Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid

on, not through his own will, but he kept on growing, that little boy, and Mr. Shepherd hated him as Mr. Shepherd hated his own self and so too he hated all that was around him, but not Mistress Shepherd, he did not hate her, he did not love and he did not hate her, but why? And Mr. Potter grew up into a man, and that man became Mr. Potter, that man that grew up from Drickie, toiling through the perils of life, he was young, new, and foolish, and he survived all of this, the young and the new and the foolish, and then one day he was Mr. Potter and no one had made him that way, one day he knew himself to be Mr. Potter. And Mr. Shepherd taught Drickie how to drive and Drickie—whose name was Mr. Potter eventually, and I came to know him by that name, Mr. Potter, and the name by which I know him is the way he will forever be known, for I am the one who can write the narrative that is his life, the only one really—drove Mr. Shepherd to Shepherd’s School, a
school for boys like Mr. Potter but those boys did not have a mother who had walked into the sea, and Mr. Shepherd hated the boys of the Shepherd School and he hated Mr. Potter more than that, and he hated himself even more, though he did not know it. And Mr. Shepherd loomed over Drickie in every way that could be imagined, for what else could he do; and the world in its entirety, and in every way imaginable, loomed over Drickie, for that is the way of the world no matter how it constitutes itself, it looms and looms, and Drickie became the opposite of glowing; he grew dull, like something useful made of a precious metal but forgotten on a shelf, he grew dull and ugly, in the way of the forgotten, and this is true: often a thing that is ugly is ugly in itself, and often a thing that is ugly is only a thing that is forgotten, kept from view and kept from memory, and often a thing that is ugly is not only a definition of beauty itself but also renders beauty as something beyond words or beyond any kind of description. And …

A nd Mr. Shepherd acquired a car, a small car in which four people could sit, and he taught Mr. Potter to drive it, and this whole process of learning to drive a motorcar led to many words of abuse from Mr. Shepherd directed at the small boy Drickie, not Mr. Potter yet, but it led to Mr. Potter, for that boy became a chauffeur and he wore a cap and a nice shirt and well-pressed trousers and after he had left his life with Mr. and Mistress Shepherd, he came to call himself Mr. Potter to anyone who wanted to be chauffeured to some destination, and it was all because he had come to have command over that small motorcar. And Mr. Shepherd had acquired his small car from a Mr. Hall, a man whose very physical frame was deformed by the evil events of history, too, settling down on him and then tightening into an inescapable grip,
and he knew himself so little that when he spoke his very words seemed an approximation of what he meant to say, and all he meant to say was often false, for Mr. Hall was descended from generations of the triumphant. And when the transaction concerning this car—something they could not make, had no idea how it got made, did not know that their brutal appearance in the new world and their degradation (for the triumphant are just as degraded as the defeated) made this thing, a car, possible—passed between them, how they each felt, though not in equal parts, swelled with importance and pride and how certain they were that most people they met in their everyday life did not receive an amount of divine blessing equal to theirs, for they had motorcars and most people they knew had none. And between them the blessings were not equal: for Mr. Hall then bought a car, brand new, just arrived from England, and it could seat five comfortably and Mr. Shepherd’s car was Mr. Hall’s old car and it could only seat four. And Mr. Shepherd was more pleased with his first little car, secondhand as it was, that could only