Mr. Potter

by Jamaica Kincaid

  And the pain she felt rending her body, starting with the wet spot between her legs and ending just below her breastbone and making her entire body seeming to be made up of just this area of her body, and all that pain, so big, so big, producing only this small ball of complacency (it was Mr. Potter), and from all that came Mr. Potter, so startlingly rash and innocent, his gelatinous lungs first closely fitted together and then, through his own efforts, expanding so he could then become part of the thing called living. But looking at that small ball of complacency and rashness and innocence: how she loved him, and not knowing what to do with such a thing, this love, she then named him Rodney, after the English maritime criminal George Brydges Rodney, a man whose criminal nature and accomplishments had become so distorted in retelling that the victims of his actions had come to revere him. Elfrida Robinson’s life at sixteen was already shriveled and pinched, and the great expanse of the life of George Brydges Rodney, the English admiral, the second son of Henry Rodney of Walton-on-Thames, overwhelmed her (for he was in the official realm of history) and seemed distant, for he really was in the official realm of history, and the distance was also familiar and common, and for her son, whose appearance in the world had no real meaning for her, she wanted a name that had no meaning at all to her, and this wanting of no meaning made her choose something different, and so she called him Roderick, not Rodney. There are many people in that part of the world, that small part of the overwhelmingly large world, called Rodney, but not Mr. Potter. Mr. Potter’s name was Roderick and that man, Roderick Potter, was my father.

  And in the middle of the night, just when Mr. Potter was being born and so had no real name yet, the contents of Nurse Sylvia Eudelle’s stomach, there since dinnertime six hours ago, had never settled and it bubbled up like some undiscovered fluid, precious or not, traveling just beneath the earth’s surface and it made her irritable and then spontaneously explosive and then treacherously calm. The room in which Mr. Potter was born made up the entire house, and the walls of that room, which was really a house in itself, were not painted and nothing hung on them. And in a corner of that room, which was the house in its entirety, stood an enamel pail full of hot water, though by the time Mr. Potter was born the water was no longer hot but it was not cold completely; and in another corner was a box made of thin wood and in this box were sheets made of white cotton and small gowns made of white cotton and a little bonnet made of white cotton and all these things Elfrida had made for the baby she was carrying in her stomach (she did not know then that it would be Mr. Potter); and behind the box made of thin wood was a rat and the rat was still, perhaps asleep or perhaps only taking a rest on a very busy night for a baby was just to be born; and in another corner, that would be three corners now, was a gathering of dust, and in the fourth corner was a gathering of dust also, and all the corners with their contents were indifferent to Elfrida’s cries for she was in such pain, and her cries pierced through the walls of the room, the house it was, and reached all the way up to the dark skies, for the clouds were thick and blocked out the light from the moon, which was full and brimming over with brightness, and the stars, which were agleam and blinding with reflected light, and the night was empty to Elfrida’s cries, not even an echo accompanied them. And a loud sound, like a grunt and like a dog’s bark, escaped through Nurse Eudelle’s lips, and a stench, a stinking smell so powerful it could kill anything, anyone, followed and it enveloped the room, which was all that made up the house, even to the four corners, and it stayed in the room, which was all that made up the house, but it did not leave the house and it did not leave the room, and the cry of Mr. Potter’s mother as she gave birth to him, a definition of pain itself, overwhelmed all in its presence, all that came near it, all that might hear of it, all that was in its vicinity, all in reality or all only imagined. And Mr. Potter came into the closed and complete world, the world satisfied beyond satisfaction itself, and to his very existence the world was indifferent, the earth spun in its eternal way, the tides of the sea swelled high and then receded, all the mountains everywhere remained majestic, the hills remained comfortingly modest in relation to the mountains, the rivers everywhere flowed gently sometimes, or sometimes in fits of capricious rage; and over time these changed landscapes define constancy itself, and this landscape can make a people; a people will know who they really are when seeing this landscape. And Mr. Potter was born, and all the world was indifferent to this.

  And the midwife, Nurse Sylvia Eudelle, took the newly born Mr. Potter, all naked and protected only by his mother’s blood and mucus, and plunged him into the bucket of water that stood in one of the corners of that room, really the house, and the water in the bucket had once been hot, but when Mr. Potter had been plunged into it, just born he was then, the water was not hot and it was not cold; the water was indifferent as to temperature. And after removing his mother’s blood and mucus from him, the midwife, Nurse Sylvia Eudelle, wrapped him in a blanket and placed him next to his mother, Elfrida Robinson, who was lying in a bed made up of very clean, so very, very clean, rags, and the mother and her child, Elfrida and Mr. Potter, fell asleep exhausted from their common purpose, bringing Mr. Potter safely into the world, a common purpose but to what end? To no end at all. The thin shrill cry of the newborn lingered, it became an unending echo, in the ears of the midwife, Nurse Sylvia Eudelle’s ears, and it made her irritable to see them, the mother and her child, asleep, so innocent of everything, all that had just happened inside the room (that was the house) and that had happened beyond it and in its entirety, so much that even this midwife did not know about and could only suspect, could only sense, as if she were gifted to do this also: sense that there were things in the world other than easing the burden of bringing the despised into it.

  And in the first hours of his life outside his mother’s womb, the newly born Mr. Potter slept next to his new mother, he was her first child and he would be her only child (she had no children besides him), his head next to her gently beating heart, her breathing so regular, so calm, so perfect, as if she had been made that way by God himself. He slept through all of that night and in the morning he drank milk from his mother’s breast. He slept through all that morning and then that noon he drank milk from his mother’s breasts, and for the first week of his life he slept and drank milk from his mother’s breasts and she, his mother Elfrida Robinson, slept and fed her son milk from her breasts. And at the end of that one week it all ended, the sleeping and then feeding, and it ended with such finality, as if it had never happened at all, as if Mr. Potter had never lain next to his own mother and he, her only son, had drunk milk from her breasts and was made so satisfied by this nourishment that he slept a sweet untroubled sleep, and he slept a sleep like that, untroubled, and such a sleep he would never in his whole life of seventy years experience again. How the innocence of Mr. Potter’s existence exhausted his mother, how he lived so instinctively and complacently, as if he were an insect and this was one of his many stages of metamorphosis, how in that one week, the first after he emerged from his mother’s womb, the reality of his small being was, with certainty, essential to the intricate vastness of all that had been and all that is and all that would be. But then his mother Elfrida Robinson, in whose womb he had spent nine months, a few days more or less, grew tired of him, lying next to her, feeding from her, and then sleeping next to her, and how she longed to be rid of him. And she got out of her bed and placed him on the floor where she made for him a bed from clean rags, very, very clean rags, a nestlike bed, and she left him alone and went outside and went about in the hot, rainless days, but she could hear him, hear Mr. Potter, crying, sometimes from hunger, sometimes from loneliness, and sometimes her heart broke in two when she heard his cries and sometimes her heart hardened, in imitation of some impregnable mineral. And her breasts became parched, barren of her milky fluids (she had willed them so), and for nourishment she brought Mr. Potter, her only son, the only child she would ever have, some thin arrowroot porridge, or som
e thin cornmeal porridge, or a porridge made from coarse brown seaweed. And Mr. Potter’s mother Elfrida Robinson grew tired of him, of the demands he made on her: he needed food, he needed clothes, for he was growing, he needed love but that was out of the order of things, neither of them knew that he needed love, for what could that be, love, between two people such as they were, a mother and a son and in a situation like that: essential to life but without meaning to them in particular.

  And looking at that small boy, for he had become a boy, a small boy, he crawled on the floor of that small room (the house), he sat up, he walked outside of the room (the house), and then he talked, at first in incomplete sentences and then in complete sentences, and when he needed more clothes, she made them with her own hands, for she knew how to do that, and when he got sick and coughed through the night and the breath coming out of his lungs sounded not like breath at all but like the sound of air coming out of the blacksmith’s bellows, she sat up with him all through the night and applied a mixture of camphor and tallow on brown paper to his chest, and made a tea from the leaves of the eucalyptus tree and the leaves of many other shrubs and trees and fed it to him and made him well again. As a small child, Mr. Potter suffered the setbacks so typical to anything living, the many ups and downs, but mainly downs, for he seemed always so pale, so sickly, so often on the verge of death itself, death being as always so unpredictable, so whimsical. And when Mr. Potter was a child, a small boy of five or so, his mother grew tired of him and gave him away to a woman named Mrs. Shepherd, and then she walked into the sea, and walked into it as if in walking she would eventually come to something new, some new place that had no resemblance to what she had known, some new place which would obliterate the memory, no really the actuality, of what she had just known. The sea then just looked as the sea was itself, an enormous body of water, the water itself so present that it overwhelmed everything that was known, everything that she, Elfrida Robinson, could know, and as she walked into it, the sea, its reality was out of her senses, but what could that be, out of her senses, for she understood herself so very well, she understood herself completely, she understood outside herself and she understood inside herself and she even understood the very boundary between herself and some something else so different, something not herself at all. But this element, so new, was not water as Elfrida Robinson could recognize it. This water was thick and blank (it was a form of darkness), black, unorderly, moving without anything and thick with something, but whatever it was thick with held no nourishment, and it was so thick and then so heavy, so overwhelming, as if it could be grace, or a blessing, or something good, anything good, but a name could not be found for it, and it was the very texture and atmosphere and reality of the sea, the sea into which Mr. Potter’s mother, Elfrida Robinson, walked when she grew tired of his existence. And Mr. Potter’s mother walked into the sea without even so much as despair, she did not have even so much as a sense of hopelessness and then going beyond that, she was made up only of what lay beyond that. See her as a small girl motherless, and see her mother before her motherless and that mother, too, motherless, and on and on reaching back not so much into eternity as into a sentence that would begin with the year fourteen hundred and ninety-two; for eternity is the unimaginable awfulness that makes up the past and the unimaginable peace and pleasure that is to come. And where is Elfrida’s father, that man named something Robinson? And where is his father and his father before him and on and on into eternity, the eternity of what has been, not the one that is to come?

  Can a human being exist in a wilderness, a world so empty of human feeling: love and justice; a world in which love and even that, justice, only exist from time to time and in small quantities, or unexpectedly, like a wild seedling of some necessary and common food (rice would do, or corn would do, or grain of any kind)? The answer is yes and yes again and the answer is no, not really, not so at all. And on that day Elfrida, Mr. Potter’s mother she was then and would always be, walked into the sea, everything was so ordinary and itself, as if ordinariness might not sometimes be worth celebrating, as if ordinariness could never be longed for, as if ordinariness could never be missed, as if ordinariness was all there was and anything else was an interruption: the light from the sun sprawled across the small island lazily now, for it had long ago fiercely driven away every shadow, it had long ago with fierceness penetrated every crevice; the sky in some places was a thin blue, as if it had exhausted being that color, blue, as if it was at the very end of being that color, blue, and in some other places the blue of the sky was so intense, so thick was the sky with that color, blue, as if that color, blue, was only then being made, as if it was so new, as if it had never been seen before, and nothing could replace it and this blue might satisfy every known want; and the trees and vegetables grew, not carelessly and wantonly (they lived mostly in a perpetual drought), with leaves everywhere surrounding flowers and fruit and seed, but grew with a careful sadness, sometimes hovering near the ground, as if reaching up to the sky would be a mistake; and sometimes a single tree would arrange itself in this way, half of it dormant, half not, and the dormant half rested and the growing half grew sparingly; and the land itself, the land over which Elfrida Robinson walked on her way into the sea which would then swallow her up, curved and straightened out, rose up into small hills and then flattened out, and the land was not welcoming and it was not rejecting, not on purpose; it was only the land of a very small island, an island of no account, really, and she was of no account, really, only she was the mother of my father and I know I cannot make myself forget that.

  And the dress she wore on that day she walked into the sea was made of blue poplin, and even the very fabric that covered her tormented skin had its own tormented history, the very name, poplin, so innocent even in description, so humble when seen in large bolts, so humble when made into a garment worn by Elfrida in any situation, sitting down or walking toward her death being swallowed up by the sea; and the dress had a white collar made of white chambray and sleeves with cuffs of white chambray, and she crossed her arms across her body, just above her waist and just below her breast, as if she were her own child and needed soothing and encouragement just before a difficult task. She wore no shoes, for she did not have any of her own. Her eyes were closed as she walked along the road; on either side of her were landscapes, brown clay heaving up, brown clay sweeping downward, and her eyes were closed not to shut out a beckoning world, not to shut out a world that might tempt her to love it; her eyes were shut because they were so tired, they had been open for so very long. And the world, satisfied in its ordinariness, moved this way and then that, as usual, and Elfrida Robinson, who was even then Mr. Potter’s mother, walked without doubt and without purpose toward the sea.

  And she walked from the flat center, which was formed by clay, toward the south and southwest, which was hilly for it had been formed by long-dormant volcanoes, and then she walked north and then toward the northeast, and she passed the Bendals stream, which was near the village of Bendals. But a stream, so often a symbol of the gentleness of life in its slow, calm, steady flow, the tender sound it so humbly makes, its very existence a repudiation of so much that is harsh and violent and frightening in the world as we human beings find it—a stream of water could not come to her attention; a stream anywhere, what was that? And she walked toward the sea, but not toward the sea as it was to be found at English Harbour, or Old Road Bluff, or Willoughby Bay, or Nonsuch Harbour, or Boone’s Point, or Wetherell Point, or Five Islands, or Carlisle Bay, or Lignum Vitae Bay, or Dieppe Bay. She walked toward Rat Island, a small formation of rock that in silhouette resembled a rodent exposed to its enemies and vulnerable, and this formation of rock was connected to Antigua by a narrow sliver of land, an isthmus. And many years later, for her life ended in nineteen hundred and twenty-seven or sometime not far from around then, my own mother would take me to Rat Island to teach me to swim and I never learned to do that, and on Good Fridays, after the sad mourning service f
or a man murdered many years ago, my mother and I went to Rat Island to dig for cockles and search for a pink-colored seaweed; we never found enough of either to make a meal, but even so, each year we went again and again after Good Friday services to Rat Island. Nothing of any use grew there, it harbored families of wild pigs, pigs that had escaped domesticity and had grown ferocious, though they were not dangerous, only frightening if you came upon them unexpectedly. And once, while I stood on the shore watching my mother swim in the waters off Rat Island, she took a deep dive and disappeared from my sight and my sense of loss, loss of her, my mother, was so beyond my own understanding that to this day, just to remember it, places me on the edge of just before falling into nothingness, a blank space that is dark and without borders and will always be so. But it is to this place that Elfrida walked, Rat Island, into the bay there, and the seas took her in, not with love, not with indifference, not with meaning of any kind. And it was at Rat Island that Elfrida Robinson died and it was at Rat Island that I falsely thought my mother had died, but at the time of the incident with my mother, I did not know of Elfrida Robinson, I did not know of Mr. Potter, but he was my father all the same and Elfrida was his mother.