Jamaica Kincaid
Authors: Annie John
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Contents
For Allen, with love
Chapter One
Figures in the Distance
For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died. At the time I thought this I was on my summer holidays and we were living far out on Fort Road. Usually, we lived in our house on Dickenson Bay Street, a house my father built with his own hands, but just now it needed a new roof and so we were living in a house out on Fort Road. We had only two neighbors, Mistress Maynard and her husband. That summer, we had a pig that had just had piglets; some guinea fowl; and some ducks that laid enormous eggs that my mother said were big even for ducks. I hated to eat any food except for the enormous duck eggs, hardboiled. I had nothing to do every day except to feed the birds and the pig in the morning and in the evening. I spoke to no one other than my parents, and sometimes to Mistress Maynard, if I saw her when I went to pick up the peelings of vegetables which my mother had asked her to save for the pig, which was just the thing the pig really liked. From our yard, I could see the cemetery. I did not know it was the cemetery until one day when I said to my mother that sometimes in the evening, while feeding the pig, I could see various small, sticklike figures, some dressed in black, some dressed in white, bobbing up and down in the distance. I noticed, too, that sometimes the black and white sticklike figures appeared in the morning. My mother said that it was probably a child being buried, since children were always buried in the morning. Until then, I had not known that children died.
I was afraid of the dead, as was everyone I knew. We were afraid of the dead because we never could tell when they might show up again. Sometimes they showed up in a dream, but that wasn’t so bad, because they usually only brought a warning, and in any case you wake up from a dream. But sometimes they would show up standing under a tree just as you were passing by. Then they might follow you home, and even though they might not be able to come into your house, they might wait for you and follow you wherever you went; in that case, they would never give up until you joined them. My mother knew of many people who had died in such a way. My mother knew of many people who had died, including her own brother.
After I found out about the cemetery, I would stand in my yard and wait for a funeral to come. Some days, there were no funerals. “No one died,” I would say to my mother. Some days, just as I was about to give up and go inside, I would see the small specks appear. “What made them so late?” I would ask my mother. Probably someone couldn’t bear to see the coffin lid put in place, and so as a favor the undertaker might let things go on too long, she said. The undertaker! On our way into town, we would pass the undertaker’s workshop. Outside, a little sign read “S
TRAFFEE
& S
ONS
, U
NDERTAKERS
& C
ABINETMAKERS
.” I could always tell we were approaching this place, because of the smell of pitch pine and varnish in the air.
* * *
Later, we moved back to our house in town, and I no longer had a view of the cemetery. Still no one I knew had died. One day, a girl smaller than I, a girl whose mother was a friend of my mother’s, died in my mother’s arms. I did not know this girl at all, though I may have got a glimpse of her once or twice as I passed her and her mother coming out of our yard, and I tried to remember everything I had heard about her. Her name was Nalda; she had red hair; she was very bony; she did not like to eat any food. In fact, she liked to eat mud, and her mother always had to keep a strict eye on her to prevent her from doing that. Her father made bricks, and her mother dressed in a way that my father found unbecoming. I heard my mother describe to my father just how Nalda had died: She had a fever, they noticed a change in her breathing, so they called a car and were rushing her off to Dr. Bailey when, just as they were crossing over a bridge, she let out a long sigh and went limp. Dr. Bailey pronounced her dead, and when I heard that I was so glad he wasn’t my doctor. My mother asked my father to make the coffin for Nalda, and he did, carving bunches of tiny flowers on the sides. Nalda’s mother wept so much that my mother had to take care of everything, and since children were never prepared by undertakers, my mother had to prepare the little girl to be buried. I then began to look at my mother’s hands differently. They had stroked the dead girl’s forehead; they had bathed and dressed her and laid her in the coffin my father had made. My mother would come back from the dead girl’s house smelling of bay rum—a scent that for a long time afterward would make me feel ill. For a while, though not for very long, I could not bear to have my mother caress me or touch my food or help me with my bath. I especially couldn’t bear the sight of her hands lying still in her lap.
At school, I told all my friends about this death. I would take them aside individually, so I could repeat the details over and over again. They would listen to me with their mouths open. In turn, they would tell me of someone they had known or heard of who had died. I would listen with my mouth open. One person had known very well a neighbor who had gone swimming after eating a big lunch at a picnic and drowned. Someone had a cousin who in the middle of something one day just fell down dead. Someone knew a boy who had died after eating some poisonous berries. “Fancy that,” we said to each other.
* * *
I loved very much—and so used to torment until she cried—a girl named Sonia. She was smaller than I, even though she was almost two years older, and she was a dunce—the first real dunce I had ever met. She was such a dunce that sometimes she could not remember the spelling of her own name. I would try to get to school early and give her my homework, so that she could copy it, and in class I would pass her the answers to sums. My friends ignored her, and whenever I mentioned her name in a favorable way they would twist up their lips and make a sound to show their disdain. I thought her beautiful and I would say so. She had long, thick black hair that lay down flat on her arms and legs; and then running down the nape of her neck, down the middle of her back for as far as could be seen before it was swallowed up by her school uniform, was a line of the same long, thick black hair, only here it flared out as if a small breeze had come and parted it. At recess, I would buy her a sweet—something called a frozen joy—with money I had stolen from my mother’s purse, and then we would go and sit under a tree in our schoolyard. I would then stare and stare at her, narrowing and opening wide my eyes until she began to fidget under my gaze. Then I would pull at the hair on her arms and legs—gently at first, and then awfully hard, holding it up taut with the tips of my fingers until she cried out. For a few weeks, she didn’t appear in school, and we were told that her mother, who had been with child, had died suddenly. I couldn’t ever again bring myself to speak to her, even though we spent two more years as classmates. She seemed such a shameful thing, a girl whose mother had died and left her alone in the world.
Not long after the little girl died in my mother’s arms on the way to the doctor, Miss Charlotte, our neighbor across the street, collapsed and died while having a conversation with my mother. If my mother hadn’t caught her, she would have fallen to the ground. When I came home from school that day, my mother said, “Miss Charlotte is dead.” I had known Miss Charlotte very well, and I tried to imagine her dead. I couldn’t. I did not know what someone looked like dead. I knew what Miss Charlotte looked like coming from market. I knew what she looked like going to church. I knew what she looked like when she told her dog not to frighten me by chasing me up and down the street. Once, when Miss Charlotte was sick, my mother asked me to take her a bowl with some food, so I saw her lying in her bed in her nightgown. Miss Charlotte was buried in a coffin my father did not make, and I was not allowed to go to the funeral.
At school, almost everyone I knew had seen a dead person, and not a spirit of a dead person but a real dead person. The girl who sat at the desk next to mine suddenly stopped sucking her thumb because her mother had washed it in water in which a dead person had been given a bath. I told her that her mother must have been playing a trick on her, that I was sure the water was plain water, since it was just the sort of trick my mother would play on me. But she had met my mother and she said she could see that my mother and her mother weren’t alike at all.
* * *
I began to go to funerals. I didn’t actually go to the funerals as an official mourner, since I didn’t know any of the people who had died and I was going without my parents’ permission. I visited the funeral parlors or the drawing rooms where the dead were laid out for viewing by the mourners. When I heard the church bell toll in the way it tolled when someone had died, I would try to find out who had died and where the funeral was to be—home or funeral parlor. The funeral parlor was in much the same direction as my route home, but sometimes to get to someone’s house I would have to go in the opposite direction of my way home. At first, I didn’t go in; I would just stand outside and watch the people come and go, hear the close relatives and friends let out incredible loud wails and moans, and then watch the procession march off to church. But then I began to go in and take a look. The first time I actually saw a dead person, I didn’t know what to think. Since it wasn’t someone I knew, I couldn’t make a comparison. I had never seen the person laugh or smile or frown or shoo a chicken out of a garden. So I looked and looked for as long as I could without letting anyone know I was just there out of curiosity.
One day, a girl my own age died. I did not know her name or anything personal about her except that she was my own age and that she had a humpback. She attended another school, and on the day of her funeral her whole school got the day off. At my school, it was all we could talk about: “Did you know the humpbacked girl?” I remembered once standing behind her in a line to take out books at the library; then I saw a fly land on the collar of her uniform and walk up and down as the collar lay flat on her hump. On hearing that she was dead, I wished I had tapped the hump to see if it was hollow. I also remembered that her hair was parted into four plaits and that the parts were crooked. “She must have combed her hair herself,” I said. At last, though, someone I knew was dead. The day of her funeral, I bolted from school as soon as we finished the last amen of our evening prayers, and I made my way to the funeral home. When I got there, the whole street was full of girls from her school, all in their white dress uniforms. It was a big crowd of them, and they were milling around, talking to each other quietly and looking very important. I didn’t have time to stop and really envy them; I made my way to the door and entered the funeral parlor. There she was. She was lying in the regular pitch-pine, varnished coffin, on a bed of mauve-and-white lilacs. She wore a white dress, and it may have come all the way down to her ankles, but I didn’t have time to look carefully. It was her face that I wanted to see. I remembered how she had looked the day in the library. Her face was just a plain face. She had black eyes, flat nostrils, broad lips. Lying there dead, she looked the same, except her eyes were closed and she was so still. I once had heard someone say about another dead person that it was as if the dead person were asleep. But I had seen a person asleep, and this girl did not look asleep. My parents had just bought me a View-Master. The View-Master came with pictures of the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Mt. Everest, and scenes of the Amazon River. When the View-Master worked properly, all the scenes looked as if they were alive, as if we could just step into the View-Master and sail down the Amazon River or stand at the foot of the pyramids. When the View-Master didn’t work properly, it was as if we were looking at an ordinary, colorful picture. When I looked at this girl, it was as if the View-Master wasn’t working properly. I stared at her a long time—long enough so that I caused the line of people waiting to stop by the coffin to grow long and on the verge of impatience. Of course, as I stared I kept my fingers curled up tight against my palms, because I didn’t want to make a mistake and point and then have them rot and drop off right there. I then went and sat among the mourners. Her family smiled at me, thinking, I am sure, that I was a school friend, even though I wore the uniform of another school. We sang a hymn—“All Things Bright and Beautiful”—and her mother said it was the first hymn the humpbacked girl had learned to sing by heart.