* * *
And what could my father have been thinking as he sat in that room, as he sat on a chair which was a copy of a chair seen in a painting of some dreadful Englishman’s drawing room, a chair copied by the hands of someone of whom he had no doubt taken advantage? What could he have been thinking as he looked at that sea, its surface sometimes heaving, its surface sometimes still? A human being, a person, many people, a people, will say that their surroundings, their physical surroundings, form their consciousness, their very being; they will get up every morning and look at green hills, white cliffs, silver mountains, fields of golden grain, rivers of blue-glinting water, and in the beauty of this—and it is beautiful, they cannot help but find it beautiful—they invisibly, magically, conquer the distance that is between them and the beauty they are beholding, and they feel themselves become one with it, they draw strength from it, they are inspired by it to sing songs, to compose verse; they invent themselves and reinvent themselves and they are inspired (again), but this time to commit small actions, small deeds, and eventually large actions, large deeds, and each success brings a validation of the original idea, the original feeling, the meeting of people and place, you and the place you are from are not a chance encounter; it is something beyond destiny, it is something so meant to be that it is beyond words. For my father, the sea, the big and beautiful sea, sometimes a shimmering sheet of blue, sometimes a shimmering sheet of black, sometimes a shimmering sheet of gray, could hold no such largesse of inspiration, could hold no such abundance of comfort, could hold no such anything of any good; its beauty was lost to him, blank; to look at it, to see it, was to be reminded of the despair of the victor and the despair of the vanquished at once; for the emptiness of conquest is not lost on the conqueror, faced as such a person is with the unending desire for more and more and more, until only death silences this desire; and the bottomless well of pain and misery that the conquered experiences—no amount of revenge can satiate or erase the perpetration of a great injustice. And so as in my father there existed at once victor and vanquished, perpetrator and victim, he chose, not at all surprisingly, the mantle of the former, always the former; this is not to say that he was at war with himself; this is only to say that he proved himself commonly human, for except for the saints who among us would not choose to be among the people with head held up, not head bowed down, and even the saints know that in the end of ends they will be among the ones with heads held up.
The callous, the cynical, the unbeliever will say, perhaps in a moment free of gravity, perhaps in a moment when they see in a blinding flash the world end and refuse to begin again, that life is a game: a game that the better of them wins, a game that the worse of them loses: a game in which to win is to gain everything and to lose is to get nothing, or a game of musical chairs in which, when the music stops, to win is to sit down and never make room for the loser, who is doomed to stand up forever. It goes without saying that to be among the callous, the cynical, the unbelievers, is to be among the winners, for those who have lost are never hardened to their loss; they feel it deeply, always, into eternity. No one who has lost dares to doubt, really doubt, human goodness; for the one who has lost, the last breath is a sigh, “Oh God.” Always.
It was not without understanding, it was not without some pity, that I observed my father. When he was a boy—an idea, a reality I sometimes found hard to grasp: him soft, in need of warmth or soothings from rampaging fevers, bruised knees and elbows, in need of reassurance as his boy-strong will would weaken and falter, in need of other reassurance: the sun will come up again, the tide will go out, the rain will stop, the earth’s turning cannot be stilled (I could only believe in this reality blindly, since such a state would not be unusual, but he had built so completely another skin over his real skin, a skin invisible to the eye but as real all the same as the protective shell of a turtle or the shield of a warrior)—when my father was a boy, he was given an egg by a neighbor of his mother and father. It was a thank-you gift from this woman because my father had been very kind to her—she was old and lived alone and he ran errands for her sometimes without being asked and never expected to be thanked—and when she gave him the egg—she had three hens, a cock, and a pig, they lived in her yard near the latrine, the fowls slept in a tree that rose up above it—he was surprised, he had never expected to be thanked at all, and he took this egg—it was brown with darker brown speckles all over it—and did not make an omelette or any other kind of meal with it but placed it under a hen, another hen which belonged to his mother, to set along with some other eggs, and when they were all hatched, he claimed one of the chickens as his own. That chicken became a hen and laid eggs and those eggs were set and became chickens and those chickens laid eggs and so on, an endless cycle interrupted only by the sale of some eggs and some chickens, and with the farthings, halfpennies, and pennies that they brought in exchange and profit. He never ate eggs after that (not all the time I knew him); he never ate chickens after that (not all the time I knew him), only collecting the bright red copper of money and polishing it so that it shone and giving it to his mother, who placed it in an old sock and kept it in her bosom awake and asleep. When his father was returning to Scotland for a visit on his journey, which was said to have ended with drownings at sea, my father gave his father the profit that had started with that original egg: a gift; it had grown into an enormous amount, enough to purchase material, English material, to make a suit for wearing only on Sundays. But my father never saw his father again, my father never saw his profit again, and he may have spent the rest of his life trying to find and fit into that first suit he had imagined himself in again and again—though he would not have known he was doing that, I believe—and his whole life may have been a succession of rewards he could never enjoy, though he would not have seen that.
“It was a beautiful day, a day of such beauty that it remains stamped forever on my memory,” my father would say to me, telling me of the day his father boarded a boat that sailed to Scotland; it never reached its destination, and so this picture that began in sunshine ended in the black of cold water, and my father’s face, my father’s very being, was the canvas on which it was painted. I was a small girl, eight years old, when he first began to tell me about this important detail in his life, the same age he was when he learned he would never see his father again. I was not physically robust, my voice was weak, I was female, I spoke to him only in English, proper English. He sat in a chair made of a wood found in India, and the arms of this chair, too, ended in the form of the closed paw of an animal whose name I did not know, and so did its two front legs, and I sat across from him on a floor that had been polished the day before and held in a tight grip the skirt of the white poplin dress I was wearing, and the poplin itself was from somewhere far away from here, the room in which we sat was the room that served no particular purpose. His face, as he spoke of the last time he saw his father, became a series of geometric references, regular and irregular lines, sharp and soft angles, the shallow surfaces beneath his cheeks growing full and round; he looked like the boy he had been then, or certainly the boy he thought he had been then, and his voice became liquid and soft, golden, as if he were speaking of someone else, not himself, someone he used to know very well, not himself, and had loved deeply, still not himself. His father sailed on a ship called the John Hawkins, but the name of that infamous criminal was not what caused my father’s face to darken, soiled, criminal, that was not what made the light go out in his small boy’s eyes.
* * *
Did my father ever say to himself, “Who am I, who am I?” not as a cry coming from the dark hole of despair but as a sign that from time to time he was inflicted with the innocent curiosity of the foolish? I do not know; I cannot know. Did he know himself? If the answer is yes, or if the answer is yes but not completely, or if the answer is yes but in an extremely narrow way, he would have had secret pleasures equal to the measure in which he knew himself; but I do not know, I do not know th
e answer. I did not know him, he was my father but I did not know him; everything I say about him is only my observation, only my opinion, and this must be a point of shame for all children—it was for me—that this person who was one of the two sources of my own existence was unknown to me, not a mystery, just not known to me.
* * *
When my father first ran his hand over my mother’s skin—the skin on her face, the skin on her legs, the skin between her legs, the skin on her arms, the skin underneath her arms, the skin on her back, the skin below her back, the skin on her breasts, the skin below her breasts—he would not have likened its texture to satin or silk, for no extraordinary preciousness and beauty had been assigned to her; the color of her skin—brown, the deep orange of an old sunset—was not the result of a fateful meeting between conqueror and vanquished, sorrow and despair, vanity and humiliation; it was only itself, an untroubled fact: she was of the Carib people. He would not have asked, Who are the Carib people? or, more accurately, Who were the Carib people? for they were no more, they were extinct, a few hundred of them still living, my mother had been one of them, they were the last survivors. They were like living fossils, they belonged in a museum, on a shelf, enclosed in a glass case. That these people, my mother’s people, were balanced precariously on the ledge of eternity, waiting to be swallowed up in the great yawn of nothingness, was without doubt, but the most bitter part was that it was through no fault of their own that they had lost, and lost in the most extreme way; they had lost not just the right to be themselves, they had lost themselves. This was my mother. She was tall (I am told—I did not know her, she died at the moment I was born); her hair was black, her fingers were long, her legs were long, her feet were long and narrow with a high instep, her face was thin and bony, her chin was narrow, her cheekbones high and wide, her lips were thin and wide, her body was thin and long; she had a natural graceful gait; she did not speak much. She perhaps never said anything that was very important, no one has ever told me; I do not know what language she spoke; if she ever told my father that she loved him, I do not know in what language she would have said such a thing. I did not know her; she died at the moment I was born. I never saw her face, and even when she appeared to me in a dream I never saw it, I saw only the back of her feet, her heels, as she came down a ladder, her bare feet, coming down, and always I woke up before I could see her going up again.
When my mother was born (so I was told) her mother wrapped her in some clean pieces of cloth and placed her outside a place where some nuns from France lived; they brought her up, baptized her a Christian, and demanded that she be a quiet, shy, long-suffering, unquestioning, modest, wishing-to-die-soon person. She became such a person. The attachment, spiritual and physical, that a mother is said to have for her child, that confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh, that inseparableness which is said to exist between mother and child—all this was absent between my mother and her own mother. How to explain this abandonment, what child can understand it? That attachment, physical and spiritual, that confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh, which was absent between my mother and her mother was also absent between my mother and myself, for she died at the moment I was born, and though I can sensibly say to myself such a thing cannot be helped—for who can help dying—again how can any child understand such a thing, so profound an abandonment? I have refused to bear any children.
And what could her actual life as a child with such people have been like—for there could not have been any joy in it, no moment of pure leisure in which she would have been an imaginary queen of an imaginary country with an imaginary army to conquer imaginary people, such a thing being the sole property of a mind free of the coarseness of living, as a child’s mind should be. She wore a dress made of nankeen, a loose-fitting dress, a shroud; it covered her arms, her knees, it fell all the way down to her ankles. She wore a matching piece of cloth on her head that covered all of her beautiful hair completely.
When did my father first see her? It is possible that he first saw her on a clear yet misty Dominica morning (such a thing does exist) coming toward him on the narrow path that winds its way (the road) around the perimeter of the island (a large mass jutting out of the larger sea), a bundle on the top of her head, and no doubt to him her beauty would have lain not in the structure of her face, the litheness of her figure (I do not know, I can only imagine this), an intelligence that he could sense from the expression on her face; no, it would have lain in her sadness, her weakness, her long-lost-ness, the crumbling of ancestral lines, her dejectedness, the false humility that was really defeat. He at that time was no longer just an ordinary, low, coarse henchman; by then he wore a uniform and it might have even had a ribbon or a marking of some kind to show that he had been properly cruel and unkind to people who did not deserve it. He had by then been from island to island and fathered children with women whose names he did not remember, the children’s names he did not know at all. He must have felt when he saw her the need to stay in one place. My poor mother! Yet to say it makes me feel sad not to have known her would not be true at all; I am only sad to know that such a life had to exist. Each day the question whether to live or die, which should it be, must have stood before her. A courtship of this woman would not have taxed his imagination. They were married in a church in Roseau and within a year she was buried in its churchyard. People say he suffered over this loss, the loss of the only woman he had married; people say he was broken by this; people say he did not enjoy life then; people say that a great sadness came over him and this led to a deep devotion to God and he became a deacon in his church. People say this, people say these things, but people cannot say that because of his own suffering he identified with and had sympathy for the sufferings of others; people cannot say that his loss made him generous, kindhearted, unwilling always to take advantage of others, that goodness in him grew and grew, completely overshadowing his faults, his defects; people cannot say these things, because they would not be true.
And this woman whose face I have never seen, not even in a dream—what did she think, what thoughts crossed her mind when she first saw this man? It is possible that he appeared as yet another irresistible force, the last in her life; it is possible that she loved him passionately.
It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you. You are conceived; you are born: these things are true, how could they not be, but you don’t know them; you only have to believe them, for there is no other explanation. You are a child and you find the world big and round and you have to find a place in it. How to do that is yet another mystery, and no one can tell you how exactly. You become a woman, a grown-up person. Against ample evidence, against your better judgment, you put trust in the constancy of things, you place faith in their everydayness. One day you open your door, you step out in your yard, but the ground is not there and you fall into a hole that has no bottom and no sides and no color. The mystery of the hole in the ground gives way to the mystery of your fall; just when you get used to falling and falling forever, you stop; and that stopping is yet another mystery, for why did you stop, there is not an answer to that any more than there is an answer to why you fell in the first place. Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. And why not, why not!
The present is always perfect. No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I live. The future I never long for, it will come or it will not; one day it will not. But it does not loom up before me, I am never in a state of anticipation. The future is not even like the black space above the sky, with an intermittent spark of light; it is more like a room with no ceiling or floor or walls, it is the present that gives it such a shape, it is the present that encloses it. The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.
I married a man I did not love, but I would not have married a man I loved at all. I married
my father’s friend, a man named Philip Bailey, a man trained to heal the sick, and in this he would succeed from time to time, but even so, only temporarily, for everyone, everywhere, succumbs eventually to the overwhelming stillness that is death. He loved me and then after that he longed for me and then after that he died. He died a lonely man, far away from the place where he was born, far away from all that had sustained him as a child, away from a woman who might have loved him, his first wife. She had died when he married me. His friends abandoned him, for they realized that his feelings for me were genuine, and he loved me. They did not attend our wedding. After we were married we moved far away into the mountains, into the land where my mother and the people she was of were born.
By the time I had married, my own womb had dried up, shriveled like an old piece of vegetable matter left out too long. The other parts of my body were drying up also; my skin did not so much wrinkle as the moisture in it seemed to evaporate. I had never ceased to observe myself, and at the time I could see that what I had lost in physical appeal or beauty I had gained in character. It was written all over me; I did not fail to arouse curiosity in anyone capable of it. I had been talked about, I had been judged and condemned. I had been loved and I had been hated. I now stood above it all, it all lay at my feet. It was said of me that I had poisoned my husband’s first wife, but I had not; I only stood by and watched her poison herself every day and did not try to stop her. She had discovered—I had introduced the discovery to her—that the large white flowers of a most beautiful weed, when dried and brewed into a tea, created a feeling of well-being and induced pleasant hallucinations. I had become acquainted with this plant through one of my many wanderings while freeing my womb from burdens I did not want it to bear, burdens I did not want to bear, burdens that were a consequence of pleasure, not a consequence of truth; but this plant was not otherwise useful to me because I was not in need of a feeling of well-being, I was not in need of pleasant hallucinations. Eventually her need for this tea grew stronger and stronger, and it turned her skin black before she died. She had lived among people whose skin was such a color for most of her life, and for that very reason and that reason only she had despised them; she knew nothing of them, except that the protective covering of their shell, their skin, was the color black, and she did not like it, but this was the color she became before she died, black, and perhaps she liked it and perhaps she didn’t, but all the same, she died anyway. I was often touched by her suffering, for she did suffer, and then again, often I was not. Before she fell into her final reverie, she demanded and she demanded, and all her demands were based on who she thought she was, and who she thought she was was based on her country of origin, which was England. The complications of who she thought her very self to be were lost on her; she was not unlike my own sister Elizabeth. My husband’s wife, this fragile human being, drew her sense of who she was from the power of her country of origin, a country which at her time of birth had the ability to determine the everyday existence of one quarter of the world’s human population, and in her small mind, she believed this situation to be not only a destiny but eternal, without any awareness of the limitations of her own self or any sympathy for her own fragility. She thought of herself as someone with values and manners and a strong certainty of the world, as if there could be nothing new, as if things had come to a standstill, as if with the arrival of her and her kind, life had reached such perfection that everything else, everything that was different from her, should just lie down and die. It was she who would lie down and die; everything else went on and it, too, eventually would lie down and die, but something more indescribable than vanity, something beyond fear, perhaps it was ignorance, made her believe that the world as she knew it was perfect. But she died and turned to dust, or dirt, or the wind, or the sea, or whatever it is we all turn into when we die.
The Autobiography of My Mother Page 13