The Autobiography of My Mother

by Jamaica Kincaid

  And so I went to meet the man who had brought my sister to the bottom of a precipice, lying in a hospital bed, a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. He had never visited her in the hospital, perhaps he had not heard of her accident. She believed he had not; she certainly believed he had not; the messengers were not people she knew; they were not reliable. I was the one person who could get a message to him, but to beg such a thing of me was too humbling, to have me know that he had refused her wish was more than she could bear. I went to see him all the same. He was a vain man, but his vanity was of the ordinary kind; it did not come from some secret belief, some deep knowledge of himself, it came from something he believed other people saw when they looked at him, something in the way he carried himself, in the intense and compelling way he fixed his gaze on them, a certain gait he had in his walk. If I could have been amused, if I could have had time in my life for laughter, such a person as he was could have provided it.

  He had a mustache, a thick, sharp brush of bristles, which he caressed with the fingers of his left hand, no matter what the situation. I had already put the neck of my dress over my head, my arms through my sleeves; I was just putting my belt through its buckle when I told him that my sister was in the hospital, she had suffered an accident, and she longed to see him. He did not know Elizabeth had a sister, and when I asked him how would knowing such a thing have changed his world, he played with his mustache and laughed; it was a sound only he could hear. His hands had been incapable of providing pleasure, or even providing interest; his lips were wide and generous, they satisfied themselves. When I had left my sister’s bedside to go to see him, I was driven by curiosity, but it was not a curiosity of any intensity. In the end I wanted to see if it was not too late to dissuade her from making permanent the presence of this unworthy man in her life; in the end I did not care, and in the end again, it did not matter anyway.

  They were married, but years passed before the event took place: three, four, five, six, then seven. She was never well again after the accident. Her entire body was so marked by scars that it looked like a map on which the lines had been drawn and redrawn, the result of battles whose outcomes were never final. For a time she wept for days and nights. Then she stopped and never cried again. She waited. One day, not too long into her seven-year wait, a woman came to my father’s house and asked for my sister. When my sister came to her she pushed a small bundle into her arms and said that in the bundle was a child; she was its mother and Pacquet was its father. She then vanished. My sister and I took care of the child, though in reality it was I who did so, tending to its needs, for she was incapable of taking care of herself, much less a small child. The child did not thrive, and after two years it died of a disease said to be whooping cough. The child’s life passed unnoticed, as if it had never happened. My father forbade its burial in the same graveyard as his son, Alfred. In the end it was buried among a small sect of Christian believers, a sect my father did not think too much of.

  I was not invited to their wedding. There was nothing unusual about the day on which they were married. It rained on and off, the sky was the color of milk just let from a cow into an old pail; nothing held a portent of good or ill. Everything was indifferent to this match-up. My sister wore a dress of white silk; it came from far away, it came from China, but it was said that she was married in English silk. She wore pearls around her neck; my father had given them to her mother, I do not know from where he got them. She was beside herself with happiness. She was not beautiful. She had been left completely disfigured by the accident: her eyes were unable to focus properly, one leg was longer than the other, and she walked with a limp. It was not those things that made her not beautiful, for the internal chaos her unfocused sight caused her could have led to an expression of vulnerability on her face; the limp, too, might have caused anyone to feel sympathetic toward her. But it was not so; she became more arrogant, she acquired a coarseness to her voice, her gaze became a hard stare, her figure grew wide and slow; she was not fury itself, only a woman disappointed with love when it comes through a man.

  After they were married, they lived with her parents, a situation my father immediately, and correctly, guessed was a danger to me. Her husband did not love her, this she knew. He did not love me either; this she did not know. I called him Monsieur Pacquet, and this formality was meant to show a lack of interest, not to mention a lack of knowledge, in regard to him. He called me Mademoiselle; he could have called me Miss, but he liked the way the word passed through his lips, the flourish with which he said it. It was then that my father arranged for me to live with and work for his friend in Roseau, his friend the same doctor who had taken care of my sister when she was made an invalid and was lying in the hospital.

  What makes the world turn?

  Who would need an answer to such a question?

  A man proud of the pale hue of his skin cherishes it especially because it is not a fulfillment of any aspiration, it is his not through any effort at all on his part; he was just born that way, he was blessed and chosen to be that way and it gives him a special privilege in the hierarchy of everything. This man sits on a plateau, not the level ground, and all he can see—fertile meadows, vast plains, high mountains with treasure buried deep within, turbulent seas, calm oceans—all this he knows with an iron certainty should be his own. What makes the world turn is a question he asks when all that he can see is securely in his grasp, so securely in his grasp that he can cease to look at it from time to time, he can denounce it, he can demand that it be taken away from him, he can curse the moment he was conceived and the day he was born, he can go to sleep at night and in the morning he will wake up and all he can see is still securely in his grasp; and he can ask again, What makes the world turn, and then he will have an answer and it will take up volumes and there are many answers, each of them different, and there are many men, each of them the same.

  And what do I ask? What is the question I can ask? I own nothing, I am not a man.

  I ask, What makes the world turn against me and all who look like me? I own nothing, I survey nothing, when I ask this question; the luxury of an answer that will fill volumes does not stretch out before me. When I ask this question, my voice is filled with despair.

  There are seven days in a week, and why, I do not know. If I were to find myself in need of such things, days and weeks and months and years, it is not clear to me that I would arrange them the way I now find them. But all the same, here they are.

  It was a Sunday in Roseau; the streets were disturbing, half-empty, quiet, clean; the water in the harbor was still, as if it were in a bottle, the houses were without the usual quarrelsome voices, the sky was a blue that was at once overwhelming and ordinary. The population of Roseau, that is, the ones who looked like me, had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins, had long ago lost any connection to wholeness, to an inner life of our own invention, and since it was a Sunday, some of them now were walking in a trance, no longer in their right minds, toward a church or away from a church. This activity—going to church, coming from church—had about it the atmosphere of a decree. It also signified defeat yet again, for what would the outcome have been of all the lives of the conquered if they had not come to believe in the gods of the people who had conquered them? I walked by a church. The church itself, a small beautiful structure, was meant to imitate in its simplicity and unworldliness a similar structure in a tiny village in some dark corner of England. But this church, typical of its time and place in every way, was built, inch by inch, by enslaved people, and many of the people who were slaves died while building this church, and their masters then had them buried in such a way that when the Day of Judgment came and all the dead were risen, the enslaved faces would not be turned toward the eternal light of heaven but toward the eternal darkness of hell. They, the slaves, were buried with their faces turned away from the east. But did the slaves have an interest in seeing eternal light in the first place, and what if the s
laves preferred eternal darkness? The pitiful thing is, an answer to these questions is no longer of use to anybody.

  And so again, what makes the world turn? Most of the people inside that church would want to know. They were singing a hymn. The words were: “O Jesus, I have promised / To serve Thee to the end: / Be Thou for ever near me, / My Master and my friend.” I wanted to knock on the church door then. I wanted to say, Let me in, let me in. I wanted to say, Let me tell you something: This Master and friend business, it is not possible; a master is one thing and a friend is something else altogether, something completely different; a master cannot be a friend. And who would want such a thing, master and friend at once? A man would want that. It is a man who would ask, What makes the world turn, and then would find in his own reply fields of gravity, imaginary lines, tilts and axes, reason and logic, and, quite brazenly, a theory of justice. And when he is done with that, he will say, Yes, but what really makes the world turn? and his mouth, grim with scorn for himself, will say the words: Connive, deceive, murder.

  This man is not completely ignorant of the people inside the church, or those same people inside their small houses. His name is John or William, or something like that; he has a wife, her name is Jane or Charlotte, or something like that; he shoots plovers, he eats their eggs. His life is simple, he shuns excess because he wants to; or his life is an elaborate web of events, rituals, ceremonies because he wants it so. He is not ignorant of the many people in his thrall, this man; sometimes he likes the condition they are in and he would even die to keep them in it; sometimes he does not like the condition they are in and he would even die to remove them from it. He is not ignorant of them, he is not ignorant of them completely. They plant a field, they harvest its yield; he calculates with his sharp eye the fruits of their labor, which are tied up uniformly in bundles and lying on docks waiting to be shipped. This man makes a profit, sometimes larger than he expected, sometimes less than he expected. It is with this profit that the reality these many people represent is kept secret. For this man who says “My Master and my Friend” builds a large house, warms the rooms, sits in a chair made from a fabric that is very valuable because its origins are distant, obscure, and involve again the forced labor, the crippling, the early death of the unnamed many; sitting in this chair, he looks out a window; his forehead, his nose, his thin lips press against the glass; it is winter (something I will never see, a climate I will never know, and since I do not know it and since it holds nothing that is beautiful to me, I regard it with suspicion; I look down on people who are familiar with it but I, Xuela, am not in a position to do more than that). The grass is alive but not actively growing (dormant), the trees are alive but not actively growing (dormant); the hedge, its severely clipped shape a small monument to misery, separates two fields; the sun shines, but the light is pale and weak as if a great effort is being made. He is not looking at a graveyard; he is looking at a small part of all that he possesses, and the irregular mounds, gravelike in shape, caused by the earth first hardening, then softening then hardening again, already holding his ancestors and their deeds, have ample room for him and all that he will do and for all who come from him and all that they will do. His forehead, his nose, his thin lips are pressed ever harder against the window; in his mind the still earth becomes a blue sea, a gray ocean, and on the blue sea and on the gray ocean are ships, and the ships are filled with people, and the ships filled with people sink to the bottom of the blue sea and the gray ocean again and again. The blue sea and the gray ocean are also a small part of all he possesses, and they, with their surfaces smooth and tranquil, are a sign of covenants made, inviolable promises, but even so, the irregular mounds, gravelike in shape, appear, small swell swallowing up small swell, hiding a depth whose measure can be taken but the knowledge of it cannot overcome the fear. The impartiality of the dormant field outside his window is well known to him; it will accept a creature he finds a pest, it will accept his most revered ancestor, it will accept him; but the dormant field is carved up and it is spring (I am not familiar with this, I cannot find any joy in this, I think people associated with it are less than I am but I, Xuela, am not in a position to make my feeling have any meaning) and the field can be made to do something he wants it to do. The impartiality of the blue sea, the gray ocean, is well known to him also, but these cold, vast vaults of water cannot be carved up and no season can influence them in his favor; the blue sea, the gray ocean will take him along with all that represents his earthly happiness (the ship full of people) and all that represents his unhappiness (the ship full of people).

  It is an afternoon in winter, the sky above him is a blue that is at once overwhelming and ordinary, there is a moon of pure white and not quite full in the middle of it. He is afraid. His name is John, he is the master of the people in the ship that sails on the blue sea, the gray ocean, but he is not master of the sea or the ocean itself. In his position as master, his needs are clear and paramount and so he is without mercy, he is without compassion, he is without tenderness. In his position as a man, unclothed, unfed, as a testament to ordinariness without his house with the warmed rooms, he meets the same fate as all he used to be master of; the ground outside his window will take him in; so will the blue sea, so will the gray ocean. And so it is that at the moment he finds himself in this position, the position of a man, an ordinary man, he asks that master be friend, he asks for himself the very thing that he cannot give; he asks and he asks, even though he knows such a thing is not possible; such a thing is not possible, but he cannot help himself, for always the first person you feel sorry for is your own self. And it is this person, this man, who says at a moment he needs to: God does not judge; and when he is saying this, God does not judge, he places himself in a childlike pose; his knees are crossed, his hands are clasped around them, and he will repeat to himself a parable, The Sower and the Wheat, and he gives it an interpretation favorable to himself: God’s love shines equally on all the wheat wherever it may grow, between the rocks, in shallow ground, in good soil.

  This short, bitter sermonette that I delivered to myself was not new to me. There was hardly a day of my life that I did not observe some incident to add fresh weight to this view, for to me history was not a large stage filled with commemoration, bands, cheers, ribbons, medals, the sound of fine glass clinking and raised high in the air; in other words, the sounds of victory. For me history was not only the past: it was the past and it was also the present. I did not mind my defeat, I only minded that it had to last so long; I did not see the future, and that is perhaps as it should be. Why should anyone see such a thing. And yet … and yet, it made me sad to know that I did not look straight ahead of me, I always looked back, sometimes I looked to the side, but mostly I looked back.

  The church outside which I stood on that Sunday was very familiar to me, I had been baptized in it; my father had become such an outstanding member of it that he was now allowed to read the lesson during Sunday-morning service. As if obeying my summons, the congregation erupted from the church, and among them were my father, who no longer bore so much as a trace of the treachery he had committed by joining such a group of people, and Philip, the man I worked for but did not hate and who at the same time was a man I slept with but did not love and whom I would eventually marry but still not love. They were, this congregation, just then in a state of deep satisfaction, though they were not all in identical states of deep satisfaction; my father was less satisfied than Philip, his position in the group less secure. But my father was an incredible mimic and knew well how to make an ordinary person miserable and how to turn the merely miserable person into the person who cries out in the middle of the night, “What makes the world turn against me?” with a wail of anguish so familiar to the night itself, yet so strange to the person from whose being these words have made an involuntary escape. Just a glance not so far away would have provided a substantial example; at the far end of the cemetery, which abutted the churchyard, stood a man named Lazarus and he w
as making a hole in the ground, he was making a grave; the person to be buried in this grave so far away from the church would be a poor person, perhaps one of the merely miserable. I knew of Lazarus—his name would have been given to him in a moment of innocent hope; his mother would have thought that such a name, rich and powerful as it was with divine second chance, would somehow protect him from the living death that was his actual life; but it had been of no use, he was born the Dead and he would die the Dead. He was one of the many people with whom my father maintained a parasitic existence (even as the people with whom my father attended church maintained a parasitic existence with my father), and I knew of him because my mother was buried in this graveyard (I could not see her grave now from where I stood), and once when I was visiting it I came upon him face-to-face in the graveyard, carrying a bottle (pint size) of white rum in one hand and holding up the waist of his trousers with the other; an insect kept trying to feed from a small pool of saliva that had settled at the corner of his mouth, and he at first used the hand that held the bottle of rum to brush it away, but the insect persisted, and so, instinctively, without calculation, he let go of his pants waist and firmly brushed the insect away. The insect did go away, the insect did not return, but his trousers fell down to his ankles, and again instinctively, without calculation, he reached down to pull them back up and he became as he was before, a poor man driven out of his mind by a set of events that the guilty and the tired and the hopeless call life. He looked like an overworked beast, he looked like a living carcass; the bones in his body were too prominent, they were too close to his skin, he smelled sour, he smelled of stink, he smelled like something rotting, when it’s in that sweet stage that can sometimes pass for a delicacy, just before real decay sets in; before his trousers met his waist again, I saw the only alive thing left of him; it was his pubic hair: it covered a large area of his crotch, growing in a wide circle, almost hiding all his private parts; its color was red, the red of a gift or the red of something burning rapidly. This brief meeting of a gravedigger and myself had no beginning and so it could have no end; there was only a “Good day” from me and an “Eh-eh” from him, and these things were said at exactly the same time, so that he did not really hear what I said and I did not really hear what he said, and that was the point. The idea of him and me really hearing each other was out of the question; from the pain of it, we might have murdered ourselves or put in motion a chain of events that would have come to an end only with our hanging from the gallows at midday in a public square. He disappeared inside the Dead House, where he kept the tools of his trade: shovels, ladders, ropes.