My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

“ANNIE”), or as if their name itself held regret. I stood over them, looking down at them and thinking how much I loved them and how glad I was that I had them, and I bent over and kissed them and they woke up and were glad to see me and begged me to get into bed with them and snuggle with them until they fell asleep again. I got into bed with them, meaning to stay there only until they fell asleep, but I fell asleep also; I awoke because my husband woke me up.
    It was six o’clock in the morning, the winter daylight was still mostly silver, it had in it only a little bit of yellow, it had in it only a little bit of pink, I could see this as I left my son’s room, standing in the hallway and facing a window.
    When my husband woke me up, he said, “Sweetie, come, come, I have to talk to you” (that is just the way he said it). In the dark of the room I could see his face; that isn’t really possible, to see something like a face in the dark of a room, but it is true all the same, I could see his face. It was an anxious face, a troubled face; on his face I could see that he was worried about something and I thought that something was himself. I said to him, “What’s the matter?” I asked him, “What’s wrong?” (and in just that way, using just those words). He would only reply, “Come, come, I have to talk to you.” In the hall where I could see the silvery daylight with just a little pink and just a little yellow, he said, “Dalma just called, Devon died.” And when he said “Devon died” I thought, Oh, it’s Devon who died, not one of his relatives, not someone of his, this is not someone he has to grieve for. I was so glad about that, so glad at the thought, the feeling that this death, this look of sadness in his face, had to do with someone who was not related to him. He was not going to suffer a grief. My husband is someone I love; it is a love I had not expected or even really knew existed; I would rather bad things or unpleasant things happen to me. I can’t bear to see him suffer; in any case, he takes suffering too seriously, too hard; it is better when bad things are happening to me, then I don’t have to worry about him. And then again, I believe that I am better at handling bad things than he.
    I got the children ready for school and gave them breakfast. I told them their uncle had died. They were not surprised, they had been expecting it; they would go to the funeral, they would go swimming with our friends Bud and Connie; Bud and Connie would take them to the Lobster Pot for dinner. I took the children to the bus stop, I had a nice chat with the other mothers while we waited for the bus to come, I did not tell them that my brother had died. I returned home, I called the travel agent and made travel arrangements; I sat and waited for a woman from a newspaper who wanted to ask me questions about a book I had written and had just published. This woman came and she asked me all sorts of questions about my past and my present, about the way in which I had become a writer, about the way in which my life, with its improbable beginning (at least from the way it looks to someone else now) of poverty and neglect, cruelty and humiliation, loss and deceit, had led to a sure footing in the prosperous and triumphant part of the world, leading to her, a newspaper reporter, being interested in my life. Whatever questions she asked me about anything, it was easy to be without mercy and to answer truthfully: about my mother, about the reasons for no longer wanting to associate my writing with the magazine where I had developed my skills as a writer. For the magazine I wrote for all of my writing life so far was like the place in which I had grown up; it was beautiful, an ideal of some kind, but it had been made vulgar and ugly by the incredibly stupid people who had become attracted to it. I said nothing about the death of my brother, which