Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

early in the morning and go to the schoolyard. I was forever in the schoolyard. I used to be playing ball, getting a sandwich at the corner, and then hanging out with my friends. We used to sing a lot. My favorite song to sing was called ‘The Huckle Buck.’ That was my song.”
    After this, we ran into some friends of his parents. They
embraced Jeffreys. They told him that his mother is very proud of him and that she speaks of him all the time. They also told him that ever since his parents went away all their friends have been regularly receiving postcards with amusing anecdotes about their trip. He said, “Yeah, I get postcards, too,” and he removed from his jacket pocket a postcard from his parents. It said, “Hi!!! We spent 2½ weeks in Houston with Ray and Cora. Had a very nice time there. We are leaving Dallas on way to El Paso. Will get in touch soon. Give love to Carole. Love, Mom and Dad.”
    â€” July 11, 1977

Nothing in Mind
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    A young woman who lives in Chelsea writes:
    I have a friend who comes from the Midwest, and he is very upset about two things: that soon most cars may come only in economy size, and that soon he may not be able to afford the gasoline even for these economy-size cars. My friend likes to drive around for no reason at all in a big car that uses up a lot of gasoline. When he gets into his car and drives off, he isn’t going to the hospital to visit a friend, or going to the beach for a day of swimming and sunning, or going to the shopping mall to do some shopping, or even going somewhere to see some historic natural wonder. When he gets into his car and drives off, he heads for a highway; then, when he is far enough away from the city, he finds a less travelled back road, and then he drives and drives at about fifty miles an hour for hours; then he takes another road back to the highway and he comes home. My friend calls this cruising. Sometimes he will say to me, “I’m going cruising. Wanna
come?” I always say yes. I like to do it, too, but I would never get up by myself and go off in a car with no destination in mind.
    When my friend goes cruising, he takes with him a six-pack of Schaefer beer in the party-bottles size and an eight-pack of Miller beer in the pony size. The beer is always very cold. He takes these particular brands of beer because he has noticed that these are favorites among the Spanish-speaking people on the block where he lives. He keeps remarking about the difference between these people and the people he’s seen in the television commercials for Miller and Schaefer beer. In the car, he never speaks except to swear at a careless motorist, or to point out something that is interesting to him and that he thinks will interest me, too. He turns on the car radio or puts a tape in the tape deck the moment he gets into the car, and the music is never off until he gets home again. He sits behind the wheel with his legs slightly apart, his right foot on the accelerator, the leg crooked at the knee and resting sidewise on the seat, his right hand looking as if it were casually holding the wheel, his left hand on the armrest. He can afford to look this relaxed because the car has power steering.
    When I am in the car with my friend, I think of other times I have been in cars with people just for the fun of driving. When I was little, my mother would say, “We are taking a motorcar trip to …” and she would name some place hours away from where we were. Then we would pile into the car and drive to the place and turn right around and come home
again. At the time, my mother was in love with religious music, especially if it was sung by Jim Reeves, and she would turn the car radio to a radio station that played religious music, mostly sung by Jim Reeves. On the night of my sixteenth birthday, my godmother and her husband took me for a drive in their gray Hillman (an English car), and on the car radio I heard the