Free My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

the undertaker unzipped the plastic bag in which he lay when I went to see him at the undertaker’s. When I saw him, though, lying in bed, two months before I saw him at the undertaker’s, he was in his mother’s house. She is my mother, too, but I wasn’t talking to her then, and when I am not talking to her, she is someone else’s mother, not mine. I could see him through the louvered windows while I was standing on the gallery. It was at the end of one of those days, like so many I used to know when I was a child, and that I wanted to run away from: in the east the darkness was already falling down from the sky; in the west, the sun, having exhausted itself from shining with such relentlessness, was hurrying to drop below the horizon. Not a bird sings then; chickens fly into trees to roost for the night, the trees become still; no one quarrels, people’s voices are muted. It is not the usual time of day to be born or to die, it is the usual time of day to prepare to be born or to prepare to die; that was the time of day when I first saw him two months before he died. He did not die in the middle of that night.
    When I was looking at him through the louvered windows, I was not thinking of myself in the sense of how it came to be that he was lying there dying and I was standing there looking at him. I was thinking of my past and how it frightened me to think that I might have continued to live in a certain way, though, I am convinced, not for very long. I would have died at about his age, thirty-three years, or I would have gone insane. And when I was looking at him through the louvered windows, I began to distance myself from him, I began to feel angry at him, I began to feel I didn’t like being so tied up with his life, the waning of it, the suffering in it. I began to feel that it would be so nice if he would just decide to die right away and get buried right away and the whole thing would be done with right away and that would be that. I entered the house and stood in the doorway of the room in which he was lying. The house had a funny smell, as if my mother no longer had time to be the immaculate housekeeper she had always been and so some terrible dirty thing had gone unnoticed and was rotting away quietly. It was only after he was dead and no longer in the house and the smell was no longer there that I knew what the smell really was, and now as I write this, I cannot find a simile for this smell, it was not a smell like any I am familiar with. I stood looking at him for a long time before he realized I was there. And then when he did, he suddenly threw the sheets away from himself, tore his pajama bottoms away from his waist, revealing his penis, and then he grabbed his penis in his hand and held it up, and his penis looked like a bruised flower that had been cut short on the stem; it was covered with sores and on the sores was a white substance, almost creamy, almost floury, a fungus. When he grabbed his penis in his hand, he suddenly pointed it at me, a sort of thrusting gesture, and he said in a voice that was full of deep panic and deep fear, “Jamaica, look at this, just look at this.” Everything about this one gesture was disorienting; what to do, what to say; to see my brother’s grown-up-man penis, and to see his penis looking like that, to see him no longer able to understand that perhaps he shouldn’t just show me—his sister—his penis, without preparing me to see his penis. I did not want to see his penis; at that moment I did not want to see any penis at all.
    What I am writing now is not a journal; a journal is a daily account, an immediate account of what occurs during a certain time. For a long time after my brother died I could not write about him, I could not think about him in a purposeful way. It was really a short time between the time that he became sick and the time he died, but that time became a world. To make a world takes an eternity, and