The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

it was mine. My father was not repelled by me, but I could not see anything else that was written in his face. He stood over me, looking down on me. His face grew round and big, filling up the whole room from one end to the other; his face was like a map of the world, as if a globe had been removed from a dark corner in a sitting room (he owned such things: a globe, a sitting room) after which its main seam had been ripped apart and the globe had been laid open, flat. His cheeks were two continents separated by two seas which joined an ocean (his nose); his gray eyes were bottomless and sleeping volcanoes; between his nose and his mouth lay the equator; his ears were the horizons, to go beyond which was to fall into the thick blackness of nothing; his forehead was a range of mountains known to be treacherous; his chin the area of steppes and deserts. Each area took on its appropriate coloring: the land mass a collection of soft yellows and blues and mauves and pinks, with small lines of red running in every direction as if to deliberately confound; the waters blue, the mountains green, the deserts and steppes brown. I did not know this world, I had only met some of its people. Most of them were not everything you could ask for.
    To die then was not something I desired, and I was young enough to believe that this was a choice, and I was young enough for this to be so. I did not die, I did not wish to. I told my father that as soon as I was able to, I would return to the household of Madame and Monsieur LaBatte. My father had a broad back. It was stiff, it was strong; it looked like a large land mass arising unexpectedly out of what had been flat; around it, underneath it, above it I could not go. I had seen this back of his so many times, so many times it had been turned to me, that I was no longer capable of being surprised at the sight of it, but it never ceased to stir up in me a feeling of curiosity: would I see his face again or had I seen him for the last time?
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    Lise was waiting for me on the steps of the verandah. She had not known when I would show up again, or if I would show up again, but she had waited for me, she was waiting for me. She wore a new black dress with an old piece of crushed-up cloth pinned just above her left bosom. The color of the cloth was red, an old red that had only darkened with time. She said, “My dear,” only that, “My dear,” and she wrapped her arms around me and drew me close to her. I could not feel her; even as she pressed me close to her, I could not feel her. She drew away from me, she could hear her husband’s footsteps coming along the path. He was wearing his galoshes, I could tell. I knew the sound of his footsteps when his feet were in his galoshes. When he saw me, he did not mention that I had been away; I knew that if he had noticed, he would not tell me in any case. I did not care, I was curious. We stood, the three of us, in a little triangle, a trinity, not made in heaven, not made in hell, a wordless trinity. And yet at that moment someone was of the defeated, someone was of the resigned, and someone was changed forever. I was not of the defeated; I was not of the resigned. There was a castor-oil bush growing, untended by human hand, not far from us, and I fixed my eyes on it with a hard stare, for I wanted to remember to harvest the seeds when they became ripe, render the oil from them, and drink it to clean out my insides.
    My heart was not unmoved by the sight of Lise haunting the space of ground that stood between the house in which she lived and the small hut I occupied. She swept the ground at night, in the dark when it rained; she planted small bushes that bore white flowers, then uprooted them and put in their place some lilies that would eventually bear flowers the color of the inside of an orange. How long it would take for the orange-colored flowers to appear she did not know, but she was very sure they would