Free The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

had, or as if counting would make a difference. He never offered any of it to me, he knew I did not want it, I knew I did not want any of it. The room was not cold or warm or suffocating, but it was not ideal either; I did not want to spend the rest of my life in it. I did not want to spend the rest of my life with the person who owned such a room. When he was not at home, my nights were spent in my room with the dirt floor off the kitchen. My days were spent in a schoolhouse. This education I was receiving had never offered me the satisfaction I was told it would; it only filled me with questions that were not answered, it only filled me with anger. I could not like what it would lead to: a humiliation so permanent that it would replace your own skin. And your own name, whatever it might be, eventually was not the gateway to who you really were, and you could not ever say to yourself, “My name is Xuela Claudette Desvarieux.” This was my mother’s name, but I cannot say it was her real name, for in a life like hers, as in mine, what is a real name? My own name is her name, Xuela Claudette, and in the place of the Desvarieux is Richardson, which is my father’s name; but who are these people Claudette, Desvarieux, and Richardson? To look into it, to look at it, could only fill you with despair; the humiliation could only make you intoxicated with self-hatred. For the name of any one person is at once her history recapitulated and abbreviated, and on declaring it, that person holds herself high or low, and the person hearing it holds the declarer high or low.
    My mother was placed outside the gates of a convent when she was perhaps a day old by a woman believed to be her own mother; she was wrapped in pieces of clean old cloth, and the name Xuela was written on these pieces of cloth; it was written in an ink whose color was indigo, a dye rendered from a plant. She was not discovered because she had been crying; even as a newborn she did not draw attention to herself. She was found by a woman, a nun who was on her way to wreak more havoc in the lives of the remnants of a vanishing people; her name was Claudette Desvarieux. She named my mother after herself, she called my mother after herself; how the name Xuela survived I do not know, but my father gave it to me when she died, just after I was born. He had loved her; I do not know how much of the person he was then, sentimental and tender, survived in him.
    This moment of my life was an idyll: peace and contentment of innocent young womanhood by day, spent in a large room with other young people of my own sex, all of them the products of legitimate unions, for this school begun by missionary followers of John Wesley did not admit children born outside marriage, and this, apart from everything else, kept the school very small, because most children were born outside marriage. I was surrounded daily by the eventually defeated, the eventually bitter, the dull hum of the voices of these girls; their bodies, already a source of anxiety and shame, were draped in blue sacks made from coarse cotton, a uniform. And then again there were my nights of silences and sighs—all an idyll, and its end I could see even so. I did not know how or when this end would come, but I could see it all the same, and the thought did not fill me with dread.
    One day I became very sick. I was with child but I did not know it. I had no experience with the symptoms of such a state and so did not immediately know what was happening to me. It was Lise who told me what was the matter with me. I had just vomited up everything I had ever eaten in my entire life and I felt that I would die, and so I called out her name. “Lise,” I said, not Madame LaBatte; she had put me to lie down on her bed; she was lying next to me, holding me in her arms. She said I was “with child”; she said it in English. Her voice had tenderness in it and sympathy, and she said it again and again, that