My Brother

by Jamaica Kincaid

  It was in that funeral home in which he lay that I first encountered the dead. The dead then was a girl with a hunchback and I did not know her, I only saw her on the street in her school uniform, but her deformity had made her well known to other schoolchildren who were not deformed at all, and so when she died I wanted to see what she looked like. Seeing her lying in her coffin created a sense of wonder in me; seeing my brother did not, but that might have been because by the time my brother died I was so old that the idea of death seemed possible, but still only possible, something other people might decide to do. When I had seen the girl with the hunchback lying dead in her coffin, my brother was not yet born, and even my own life, the life that I now live, was not yet born, and so I could not imagine, would not have been capable of wondering, if this place, Straffee’s funeral parlor (the funeral parlor where the girl lay, the funeral parlor where my brother lay), would resonate in me, would come up in any way in my life again. My brother’s body lay not in the same room as hers, he lay in the room next to the one in which her body had been; the funeral parlor had expanded, and in any case, the room in which she had lain held another body, another funeral, a man thirty-five years old who also had died of AIDS, or the virus that causes AIDS, or something like that; whatever is the right way to say it, he had died of the same thing as my brother. Mr. Straffee, the owner of the funeral parlor, died in the same year as my brother; Mr. Straffee was very old then, and I cannot tell if he got involved in such, the business of burying people, to accustom himself to the idea of his own death, or if he hoped such an intimacy with death would protect him from its actual occurrence, or lessen his fear of its actual occurrence.

  My brother’s coffin was most plain, it was in the category of the ones that cost less, pitch pine stained with a very dark varnish. I had known how much it would cost, and so before I returned for his funeral I went to the bank in the small town in which I lived and purchased traveler’s checks. The undertaker took payment in traveler’s checks.

  His funeral procession was not large, and there might have been many reasons for this. He had died of a disease that carried a powerful social stigma. People in the place that I am from are quite comfortable with the shame of sex, the inexplicable need for it, an enjoyment of it that seems beyond the ordinary, the actual peculiarity of it; only then when you die from it, sex, does the shame become, well, shame. Then he was not a well-known person, a famous person, and this would have disappointed him, he so longed to be well known and well thought of. Funerals in Antigua have always been social events, especially the funerals of young people, but he was not so young, he was not well known, he died of a disease that had a great shame attached to it.

  His death, and so his funeral, was not like that of the little boy, only four years old, who died while taking a swimming lesson with his schoolmates in the seawater at Fort James, just died suddenly, fainting, losing consciousness and then dying, and that is what was said of his death: he just died suddenly, while learning to swim; he fainted and lost consciousness and then died. He lay in a refrigerator in a funeral home, the same funeral home that took care of my brother’s burial, while his mother’s and father’s relatives who were living in various parts of the world, all far away from Antigua, in climates different from the one in Antigua, returned to Antigua. His mother and some close female relatives of both his parents all wore brand-new dresses made from the same material, though not in the same style, and also, they did not show their feelings of sorrow at the same time. The church service part of this little boy’s funeral was held in the same church in which my brother (and I) had been christened and confirmed (the Methodist church, though in that tradition you are received not confirmed), and I had no real feelings when I saw that his coffin was in the same place, in front of the altar where I had taken my first communion and just plain communion many times after that. I was, at that moment I was seeing his coffin, trying to find my brother’s doctor, Dr. Prince Ramsey. The church was filled with the dead four-year-old boy’s relatives and their friends, people were standing on the steps of the church trying to see the little coffin and of course the family, because the sorrow expressed by the family, the sorrow shown by the family excites observers, evoking pity for the mourner and, ultimately, superiority, for to see someone suffer in a moment when you are not suffering can inspire such a feeling, superiority, in a place like Antigua, with its history of subjugation, leaving in its wake humiliation and inferiority; to see someone in straits worse than your own is to feel at first pity for them and soon better than them. And so it was that a large number of people who did not know this little boy or any member of his family but had heard of his death through hearsay had come to see his little coffin, something made out of cheap wood and then covered with white velvet, and had come to see his family suffer over their loss. His little classmates stood not far from the coffin, and later they sang a song about Jesus and his particular love for children. The children were not at the graveyard, and so they did not see his mother as she wept over his coffin being lowered into the ground and his mother weeping and throwing up nothing but mucus, the only thing left in her stomach. The children did not see this, but many onlookers did, they saw the mother vomiting nothing but mucus at the sight of her son’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and the father, her husband, holding her up after she had slumped to the ground, and then leading her away from the grave to sit on a grave nearby, a grave of someone I do not believe they knew, yet it was a good place to sit all the same. I was at the graveyard still looking for Dr. Ramsey, but he was not there, and when next I saw him in the graveyard, it was at my brother’s funeral, and between that boy’s burial and my brother’s death I saw and spoke to Dr. Ramsey many times, but on that day I did not see him.

  And so my brother’s funeral; the undertaker (and it was not at that moment that I first made the observation that an undertaker often looks like a corpse in one way or another: bloated like a dead body that has been neglected, or thin and emaciated like a dead body properly preserved so that it decays slowly, dryly, or like a dead body that has been carefully manicured and tended to make the relatives doubt slightly the sight they are witnessing: I am looking at the dead)—the undertaker called us, his family, to take a last look at him, and this call for a last look only reminded me of scenes in other narrative forms in which there is a bartender and just before the bar closes there is a last call for drinks. We all looked at him, I and his and my mother, my brother who no longer speaks to my mother even though they continue to live in the same house, and my other brother, who broke my mother’s neck by throwing her onto the ground in the process of trying to stop her from throwing stones at him because she disapproved of him bringing a girlfriend, or any woman with whom he had a sexual relationship, into the structure where he—they all—lived; this structure was so near to my mother’s own house that she could hear all their conversations and all their sounds, and the conversations and sounds were an abomination to her (and that is the word for the feelings that roiled in her heart toward his actions, his wanting to live: abomination!), and when he would not cease this behavior of which she disapproved she first quarreled with him and then threw stones at him, and while trying to stop her from stoning him (and this was not exactly a defense of himself, for I say a defense of himself would have been to throw stones back at her), he threw her to the ground and broke her neck; it was a break so serious that she should have died or become a quadriplegic, yet she recovered so completely that she has buried one of her own children. When once she was complaining to me about her health, I jokingly said, “Oh, Mother, you will bury us all”; she said in reply, “You think so,” and she laughed, but I did not laugh, I could not laugh, I was—am—one of the “us.” There were her two sons still alive, and then there was me, her only daughter, but not Devon’s only sister in the world, for his father, Mr. Drew, had had other girl children with other mothers, but I was his only sister at his funeral, and I, too, went to take a last look at him, but it w
as unreal the way he looked: his hair styled in a way I had never seen it styled when I knew him alive; his eyes closed, shut, sealed, like an envelope, not a vault; his body was delicate, fragile-seeming, all bones, finally stilled, not ever so slightly moving up and down; his farawayness so complete, so final, he shall never speak again; he shall never speak again in the everyday way that I speak of speech.

  The coffin lid was put in place and the sounds of the screws securing it did not cause us to cry or vomit or pass out. My mother said it did not look like Devon at all, and that was true, but I did not know which Devon she meant: Was it the baby a day old almost eaten alive by red ants, or was it the two-year-old boy who was left in my charge and whose diaper I neglected to change as it became filled with his still-baby feces because I had become absorbed in a book; or was it the Devon who was involved in the homicide of a gas-station attendant; or the one who played cricket so well and learned to swim at Country Pond; or the one who smoked the Weed, the way she referred to his marijuana addiction; or the one who changed from a vibrant young man who had come down with a very bad case of pneumonia and then was told in an open hospital ward by a doctor accompanied by two nurses that he had the HIV virus and that shortly he would be dead; or the one who was well enough shortly after that to begin having unprotected sex with women and sex with other people who were not women but who we—that is, his family—did not know about? Which Devon was he? All of them, I suppose; and which did he like best, and which one of his selves made him happiest? I cannot tell this, and perhaps neither could he.

  And that day that he was buried was not at all unlike the day on which I first saw him lying almost dead in a bed in the Gweneth O’Reilly ward of the Holberton Hospital. All days in Antigua must be the same, people count on it, it is for this reason they go there, it is for this reason they leave there; the days are the same, the sun shines, no rain will fall, the sun rises at around six in the morning, the sun sets at around six in the evening; if this does not remain so, it is a catastrophe; a hurricane can change this, or the coming-awake of a volcano, but Antigua does not have such a thing as a volcano. He died on a sunny day, he was buried on a sunny day. At the funeral parlor there were people milling around outside and I did not know them, but that made sense when I realized that there was another young man being buried, a young man with a family and not many friends; he, too, had died of AIDS. His grave was not more than twenty yards away from my brother’s, and their graveside ceremonies coincided; the families and friends of the two dead men did not speak to one another; the two men were buried at the margins of the cemetery, far away from the entrance, and this was so not because of the thing that had caused their death but because of something that long ago perhaps had the same social stigma as AIDS: they or their families were not members of respectable churches. The other man was buried in the place reserved for Seventh-Day Adventists, my brother was buried in the place reserved for the Church of the Nazarene. Nothing about their death ceremonies made communication between their families occur; not sharing the same funeral parlor, not sharing the margin of the burial ground. The other dead man’s family did not say a sympathetic word to us and we did not say a sympathetic word to them. The Church of the Nazarene was our mother’s church, she attended services there regularly, her fellow church members came often to pray with my brother, though he did not believe in anything himself, except if he thought, just at the moment he needed to, that faith in the thing in front of him might serve him well. But he died, and on the way to the church part of the service, we passed some men who were in a yard, sitting under a tree making coffins, and they looked up as we passed by, perhaps to see their handiwork, for his coffin had been made by them, they worked for Mr. Straffee, and also out of curiosity, for it must be true for them, too, even as they make these houses for the dead that are in constant demand, the wondering if it is something real, will it happen to them; if it is so certain, death, why is it such a surprise, why is everybody who is left behind, who is not dead, in a state of such shock, as if this thing, death, this losing forever of someone who means something to you, has never happened before. Why is it so new, why is this worn-out thing, death, someone dying, so new, so new?

  And yet when the minister preached a sermon about us all being reunited at some later date, I did not like that at all, I wanted to tell him that I did not want to see these people with whom I had shared so much—a womb in the case of my brother, blood and breath in the case of my mother—I did not want to be with any of these people again in another world. I had had enough of them in this one; they mean everything to me and they mean nothing, and even so, I do not really know what I mean when I say this. My brother, the one who lives in the same house as my mother but who does not speak to her and will not make a reply to her no matter what she says to him, and says he would not make a reply to her even if she asked him to save her life, especially if she asked him to save her life (and he is not the one who threw her down and broke her neck, a break that should have left her dead or crippled from the waist down and instead she made a complete recovery and has buried one of her children so far), this brother said a few words about his dead sibling, the one he had named “Patches,” but he did not mention that, the part about the name Patches, he only recalled that Devon loved to play cricket, how close they had been when they were schoolboys together; he did not say how afraid they were when their father (Mr. Drew) died and they did not want to attend his funeral and hid from our mother, who had to beat them (in one case) or threaten to beat them (in another case) to attend; he did not say how his dead brother’s carelessness with his own life might have led to such an early death and was a contrast to his own caution and industriousness (he held three jobs: an accountant, a peddler of imported foods in the market, and a bass-steel-drum player in the most prominent steel band in Antigua). His voice broke as he spoke of his brother; I cried when I heard him speak of his brother, but why did he and I do that, for so many times we used to say that if by some miracle Devon could be cured of his disease he would not change his ways; he would not become industrious, holding three jobs at once to make ends meet; he would not become faithful to one woman or one man. But this was the end and he was lying in the coffin, the least expensive coffin in Mr. Straffee’s display of coffins for adults; he was thin, so diminished that his bedclothes and bed linen, freshly cleaned by his mother, had to be packed inside the coffin to keep his body from rattling around (though really he would not have been able to hear it and he certainly would not have been able to feel it).

  I became a writer out of desperation, so when I first heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying. When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother’s illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it.

  For many years I wrote for a man named William Shawn. Whenever I thought of something to write, I immediately thought of him reading it, and the thought of this man, William Shawn, reading something I had written only made me want to write it more; I could see him sitting (not in any particular place) and reading what I had written and telling me if he liked it, or never mentioning it again if he didn’t, and the point wasn’t to hear him say that he liked it (though that was better than anything in the whole world) but only to know that he had read it, and why that should have been so is beyond words to me right now, or just to put it into words now (and it was only through words that I knew him) would make it either not true, or incomplete, like love, I suppose: why do I love you, why do you love me? Almost all of my life as a writer, everything I wrote I expected Mr. Shawn to read, and so when I first heard of my brother dying and immediately knew I would write about him, I thought of Mr. Shawn, but Mr. Shawn had just died, too, and I had seen Mr. Shawn when he was dead, and even th
en I wanted to tell him what it was like when he had died, and he would not have liked to hear that in any way, but I was used to telling him things I knew he didn’t like, I couldn’t help telling him everything whether he liked it or not. And so I wrote about the dead for the dead, and all along as I was writing I thought, When I am done with this I shall never write for Mr. Shawn again, this will be the end of anything I shall write for Mr. Shawn; but now I don’t suppose that will be so. It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind. For a very long time I had the perfect reader for what I would write and place in the unscathed books; the source of the books has not died, it only comes alive again and again in different forms and other segments. The perfect reader has died, but I cannot see any reason not to write for him anyway, for I can sooner get used to never hearing from him—the perfect reader—than to not being able to write for him at all.