Mr. Potter

by Jamaica Kincaid

  How sad never to hear again the sound of a mother hen chirping with satisfaction at the sight of an overly bloated worm which she knows will be nourishment for her baby chicks; how sad never again to see a rainbow gracing the arch of the sky in that space before the horizon begins and ends; how sad never again to see the gleaming mound that is the top of a woman’s breast; never to look up and see a sky sealed blue and blue and blue again, and to know that blue signals the sky’s opposition to moisture-bearing clouds; how sad never to hear your name called again; how sad never to look up again and see the face of someone you recognize, someone you love or thought you loved, someone really dear to you, or someone you know to be dear to you because her nose is shaped exactly like your own; how sad never again to see a winged mammal wending its way in the cool, dark night; how sad never to touch your own toes again as you remove your shoes from your feet; how sad never to clasp yourself in your own arms again out of a sense of desolation or loneliness or approval or pleasure or knowing the sheer nothingness of such a gesture; how sad never to be able to look up at the vast expanse of endless emptiness above and the seeming limit of the ground on which you stood ever again; how sad never to again see the sun turn red sometimes and disappear sometimes; how sad never again to touch another person spontaneously, without thought, without reason, without justification, and to expect a similar response, and how sad to find yourself disappointed, one way or the other, the other or one way; how sad never again to stand in the middle of nowhere and see the world in all its brightness and brimming over with possibilities innumerable heading toward you; how sad to know that you will be alive once and never so again, no matter how you rearrange your life and your very own self. “So, me ah wharn you, me ah tell you, eh, eh!” said Mr. Potter when he was still alive and not dead and helpless, lying all alone in his coffin, dressed up in garments suitable for burial, his naked body swathed in a brand-new white linen suit. But when he was dead, he said nothing at all, and sadness or its opposite could not come from him; sadness or its opposite might be attached to him, but Mr. Potter himself was dead and could experience no such thing, could not experience anything at all, for he was dead. And the world in its entirety and the individuals who contribute to its entirety are small and smaller yet again, and how sad, how sad, how very sad is life, for its glorious beginnings end and the end is always an occasion for sadness, no matter what anyone says.

  Oh, and there is the thinning of hair on your head, and your skin losing its firm, taut texture, and the loss of the thick substance that held your limbs together, and events and events again and the time lapsed between these events, and the failing to recall all these events and even the times between them! Oh! Oh! And never again to see the faces of all those female people named Andrina and Elaine and Cynthia and Elfrida Robinson and Annie Victoria Richardson and someone named Emma and the flower called Marigold, and Rachelle and Etta and Esther and Roma and Joycelynne and Sylvie, and to wonder sometimes if they had any needs and then to dismiss the idea of them having needs and then just completely forget their existence: Oh, how sad, so sad! So sad to be removed from life, with all its clutter: like the many girls with the same-shaped noses; the arrival of Mr. Shoul, the appearance of Dr. Weizenger, diminished the presence of Mr. Shepherd; to hold the loving attention of many women at once, without letting any one of them become aware of the presence of the others. So sad to meet the unexpected love, grief, huge loss, grief again. Oh, how sad! So sad! Too sad!

  And on the day of Mr. Potter’s burial, it rained and rained. A spout opened up in the sky and poured its contents into his grave and that was enough, for no other source of water marked his death. No one cried to show sorrow over his death and no one was sorry that he had died, they were only sorry they had known him, or sorry they had loved him, for he left them nothing at all. He left his wealth, his house and a large bank account, to a distant relative who had migrated to an island so small that only the very poor or the very rich could afford to live on it and sometimes they are the same thing. Oh, to be rescued from the oblivion of death must be a cry each of us makes in the middle of the darkest of nights, but who can hear it, who can hear our voices? And when Mr. Potter died, I could read and by then I had become a writer, and so when I heard of his death, to hear it was the same as to read it, and I heard through reading, Mr. Potter is dead, my father is dead, and I recognized that a source from which I flowed had been stanched. It was my mother who told me that my father had died: she said, “Potter dead, ’e dead you know, me ah tell you, eh, eh, me ah tell you,” and she said it in the same tone of voice as if she were describing a natural catastrophe, a hurricane or an earthquake, as if she were noting something common and everyday: the sun did not shine the day she had put the starched white clothes out to dry. And how amazed I was to hear my own mother, who was alive, tell me that my father had died, for he was dead, she had never told me of his being alive. And at that moment I could read and I could write and I wrote then only about my mother, trying to explain to myself her life and why it should make sense to me, for my own life as I lived it had become irrevocably (and yet impossible to do so) untethered from her life and that was a natural thing to have occurred.

  And it was Tan-Tan, the man who dug Mr. Potter’s grave, who told me of how he tried to bail the water out of Mr. Potter’s grave and how futile was his effort and how, in resignation, he just stood there with the rain falling down on him and then into Mr. Potter’s grave, and how while standing, he crossed one leg over the other to balance himself and he put his hands together and then laced his fingers into each other tightly, so tightly that it hurt, and he had to unlace his fingers and just let himself stand there, his hands at his side, his pitchfork leaning against his body, and how he watched Mr. Potter’s relations fiercely quarreling with each other and his grave filling up with water and the sky never clearing to reveal the sun and Tan-Tan said that the dead did not bother him, for he knew them so well and he didn’t care about the dead one way or the other, and how the dead were always wrapped up in coffins made of mahogany or pitch pine and how indifferent he was to them, and I did not say to him then that love made you indifferent, I only shook my head up and down, backward and forward, in agreement or disagreement, one way or the other, and even I did not know what I meant. And in the world of graveyards and burying, Tan-Tan sailed away, as if he were a ship whose port was always on the horizon and the horizon kept shifting, as horizons will, and he only remembered Mr. Potter and his funeral and the burial because I asked him, I was by then someone who wrote, I said, I said, I asked … and in response to my statements and my questions, Tan-Tan showed me, many years after the actual event, the place where Mr. Potter had been buried, but instead of the fat, upright mound that should have been his grave, he showed me a place in the ground that looked as if it had been built by ants, or as if it had been made by a child who had the privilege of play. What, I asked Tan-Tan, Tell me something, I said to Tan-Tan, What am I looking at? And Tan-Tan said that this burial spot was where Mr. Potter had been buried, and that even though it had no official marker, even though there was not a headstone, he could remember it anyway, for how over Mr. Potter’s grave there had been such a commotion, so much contention regarding who was really entitled to weep at the sight of Mr. Potter’s coffin or who was entitled to weep at the memory of Mr. Potter, and how the rain came down and filled the hole of Mr. Potter’s grave and how he tried to bail the water out of the grave in vain, and how he had had to place the coffin on a bier and carry it to the dead house and leave it there for the night and how, early the next morning, after it had stopped raining, only he, Tan-Tan, and Mr. Tongue, who was the overseer of the graveyard, had lowered Mr. Potter’s body, which lay inside a coffin, into the ground. And Tan-Tan noted to himself how easy it was to lower Mr. Potter into the ground, especially with the assistance of Mr. Tongue, how easy it was.

  And to start again at the beginning: Mr. Potter’s appearance in the world was a combination of sadness, joy, and a
chasm of silent horror for his mother (Elfrida Robinson) and indifference to his father (Nathaniel Potter), who had so many children that none of them could matter at all; and to the world he was of no consequence at all, for the world is filled with many people and each of them is like a second in a minute and a minute is in an hour and an hour is in a day and a day is in a week and a week is in a month and a month is in a year and a year is in a century and a century is in a millennium and a millennium is in the world and the world eventually becomes a picture trapped in a four-sided frame. And Mr. Potter’s birth was equal to the fraction of a moment that had already been divided and he moved slowly, slowly toward this moment of Tan-Tan bailing water from his grave and Mr. Tongue being called on for assistance to bail water from his grave, and in that way Mr. Tongue became a witness to something obscure and without significance, Mr. Potter’s burial, and only because I am his daughter, for I have his nose, and because I learned how to read and how to write, only so is Mr. Potter’s life known, his smallness becomes large, his anonymity is stripped away, his silence broken. Mr. Potter himself says nothing, nothing at all. How sad it is never to hear the sound of your own voice again and sadder still never to have had a voice to begin with.

  Here again for the last time is Mr. Potter, so sweetly new, emerging from the warmth of his mother’s womb, swathed in a thick film of bloody mucus, the cage of cartilage that was his lungs expanding into its natural and eventual form: open and then closed, like a door or a musical instrument of a certain kind; the first true smile to appear on his face because he recognized the face of his true mother, Elfrida Robinson; a distant thud, a distant rumble, all frightening to the small boy he had become, and no one to offer an explanation that this was universal to every individual life, change was always accompanied by a thud and rumble; and here is a dramatic curve in his life, more like a tiny stream of water ambling along without any known destination, and this likeness of a carelessly ambling stream without destination that is suddenly interrupted and forced into the strict order of a dam or a reservoir becomes the reality of Mr. Potter’s life when, in the middle of his boyhood, his mother Elfrida walks into the sea and he never sees her again, not her face or any other part of her and not in a dream or any other situation imagined or real, he never sees her again and for the rest of his life he longs for her in some form, imagined or real, but never allows himself to know this. And here is Mr. Potter with the enforced wallowing in his childhood with the innocently cruel group of people, the family Shepherd, his father Nathaniel passing him by coincidence in an alley in the village of Table Hill Gordon without saying hello, without any sign of recognition whatsoever; and here is Mr. Potter meeting Mr. Shoul, who had so recently been disenfranchised from the Lebanon and the road which led to Damascus and back, and Dr. Weizenger and his wife May, passengers in his taxi (Mr. Shoul’s car, it was then), whose presence remained vivid in Mr. Potter’s mind and he could remember, up to the moment he died, Mr. Shoul and Dr. Weizenger more perfectly and more accurately than he could his mother Elfrida, who had walked into the sea, and his father Nathaniel, who had never acknowledged him at all. And at the moment he died, Mr. Potter did not remember the girl children, all of whom had noses that looked like his own nose, and certainly he could not remember the names of their mothers or even their faces and Mr. Potter died in the way of great men and in the way of ordinary men, for all men die in the same way, they just die, cannot breathe, will no longer get up and walk, they die, they are dead. Oh, hear the bells of the Anglican cathedral ring in the city of St. John’s, on the island of Antigua, not because this is a symbol of Mr. Potter’s end or beginning, just hear them ring and see them ring, for I tell you that they do ring and you can read the words: the bell of the church rang: and it rang on the day Mr. Potter was born and it rang throughout all the days of his life and it rang also on the day that he died and the bell rang, indifferent to Mr. Potter’s coming and going, indifferent to whether his coming and going was in regard to Mr. Shoul’s garage, Dr. Weizenger’s arrival after he, Dr. Weizenger, had survived ten lifetimes of horror and then lived one lifetime of ordinary, everyday horror, which is to say that he climbed out of bed every morning of every day and he climbed back into it at the beginning of every night. See the flat feet of the boy Drickie crossing the yard, away from the stone heap, toward the gate and out into the street that led to Mr. Shepherd’s home and Mr. Potter’s mother, Elfrida Robinson, walking into the sea and never returning from it.

  And Mr. Potter died, so simple a thing, he died and will never be heard from again, except through me, for I can read and I can write my own name, which includes his name also, Elaine Cynthia Potter, and like him and his own father before him, I have a line drawn through me, a line has been drawn through me.

  And staring at the place where Mr. Potter was buried, in a grave not quite six feet deep, not quite six feet long, and not quite four feet wide, a mound so worn down that it looked as if it been built by ants, by then I was a middle-aged woman and I could also see my mother’s grave. Her name was Annie Victoria Richardson and she did not have a line drawn through her, and for my whole life up to then, to see my mother dead was an event I was afraid I would never witness, I had waged a battle to see my own mother dead, and from time to time I was certain I would lose. I had never imagined standing on my father’s grave for I did not know I had a father at all and that he had a name. My father’s absence will forever hang over my present and my present, at any given moment, will echo his absence, but my own existence, as far as I can understand, modified him not at all. And Mr. Potter grew old and I remained a child and my mother remained my mother and these three things, my father, me, my mother, remain the same into eternity, remain the same now, which is a definition of eternity. And my father, Mr. Potter, lay dead and buried at my feet in his own grave and my mother’s grave was a short distance from his and I, Elaine Cynthia Potter and Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, stood on the earth above them for some time, not forever and ever, only for a long time. And for a very long time after that. And it was my mother, who had left the house she shared with my father, Mr. Potter, when I was seven months in her womb, who had taught me how to read but did not then tell me that my father could not do so, or that her teaching me how to read, which led to me knowing how to write, was a dagger, so to speak, directed at Mr. Potter, for he lived his life deliberately ignorant of my existence, as if I were in a secret chamber separated from the rest of the world and the world would never know of me, or suspect that I was in the world. And I now say, “Mr. Potter,” but as I say his name, I am reading it also, and so to say his name and to imagine his life at the same time makes him whole and complete, not singular and fragmented, and this is because he is dead and beyond reading and writing and beyond contesting my authority to render him in my own image. Hear the sound of my mother being in love with him and the rain pat-patting against the hard dry ground and the galvanized tin roof of the house which was just one room with some windows. Hear the sound of my mother’s harsh words directed at Mr. Potter, expressing her own disappointments and frustrations, all of which were far removed from him, but at that time I was all furled up inside her womb, growing and growing until the time I was expelled. Hear the sound of my mother’s wounds as she left the house she shared with Mr. Potter and hear the sound of Mr. Potter as he experienced my mother’s treachery. Hear the sound of my birth and my father turning his back against my presence in the world. Hear the arrival of Mr. Shoul and Dr. Zoltan Weizenger in the world of Mr. Potter and their presence in the world Mr. Potter occupied came about because all they had ever known was completely shattered and then vanished and so they had to begin again, re-create their own selves, make something new, but they couldn’t do that at all. Hear Mr. Potter wending himself through the maze of his life in complete innocence, without ever knowing how like everyone else he was and without recognizing how ordinary is the uniqueness of life as it appears in each individual. Hear Mr. Potter, who was my father; hear his child
ren and hear the women who bore those children; hear the end of life itself rushing like a predictable wave in a known ocean to engulf Mr. Potter. Hear Mr. Potter dead and lying on a cold slab of something and then his body placed in a wooden box but the wooden box cannot be placed in its grave, for the grave has filled up with water. Hear the cry of his mourners, who on learning of the contents of his will were all disappointed; hear the cry of the gravediggers when they could not place Mr. Potter, who lay inside his coffin, in his grave, for his grave was filled up with water. Hear Mr. Potter! See Mr. Potter! Touch Mr. Potter!

  Mr. Potter was my father, my father’s name was Mr. Potter.

  Also by Jamaica Kincaid

  At the Bottom of the River

  Annie John

  A Small Place

  Lucy

  The Autobiography of My Mother

  My Brother

  My Favorite Plant [editor]

  My Garden (Book):

  Talk Stories

  Copyright © 2002 by Jamaica Kincaid

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto