The Autobiography of My Mother (19 page)

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 never 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 HarperCollins
CanadaLtd

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

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.