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

wishing me dead was an automatic response; she had never loved me, she had never wished to see me alive in the first place, and so when she saw me, really saw me, looked at me and realized who I was, she could only wish me dead. But after her first real attempt—the one in which she made me a gift of a necklace, which I then presented as a gift to her favorite dog and the necklace gave the dog the death that was meant for me—the other attempts she made were only halfhearted; this was partly because she recognized my desire to survive and partly because she had become preoccupied with her life as the mother of a great man to be. When her son died, I was no longer living in her house, I had passed out of her view, she did not have me to look on and perhaps take revenge on because I went on living.
    Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with the caution of life—all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love. No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn. It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended.
    And so it was that when I first saw the thick red fluid of my menstrual blood, I was not surprised and not afraid. I had never heard of it, I had not been expecting it, I was twelve years old, but its appearance to my young mind, to my body and soul, had the force of destiny fulfilled; it was as if I had always known of it but had never admitted it to consciousness, had never known how to put it into words. It appeared that first time so thick and red and plentiful that it was impossible to think of it as only an omen, a warning of some kind, a symbol; it was just its real self, my menstrual flow, and I knew immediately that its failure to appear regularly after a certain interval could only mean a great deal of trouble for me. Perhaps I knew then that the child in me would never be stilled enough to allow me to have a child of my own. From a baker I bought four bags, the kind in which flour was shipped, and after removing the dyed brand markings through a long process of washing and bleaching in the hot sun, I made four squares from each and used them as napkins to catch my blood as it flowed from between my legs. After my father’s wife saw me initiate and complete this one act, she said to me that when I became a real woman, she would have to guard herself against me. At the time I felt such a statement to be unwarranted, for after all I was still on my guard when it came to her. It was around then, too, that the texture of my body and the smell of my body began to change; coarse hairs appeared under my arms and in the space between my legs where there had been none, my hips widened, my chest thickened and swelled up slightly at first, and a deep space formed between my two breasts; the hair on my head grew long and soft and the waves in it