and I with him, he lay on top of me, breathing indifferently; his mind was on other things. On a small shelf at his back I could see he had lined up many coins, their sides turned heads up; they bore the face of a king.

  In the room where I slept, the room with the floor of dirt, I poured water into a small tin basin and washed the thin crust of blood that had dried between my legs and down the inside of my legs. This blood was not a mystery to me, I knew why it was there, I knew what had just happened to me. I wanted to see what I looked like, but I could not. I felt myself; my skin felt smooth, as if it had just been oiled and freshly polished. The place between my legs ached, my breasts ached, my lips ached, my wrists ached; when he had not wanted me to touch him, he had placed his own large hands over my wrists and kept them pinned to the floor; when my cries had distracted him, he had clamped my lips shut with his mouth. It was through all the parts of my body that ached that I relived the deep pleasure I had just experienced. When I awoke the next morning I did not feel I had slept at all; I felt as if I had only lost consciousness and I picked up where I had left off in my ache of pleasure.

  It had rained during the night, a rain that was beyond torrential, and in the morning it did not stop, in the evening after the morning it did not stop; the rain did not stop for many, many days. It fell with such force and for such a long time that it appeared to have the ability to change the face and the destiny of the world, the world of the outpost Roseau, so that after it stopped, nothing would be the same: not the ground itself that we walked on, not the outcome of even a quarrel. But it was not so; after the rain stopped, the waters formed into streams, the streams ran into rivers, the rivers ran into the sea; the ground retained its shape. I was in a state of upheaval. I would not remain the same, even I could see that; the respectable, the predictable—such was not to be my own destiny.

  For the days and nights that the rain fell I could not keep to my routine: make my own breakfast, perform some household tasks in the main house in which Madame and Monsieur lived, then walk to my school, in which all the students were female, shunning their childish company, returning home, running errands for Madame, returning home, performing more household chores, washing my own clothes and generally taking care of my own self and things. I could not attend to any of that; the rain made it impossible.

  I was standing in the middle of a smaller version of the larger deluge; it was coming through the roof of my room, which was made of tin. There were the same sensations; I was not used to them yet, but the rain was familiar. A knock at the door, a command; the door shook open. She came to rescue me, she knew how I must be suffering in the wet, she had been in the kitchen and from there she could hear my suffering, caused by this unexpected deluge, this unconscionable downpour; to be alone in it would be the cause of much suffering for me, she could already hear me suffering so. But I was not making a sound at all, only the soft sighs of satisfaction remembered. She took me into the house; she made me coffee, it was hot and strong, with fresh milk he had brought that morning from some cows he kept not too far away from the house. He was not in the house now; he had come and he had gone away. I spent the day with her; I spent the night with him.

  It was not an arrangement made with words; it could not be made with words. On that day she showed me how to make him a cup of coffee; he liked to drink coffee with so strong a flavor that it overwhelmed anything that anyone wanted to put in it. She said this: “The taste is so strong you can put anything in it, he would never know.” When we were alone we spoke to each other in French patois, the language of the captive, the illegitimate; we never spoke of what we were doing, we never spoke for long, we spoke of the things in front of us and then we were silent. A silence had preceded the instructions to make coffee; a silence followed it. I did not say to her, I do not want to make him coffee, I shall never make him coffee, I do not need to know how to make this man coffee, no man will ever drink coffee from my hands made in that way! I did not say this. She washed my hair and rinsed it with a tea she had made from nettles; she combed it lovingly, admiring its thickness; she applied oil she had rendered from castor beans to my scalp; she plaited it into two braids, just the way I always wore it. She then bathed me and gave me another dress to wear that she had worn when she was a young woman. The dress fit me perfectly, I felt most uncomfortable in it, I could not wait to remove it and put on my own clothes again.

  We sat on two chairs, not facing each other, speaking without words, exchanging thoughts. She told me of her life, of the time she went swimming; it was a Sunday, she had been to church and she went swimming and almost drowned, and never did that again, to this day, many years after. It had happened when she was a girl; now she never goes into the water of the sea, she only looks at it; and to my silent question, whether when she looks at the sea she regrets that she is not now part of its everlastingness, she did not answer, she could not answer, so much sadness had overwhelmed her life. The moment she met her Monsieur LaBatte—she called him that then, she called him Jack later, she calls him Him now—she wanted him to possess her. She cannot remember the color of the day. He did not notice her, he did not wish to possess her; his arms were powerful, his lips were powerful, he walked with a purpose, even when he was going nowhere; she bound him to her, a spell, she wanted to graft herself onto him, the way it’s done with trees. She started in the world of the unnatural; she hoped to end in the world of the natural. She wanted only to have him; he would not be had, he would not be contained. To want what you will never have and to know
too late that you will never have it is a life overwhelmed with sadness. She wanted a child, but her womb was like a sieve; it would not contain a child, it would not contain anything now. It lay shriveled inside her; perhaps her face mirrored it: shriveled, dried, like a fruit that has lost all its juice. Did I value my youth, did I treasure the newness that was me, sitting next to her in a chair? I did not; how could I? In my loss column, youth had not been entered; in my loss column was my mother; love was not yet in my loss column. I had not yet been loved, I could not tell if the way she had combed my hair was an expression of love. I could not tell if the way she had gently bathed me, passing the piece of cloth over my breasts, between the front and back of my legs, down my thighs, down my calves—if that was love. I could not tell if wanting me dry when I was wet, if wanting me fed when I was hungry—if that was love. I had not had love yet, it was not in my column of gain, so it could not be in my column of loss. The rain fell and we no longer heard it, we would hear only its absence, my days full of silence yet crowded with words, my nights full of sighs, soft and loud with agony and pleasure. I would call out his name, Jack, sometimes like an epithet, sometimes like a prayer. We were never alone together, the three of us; she saw him in one room, I saw him in another. He never spoke to me, not even in silence. He was behaving in a way he knew well, I was following a feeling I had, I was acting from instinct. The feeling I had, the instinct I was acting from, were all new to me. She heard us. She never let me know that she did, that she could hear us. She had wanted a child, had wanted children; I could hear her say that. I was not a child, I could no longer be a child; she could hear me say that. She wanted something again from me, she wanted a child I might have; I did not let her know that I heard that, and this vision she would have, of a child inside me, eventually in her arms, hung in the air like a ghost, something only the special could see. Not for every eye, it was for my eyes, but I would never see it, and it would go away and come back, this ghost of me with a child inside me. I turned my back to it; my ears grew deaf to it; my heart would not beat. She was stitching me a garment from beautiful old cloths she had saved from the different times in her life, the happy times, the sad times. It was a shroud made of memories; how she wished to weave me into its seams, its many seams. How hard she tried; but with each click of the thimble striking the needle, I made an escape. Her frustration and my satisfaction were in their own way palpable.