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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
Also by Jamaica Kincaid
Praise for My Brother
Copyright
For Ian (“Sandy”) Frazier
WHEN I SAW MY BROTHER again after a long while, he was lying in a bed in the Holberton Hospital, in the Gweneth O’Reilly ward, and he was said to be dying of AIDS. He was not born in this hospital. Of my mother’s four children, he was the one born at home. I remember him being born. I was thirteen years of age then. We had just finished eating our supper, a supper of boiled fish and bread and butter, and my mother sent me to fetch the midwife, a woman named Nurse Stevens, who lived on the corner of Nevis and Church Streets. She was a large woman; the two halves of her bottom rolled up and down with each step she took, and she walked very slowly. When I went to give her the message that my mother wanted her to come and assist with my brother’s birth, she was just finishing her own supper and said that she would come when she was through. My brother was born in the middle of the night on the fifth of May in 1962. The color of his skin when he was born was a reddish-yellow. I do not know how much he weighed, for he was not weighed at the time he was born. That night, of course, the routine of our life was upset: the routine of my two other brothers and I going to sleep, our father taking a walk to a bridge near the recreation grounds—a walk recommended by his doctor as good for his bad digestive tract and for his bad heart—the heavy black of the streetlamp-less night falling, our father returning from his walk, a dog barking at the sound of his steps, the door opening and being locked behind him, the click of his false teeth as they were placed in a glass of water, his snoring, and then the arrival of early morning. We were sent to neighbors’ houses. I do not remember exactly to whose house my other brothers were sent. I went to the house of a friend of my mother’s, a woman whose six-year-old daughter took sick not so very long after this night of my brother’s birth and died in my mother’s arms on the way to the doctor, exhaling her last breath as they crossed the same bridge that my father walked to on his nightly outing. This was the first person to die in my mother’s arms; not long after that, a woman who lived across the street from us, Miss Charlotte was her name, died in my mother’s arms as my mother tried to give her some comfort from the pain of a heart attack she was having.
I heard my brother cry his first cry and then there was some discussion of what to do with his afterbirth, but I don’t know now what was decided to do with all of it; only that a small piece of it was dried and pinned to the inside of his clothes as a talisman to protect him from evil spirits. He was placed in a chemise my mother had made, but because she had two other small children, my other brothers, one of them almost four years old, the other almost two years old, she could not give his chemise the customary elaborate attention involving embroidery stitching and special washings of the cotton fabric; the chemises he wore were plain. He was wrapped in a blanket and placed close to her, and they both fell asleep. That very next day, while they were both asleep, he snuggled in the warmth of his mother’s body, an army of red ants came in through the window and attacked him. My mother heard her child crying, and when she awoke, she found him covered with red ants. If he had been alone, it is believed they would have killed him. This was an incident no one ever told my brother, an incident that everyone else in my family has forgotten, except me. One day during his illness, when my mother and I were standing over him, looking at him—he was asleep and so didn’t know we were doing so—I reminded my mother of the ants almost devouring him and she looked at me, her eyes narrowing in suspicion, and she said, “What a memory you have!”—perhaps the thing she most dislikes about me. But I was only wondering if it had any meaning that some small red things had almost killed him from the outside shortly after he was born and that now some small things were killing him from the inside; I don’t believe it has any meaning, this is only something a mind like mine would think about.
That Thursday night when I heard about my brother through the telephone, from a friend of my mother’s because at that moment my mother and I were in a period of not speaking to each other (and this not speaking to each other has a life of its own, it is like a strange organism, the rules by which it survives no one can yet decipher; my mother and I never know when we will stop speaking to each other and we never know when we will begin again), I was in my house in Vermont, absorbed with the well-being of my children, absorbed with the well-being of my husband, absorbed with the well-being of myself. When I spoke to this friend of my mother’s, she said that there was something wrong with my brother and that I should call my mother to find out what it was. I said, What is wrong? She said, Call your mother. I asked her, using those exact words, three times, and three times she replied the same way. And then I said, He has AIDS, and she said, Yes.
If she had said he had been in a terrible car accident, or if she had said he was suddenly stricken with a fatal cancer, I would have been surprised, for he did not drive a car—I knew that. What causes a fatal cancer? I do not know that. But he lived a life that is said to be typical in contracting the virus that causes AIDS: he used drugs (I was only sure of marijuana and cocaine) and he had many sexual partners (I only knew of women). He was careless; I cannot imagine him taking the time to buy or use a condom. This is a quick judgment, because I don’t know my brothers very well, but I am pretty sure that a condom would not be something he would have troubled himself to use. Once, a few years ago when I was visiting my family—that is, the family I grew up in—I sat on his bed in the house he lived in alone, a house which was two arm’s lengths away from our mother’s house, where she lived with another son, a grown man, I told him to use condoms when having sex with anyone; I told him to protect himself from the HIV virus and he laughed at me and said that he would never get such a stupid thing (“Me no get dat chupidness, man”). But I might have seemed like a ridiculous person to him. I had lived away from my home for so long that I no longer understood readily the kind of English he spoke and always had to have him repeat himself to me; and I no longer spoke the kind of English he spoke, and when I said anything to him, he would look at me and sometimes just laugh at me outright. You talk funny, he said. And then again, I was not fat, he had expected after not seeing me for twenty years that I would be fat. Most women where we are from become fat after a while; it is fashionable to be a fat woman.
When I saw my brother lying in the hospital bed, dying of this disease, his eyes were closed, he was asleep (or in a state of something like sleep, because sleep, a perfectly healthy and normal state to be in, could not be what he was experiencing as he lay there dying); his hands were resting on his chest, one on top of the other, just under his chin in that pious pose of the dead, but he was not dead then. His skin was a deep black color, I noticed that, and I thought perhaps I noticed that because I live in a place where no one is of his complexion, except for me, and I am not really of his complexion, I am only of his complexion in the way of race. But many days later my mother said to me, He has gotten so black, the disease has made him so black (she said this to me in this kind of English, she makes an effort to speak to me in the kind of English that I now immediately understand). His lips were scarlet and covered with small sores that had a golden crust. When he opened his eyes and saw me, he made the truups sound (this is done by placing the teeth toge
ther while pushing out both lips and sucking in air with force all at once). He said he did not think I would come to see him (“Me hear you a come but me no tink you a come fo’ true”).
At the time the phone call came telling me of my brother’s illness, among the many comforts, luxuries, that I enjoyed was reading a book, The Education of a Gardener, written by a man named Russell Page. I was in the process of deciding that as a gardener who designed gardens for other people he had the personality of the servant, not the personality of the artist, that his prose was fussy, tidy, timid; though the book bored me I would continue to read it because it offered such an interesting contrast to some other gardeners whose writing I loved. (I only thought all that before the phone rang. I now love The Education of a Gardener and look forward to reading it again.) And so when the phone rang I put this book down and answered it and I was told about my brother.
The next time I opened this book I was sitting on the lawn in front of the Gweneth O’Reilly ward and my brother was sitting in a chair next to me. It was many days later. He could barely walk, he could barely sit up, he was like an old man. The walk from his bed to the lawn had exhausted him. We looked out on an ordinary Antiguan landscape. There was a deliberate planting of willow trees, planted, I suspect, a long time ago, when Antigua was still a colony and the colonial government would have been responsible for the running of the hospital. It was never a great hospital, but it is a terrible hospital now, and only people who cannot afford anything else make use of it. Near the willow trees was an old half-dead flamboyant tree; it needed pruning and food. There was an old lopsided building in the near distance; and the rest of the landscape was taken up with cassi (cassia) trees. And when I picked up that book again, The Education of a Gardener, I looked at my brother, for he was a gardener also, and I wondered, if his life had taken a certain turn, if he had caused his life to take a different turn, might he have written a book with such a title? Behind the small house in which he lived in our mother’s yard, he had planted a banana plant, a lemon tree, various vegetables, various non-flowering shrubs. When I first saw his little garden in the back of his little house, I was amazed at it and I asked him if he had done it all himself and he said, Of course (“How you mean, man!”). I know now that it is from our mother that we, he and I, get this love of plants. Even at that moment when he and I were sitting on the lawn, our mother had growing on a trellis she had fashioned out of an old iron bedstead and old pieces of corrugated galvanize a passion-fruit vine, and its voluptuous growth was impressive, because it isn’t easy to grow passion fruit in Antigua. It produced fruit in such abundance that she had to give some of it away, there was more than she could use. Her way with plants is something I am very familiar with; when I was a child, in the very place where my brother’s house is now, she grew all sorts of vegetables and herbs. The red ants that attacked him when he was less than a day old had crawled up some okra trees that she had planted too near the house and the red ants went from the okra trees through a window onto the bed in which he and my mother lay. After she killed all the red ants that had attacked her child, she went outside and in a great fit of anger tore up the okra trees, roots and all, and threw them away.
* * *
I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.
For one day when my mother and I were outside in the back yard and she was complaining, though she did not know it, of how dependent on her one or the other of her children was, and did not notice that she did this all the time, said bad things to each of us about the others behind their back, I noticed that the lemon tree my sick brother had planted was no longer there and I asked about it, and she said quite casually, Oh, we cut it down to make room for the addition. And this made me look at my feet immediately, involuntarily; it pained me to hear her say this, it pained me the way she said it, I felt ashamed. That lemon tree would have been one of the things left of his life. Nothing came from him; not work, not children, not love for someone else. He once had a job doing something in the public works department, but he talked back too much—he had a nasty tongue when crossed, my mother said—and one day in an argument with his supervisor he said something rude (“He cuss dem out”) and was fired. Someone told me he had made a lot of money then. He gave my mother a lot of it to save for him, but after he was out of work he would often ask her for some of it, until eventually there was nothing left, and when he became sick he was destitute, without any financial support at all. This did not seem to worry him; I could not tell if it had any meaning. When his father, my mother’s husband, died, he left my mother a pauper and she had to borrow money to bury him. My brother did not have a steady girlfriend, a woman, someone other than his own mother, to take care of him; he had no children, as he lay dying, his friends had abandoned him. No one, other than the people in his family and his mother’s friends from her church, came to visit him.
But this too is a true picture of my mother: When he was ill, each morning she would get up very early and make for her sick son a bowl of porridge and a drink of a fortified liquid food supplement and pack them in a little bag and go to the hospital, which is about a mile away and involves climbing up a rather steep hill. When she set out at about half past six, the sun was not yet in the middle of the sky so it was not very hot. Sometimes someone would give her a lift in a car, but most often no one did. When she got to the hospital, she would give my brother a bath, and when she was doing that she wouldn’t let him know that she saw that the sore on his penis was still there and that she was worried about it. She first saw this sore by accident when he was in the hospital the first time, and when she asked him how he got such a thing, he said that from sitting on a toilet seat he had picked up something. She did not believe or disbelieve him when he told her that. After she bathed him, she dressed him in the clean pajamas she brought for him, and if his sheets had not been changed, she changed them and then while he sat in bed, she helped him to eat his food, the food she had prepared and brought to him.
When I first saw him, his entire mouth and tongue, all the way to the back of the inside of his mouth, down his gullet, was paved with a white coat of thrush. He had a small sore near his tonsil, I could see it when he opened his mouth wide, something he did with great effort. This made it difficult for him to swallow anything, but especially solid food. When he ate the porridge and drank the fortified liquid food supplement that my mother had brought for him, he had to make such an effort, it was as if he were lifting tons upon tons of cargo. A look of agony would come into his eyes. He would eat and drink slowly. Our mother, who loves to cook and see people eat the food she has cooked, especially since she knows she is an extremely good cook, would urge him to eat whenever she saw him pause (“Come on, man, yam up you food”) and he would look at her helplessly. Ordinarily he would have made his own sharp reply, but at those moments I do not think one crossed his mind. After she saw him eat his breakfast, she would tidy up his room, put his dirty clothes and bath towel in a bag to be taken home and washed; she would empty the pan that contained his urine, she would rub cream into the parched skin on his arms and legs, she would comb his hair as best she could. My mother loves her children, I want to say, in her way! And that is very true, she loves us in her way. It is her way. It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might not be the best thing for us. It has never occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her better than it served us. And why should it? Perhaps all love is self-serving. I do not know, I do not know. She loves and understands us when we are weak and helpless and need her. My own powerful memories of her revolve around her bathing and feeding me. When I was a very small child and my nose would become clogged up with mucus, the result of a cold, she would place her mouth over my nose an
d draw the mucus into her own mouth and then spit it out; when I was a very small child and did not like to eat food, complaining that chewing was tiring, she would chew my food in her own mouth and, after it was properly softened, place it in mine. Her love for her children when they are children is spectacular, unequaled I am sure in the history of a mother’s love. It is when her children are trying to be grown-up people—adults—that her mechanism for loving them falls apart; it is when they are living in a cold apartment in New York, hungry and penniless because they have decided to be a writer, writing to her, seeking sympathy, a word of encouragement, love, that her mechanism for loving falls apart. Her reply to one of her children who found herself in such a predicament was “It serves you right, you are always trying to do things you know you can’t do.” Those were her words exactly. All the same, her love, if we are dying, or if we are in jail, is so wonderful, a great fortune, and we are lucky to have it. My brother was dying; he needed her just then.
In his overbearingly charming reminiscence of how he became a gardener, Russell Page writes:
When I was a child there was a market each Friday in the old Palladian butter market near the Stonebow in Lincoln. The farmers’ wives would drive in early in the morning, dressed in their best, with baskets of fresh butter, chickens, ducks and bunches of freshly picked mint and sage. I used often to be taken there by my grandfather’s housekeeper while she made her purchases, and I remember that always, in the spring, there would be bunches of double mauve primroses and of the heavenly scented Daphne mezereum. Later when my passion for gardening developed I wanted these plants but could never find them in our friends’ gardens. They seemed to grow only in cottage gardens in hamlets lost among the fields and woods. I gradually came to know the cottagers and their gardens for miles around, for these country folk had a knack with plants. Kitchen windows were full of pots with cascades of Campanula isophylla, geraniums, fuchsias and begonias all grown from slips. I would be given cuttings from old-fashioned pinks and roses which were not to be found in any catalogue, and seedlings from plants brought home perhaps by a sailor cousin—here was a whole world of modest flower addicts.
My Brother Page 1