The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

please me. She wore the black dress with the tattered red flower over her breast day after day. She was in mourning. Her eyes were black and shiny with tears; the tears were trapped there, they never spilled out. Her arms would reach out to me—I never stood too near her—then up to the wide-open blue sky as if she were drowning, her mouth open with no sound coming out, yet even so I could hear her say, “Save me, save me”; but even if she did not know, I knew it was not herself she wanted to save; it was me she wanted to consume. I was not unmoved by the sight of her, she was a sad sight to me; but I was not an angel, nothing in me broke.
    I could hear the clap of thunder, the roar of water falling from great heights into great pools and the great pool wending its way slowly toward the sea; I could hear clouds emptying themselves of their moisture as if by accident, as if someone had kicked over a goblet in the dark, and their contents landing on an indifferent earth; and I could hear the silence and I could hear the dark night gobbling it up, and it in turn being gobbled up by the light of yet another day.
    My father wrote to my host and hostess to ask after my health; he did not know what had happened to me and so he asked them to forgive me the bad manners I had shown when I disappeared without telling them of my whereabouts, and went to live all by myself in a section of Roseau which was dangerous and unsanitary, and so almost caused my own death. He sent me his best through them. He sent me five guineas. Lise gave me the five guineas. She showed me the letter. His handwriting was such a beautiful thing to behold. It covered the page with strong curves and strong dashes and strong slashes. I could not read it; I could not bring myself to make out each word and put them together in sentences. I only saw that his handwriting covered the page from top to bottom. The envelope bore the postmark of Dublanc, a small town in the parish of St. Peter, many, many miles away from Roseau; even so, I felt I knew the small miseries he had created and left in his wake there.
    The days followed the nights with a helpless regularity, day devouring night devouring day devouring night with such obsessiveness that it might have fascinated me if I could be fascinated. I wanted time to pass in one fell swoop, like the blink of an eye; I wanted to look up and suddenly find myself looking at the events of my immediate past on a horizon from which I was receding rapidly. When this did not become so, I did not grow insane, I did not grow tired. I left the household of the LaBattes at the very blackest point of the night. This was not because of the cover of darkness. I did not want the actual sight of Lise seeing me leave her to haunt me for the rest of my life; I could imagine it well enough. I walked just past the village of Loubière and rented a house for which I paid sixpence a week. I had four dresses, two pairs of shoes, a very nice straw hat, and the five guineas given to me by my father; it was not nothing. A road was being built between Loubière and Giraudel. I took a job sifting the sand needed for it. I was paid eightpence for each day of work, and each day of work consisted of ten hours; at the end of a fortnight I received in a small brown envelope my pay of seven shillings and fourpence.
    In this house, for which I paid sixpence a week, I spent all my time that I was not working. I acquired bedding, a mattress stuffed with coconut fiber, from a woman who lived in the middle of the village. It was not new; I could not tell if she was the only one who had slept on it before, but I was not afraid to take on the hardships of all who had done so. My life was beyond empty. I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete. I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would