Free The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

I was having a child, and then she sounded quite happy, smoothing down the hair on my head, rubbing my cheek with the back of her hand, as if I were a baby, too, and in a state of irritation that I could not articulate and her touch would prove soothing to me. Her words, though, struck a terror in me. At first I did not believe her, and then I believed her completely and instantly felt that if there was a child in me I could expel it through the sheer force of my will. I willed it out of me. Day after day I did this, but it did not come out. From deep in Lise’s underarms I could smell a perfume. It was made from the juice of a flower, this smell would fill up the room, fill up my nostrils, move down into my stomach and out through my mouth in waves of vomiting; the taste of it slowly strangling me. I believed that I would die, and perhaps because I no longer had a future I began to want one very much. But what such a thing could be for me I did not know, for I was standing in a black hole. The other alternative was another black hole, this other black hole was one I did not know; I chose the one I did not know.
    One day I was alone, still lying in Lise’s bed; she had left me alone. I got up and walked into Monsieur LaBatte’s counting room, and reaching into a small crocus bag that had only shillings in it, I removed from it one handful of this coin. I walked to the house of a woman who is dead now, and when she opened her door to me I placed my handful of shillings in her hands and looked into her face. I did not say a word. I did not know her real name, she was called “Sange-Sange,” but that was not her real name. She gave me a cupful of a thick black syrup to drink and then led me to a small hole in a dirt floor to lie down. For four days I lay there, my body a volcano of pain; nothing happened, and for four days after that blood flowed from between my legs slowly and steadily like an eternal spring. And then it stopped. The pain was like nothing I had ever imagined before, it was as if it defined pain itself; all other pain was only a reference to it, an imitation of it, an aspiration to it. I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through. I had carried my own life in my own hands.

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    On the road between Roseau and Potter’s Ville I was followed by a large agouti whose movements were not threatening. It stopped when I stopped, looked behind itself when I looked behind myself to see what it was up to—I did not know what it saw behind itself—walked when I walked. At Goodwill I stopped to drink water and the agouti stopped but did not drink water then. At Massacre the entire Church of St. Paul and St. Anne was wrapped in purple and black cloth as if it were Good Friday. It was at Massacre that Indian Warner, the illegitimate son of a Carib woman and a European man, was murdered by his half brother, an Englishman named Philip Warner, because Philip Warner did not like having such a close relative whose mother was a Carib woman. I passed through Mahaut crawling on my stomach, for I was afraid I would be recognized. I did not need to swim across the mouth of the Belfast River; the water was low. Just before I reached St. Joseph, at Layou, I spun around three times and called out my name and so made the agouti fall asleep behind me. I never saw it again. It was raining in Merot, it was raining in Coulibistri, it was raining in Colihaut.
    I could not see the top of Morne Diablotin; I had never seen it in any case, even when I was awake. At Portsmouth I found bread at the foot of a tree whose fruit was inedible nuts and whose wood is used to make exquisite furniture. I passed by the black waters of the Guadeloupe Channel; I was not tempted to be swallowed up whole in it. Passing through La Haut, passing through Thibaud, passing through Marigot—somewhere between Marigot