See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

captain of a ship, sailing from the South Pacific with a cargo of saplings, in which the crew mutinied. Mrs. Sweet knew the movie very well, for the cargo of the ship at the time the crew mutinied was the breadfruit, a staple of Mrs. Sweet’s diet when she had been a child, and it had been a staple of the diet of children born for generations before hers and all of those children hated this food. Then, when she was a child, she was very thin and her mother, she did not have a father, worried very much about her. Her mother, believing that the uncooked liver of cows would make the child Mrs. Sweet strong, sought this out from a butcher she had made friends with at the meat market; her mother grated carrots with a grater made by an old Portuguese man, a man who made things like that, and also soldered old tin cans for their household use: cups, pots, shit pots, things like that; and squeezed the juice out of the grated carrots and made the little girl, who was not yet Mrs. Sweet, drink it. And so, when Mr. Sweet compared her bodily form, after the birth of the young Heracles, to the captain of that awful ship, Mrs. Sweet almost wept, but then, Mr. Sweet laughed at this comment he had made, he often thought he had just said the funniest thing that was ever said in all the history of funny things said, when right then and now, he had not.
    But not really minding any of that then, which was right now, for Now will be Then and Then is right at this very moment: Mrs. Sweet held the young Heracles close to her and kissed the top of his head and then his cheeks and his mouth and his eyes (when he saw her lips move closer that way, he closed them) and his ears and then his baby-fat little chin and neck and then his chest and then she buried her full face into his stomach and with her mouth made sounds that might be like a fart or a pig squealing in torment or a clown laughing in a way that would frighten the children she had been hired to entertain. But young Heracles loved all of it, kisses and sounds and in particular he loved the smell of his mother, for to him she neither looked like nor smelled like a captain of anything; he loved her face as it hovered over him: the eyes black, dark as a night that had yet to be invented, black as if waiting to give a meaning to light, so black it made light itself disappear forever; the nose like the nose of a water-dwelling mammal; the cheeks like the top of a bun; and the lips and mouth, so big, as if together they were keeping in check an unknown geographical expanse. That was Mrs. Sweet’s face as it appeared to the young Heracles, still a baby, not yet being able to walk, just being able to sit up on his own without being surrounded and propped up with pillows and cushions and sometimes his mother’s large body, that was her face as it hovered above, and at times, as she held him aloft, as he hovered over her. And he called his mother Mrs. Sweet, for she appeared to him to be so sweet, as if she were something to eat, and then he called her Mom, knowing without knowing that he had once drunk milk from her breast, his only food then, his sole source of nourishment.
    The young Heracles went through the stages of crawling, though he was very awkward at it, and at trying to pull himself up from a sitting position, and after many tries, he one day could do this; and then not long after, he could walk across the room by himself, though at that time, Then, he did not walk in the way walking is known to be, instead, he projected himself across the room in which he stood, from one side to the other and when successfully reaching the opposite place from where he started out would burst out in laughter and clap his hands in happiness, so proud was he of his own accomplishment. Mrs. Sweet shared his joy, how could she not, she loved him so! When one day Mr. Sweet observed this performance, he later asked Mrs. Sweet if perhaps Heracles should not see a specialist, for the way he hurled himself across