The Autobiography of My Mother

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online

Book: The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
walked like a warrior and could not contain the fury that was inside her. Nor did she have his quality of keeping her own counsel; every thought that came into her mind had to be voiced, so that whenever she saw me, she would let me know immediately whatever my presence suggested to her. I never hated her, I had only sympathy for her. Her tragedy was greater than mine; her mother did not love her, but her mother was alive, and every day she saw her mother and every day her mother let her know she was not loved. My mother was dead. It was her own son that my father’s wife favored, not loved more, for she was incapable of it—love; she favored him because he was not like her: he was not female, he was male. This boy thought, and was encouraged to think, that he was like his father in ways that were physical and in ways that were spiritual, so that it was said of him that he walked like his father and that certain of his gestures were like his father’s, but it was not true; it was not so, not really. He did walk like my father, he did have some of his gestures, but this walk of my father’s was not natural to my father and his gestures were not natural to him, either. My father had invented himself, had made himself up as he went along; when he wanted something, he made himself meet the situation, he made his cut fit the jib. The man, my father, whom his wife and his son saw, the man they wanted that boy to be, existed, but the person they saw was an expression of my father’s desires, an expression of his needs; the personality they were observing was like a suit of clothes my father had made for himself, and eventually he wore it so long that it became impossible to remove, it covered completely who he really was; who he really might have been became unknown, even to himself. My father was a thief, he was a jailer, he spoke falsehoods, he took advantage of the weak; that was who was he was at heart; he acted in these ways at all times in his life, but by the end of his life, the jailer, the thief, the liar, the coward—all were unknown to him. He believed himself to be a man of freedom, honest and brave; he believed it as he believed in the realness of anything he could see standing in front of him, like the warmth of the sun or the blueness of the sky, and nothing could convince him that just the opposite was the truth. This was not something his wife and her son would have known, or could have known, and so this boy from his beginning lived a painful life, a copied life, a life whose origins he did not know. To see him, when he was eleven years old or so, wearing a white linen suit, a direct copy of his father’s; so thin, so pale; his black hair, which was the same as his mother’s, forced down straight against his scalp; his gait awkward, unsteady, as if he had only just mastered the ability to use his feet—to see him walking to church, to worship a god my father did not really believe in, because my father could not believe in any god; to see him try so very hard to be like this man he did not know, whose actions he had never examined, inspired in me only pity and sadness; and so when he died, before he was nineteen years of age, I did not feel it was a tragedy, I only felt it was merciful that his life of misery and torture should be so short. His death was long and painful, its cause unknown, perhaps even unknowable; when he died there was no empty space where he had been, and his mother’s grief and my father’s grief for him would often seem mysterious, a big why and what, because who was this boy, this person whom they grieved over.
    And so I had come to know well the world in which I was living. I knew how to interpret the long silences my father’s wife had constructed between us. Sometimes in these silences there was nothing at all; sometimes they were filled with pure evil; sometimes she meant to see me dead, sometimes my being alive was of no interest to her. Her

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