Free The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

and Castle Bruce lived my mother’s people, on a reserve, as if in commemoration of something no one could bring herself to mention. At Petite Soufrière the road ceased to exist. I passed by the black waters of the Martinique Channel; I was not tempted to be swallowed up whole in it. It rained between Soufrière and Roseau. I believe I heard small rumblings coming from deep within Morne Trois Pitons, I believe I smelled sulfur fumes rising up from the Boiling Lake. And that is how I claimed my birthright, East and West, Above and Below, Water and Land: In a dream. I walked through my inheritance, an island of villages and rivers and mountains and people who began and ended with murder and theft and not very much love. I claimed it in a dream. Exhausted from the agony of expelling from my body a child I could not love and so did not want, I dreamed of all the things that were mine.
    It was the smell coming from my father that awoke me. He had been asked to arrest some men suspected of smuggling rum and they threw stones at him, and when he fell to the ground he was stabbed with a knife. Now he stood over me, and the wound was still fresh; it was on his upper arm, his shirt hid it from sight, but he smelled of iodine and gentian violet and carbolic acid. This smell seemed orderly and reasonable; I associated it with a small room and shelves on which were small brown bottles and bandages and white enamel utensils. This smell reminded me of a doctor. I had once been to a doctor’s home; my father had asked me to deliver an envelope inside of which was a piece of paper on which he had written a message. On the envelope he had written the doctor’s name: Bailey. This smell he had about him now reminded me of that doctor’s room. My father stood over me and looked down. His eyes were gray. He could not be trusted, but you would have to know him for a while to realize that. He did not seem repelled by me. I did not know if he knew what had happened to me. He had been told that I was missing, he looked for me, he found me, he wanted to take me to his home in Mahaut, and when I was well again I could go back to Roseau to live. (He did not say with whom). In his mind he believed he loved me, he was sure that he loved me; all his actions were an expression of this. On his face, though, was that mask; it was the same mask he wore when stealing all that was left from an unfortunate someone who had lost so much already. It was the same mask he wore when he guided an event, regardless of its truth, to an end that would benefit him. And even now, as he stood over me, he did not wear the clothes of a father: he wore his jailer’s uniform, he was in his policeman’s clothes. And these clothes, these policeman’s clothes, came to define him; it was as if eventually they grew onto his body, another skin, because long after he ceased to wear them, when it was no longer necessary for him to wear them, he always looked as if he were still in his policeman’s clothes. His other clothes were real clothes; his policeman’s clothes had become his skin.
    I was lying down on a bed made of rags in a house that had only the bare earth for a floor. There was no real evidence of my ordeal to see. I did not smell of the dead, because for something to be dead, life would have had to come first. I had only made the life that was just beginning in me, not dead, just not to be at all. There was a pain between my legs; it started inside my lower abdomen and my lower back and came out through my legs, this pain. I was wet between my legs; I could smell the wetness; it was blood, fresh and old. The fresh blood smelled like a newly dug-up mineral that had not yet been refined and turned into something worldly, something to which a value could be assigned. The old blood gave off a sweet rotten stink, and this I loved and would breathe in deeply when it came to dominate the other smells in the room; perhaps I only loved it because