Free Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid

sea
closed over her; that moment had come a long time before. The moment she surrendered her life, the moment that the space between her and the world became vast and unknowable, had occurred long before the very powerful reality of the sea’s water had overtaken her. Then there was a silence, but only for her; and then there was a blackness, but only for her; and the world retreated to beyond words and order and beauty and all its opposites, but only for her. And after a short while, no one spoke of her again, her courage (for it was that, courage) became cowardice and then strange, so strange that it must not be repeated, and after a short while no one thought of her again, not her only child, her son, Mr. Potter, not his father Nathaniel and not Nathaniel’s other children or his other wives or loves or acquaintances, not anyone, and only I now do so, think of her, and she was Mr. Potter’s mother, my father’s name was Mr. Potter.
    See the motherless Roderick Nathaniel Potter, but he did not know himself to be so, motherless. See him a small boy, vulnerable to all that is hard and without heart, to all that is hard and without love, to all that is hard and without mercy. See him a small boy! Eating his penny loaf with no butter on it, drinking his cup of cocoa with no milk in it, never drinking a cup of milk at all; eating his small amount of rice and fish that came from the bottom of the pot, the part that had burned. See his clothes, his khaki pants, his shirt of
chambray, thinned in some parts, shredded in some parts, hang without shape on his poor frame, shrink away from his body as if in terror of touching that coarse, scaly covering that is his skin. See him walk across a yard, the soles of his feet bare, naked, as they meet the immediate, near surface of the earth, and sometimes this near surface is soft mud and sometimes this near surface is hard and dry and stony. See him walk down a narrow lane, carrying a letter in his hands, or a brief message on his lips; see him walk down a narrow lane with a large bundle of something important—food, for instance—balanced carefully (not beautifully, he was not a woman) on his head; see him walk down a narrow lane, with the concerns of Mr. Shepherd and his wife, Mistress Shepherd, on his small boy’s shoulders. See the small boy, Roderick Nathaniel Potter, asleep on a bed of old and dirty rags, not old and clean rags like the ones that made up the bed on which he was born. See the small boy, so tired, so hungry, before he falls asleep, just before he falls asleep, and hear the grinding sound from his belly, like an old unoiled saw, its blade put to green wood. See the small boy asleep, in a slumber so deep, and his dreams become so much a reality, so much a world of its own, and this world is sometimes the opposite of the one he knows when awake and sometimes it is just the same, and sometimes he does not miss them and sometimes he does not even remember them afterward.
See the small boy asleep in a slumber so deep, seamlessly still, his body seems stilled, but not in death, not in the life of death, his body is stilled yet moving with stillness (for yes, that could be so, moving and stillness at one and the same time; it could be so and it was so), and he breathes in and he breathes out, and his chest moves up and down, gently. See the small boy, he would become Mr. Potter, his name then was Roderick Nathaniel on his birth certificate, his name then was Roderick Potter in his mother’s mind, his name then was Drickie to all who met him. See the small boy coming awake in the morning, from the deep slumber that had produced a not at all troubling landscape, a landscape with its up and downs, its good and bad; see the small boy awake in the world of his corner in the kitchen, and when he wipes his eyes, a thick liquid, almost like perspiration but it is not, has, while he was sleeping, oozed out of his eyes and thickened into a thin crust, and