The Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  I lay down to sleep and to dream of my mother—for I knew I would do that, I knew I would make myself do that, I needed to do that. She came down the ladder again and again, over and over, just her heels and the hem of her white dress visible; down, down, over and over. I watched her all night in my dream. I did not see her face. I was not disappointed. I would have loved to see her face, but I didn’t long for it anymore. She sang a song, but it had no words; it was not a lullaby, it was not sentimental, not meant to calm me when my soul roiled at the harshness of life; it was only a song, but the sound of her voice was like a small treasure found in an abandoned chest, a treasure that inspires not astonishment but contentment and eternal pleasure.

  All night I slept, and in my sleep saw her feet come down the ladder, step after step, never seeing her face, hearing her voice sing that song, sometimes humming, sometimes through an open mouth. To this day she will appear in my dreams from time to time but never again to sing or utter a sound of any kind—only as before, coming down a ladder, her heels visible and the white hem of her garment above them.

  * * *

  I came to my father’s house in the blanket of voluptuous blackness that was the night; a morning naturally followed. I awoke in the false paradise into which I was born, the false paradise in which I will die, the same landscape that I had always known, each aspect of it beyond reproach, at once beautiful, ugly, humble, and proud; full of life, full of death, able to sustain the one, inevitably to claim the other.

  My father’s wife showed me how to wash myself. It was not done with kindness. My human form and odor were an opportunity to heap scorn on me. I responded in a fashion by now characteristic of me: whatever I was told to hate I loved and loved the most. I loved the smell of the thin dirt behind my ears, the smell of my unwashed mouth, the smell that came from between my legs, the smell in the pit of my arm, the smell of my unwashed feet. Whatever about me caused offense, whatever was native to me, whatever I could not help and was not a moral failing—those things about me I loved with the fervor of the devoted. Her hands as they touched me were cold and caused me pain. We would never love each other. In her was a despair rooted in a desire long thwarted: she had not yet been able to bear my father a child. She was afraid of me; she was afraid that because of me my father would think of my mother more often than he thought of her. On that first morning she gave me some food and it was old, moldy, as if she had saved it specially for me in order to make me sick. I did not eat what she gave me after that; I learned then how to prepare my own food and made this a trait by which others would know me: I was a girl who prepared her own food.

  Parts of my life, incidents in my life then, seem, when I remember them now, as if they were happening in a very small, dark place, a place the size of a dollhouse, and the dollhouse is at the bottom of a hole, and I am way up at the top of the hole, peering down into this little house, trying to make out exactly what it is that happened down there. And sometimes when I look down at this scene, certain things are not in the same place they were in the last time I looked: different things are in the shadows at different times, different things are in the light.

  * * *

  My father’s wife wished me dead, at first in a way that would have allowed her to make a lavish display of sorrow over my death: an accident, God’s desire. And then when no accident occurred and God did not seem to care one way or the other whether I lived or died, she tried to accomplish this herself. She made me a present of a necklace fashioned from dried berries and polished wood and stone and shells from the sea. It was most beautiful, too beautiful for a child, but a child, a real child, would have been dazzled by it, would have been seduced by it, would have immediately placed it around her neck. I was not a real child. I thanked and thanked her. I thanked her again. I did not take it into my small room. I did not want to hold on to it for very long. I had made a small place in the everlastingly thick grove of trees at the back of the house. She did not know of it yet; when eventually she discovered it, she sent something that I could not see to live there and it drove me away. It was in this secret place that I left the necklace until I could decide what to do with it. She would look at my neck and notice that I was not wearing it, but she never mentioned it again. Not once. She never urged me to wear it at all. She had a dog that she took to ground with her; this dog was a gift from my father, it was to protect her from real human harm, a harm that could be seen, it was meant to make her feel a kind of safety. One day I placed the necklace around the dog’s neck, hiding it in the hair there; within twenty-four hours he went mad and died. If she found the necklace around his neck she never mentioned it to me. She became pregnant then and bore the first of her two children, and this took her close attention away from me; but she did not stop wishing me dead.

  The school I attended was five miles away in the next village, and I walked to it with some other children, most of them boys. We had to cross a river, but in the dry season that meant stepping on the stones in the riverbed. When it rained and the water had risen very high, we would remove our clothes and tie them in a bundle, placing them on our heads, and cross the river naked. One day when the river was very high and we were crossing naked, we saw a woman in the part of the river where the mouth met the sea. It was deep there and we could not tell if she was sitting or standing, but we knew she was naked. She was a beautiful woman, more beautiful than any woman we had ever seen, beautiful in a way that made sense to us, not a European way: she was dark brown in skin, her hair was black and shiny and twisted into small coils all around her head. Her face was like a moon, a soft, brown, glistening moon. She opened her mouth and a strange yet sweet sound came out. It was mesmerizing; we stood and stared at her. She was surrounded by fruit, mangoes—it was the season for them—and they were all ripe, and those shades of red, pink, and yellow were tantalizing and mouth-watering. She beckoned to us to come to her. Someone said it was not a woman at all, that we should not go, that we should run away. We could not move away. And then this boy, whose face I can remember because it was the male mask of heedlessness and boastfulness that I have come to know, started forward and forward, and he laughed as he went forward. When he seemed to get to the place where she was, she moved farther away, yet she was always in the same place; he swam toward her and the fruit, and each time he was almost near, she became farther away. He swam in this way until he began to sink from exhaustion; we could see only the top of his head, we could see only his hands; then we could see nothing at all, only a set of expanding circles where he used to be, as if a pebble had been thrown there. And then the woman with her fruit vanished, too, as if she had not been there, as if the whole thing had never happened.

  The boy disappeared; he was never seen again, not dead even, and when the water got low in that place, we would go and look, but he wasn’t there. It was as if it had never happened, and the way we talked about it was as if we had imagined it, because we never spoke about it out loud, we only accepted that it had happened, and it came to exist only in our minds, an act of faith, like the Virgin Birth for some people, or other such miracles; and it had the same power of belief and disbelief, only unlike the Virgin Birth we had seen this ourselves. I saw it happen. I saw a boy in whose company I would walk to school swim out naked to meet a woman who was also naked and surrounded by ripe fruit and disappear in the muddy waters where the river met the sea. He disappeared there and was never seen again. That woman was not a woman; she was a something that took the shape of a woman. It was almost as if the reality of this terror was so overwhelming that it became a myth, as if it had happened a very long time ago and to other people, not us. I know of friends who witnessed this event with me and, forgetting that I was present, would tell it to me in a certain way, daring me to believe them; but it is only because they do not themselves believe what they are saying; they no longer believe what they saw with their own eyes, or in their own reality. This is no longer without an explanation to me. Everything about us is held in doubt and we t
he defeated define all that is unreal, all that is not human, all that is without love, all that is without mercy. Our experience cannot be interpreted by us; we do not know the truth of it. Our God was not the correct one, our understanding of heaven and hell was not a respectable one. Belief in that apparition of a naked woman with outstretched arms beckoning a small boy to his death was the belief of the illegitimate, the poor, the low. I believed in that apparition then and I believe in it now.

  * * *

  Who was my father? Not just who was he to me, his child—but who was he? He was a policeman, but not an ordinary policeman; he inspired more than the expected amount of fear for someone in his position. He made appointments to see people, men, at his house, the place where he lived with his family—this entity of which I was now a sort of member—and he would make these people wait for hours; at times he never showed up at all. They waited for him, sometimes sitting on a stone that was just inside the gate of the yard, sometimes pacing back and forth from inside the yard to outside the yard, causing the gate to creak, and this always made his wife cross, and she would complain to these people, speaking rudely to them, the rudeness way out of proportion to the annoyance of the creaky gate. They waited for him without complaint, falling asleep standing up, falling asleep as they sat on the ground, flies drinking from the saliva that leaked out of the corners of their open mouths. They waited, and when he did not show up they left and returned the next day, hoping to see him; sometimes they did, sometimes they did not. He suffered no consequences for his behavior; he just treated people in this way. He did not care, or so I thought at first—but of course he did care; it was well thought out, this way he had of causing suffering; he was a part of a whole way of life on the island which perpetuated pain.

  At the time I came to live with him, he had just mastered the mask that he wore as a face for the remainder of his life: the skin taut, the eyes small and drawn back as though deep inside his head, so that it wasn’t possible to get a clue to him from them, the lips parted in a smile. He seemed trustworthy. His clothes were always well ironed, clean, spotless. He did not like people to know him very well; he tried never to eat food in the presence of strangers, or in the presence of people who were afraid of him.

  Who was he? I ask myself this all the time, to this day. Who was he? He was a tall man; his hair was red; his eyes were gray. His wife, the woman he married after my mother died while giving birth to me, was the only daughter of a thief, a man who grew bananas and coffee and cocoa on his own land (these crops were sold to someone else, a European man who exported them). She came to my father with no money, but her father made possible many connections for him. They bought other people’s land together, they divided the profits in a way satisfactory to them both, they never quarreled, but they did not seem to be close friends; my father did not have that, a close friend. When he met the daughter of his sometime partner in crime I do not know. It might have been a night full of stars, or a night with no light at all from above, or a day with the sun big in the sky or so bleak it felt sad to be alive. I do not know and I do not want to find out. Her voice had a harsh, heated quality to it; if there is a language that would make her voice sound musical and so invite desire, I do not yet know of it.

  My father must have loved me then, but he never told me so. I never heard him say those words to anyone. He wanted me to keep going to school, he made sure of this, but I do not know why. He wanted me to go to school beyond the time that most girls were in school. I went to school past the age of thirteen. No one told me what I should do with myself after I was finished with school. It was a great sacrifice that I should go to school, because as his wife often pointed out, I would have been more useful at home. He gave me books to read. He gave me a life of John Wesley, and as I read it I wondered what the life of a man so full of spiritual tumult and piety had to do with me. My father had become a Methodist, he attended church every Sunday; he taught Sunday school. The more he robbed, the more money he had, the more he went to church; it is not an unheard-of linking. And the richer he became, the more fixed the mask of his face grew, so that now I no longer remember what he really looked like when I first knew him long ago, before I came to live with him. And so my mother and father then were a mystery to me: one through death, the other through the maze of living; one I had never seen, the other I saw constantly.

  The world I came to know was full of danger and treachery, but I did not become afraid, I did not become cautious. I was not indifferent to the danger my father’s wife posed to me, and I was not indifferent to the danger she thought my presence posed to her. So in my father’s house, which was her home, I tried to cloak myself in an atmosphere of apology. I did not in fact feel sorry for anything at all, I had not done anything, either deliberately or by accident, that warranted my begging for forgiveness, but my gait was a weapon—a way of deflecting her attention from me, of persuading her to think of me as someone who was pitiable, an ignorant child. I did not like her, I did not wish her dead, I only wanted her to leave me alone. I was very careful how far I carried this attitude of piousness, because I did not wish to draw the sympathy of anyone else, especially not my father, for I calculated she might become jealous of that. I had a version of this piety that I took with me to school. To my teachers I seemed quiet and studious; I was modest, which is to say, I did not seem to them to have any interest in the world of my body or anyone else’s body. This wearying demand was only one of many demands made on me simply because I was female. From the moment I stepped out of my bed in the early morning to the time I covered myself up again in the dark of night, I negotiated many treacherous acts of deception, but it was clear to me who I really was.

  I lay in my bed at night, and turned my ear to the sounds that were inside and outside the house, identifying each noise, separating the real from the unreal: whether the screeches that crisscrossed the night, leaving the blackness to fall to earth like so many ribbons, were the screeches of bats or someone who had taken the shape of a bat; whether the sound of wings beating in that space so empty of light was a bird or someone who had taken the shape of a bird. The sound of the gate being opened was my father coming home long after the stillness of sleep had overtaken most of his household, his footsteps stealthy but sure, coming into the yard, up the steps; his hand opening the door to his house, closing the door behind him, turning the bar that made the door secure, walking to another part of the house; he never ate meals when he returned home late at night. The sound of the sea then, at night, could be heard so clearly, sometimes as a soft swish, a lapping of waves against the shore of black stones, sometimes with the anger of water boiling in a cauldron resting unsteadily on a large fire. And sometimes when the night was completely still and completely black, I could hear, outside, the long sigh of someone on the way to eternity; and this, of all things, would disturb the troubled peace of all that was real: the dogs asleep under houses, the chickens in the trees, the trees themselves moving about, not in a way that suggested an uprooting, just a moving about, as if they wished they could run away. And if I listened again I could hear the sound of those who crawled on their bellies, the ones who carried poisonous lances, and those who carried a deadly poison in their saliva; I could hear the ones who were hunting, the ones who were hunted, the pitiful cry of the small ones who were about to be devoured, followed by the temporary satisfaction of the ones doing the devouring: all this I heard night after night, again and again. And it ended only after my hands had traveled up and down all over my own body in a loving caress, finally coming to the soft, moist spot between my legs, and a gasp of pleasure had escaped my lips which I would allow no one to hear.

  It perhaps was inevitable that as soon as I came to know the long walk from my father’s house to my school in the next village like the back of my hand, I was to leave it behind. This walk, all five miles of it one way, five miles of it the other, never ceased to be of some terror for all the children who walked it, and we tried never to be alone. We walked i
n groups always. In any one year, at any one time, there were not more than a dozen of us, more boys than girls. We were not friends; such a thing was discouraged. We were never to trust each other. This was like a motto repeated to us by our parents; it was a part of my upbringing, like a form of good manners: You cannot trust these people, my father would say to me, the very words the other children’s parents were saying to them, perhaps even at the same time. That “these people” were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me. The people we should naturally have mistrusted were beyond our influence completely; what we needed to defeat them, to rid ourselves of them, was something far more powerful than mistrust. To mistrust each other was just one of the many feelings we had for each other, all of them the opposite of love, all of them standing in the place of love. It was as if we were in competition with each other for a secret prize, and we were afraid that someone else would get it; any expression of love, then, would not be sincere, for love might give someone else the advantage.

  We were not friends. We walked together in a companionship based on fear, fear of things we could not see, and when those things were seen, we often could not really comprehend their danger, so confusing was much of reality. It was only after we had left the immediate confines of our village and were out of the sight of our parents that we drew close to each other. We would talk, but our conversation was always about terror. How could it not be so? We had seen that boy drown in the mouth of the river we crossed each day. If our schooling was successful, most of us would not have believed we had witnessed such a thing. To say that we had seen this boy float out to meet a woman surrounded by fruit, and then vanish in the swollen waters in the mouth of the river, was to say that we lived in a darkness from which we could not be redeemed. I then and now had and have no use for redemption.