Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

to take you by my high school. I went to Abraham Lincoln High School. Then I’m going to take you by my house. We can’t go in, though. My folks aren’t in town. They’re taking a trip across the country in a car. My folks are named Carmen and Ray. They are the nicest people.”
    On the Belt Parkway, just before we reached the exit to the Abraham Lincoln High School, we saw some children playing baseball. He said, “I used to play ball right here when I was little. I was a member of the Saint Mark’s Little League. I played ball here from the time I was eight. My father was a great baseball player.”
    Then we came to the school. We saw some people dressed in various sports uniforms standing around the grounds. “I ran track here,” he said.
    â€œWere you any good?” we asked.
    â€œNo,” he said, and he laughed. “There were always cats there who were faster than me.”

    We drove up to the front of the school. It looked like many pictures of American high schools. He looked around and said, “Things have really changed around here. See all these apartment buildings?” He pointed to some apartment buildings just across the street from the school. “Well, they were not here. There wasn’t anything around here except a little candy store across the corner. Oh, hell, let’s go on.”
    Garland Jeffreys directed the driver to go on to Brighton Beach. He wanted to pass by a billiard parlor where he used to play billiards, and he wanted to stop off at Irving’s Delicatessen, where he and his friends used to buy sandwiches after they were through playing billiards. At the delicatessen, he bought some meats—corned beef and brisket—and potato salad, and some celery tonic, and we ate them in the car.
    As we drove on, he said, “Do you see that sign?” We looked at a sign that said “Brighton Beach—Private.” He said, “When I was little, I used to wonder why my friends could go into that place and I couldn’t. I didn’t know what was going on. I used to do everything I could to get into that place. But just look at it. It’s a nothing place. I didn’t know that then.”
    We drove to a section of Brighton Beach where there were some prosperous-looking houses. He said, “I used to come to this part of town three times a year. Trick-or-treating, Happy Thanksgiving, and shovelling snow.”
    Then we drove to Sheepshead Bay and passed a restaurant called Lundy’s. He said that his grandfather had been the headwaiter there in the twenties and thirties and that his two
uncles and his father had worked there as waiters. We drove by another restaurant, called Pips, where he said he himself used to be a waiter when he was a teen-ager. We drove by a Roman Catholic church, and he said he and his family were its only black members. We drove by a store where he said he bought his first tropical fish. We drove by a drugstore called Kips, where he said he had been a delivery boy. We drove by Ethel’s Shop, where he said his mother bought her clothes. We drove by Bay Florist, where he said he had bought his mother flowers for Mother’s Day when he was a boy. And we drove by a restaurant called Subway Hero Sandwiches, where he said he and his dad used to stop by for a hamburger and French fries when it was called the Yankee Diner.
    Then we drove up to the house he grew up in. It is a nice, comfortable-looking three-story red brick house. It was late afternoon, and all the other houses looked busy with dinner-time. He reminded us that his parents were driving across the country. He said, “I can’t go in. When I left home, they took my keys away.” He laughed. Then he said, “I love this house now, but when I was growing up I used to wonder how come we couldn’t live in an apartment. I used to want to live in an apartment so bad. When I was real little, I used to leave from here