The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god. I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them at noon in a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once. They would live and then they would not live. In their day of life, I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over; I would not have to; the sweet voices of unusual pleasures would call to them from its bottom; they would not rest until they became one with these sounds. I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched. I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. I would decorate them when they were only corpses and set each corpse in a polished wooden box, and place the polished wooden box in the earth and forget the part of the earth where I had buried the box. It is in this way that I did not become a mother; it is in this way that I bore my children.
    In that house with its openings of one door and three windows, the many crevices in the sides where the planks of wood did not meet, the holes in its roof made from the branches of a coconut tree, I sat, I stood, I lay down at night, and so sealed the doom of the children I would never have. I slept; the dawn came; I went to work; the dusk fell. Each morning I roasted coffee beans, pounded them into a coarse powder, and brewed a beverage that was thick and black and so pungent the flavor of it caused my taste buds to feel not whole but as if they had been stripped and flung about into various parts of my atmosphere.
    I did not yet know how vulnerable each individual is to the small eruptions that establish themselves inside her heart. I bought from his wife the garments of a man who had just died: his old nankeen drawers, his one old pair of khaki pants, his old shirt of some kind of cotton. I paid her fourpence for all this, plus a hand of bananas and some ground food. It was these clothes, the clothes of a dead man, that I wore to work each day. I cut off the two plaits of hair on my head; they fell to my feet looking like two headless serpents. I wrapped my almost hairless head in a piece of old cloth. I did not look like a man, I did not look like a woman. Each morning I cooked the food I would eat at midday; I wrapped it in fig leaves, then wrapped it again in a knapsack made out of a tired piece of madras cloth and took it with me to work. All day I carried buckets filled with black sand, or filled with mud, or filled with small stones; all day I dug holes and filled the holes with water and bailed water out of other holes. I spoke to no one, not even to myself. Inside me there was nothing; inside me there was a vault made of a substance so heavy I could find nothing to compare it to; and inside the vault was an ache of such intensity that each night as I lay alone in my house all my exhalations were long, low wails, like a lanced boil, with a small line of pus trickling out, not like a dam that had burst.
    I came to know myself, and this frightened me. To rid myself of this fear I began to look at a reflection of my face in any surface I could find: a still pool on the shallow banks of the river became my most common mirror. When I could not see my face, I could feel that I had become hard; I could feel that to love was beyond me, that I had gained such authority over my own ability to be that I could cause my own demise with complete calm. I knew,