Mr. Potter

Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
place, he said, and then he said no, perhaps it was not too far from that flamboyant tree over there, and there were many flamboyant trees, the graveyard had many of that kind of tree growing in it, and so I could not tell which tree in particular he meant. He remembered the day well, he said, the sun was shining very bright, there was not a cloud in the
sky, and I did not say to him that the sun always shone very bright here and there was never a cloud in the sky, and is there something to be found in that, the cloudless day, the sun so bright? But I did not say anything to him, I did not agree, I did not disagree. And he remembered the day, he said, the angry people gathered around the grave, the coffin being lowered and people singing hymns for the dead. He heard them sing, he said; they sang, “When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died.” They sang, “Wh-en I sur-vey/the won-drous cross/ On whi-ch the Pr-ince/of Glo-ry died.” And did their voices go astray, I wondered to myself, each leaving the other, bending the melody to suit her purpose and his need. And he said, “Yes!” and he pointed to a mound, an eroded mound, a thinning mound, and he said this is where Mr. Potter was buried, this was where he believed Mr. Potter was buried, and perhaps that is the moment he grew weary of me and wanted to get rid of me, for I had made so many demands, and so he showed me the mound under which Mr. Potter had been buried. And the mound was not bare, it was covered with a wormwood, a plant used by my mother and her friends as the main ingredient in an elixir they drank when they wanted to clean their wombs; it was also covered with a plant I now know as Tradescantia albiflora. And the grave master said, “Did you know Potter?” This is what the grave master asked of
me, he said, “Did you know Potter?” And I said, “Mr. Potter was my father, my father’s name was Mr. Potter.” And when I had said this to the grave master, in the most straightforward way I knew, concerning my relationship to Mr. Potter, his intimate knowledge of my mother and the way he had made me and had contributed to my appearance in the world, I was transported back to how I began again, nine months lying in my mother’s stomach, warm and curled up and feeding from her own very physical existence, and I knew nothing of Mr. Potter and my own self. And at seven months in my mother’s stomach, I lay coiled up not like something about to strike, not like a thing about to be unleashed, but like something benign and eternal, something for which I do not yet have a name. And I am imagining this and yet it is true, this thing that I now imagine is a fact, is something true, it cannot be denied: I lay in my mother’s stomach for nine months, but when I had been in my mother’s stomach for seven months, my mother, whose name then was Annie Victoria Richardson, left my father, whose name then was Roderick Potter, and this remained his name until his death. And the grave master was not at all interested in my beginnings, for he was concerned only with the well-being of the dead, or at any rate he had only to convince those living that he was a crucial part of their general concern for the dead. And people in the midst of their sorrow and their loss came
to him believing that he had never seen such a thing as their sorrow and their loss before, and he did not tell them otherwise and he did not compare so much sorrow and loss here with so much sorrow and despair there. And he asked me, though not speaking to me at all, for he was looking toward the sky or rather toward the heavens, if Mr. Potter was my father (“You Potter pickney?”) and when I said “Yes” he did not show me kindness or unkindness, he remained indifferent. And the grave master’s name was not Hector or Baldwin, and as I was looking at him, standing near the place where he said Mr. Potter was

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