Into the middle of the bright sunlight at midday Mr. Potter drove Mr. Shoul’s car, leaving Dr. Weizenger and his wife behind, and when they were no longer in his sight, when he had come some distance from them (a mile or so and a mile was quite a distance to Mr. Potter) they vanished entirely from his thoughts and he became absorbed by the uneven road; its surface was coarse, the thick coating of asphalt no longer lay smooth like the icing on a cake (or something like that), and the road itself was a series of twists and turns and every inch of this road, every foot, every yard, every mile held a danger of the sudden drop off a precipice, a turn in the road so sharply rounded that it might not be a turn at all, it might be the end of the road itself. And Mr. Potter held the steering wheel in his hands, sometimes even caressing it as if it were something to which he could administer pleasure, and the steering wheel itself, from the look of it, from the feel of it, was meant to recall the hard protective shell that was the back of a turtle, but Mr. Potter only held the steering wheel in his two hands and the feel of it was familiar and then again the feel of it was not familiar and it remained a steering wheel; and the Weizengers with their complications involving the world that was beyond the horizon did not now exist, and he drove along the road almost in a stupor and said nothing to himself and sang nothing to himself and thought nothing to himself. Mr. Potter drove along and nothing crossed his mind and the world was blank and the world remained blank.
Mr. Potter, while driving Mr. Shoul’s car, was passing through villages named John Hughes, Urlings, Newfield, Barnes Hill, Seatons, Swetes, Freetown, and each village was an entire history unto itself, each village a mouthful of pain, each village inhabited by individual human beings with stories so similar and stories so different; and Mr. Potter, while driving Mr. Shoul’s car through these villages, each with their scene after scene of pain, withheld himself from the world around him; some of these villages were in the Parish of St. Paul, the parish in which he was born on the seventh of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two, and as he drove through the parish in which he was born he withheld himself from the world around him. And through the village of Bolans he entered the Parish of St. Mary and he left the Parish of St. Mary through the village of Emanuel and he made his way up Market Street to Mr. Shoul’s garage. And all that time Mr. Potter withheld himself from the world and so when he entered the world of Mr. Shoul and Mr. Shoul’s garage which housed the other three cars, also owned by Mr. Shoul, but not the drivers of those cars, men, were not owned by Mr. Shoul—for Mr. Shoul was not allowed to own men then—Mr. Potter still withheld himself from the world.
Mr. Potter was born on the seventh day of January in nineteen hundred and twenty-two in the village of English Harbour in the Parish of St. Paul. His mother’s name was Elfrida Robinson and his father’s name was Nathaniel Potter. And Nathaniel was the father of eleven children with eight altogether different mothers and Mr. Potter was the last of Nathaniel’s children to be born, so by that time Nathaniel Potter greeted Mr. Potter’s arrival in the world not with a feeling of happiness or a feeling of unhappiness, not with resignation or with the impulse to revolt against the burden of having another person who needed support of one kind or another, not even with indifference. Nathaniel Potter withheld himself from the world of Mr. Potter, my father, the man who could not read and write and so made someone who could do both, read and write, and so made someone who would always be in love with that, reading and writing. But Nathaniel was a fisherman and he cast his fishnet on Mondays and Thursdays and he went to check his pots on Tuesdays and Fridays and on Wednesdays he mended his fishnets, on Saturdays he counted all the money he had made for the week just past through selling fish and on Sundays, his wife (for he had a wife, only she was not Mr. Potter’s mother) made him a dinner of goat stew. But on Saturdays, when counting the money he had made all week, he could see that the money always remained the same, week after week, year in and year out, the money remained the same, but the number of his children did not remain so, the same.
The open sky, stretching from the little village called English Harbour to way out beyond the horizon, was familiar to Nathaniel Potter, and this sky was a blue unimaginable to people who had never seen it before; the eminence that was the sun, traveling such a vast distance, reaching the village of English Harbour as harshness of light and temperature, if you were overly familiar with it, or as a blessing of light and temperature, if you were not familiar with it at all; the water that made up the ocean (it was the Atlantic) and the water that made up the sea (it was the Caribbean) flowed gently and calmly as if it were a domesticated body of water cast large. But the beautiful sky (and it was beautiful) and the beautiful days (for they were that, beautiful) and the beautiful bodies of water (and they were that, beautiful) and all of the beauty of the sky and all of the beauty of the land and all of the beauty of the water were so much a part of Nathaniel Potter, it was as if he had been asked to consider his hands or his eyes or his feet; his life would be not imaginable without them. So too would his life be unimaginable without that water, that land, that sky.
And there was the world of sky above and light forcefully illuminating and forcefully streaming through the sky and the awe of great bodies of water flowing into each other even as they remained separate, and Nathaniel Potter was a fisherman in that world of sky above and light streaming through the blue sky and the bodies of water below it and he was subject to this world, a small something in the great and big world that answered to nothing and no one. And from the sky would fall sheets of rain for days upon days; and the light streaming down through the sky often became blanket after blanket of heat smothering him; and the great bodies of water, ocean and sea, would become so turbulent that the world became uninhabitable to all who lived in it. And in those days, Nathaniel Potter’s life narrowed and grew ugly and all the beauty of the sky and the light and the sea was ugly when seen through his eyes. And in those days Nathaniel Potter was beautiful also: his legs were long and strong and they were of help to him as he rowed his boat; his arms were long and strong and they were of tremendous help to him as he rowed his boat into the very deep waters; his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and his hair, which was the color of copper and had the texture of metal shredded to resemble tangled thread, made him beautiful, so much so that he was really the father of twenty-one children who had different mothers but Nathaniel knew only of eleven of them. And in those days of the beautiful sky and the beautiful light and the beautiful waters with the sky leaking, sometimes leaking light, sometimes leaking water, and the light streaking through the sky, sometimes creating intolerable heat, and the waters of the sea so turbulent, Nathaniel Potter found no fish in his pots and when he cast his net no fish were trapped, and this went on for such a long time. And as he grew old, his life grew harder: he could no longer easily make a joke when faced with misfortune: no fish in his fish pots and fishnet. And the sun was in its rightful place in the sky and the sky itself was blue and the waters were calm on the surface and it was an ordinary day just to look at it, there was no trace of commotion just to look at the landscape, the landscape was so untroubled, as if it had never known the hand of man or the wrath of a god, as if it had never been observed, as if no one had ever claimed to own it and as if its ownership had never been contested; as if it had never known so much as the capriciousness that was within nature itself, a capriciousness that was beyond human understanding.
And on a day such as that: Nathaniel Potter could hear the faint sound of all that had been capricious and had come to make up his life: his children and their mothers, his ancestors from some of the many places that make up Africa and from somewhere in Spain and from somewhere in England and from somewhere in Scotland. And the faint sound of all that he was made of caused him to grow angry, caused him to grow almost happy and curious but then angry again, and the anger welled up in him and he was all alone in the world, the world that refused to bear any trace of the capriciousness of history or the capriciousness of memory, the w
orld that had passed away. But Nathaniel Potter could not so simply come into such a day and into such a landscape, for at that moment his very existence was part of all that surrounded him. The very shape of the earth, for instance: he was part of its mysterious and endless beginnings, he was part of its boundaries; the day, the night, the light from the sun forcing its way through the heavens onto the land on which he stood, all this too was part of what made him. How simple he was then, how without knowledge of harm he was then, how beautiful, how innocent, how perfect.
Nathaniel Potter could not read and he did not make a child who could do so. He made eleven children but he did not make one who could read and so write. He made a fishing boat with his own hands, he made the oars with which to row his fishing boat, he sat under a tree and made himself a fishing net, and while he was doing all those things his life flowed out of him and then flowed back into him again; and there was nothing he could make of himself, for he was happy sometimes and sad sometimes and angry sometimes and helpless sometimes and without hope sometimes and there was nothing he could make of himself. How it rained when he did not want it to do so, how the rain refused to come down when he wished it would do so, how fast the dark that is night fell when he wanted the light of day to last longer and to shine brighter, how harsh, as it falls on his bare head, could something so innocent as the rays of the sun be!
And that boat, how did he come to know the way in which it should be made? When he had been a little boy he had sat next to a man who made boats and watched that man do so. And those oars, how did he come to know the way in which they should be carved? When he sat next to the man who built the boats, Nathaniel watched as he made oars. And that fishing net, how did he come to know the ways of making it and repairing any rent in it? That same man who built the boat and made the oars had been a fisherman also and he knew how to make fish pots and how to make a fishing net, and Nathaniel had sat next to him and watched him do all those things, for Nathaniel then was just a boy and that fisherman was his father. And his father taught him how to do all the things that would eventually shape his life, for Nathaniel became a fisherman also. But his father did not teach him how to make children and his father could not teach him how to make children who could read and write.
And when Nathaniel became a fisherman, that is to say, a man who went out to sea in the deep dark of late night and the thinning dark of early morning to catch fish, he no longer thought of his father or anyone who came before him. His life was his own and it appeared to him, his life, as itself, not like another life, it came to him without a reference to anything and he was only himself and he was made up of nothing else. And if someone came upon him then, he could not give an account of himself, not even one that began with “I was born …” for he no longer had an interest in when he came into the world. But he was born in the way that all people are born and he was conceived in the way all people are conceived: no one enters the world in the exact same situation.
Oh, memory so fresh, so not! Oh, memory so reliable, so not! His skin, protecting him from the elements outside, protecting him from the emotions inside! The future unimaginable, the past so impossible! The skin had not yet separated from Nathaniel Potter’s flesh and bones! He was still young.
And Nathaniel Potter walked to the edge of the land and stepped into his boat and sailed to the edge of the sea as he knew it and cast his net and gathered all that was caught in it; and found his fish pots and gathered up all that had been caught in them and he returned to the edge of the land where it met the sea and he was disappointed, for he had caught only a few fish; how alone he felt in his disappointment. What is the glory of the world? He was so much a part of the glory of the world and he could not see himself. Naked at all times, no matter what covered his body, that was Nathaniel Potter. The sun fell into the black before him; the moon rose up from the black behind him: and in between was history, all that had happened, and at its end was a man named Nathaniel Potter and who was only that, Nathaniel Potter. And he asked himself … What? He asked himself, not a thing; not why did this go in that way and something else in another. He grew too large for his shirt and his pants and then after that he became small again, not the way he had been as a boy, he only shrunk from his large manly self, and then he was the size of a boy, but he was not a boy again. And love could have entered into his existence and love, very much so, should have entered into his existence, for almost no one needed it more, but love did not become part of Nathaniel Potter’s existence. So unloved he was, but he did not know it and so he could not miss love, for it had never been part of his very being.
And the world lay not before him and not behind him. He stood on the very ground that made up his world and nothing was lost and nothing was gained and then again everything was lost forever and ever. One day when he went to his fish pots, they were filled with nothing, and on that day he needed them to be filled with fish. And one day when he cast his net, he caught nothing, not even the stray piece of rubbish produced by the land or by the sea. And at first he was filled with a feeling of awe, of wonderment, at the perfection of the emptiness: his fish pots, his fishnet, making up, as they did, his life as he knew it, his life as he could feel it; but his immediate need was for a fish pot full of fish and a fishnet, as it coursed through the seawaters not far from the shore, to ensnare scores of anything living in the shallow waters of the sea. And that one day of fruitlessness, that first day of fish pots and fishnet empty of everything, was repeated again and again; for many days after, Nathaniel Potter found his fish pots and fishnet empty of prey, and this prey was the very thing that sustained his world. And after many days of this particular emptiness, of this particular silence, Nathaniel Potter cursed God. And these were his actions: he cut his fish pots from their anchors, letting them go drifting into the shallow and deep waters of the blue sea, and then, removing his trousers, he caused his bare bottom to face the sky and in an angry cry he asked God to kiss it; and his fishnet yielded nothing, not a single thing was trapped in his fishnet, and this fishnet, each knot in it, each stitch in it, he knew well, for he had made his fishnet himself. And he cursed God, it was not a God with any specific character; the God he cursed had only an all-encompassing character, this God he cursed was capable of boundless amounts of good but all of that goodness had been denied to Nathaniel; and this God was capable of boundless amounts of evil and a great deal of it, an intense amount of it, had rained down on Nathaniel Potter. And at the moment of the empty fish pots and at the moment of the empty fishnet, the boundless goodness of this God, the vast waters of the sea on which he sailed in his boat and its contents which provided him with his life’s support, was no longer known to him; and at the moment of the empty fish pots and the empty fishnet he was only certain of the boundless amounts of evil that were attached to this God. And Look! was the very word he said to himself. And he looked and on his left side moving right was the world painted in hues of silver and yellow and red and green and blue and white and purple and orange and permutations of all these; and he looked and on his right side moving toward the left was the world and it too was painted in hues of silver and yellow and red and green and blue and white and purple and orange and permutations of these colors. And he looked again, first to one and then to another; and then again to one and then again to the other. And Look! he said to himself again and then again and again and again, he said this word to himself, Look! And he looked outside himself and he looked within himself and it was all the same. And he looked again, but it was always the same: inside and out, it was always the same. The coldness of all that was real, inside and outside; the long, bleak blankness of all that was real, inside and outside; oh, for a day so brand new, Nathaniel Potter said to himself, for though he could not read and he could not write and did not know that he could make someone who could do that, read and write, his feelings, all bundled up in a mass of confusion, were not too far back from the tip of his tongue. And he looked again into the abyss that was the dawn before day
and then into the mystery that was the same day’s end and could not find himself and he looked into his empty fish pots and his empty fishnet and felt how indecipherable was the world, how it could not maintain a pattern of regularity, how uncertainty was attached to everything he knew, how rain could fall beyond necessity, how the sun could shine with such ferociousness that his whole world would long for its cessation. And looking up to the heavens, he cursed the divine being who had made this world of the ground beneath his bare feet—he did not wear shoes—the sky above his bare head, the seas whose bounty had so often been withheld from him. The trousers he wore were made of cotton that had been grown in fields not far from the village where he lived and that had then been sent bale on top of bale to England, where in a factory it had been made into yard on top of yard of cloth and sent back to a store that was in a village not far from the one in which he lived and it was there that he bought yards of this cloth and had it made into the garment covering that part of his body. The shirt he wore had the same origin and destination as his trousers, and shirt and trousers clung to his lean frame as if they were another kind of skin, clung to his lean body as if he had been born wearing only them, and in that way even his body was mixed up with the world and he could not extricate himself from it, not at all could he separate himself from the world. Each intake of breath was a deep cry of pain, each sigh was an expression of unbearable sorrow.
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