The Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  * * *

  On a day that began in no special way that I can remember, I was taught the principles involved in writing an ordinary letter. A letter has six parts: the address of the sender, the date, the address of the recipient, the salutation or greeting, the body of the letter, the closing of the letter. It was well known that a person in the position that I was expected to occupy—the position of a woman and a poor one—would have no need whatsoever to write a letter, but the sense of satisfaction it gave everyone connected with teaching me this, writing a letter, must have been immense. I was beaten and harsh words were said to me when I made a mistake. The exercise of copying the letters of someone whose complaints or perceptions or joys were of no interest to me did not make me angry then—I was too young to understand that vanity could be a weapon as dangerous as any knife; it only made me want to write my own letters, letters in which I would express my feelings about my own life as it appeared to me at seven years old. I started to write to my father. I wrote, “My dear Papa,” in a lovely, decorative penmanship, a penmanship born of beatings and harsh words. I would say to him that I was mistreated by Eunice in word and deed and that I missed him and loved him very much. I wrote the same thing over and over again. It was without detail. It was nothing but the plaintive cry of a small wounded animal: “My dear Papa, you are the only person I have left in the world, no one loves me, only you can, I am beaten with words, I am beaten with sticks, I am beaten with stones, I love you more than anything, only you can save me.” These words were not meant for my father at all but for the person of whom I could see only her heels. Night after night I saw her heels, only her heels coming down to meet me, coming down to meet me forever.

  I wrote these letters without any intention of sending them to my father; I did not know how to do that, to send them. I folded them up in such a way that if they were torn apart they would make eight small squares. There was no mysterious significance to this; I did it only to make them fit more discreetly under a large stone just outside the gate to my school. Each day, as I left, I would place a letter I had written to my father under it. I had written these letters in secret, during the small amount of time allotted to us as recess, or during the time when I had completed my work and had gone unnoticed. Pretending to be deeply involved in what I was supposed to be doing, I would write a letter to my father.

  This small cry for help did not bring me instant relief. I recognized my own misery, but that it could be alleviated—that my life could change, that my circumstances could change—did not occur to me.

  My letters did not remain a secret. A boy named Roman had seen me putting them in their secret place, and behind my back, he removed them. He had no empathy, no pity; any instinct to protect the weak had been destroyed in him. He took my letters to our teacher. In my letters to my father I had said, “Everyone hates me, only you love me,” but I had not truly meant these letters to be sent to my father, and they were not really addressed to my father; if I had been asked then if I really felt that everyone hated me, that only my father loved me, I would not have known how to answer. But my teacher’s reaction to my letters, those small scribblings, was a tonic to me. She believed the “everybody” I referred to was herself, and only herself. She said my words were a lie, libelous, that she was ashamed of me, that she was not afraid of me. My teacher said all this to me in front of the other pupils at my school. They thought I was humiliated and they felt joy seeing me brought so low. I did not feel humiliated at all. I felt something. I could see her teeth were crooked and yellow, and I wondered how they had got that way. Large half-moons of perspiration stained the underarms of her dress, and I wondered if when I became a woman I, too, would perspire so profusely and how it would smell. Behind her shoulder on the wall was a large female spider carrying its sac of eggs, and I wanted to reach out and crush it with the bare palm of my hand, because I wondered if it was the same kind of spider or a relative of the spider that had sucked saliva from the corner of my mouth the night before as I lay sleeping, leaving three small, painful bites. There was a drizzle of rain outside, I could hear the sound of it on the galvanized roof.

  She sent my letters to my father, to show me that she had a clear conscience. She said that I had mistaken her scoldings, which were administered out of love for me, as an expression of hatred, and that this showed I was guilty of the sin of pride. And she said that she hoped I would learn to tell the difference between the two: love and hate. To this day, I have tried to tell the difference between the two, and I cannot, because often they wear so much the same face. When she said this, I did look in her face to see if I could tell whether it was true that she loved me and to see if her words, which so often seemed to be a series of harsh blows, were really an expression of love. Her face to me then did not appear loving, but perhaps I was mistaken—perhaps I was too young to judge, too young to know.

  I did not immediately recognize what had happened, what I had done: however unconsciously, however without direction, I had, through the use of some words, changed my situation; I had perhaps even saved my life. To speak of my own situation, to myself or to others, is something I would always do thereafter. It is in this way that I came to be so extremely conscious of myself, so interested in my own needs, so interested in fulfilling them, aware of my grievances, aware of my pleasures. From this unfocused, childish expression of pain, my life was changed and I took note of it.

  * * *

  My father came to fetch me wearing the uniform of a jailer. To him this had no meaning, it was without significance. He was returning to Roseau from the village of St. Joseph, where he had been carrying out his duties as a policeman. I was not told that he would arrive on that day; I had not expected him. I returned from school and saw him standing at the final bend in the road that led to the house in which I lived. I was surprised to see him, but I would admit this only to myself; I did not let anyone know. The reason I had missed my father so—the reason he no longer came to the house in which I lived, bringing his dirty clothes and taking away clean ones—was that he had married again. I had been told about this, but it was a mystery to me what it might mean; it was not unlike the first time I had been told that the world was round; I thought, What can it mean, why should it be? My father had married again. He took my hand, he said something, he spoke in English, his mouth began to curl around the words he spoke, and it made him appear benign, attractive, even kind. I understood what he said: He had a home for me now, a good home; I would love his wife, my new mother; he loved me as much as he loved himself, perhaps even more, because I reminded him of someone whom he knew with certainty he had loved even more than he had loved himself. I would love my new home; I would love the sky above me and the earth below.

  The word “love” was spoken with such frequency that it became a clue to my seven-year-old heart and my seven-year-old mind that this thing did not exist. My father’s eyes grew small and then they grew big; he believed what he said, and that was a good thing, because I did not. But I would not have wanted to stop this progression, this new thing, this going away from here; and I did not believe him, but I did not have any reason to, no real reason. I was not yet cynical and thought that behind everything I heard lay another story altogether, the real story.

  I thanked Eunice for taking care of me. I did not mean it, I could not mean it, I did not know how to mean it, but I would mean it now. I did not say goodbye; in the world that I lived in then and the world that I live in now, goodbyes do not exist, it is a small world. All my belongings were in a muslin knapsack and he placed them in a bag that was on the donkey he had been riding. He placed me on the donkey and sat behind me. And this was how we looked as my back was turned on the small house in which I spent the first seven years of my life: an already important man and his small daughter on the back of a donkey at the end of the day, an ordinary day, a day that had no meaning if you were less than a smudge on a page covered with print. I could hear my father’s breath; it was not the breath of my life
. The back of my head touched his chest from time to time, I could hear the sound of his heart beating through his shirt, the uniform that, when people saw him wearing it coming toward them, made them afraid, for his presence when wearing these clothes was almost always not a good thing. In my life then his presence was a good thing, it was too bad that he had not thought of changing his clothes; it was too bad that I had noticed he had not done so, it was too bad that such a thing would matter to me.

  This new experience of really leaving the past behind, of going from one place to the other and knowing that whatever had been would remain just so, was something I immediately accepted as a gift, as a right of nature. This most simple of movements, the turning of your back, is among the most difficult to make, but once it has been made you cannot imagine it was at all hard to accomplish. I had not been able to do it by myself, but I could see that I had set in motion events that would make it possible. If I were ever to find myself sitting in that schoolroom again, or sitting in Eunice’s yard again, sleeping in her bed, eating with her children, none of it would have the same power it once had over me—the power to make me feel helpless and ashamed at my own helplessness.

  I could not see the look on my father’s face as he rode, I did not know what he was thinking, I did not know him well enough to guess. He set off down the road in the opposite direction from the schoolhouse. The stretch of road was new to me, and yet it had a familiarity that made me sad. Around each bend was the familiar dark green of the trees that grew with a ferociousness that no hand had yet attempted to restrain, a green so unrelenting that it attained great beauty and great ugliness and yet great humility all at once; it was itself: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be taken away from it. Each precipice along the road was steep and dangerous, and a fall down one of them would have resulted in death or a lasting injury. And each climb up was followed by a slope down, at the bottom of which was the same choke of flowering plants, each with a purpose not yet known to me. And each curve that ran left would soon give way to a curve that ran right.

  The day then began to have the colors of an ending, the colors of a funeral, gray, mauve, black; my sadness inside became manifest to me. I was a part of a procession of sadness, which was moving away from my old life, a life I had lived for only seven years. I did not become overwhelmed, though. The dark of night came on with its usual suddenness, without warning. Again I did not become overwhelmed. My father placed an arm around me, as if to ward off something—a danger I could not see in the cool air, an evil spirit, a fall. His clasp was at first gentle; then it grew till it had the strength of an iron band, but even then I did not become overwhelmed.

  We entered the village in the dark. There were no lights anywhere, no dog barked, we did not pass anyone. We entered the house in which my father lived, there was a light coming from a beautiful glass lamp, something I had never seen before; the light was fueled by a clear liquid that I could see through the base of the lamp, which was embossed with the heads of animals unfamiliar to me. The lamp was on a shelf, and the shelf was made of mahogany, its brackets ended in the shape of two tightly closed paws. The room was crowded, with a chair on which two people could sit at once, two other chairs on which only one person could sit, and a small, low table draped with a piece of white linen. The walls of the house and the partition that separated this room from the rest of the house were covered with paper, and the paper was decorated with small pink roses. I had never seen anything like this before, except once, while looking through a book at my school—but the picture I had seen then was a drawing illustrating a story about the domestic goings-on of a small mammal who lived in a field with his family. In their burrow, the walls had been covered with similar paper. I had understood that story about the small mammal to be a pretense, something to amuse a child, but this was my very real father’s house, a house with a bright lamp in a room, and a room that seemed to exist only for an occasional purpose.

  At that moment I realized that there were so many things I did not know, not including the very big thing I did not know—my mother. I did not know my father; I did not know where he was from or whom or what he liked; I did not know the land whose surface I had just come through on an animal’s back; I did not know who I was or why I was standing there in that room of the occasional purpose with the lamp. A great sea of what I did not know opened up before me, and its powerful treacherous currents pulsed over my head repeatedly until I was sure I was dead.

  I had only fainted. I opened my eyes soon after to see the face of my father’s wife not too far above mine. She had the face of evil. I had no other face to compare it with; I knew only that hers was the face of evil as far as I could tell. She did not like me. I could see that. She did not love me. I could see that. I could not see the rest of her right away—only her face. She was of the African people and the people from France. It was nighttime and she was in her own house, so her hair was exposed; it was smooth and yet tightly curled, and she wore it parted in the middle and plaited in two braids that were pinned up in the back. Her lips were shaped like those of people from a cold climate: thin and ungenerous. Her eyes were black, not with beauty but with deceit. Her nose was long and sharp, like an arrow; her cheekbones were also sharp. She did not like me. She did not love me. I could see it in her face. My spirit rose to meet this challenge. No love: I could live in a place like this. I knew this atmosphere all too well. Love would have defeated me. Love would always defeat me. In an atmosphere of no love I could live well; in this atmosphere of no love I could make a life for myself. She held a cup to my mouth, one of her hands brushed against my face, and it felt cold; she was feeding me a tea, something to revive me, but it tasted bitter, like a bad potion. My small tongue allowed no more than a drop of it to come into my mouth, but the bitter taste of it warmed my young heart. I sat up. Our eyes did not meet and lock; I was too young to throw out such a challenge, I could then act only on instinct.

  I was led down a short hallway to a room. It was to be my own room; my father lived in a house in which there were enough rooms for me to occupy my own. This small event immediately became central to my life: I adjusted to this evidence of privacy without question. My room was lit by a small lamp, the size of my now large, aged fist, and I could see my bed: small, of wood, a white sheet on its copra-filled mattress, a square, flat pillow. I had a washstand on which stood a basin and an urn that had water in it. I did not see a towel. (I did not then know how to wash myself properly, in any case, and the lesson I eventually got came with many words of abuse.) There was not a picture on the wall. The walls were not covered with paper; the bare wood, pine, was not painted. It was the plainest of plain rooms, but it had in it more luxury than I had ever imagined, it offered me something I did not even know I needed: it offered me solitude. All of my little being, physical and spiritual, could find peace here, in this little place of my own where I could sit and take stock.

  I sat down on the bed. My heart was breaking; I wanted to cry, I felt so alone. I felt in danger, I felt threatened; I felt as each minute passed that someone wished me dead. My father’s wife came to say good night, and she turned out the lamp. She spoke to me then in French patois; in his presence she had spoken to me in English. She would do this to me through all the time we knew each other, but that first time, in the sanctuary of my room, at seven years old, I recognized this to be an attempt on her part to make an illegitimate of me, to associate me with the made-up language of people regarded as not real—the shadow people, the forever humiliated, the forever low. She then went to the part of the house where she and my father slept; it was far enough away that I could hear the sound of her footsteps fade; still, I could hear their voices as they spoke, the sounds swirling upward to the empty space beneath the ceiling. They had a conversation; I could not make out the words; the emotions seemed neutral, neither hot nor cold. There was some silence; there were short gasps and sighs; there were the sounds of people sleeping, breath escaping through the mouth.
/>