Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
I had not been opening the letters my mother had been sending to me for months. In them she tried to give me a blow-by-blow description of how quickly the quality of her life had deteriorated since I had left her, but I only knew this afterward—after I had learned of my father’s death, written to her and sent her money, and then opened the letter she sent in reply. For if I had seen those letters sooner, one way or another I would have died. I would have died if I did nothing; I would have died if I did something. I then made a last reply to her, though she did not know she might never hear from me again. I told her that I would come home soon, and how sorry I was for everything that had happened to her. I did not say that I loved her. I could not say that. I then told her that the family I was living with (Lewis and Mariah) were moving to another part of town; the address I gave her was one I made up off the top of my head. The moment I did that was the moment I knew I would soon make living with Lewis and Mariah the past.
After that, the days went by too slowly and too quickly: I could not wait to put this period of my life behind me, and each moment felt like a ball of lead; at the same time, I wanted to understand everything that was happening to me, and each day felt like a minute. It was gloomy inside the house, and gloomy outside, too. “The holidays are coming,” Mariah said. “The holidays are coming.” She should have been happy, but she said it as if she were expecting a funeral. The skies were hard and gray; it rained, and the rain felt like small, hard nails; the sun shone sometimes, but weakly, as if it held a grudge. I noticed how hard and cold and shut up tight the ground was. I noticed this because I used to wish it would just open up and take me in, I felt so bad. If I dropped dead from despair as I was crossing the street, I would just have to lie there in the cold. The ground would refuse me. To die in the cold was more than I could bear. I wanted to die in a hot place. The only hot place I knew was my home. I could not go home, and so I could not die yet.
When I told Mariah that I was leaving, she had said, “It’s not a year yet. You are supposed to stay for at least a year.” Her voice was full of anger, but I ignored it. It’s always hard for the person who is left behind. And even as she said it she must have known how hollow it sounded, for it was only a matter of weeks before it would be a year since I had come to live with her. The reality of her situation was now clear to her: she was a woman whose husband had betrayed her. I wanted to say this to her: “Your situation is an everyday thing. Men behave in this way all the time. The ones who do not behave in this way are the exceptions to the rule.” But I knew what her response would have been. She would have said, “What a cliché.” She would have said, “What do you know about these things?” And she would have been right; it was a cliché, and I had no personal experience of a thing like that. But all the same, where I came from, every woman knew this cliché, and a man like Lewis would not have been a surprise; his behavior would not have cast a pall over any woman’s life. It was expected. Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people. It was why men like laws so much; it was why they had to invent such things—they need a guide. When they are not sure what to do, they consult this guide. If the guide gives them advice they don’t like, they change the guide. This was something I knew; why didn’t Mariah know it also? And if I were to tell it to her she would only show me a book she had somewhere which contradicted everything I said—a book most likely written by a woman who understood absolutely nothing.
The holidays came, and they did feel like a funeral because so many things had died. For the children’s sake, she and Lewis put up a good front. He came and went, doing all the things he would have done if he were still living with them. He bought the fir tree, bought the children the presents they wanted, bought Mariah a coat made up from the skins of a small pesty animal who lived in the ground. She, of course, hated it, but for appearances’ sake she kept her opinion to herself. He must have forgotten that she was not the sort of person who would wear the skin of another being if she could help it. Or perhaps in the rush of things he gave his old love his new love’s present. Mariah gave me a necklace made up of pretty porcelain beads and small polished balls of wood. She said it was the handiwork of someone in Africa. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given me.
The New Year came, and I was going somewhere new again. I gathered my things together; I had a lot more than when I first came. I had new clothes, all better suited to this new climate I now lived in. I had a camera and prints of the photographs I had taken, prints I had made myself. But mostly I had books—so many books, and they were mine; I would not have to part with them. It had always been a dream of mine to just own a lot of books, to never part with a book once I had read it. So there they were, resting nicely in small boxes—my own books, the books that I had read. Mariah spoke to me harshly all the time now, and she began to make up rules which she insisted that I follow; and I did, for after all, what else could she do? It was a last resort for her—insisting that I be the servant and she the master. She used to insist that we be friends, but that had apparently not worked out very well; now I was leaving. The master business did not become her at all, and it made me sad to see her that way. Still, it made me remember what my mother had said to me many times: for my whole life I should make sure the roof over my head was my own; such a thing was important, especially if you were a woman.
On the day I actually left, there was no sun; the sky had shut it out tightly. It was a Saturday. Lewis had taken the children to eat snails at a French restaurant. All four of them liked such things—and just as well, for that went with the life they were expected to lead eventually. Mariah helped me put my things in a taxi. It was a cold goodbye on her part. Her voice and her face were stony. She did not hug me. I did not take any of this personally; someday we would be friends again. I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me.
* * *
The next day I woke up in a new bed, and it was my own. I had bought it with my money. The roof over my head was my own—that is, as long as I could afford to pay the rent for it. The curtains at my windows had loud, showy flowers printed on them; I had chosen this pattern over a calico that the lady in the cloth store had recommended. It did look vulgar in this climate, but it would have been just right in the climate I came from. Through the curtains I could see that the day was just like the one before: gray, the sky shut up tight, the sun locked out. I knew then that even though I would always notice the absence or presence of the sun, even though I would always prefer a sunny day to a day without sun, I would get used to it; I wouldn’t make an important decision based on the weather.
It was Peggy who had found the apartment. We were then still best friends. We had nothing in common except that we felt at ease in each other’s company. From the moment we met we had recognized in each other the same restlessness, the same dissatisfaction with our surroundings, the same skin-doesn’t-fit-ness. That was as far as it went. We had accepted each other’s shortcomings and differences; then, just when we began to feel the yoke of each other’s companionship, just when we began to feel the beginnings of what might eventually lead to lifelong loathing, we decided to move in together. It could have been worse. People marry at times like that; they then have ten children, live under the same roof for years and years, eventually die and arrange to be buried side by side. We only signed our names to a two-year lease.
It was a Sunday. I could hear church bells ringing. I had not been to church in over a year—not since leaving home. I supposed I still believed in God; after all, what else could I do? But no longer could I ask God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me now, as long as I could pay for it. “As long as I could pay for it.” That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epitaph.
Peggy, who had been living with her parents all along, decided not to do so anymore. She said that she was sick of them. She said it as if her parents were a style of dressing she had outgrown. I had never heard anyone speak of their parents in this way; I never even knew you could make them seem trivial, trinketlike, mere pests. I was not sure whether to admire her or feel sorry for her because she hadn’t got parents whose personalities were on a larger scale, parents whose presence you are reminded of with each breath you take. Someone had told Peggy about this vacancy; it had two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. I had spent my entire life not knowing the luxury of plumbing, hot and cold tap water, the privacy to be had by closing the door and taking off your clothes and stepping into a bathtub and staying there for as long as it pleased you. I could very well have gone through my entire life without knowledge of such things, and on my list of unhappinesses this would not have made an appearance. But not so anymore. When I saw that the apartment had only one bathroom, I made note of it with disappointment. At Mariah and Lewis’s house I had my own bathroom, and my smells were known only to me. Here the windows in the back had bars—not the decorative kind to keep children from falling out, but the crisscross kind to keep people who meant us no good from coming in; the windows in the front allowed the sun, when it shone, to come in plenty. I used to lie in my bed at home, surrounded by all the things they say make for a contented life—a loving family, a safe full of food, harmonious surroundings—and not feel contented. I longed then to live in a place like this: bars on the windows to keep out people who might wish to do me harm, an unfriendly climate, uncertainty at every turn. History is full of great events; when the great events are said and done, there will always be someone, a little person, unhappy, dissatisfied, discontented, not at home in her own skin, ready to stir up a whole new set of great events again. I was not such a person, able to put in motion a set of great events, but I understood the phenomenon all the same.
There were many Sundays when I wished I could just lie in bed and not get up for anything, especially not for church. It was a Sunday, I was lying in bed, and I would get up only if I wished to. On the wall in front of me was a photograph I had taken with a camera borrowed from Hugh; it was of a body of water, the lake where I had spent the summer; there was nothing in the picture—there were no boats, no people, no signs of life—except the water, its surface of uniformly shaped ripplets, its depths dark, treacherous, and uninviting. It was the opposite of the water I was surrounded by on the island where I grew up. That water was three shades of blue, calm, inviting, warm; I had taken it for granted, so much so that it became one of the things I cursed.
Mariah had given me a small desk with many drawers. I had placed it near my bed, with a lamp on it. I reached into the top drawer and retrieved a small stack of official documents: my passport, my immigration card, my permission-to-work card, my birth certificate, and a copy of the lease to the apartment. These documents showed everything about me, and yet they showed nothing about me. They showed where I was born. They showed that I was born on the twenty-fifth of May 1949. They showed how tall I was. They showed that my skin and my eyes were the same color, brown, though they did not say if the shades were identical. These documents all said that my name was Lucy—Lucy Josephine Potter. I used to hate all three of those names. I was named Josephine after my mother’s uncle Mr. Joseph, because he was rich, from money he had made in sugar in Cuba, and it was thought that he would remember the honor and leave something for me in his will. But when he died it was discovered that he had lost his fortune a while before and did not even have a roof over his head; he had been living in an old tomb in the Anglican churchyard. The Potter must have come from the Englishman who owned my ancestors when they were slaves; no one really knew, and I could hardly blame them for not caring to find out. The Lucy was the only part of my name that I would have cared to hold on to. When I had first begun to think of the significance of my three names, I disliked the name Lucy, because it seemed slight, without substance, not at all the person I thought I would like to be even then. In my own mind, I called myself other names: Emily, Charlotte, Jane. They were the names of the authoresses whose books I loved. I eventually settled on the name Enid, after the authoress Enid Blyton, because that name seemed the most unusual of all the names I thought of. One day when it was firm in my mind that the name Enid was the name I wanted to be known by, I told my mother. I said, “I do not like my name, Lucy. I want to change it to Enid. I like that name better.” The moment I said this, she turned a dark color, the color of boiling blood. She turned toward me, and she was no longer my mother—she was a ball of fury, large, like a god. I wondered then, for the millionth time, how it came to be that of all the mothers in the world mine was not an ordinary human being but something from an ancient book. Not long after that I learned, through my usual habit of eavesdropping on conversations between my mother and her friends, that a woman with whom my father had had a child and who had tried to kill my mother and me through obeah was named Enid. I had never heard of that Enid before. When the mystery of my mother’s behavior became clear to me, I felt ashamed of the mistake I had made. Even to hurt my mother I would not have wanted the same name as the woman who had tried to kill my mother and me.
Much later, when I no longer cared how I made her feel, I brought up the question of my name again. My mother was stooped over a bowl of fish, cleaning and seasoning them in preparation for our supper. She was pregnant with the last of her children. She did not want to be pregnant and three times had tried to throw away the child, but all her methods had failed and she remained pregnant. An old brown-and-white dog had become attached to her. We didn’t know where the dog had come from—only that whenever my mother left our house it was always waiting outside and would follow only her. She did not like animals; where she came from, sometimes when someone wanted to harm someone else they sent the harm in the shape of an animal. When she saw the dog follow her around, she was sure it was something bad, and so she tried everything to get rid of it, but the dog would not go away. She stopped trying to get rid of the dog the day she realized that the dog was pregnant also. It was funny to see them walking down the street together—two female beings, a human and a dog, both of them pregnant. They went everywhere together, and they grew to look alike: thin, shriveled, undernourished (my mother had no appetite), unmaternal. They both became bad-tempered and would snarl at anyone who did anything they found offensive. As my mother was cleaning the fish, the dog was standing nearby, snapping at flies that were bothering her. They made such a picture: the dead fish, the flies, the pregnant woman, the pregnant dog.