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

deepened, my lips spread across my face and thickened into the shape of a heart that had been stepped on. I used to stare at myself in an old piece of a broken looking glass I had found in some rubbish under my father’s house. The sight of my changing self did not frighten me, I only wondered how I would look eventually; I never doubted that I would like completely whatever stared back at me. And so, too, the smell of my underarms and between my legs changed, and this change pleased me. In those places the smell became pungent, sharp, as if something was in the process of fermenting, slowly; in private, then as now, my hands almost never left those places, and when I was in public, these same hands were always not far from my nose, I so enjoyed the way I smelled, then and now.
    *   *   *
    At the age of fourteen, I had exhausted the resources of the tiny school in Massacre, the tiny village between Roseau and Mahaut. I really knew much more than that school could teach me. I could sense from the beginning of my life that I would know things when I needed to know them, I had known a long time ago that I could trust my own instincts about things, that if I were ever in a difficult situation, if I thought about it long enough a solution would appear to me. That there would be limitations to having such a view of life I could not know, but in any case, my life was already small and limited in its own way.
    I also knew the history of an array of people I would never meet. That in itself should not have kept me from knowing of them; it was only that this history of peoples that I would never meet—Romans, Gauls, Saxons, Britons, the British people—had behind it a malicious intent: to make me feel humiliated, humbled, small. Once I had identified and accepted this malice directed at me, I became fascinated with this expression of vanity: the perfume of your own name and your own deeds is intoxicating, and it never causes you to feel weary or exhausted; it is its own inspiration, it is its own renewal. And I learned, too, that no one can truly judge himself; to describe your own transgressions is to forgive yourself for them; to confess your bad deeds is also at once to forgive yourself, and so silence becomes the only form of self-punishment: to live forever locked up in an iron cage made of your own silence, and then, from time to time, to have this silence broken by a designated crier, someone who repeats over and over, in broken or complete sentences, a list of the violations, the bad deeds committed.
    I had never been to Roseau until that day in my fifteenth year when my father took me to the house of a man he knew, Monsieur LaBatte, Monsieur Jacques LaBatte, Jack, as I came to call him in the bitter and sweet dark of night. He, too, was a man of no principles, and this did not surprise or disappoint me, this did not make me like him more or less. He and my father knew each other through financial arrangements they made with each other. They called each other friend, but the fragility of the foundation on which this friendship was built would cause only sadness in someone who does not love the world and all the material things in it. And Roseau, even then, when the reality of every situation was so horrible that it had to be disguised and called something else, something the opposite of its true self, was not referred to as a city, it was called the capital, the capital of Dominica. It, too, had a fragile foundation, and from time to time was destroyed by forces of nature, a hurricane or water coming from the sky as if suddenly the sea were above and the heavens below. Roseau could not be called a city, because it could not embody such noble aspirations—center of commerce and culture and exchange of ideas among people, place of intrigue, place in which plots are hatched and the destinies of many are determined; it was no such thing as a city, it was an outpost, a way station for people for whom