The Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  Who can forget? This man I lived with for many years, and whom I would live without for a long time after that, would gather around him various things. In his life, by his tradition, he had become convinced of a certain truth, and this truth was based on reducing, so that only what survived was deemed worthy. He and all like him had survived, so far. He looked at the land on which he lived, he made decisions, his decisions were limited to what pleased him, his idea of what might be beautiful, and then what was beautiful. He cleared the land; nothing growing on it inspired any interest in him. The inflorescence of this, he said, was not significant; and the word “inflorescence” was said with an authority, as if he had created inflorescence itself, which made me laugh with such pleasure I lost consciousness for that moment of my own existence. He took sheets of glass and, gluing them together, made boxes in which he would place a lizard, a crab whose habitat was the land—not the sea, not both, only the land; in a box made of glass he placed a turtle whose habitat was the land, not the sea, not both, only the land; in a box made of glass he placed small frog after small frog; they died, frozen in that pose of stillness natural to a frog which is meant to confound a foe. He made long lists under the heading Genus, he made long lists under the heading Species. From time to time I would release whatever individual he held in captivity, replacing it with its like, its kind: one lizard replaced with another lizard, one crab replaced with another crab, one frog with another frog; I could not ever tell if he knew I had done so. He was so sure inside himself that all the things he knew were correct, not that they were true, but that they were correct. Truth would have undone him, the truth is always so full of uncertainty.

  And when finally I was a true orphan, my father had at last died and he died not knowing me, not ever speaking to me in a language in which I could have faith, a language in which I could believe the things he said—when I was a true orphan then, the reality of how alone I had been in the world, how I would become even more so, brought me an air of peace. My entire life so far, all seventy years of it, I had dreaded the moment when I would be alone; the two people I had come from, the two people who had made me, dead; but then at last a great peace came over me, a quietness that was not silence and not acceptance, just a feeling of peace, a resolve. I was alone and I was not afraid, I accepted it the way I accepted all the things that were true of me: my two hands, my two eyes, my two feet, my two ears, all my senses, all that could be known about me, all that I did not know. That I was alone was now a true thing. This fact did not have a codicil attached, a metaphorical asterisk was not a part of this statement. There was no aside. I was alone in the world.

  The man to whom I was married, my husband, was alone, too, but he did not accept it, he did not have the strength to do so. He drew on the noisiness of the world into which he was born, conquests, the successful disruption of other peoples’ worlds, peoples whose reality he and those he came from could not understand, so instead of bowing before such an incomprehensibility lifted up their heads and committed murder. He now busied himself with the dead, arranging, disarranging, rearranging the books on his shelf, volumes of history, geography, science, philosophy, speculations: none of it could bring him peace. He now lived in a world in which he could not speak the language. I mediated for him, I translated for him. I did not always tell him the truth, I did not always tell him everything. I blocked his entrance to the world in which he lived; eventually I blocked his entrance into all the worlds he had come to know. He became all the children I did not allow to be born, some of them fathered by him, some of them fathered by others. I would oversee his end also. I gave him a kind and sweet burial, even though it could not matter to him. What makes the world turn? He never needed an answer to such a question.

  * * *

  Did so much sadness ever enclose two people? Yet not the same kind of sadness, for it did not come from the same source, this sadness. His life, the external part of it, was full of victories, hardly a desire that could not be fulfilled, and the power to make the world the way he wished it to be. And yet—oh, and yet—how is it possible to be so lost? There are many ways to be lost. All ways are ways to be lost. So how much pity should I extend to him? Could he be blamed for believing that the successful actions of his ancestors bestowed on him the right to act in an unprecedented, all-powerful way, and without consequences? He believed in a race, he believed in a nation, he believed in all this so completely that he could step outside it; he wanted at the end of his life only to die with me, though I was not his race, I was not of his nation.

  Who was I? My mother died at the moment I was born. You are not yet anything at the moment you are born. This fact of my mother dying at the moment I was born became a central motif of my life. I cannot remember when I first knew this fact of my life, I cannot remember when I did not know this fact of my life; perhaps it was at the moment I could recognize my own hand, and then again there was never a moment that I can remember when I did not know myself completely. My body now is still; when it moves, it moves inward, shrinking into itself, withering like fruit dying on a vine, not rotting like fruit that has been picked and lies uneaten on a dirty plate. For years and years, each month my body would swell up slightly, mimicking the state of maternity, longing to conceive, mourning my heart’s and mind’s decision never to bring forth a child. I refused to belong to a race, I refused to accept a nation. I wanted only, and still do want, to observe the people who do so. The crime of these identities, which I know now more than ever, I do not have the courage to bear. Am I nothing, then? I do not believe so, but if nothing is a condemnation, then I would love to be condemned.

  I can hear the sound of much emptiness now. A shift of my head this way to the right, that way to the left; I hear it, a soft rushing sound, waiting to grow bigger, waiting to envelop me. It holds no fear, only a growing curiosity. I only wish to know it so that I may one day tell myself the story of my existence within it. It is not an amusement. To know all is an impossibility, but only such a thing would satisfy me. To reverse the past would bring me complete happiness. Such an event—for it would be that, an event—would make my world stand on its feet; it does so now and has for a long time stood on its head. In a moment of extreme recklessness, I once said this to my husband—recklessness because to allow him an entry into my deepest thoughts was to give him a small measure of understanding of me. I once said to him that I was born standing on my head, the world then was upside down at the moment I first laid eyes on it, and he said, with a laugh, that everybody came into the world that way. I was not everybody, and it pleased me to know he did not understand this. He laughed when he told me this, I laughed when he told me this. When he laughed, his face opened with pleasure, grew wide as if about to split; but when he saw my own pleasure in his pleasure, he understood his mistake; we could not both be happy at the same time. Life, History, whatever its name, had made such a thing an impossibility. He never grew grim, there were no hardships in his own life, his disappointments were not known to him. His life grew darker, its opening was closing up. Seeing him in that way, standing at the edge of a cliff that faced east, the direction in which he would be buried, standing there on its very edge, precariously yet soundly balanced, like a bird, not a bird of prey but the humble winged being that inspires love and fantasy in children, I wanted to push him over, into the abyss, and not with deliberate anger but with a tap-tap, as if of recognition, as if of a friend, as if to say to him, You were not the great love of my life and so I understand you completely and this sentiment is unusual, unique only to me. Ahhh!

  This account of my life has been an account of my mother’s life as much as it has been an account of mine, and even so, again it is an account of the life of the children I did not have, as it is their account of me. In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from. In me are the voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me. This account is an account of the person who was ne
ver allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow myself to become.

  The days are long, the days are short. The nights are a blank; they harken to something, but I refuse to become familiar with it. To that period of time called day I profess an indifference; such a thing is a vanity but known only to me; all that is impersonal I have made personal. Since I do not matter, I do not long to matter, but I matter anyway. I long to meet the thing greater than I am, the thing to which I can submit. It is not in a book of history, it is not the work of anyone whose name can pass my own lips. Death is the only reality, for it is the only certainty, inevitable to all things.

  Also by Jamaica Kincaid

  At the Bottom of the River

  Annie John

  A Small Place

  Lucy

  Copyright © 1996 by Jamaica Kincaid

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd

  First edition, 1996

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kincaid, Jamaica.

  The autobiography of my mother / Jamaica Kincaid.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9275.A583K5636 1995 813—dc20 94-24580 CIP

  Part of this book appeared in different form in The New Yorker.

  eISBN 9781466828841

  First eBook edition: September 2012

  See Now Then

  by Jamaica Kincaid

  A beautifully wrought new novel about marriage and family from the acclaimed author of

  Autobiography of My Mother

  “Writers wish for perfect readers, but readers wish even harder for perfect writers and rarely find them…

  Jamaica Kincaid is about as perfect as it’s possible to be.”

  Carolyn See, The Washington Post

  For more information:

  http://us.macmillan.com/seenowthen/JamaicaKincaid

  1

  See now then, the dear Mrs. Sweet who lived with her husband Mr. Sweet and their two children, the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles in the Shirley Jackson house, which was in a small village in New England. The house, the Shirley Jackson house, sat on a knoll, and from a window Mrs. Sweet could look down on the roaring waters of the Paran River as it fell furiously and swiftly out of the lake a man-made lake, also named Paran; and looking up, she could see surrounding her, the mountains named Bald and Hale and Anthony, all part of the Green Mountain Range; and she could see the firehouse where sometimes she could attend a civic gathering and hear her government representative say something that might seriously affect her and the well-being of her family or see the firemen take out the fire trucks and dismantle various parts of them and put the parts back together and then polish all the trucks and then drive them around the village with a lot of commotion before putting them away again in the firehouse and they reminded Mrs. Sweet of the young Heracles, for he often did such things with his toy fire trucks; but just now when Mrs. Sweet was looking out from a window in the Shirley Jackson house, her son no longer did that. From that window again, she could see the house where the man who invented time-lapse photography lived but he was dead now; and she could see the house, the Yellow House, that Homer had restored so carefully and lovingly, polishing the floors, painting the walls, replacing the pipes, all this in the summer before that awful fall, when he went hunting and after felling the largest deer he had ever shot, he dropped down dead while trying to load it onto the back of his truck. And Mrs. Sweet did see him lying in his coffin in the Mahar funeral home, and she thought then, why does a funeral home always seem so welcoming, so inviting from the outside, so comfortable are the chairs inside, the beautiful golden glow of the lamplight softly embracing every object in the room, the main object being the dead, why is this so, Mrs. Sweet said to herself as she saw Homer, lying all alone and snug in his coffin, and he was all dressed up in brand-new hunting clothes, a red and black plaid jacket made of boiled wool and a red knitted hat, all clothing made by Woolrich or Johnson Bros. or some outdoor clothing outfitters like that; and Mrs. Sweet wanted to speak to him, for he looked so much like himself, to ask him if he would come to paint her house, the Shirley Jackson house, or could he come and do something, anything, fix the pipes, clean the gutters of the roof, check to see if water had leaked into the basement, because he appeared to be so like himself, but his wife said, Homer shot the biggest deer of his life and he died while trying to put it in the back of his truck; and Mrs. Sweet was sympathetic to the worldly-ness of the dead, for she could make herself see the army of worms, parasites, who had, without malice aforethought, begun to feed on Homer and would soon reduce him to the realm of wonder and disillusion so sad, so sad all of this that Mrs. Sweet could see then, while standing at the window of the house in which Shirley Jackson had lived and across the way was the house in which old Mrs. Mc-Govern had died and she had lived in it for many years before she became old, she had lived in her house, built in a neo-something style that harkened back from another era, long ago, long before Mrs. McGovern had been born and then a grown-up woman who married and lived with her husband in the Yellow House and made a garden of only peonies, big white ones that were streaked with a wine-dark red on the petals nearest the stamens, like an imagined night crossing an imagined day, so had been those peonies in Mrs. McGovern’s garden and she had grown other things but no one could remember what they were, only her peonies were committed to memory and when Mrs. McGovern had died and so therefore vanished from the face of the earth, Mrs. Sweet had dug up those peonies from that garden, “Festiva Maxima” was their name, and planted them in her own garden, a place Mr. Sweet and the beautiful Persephone and even the young Heracles hated. The Pembrokes, father and son, mowed the lawn, though sometimes the father went off to Montpelier, the capital, to cast votes for or against, as he felt to be in the best interest of the people who lived in that village in New England, which even now is situated on the banks of the river Paran; and the other people in that village, the Woolmingtons lived always in their house, and the Atlases too, and so also were the Elwells, the Elkinses, the Powerses; the library was full of books but no one went into it, only parents with their children, parents who wanted their children to read books, as if reading books were a form of love that was a mystery to them, a mystery that must remain so. The small village in New England held all that and much more and all that and much was then and now, time and space intermingling, becoming one thing, all in the mind of Mrs. Sweet.

  •

  All that was visible to Mrs. Sweet as she stood in the window, at the window, but so much was not visible to her then, it lay before her, all clear and still, as if trapped on a canvas, enclosed in a rectangle made up of dead branches of Betula nigra, and she could not see it and could not understand it even if she could see it: her husband, the dear Mr. Sweet, hated her very much. He so often wished her dead: once then, a night when he had returned home after performing a piano concerto by Shostakovich to an audience of people who lived in the nearby villages and so felt that they wanted to get out of their homes from time to time, but as soon as they left their homes they wanted to return immediately, for nothing was nearby and nothing was as nice as their own homes and hearing Mr. Sweet play the piano made them sleepy and their heads sometimes fell suddenly forward and they wrested to keep their chins from landing on their chests and sometimes that happened anyway and there would be lurching and balancing and gulping and coughing and though Mr. Sweet’s back was turned away from his rural audience he could sense all this and he could feel every twitch of every individual in his audience. He loved Shostakovich and as he played the music the grave sorrows and injustices visited on that man flowed over him and he was very moved by the man and the music that the man made and he wept as he played, pouring all of his feelings of despair into that concerto, imagining that his life, his precious life was being spent with that dreadful woman, his wife, the dear Mrs. Sweet, who loved making three courses of Fre
nch food for her small children and loved their company and she loved gardens and loved him and he was least worthy of her love, for he was such a small man, sometimes people mistook him for a rodent, he scurried around so. And he was not a rodent at all, he was a man capable of understanding Wittgenstein and Einstein and any other name that ended in stein, Gertrude included, the intricacies of the universe itself, the intricacies of human existence itself, the seeing of Now being Then and how Then becomes Now; how well he knew everything but he could not express himself, he could not show the world, at least as the world turned up in the form of the population of some small villages in New England, what a remarkable person he was then and had been and in time to come, these people who wore the same socks days in a row and didn’t dye their hair after it lost the natural color and luster it had when they were young and they liked to eat foods that were imperfect, food made limp by natural pathogens and insects for instance, people who worried about the pilot light going out of the boiler and the pipes freezing because the house was cold and then the plumber would have to be called and that plumber would complain about the work of the plumber who came before him because plumbers always found each other’s work imperfect; and his audience worried about all sorts of things Mr. Sweet had never heard of because he grew up in a city and lived in a building where when things went wrong you called someone named the super: the super could change a lightbulb, get the elevator to work again after it had ceased to do so, make the garbage disappear, scrub the floor of the lobby, call the utility company if the utility company had to be called, the super could do many things and in Mr. Sweet’s life, when he was a child, the super did them and Mr. Sweet had never heard of them until he came to live with that dreadful woman whom he had married and was now the mother of his children, the mother of his beautiful daughter in particular. The piano concerto came to an end and Mr. Sweet shook himself out of the deep sympathy he felt for the composer of the piano concerto and the audience shook themselves into their down coats, which had trapped the smell of wood smoke from the fires built in fireplaces and wood-burning stoves, that was a winter smell, that was a smell Mr. Sweet hated, the super would have taken care of that smell, this was not a smell of Mr. Sweet’s childhood; a dining room in the Plaza Hotel, his mother wearing French perfume, those were the smells of Mr. Sweet’s childhood and that then: the mother’s perfume, the Plaza Hotel. And he said a good night to those people who smelled as if they lived in rooms where wood was always burning in the wood-stove, and immediately no longer thought of them as they drove home in their Subarus and secondhand Saabs, and he put on his coat, a coat made from the hair of camels, a very nice coat, double-breasted, that the beastly wife of his, Mrs. Sweet, had bought for him from Paul Stuart, a fine haberdasher in the city where Mr. Sweet was born and he hated the coat because his benighted wife had given it to him and how could she know what a fine garment it was, she who had just not long ago gotten off the banana boat, or some other benighted form of transport, everything about her being so benighted, even the vessel on which she arrived, and he loved the coat for it suited him, he was a prince, a prince should wear such a coat, an elegant coat; and so glad he was to be rid of this audience, he slipped behind the wheel of his own used Saab, a better one than most of the others, and he turned into a lane and then turned left onto another lane and after one quarter of a mile he could see his home, the Shirley Jackson house, the structure that held within it his doom, that prison and the guard inside, in bed already, most likely, surrounded by catalogs of flowers and their seeds, or just lying there reading The Iliad or The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus, his wife that horrible bitch who’d arrived on a banana boat, it was Mrs. Sweet. But what if a surprise awaited him just inside the door, for even a poor unfortunate man as he, for so Mr. Sweet thought of himself, unfortunate to be married to that bitch of woman born not of beast; the surprise being the head of his wife just lying on the counter, her body never to be found, but her head severed from it, evidence that she could no longer block his progress in the world, for it was her presence in his life that kept him from being who he really was, who he really was, who he really was, and who might that really be, for he was a man small in stature and he really felt so keenly, especially when standing right next to the young Heracles, whose deeds were known and they were great and he was famous for them, even before he was born.