Mr. Potter (9 page)
Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
A
nd my own mother Annie Victoria Richardson left her home in Mahaut, Dominica, and she passed through the Windward Passage, which was a corridor of violent winds trapped in a swirling torrent of motion, moving, moving toward a cluster of islands, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla, and she left Dominica on a boat with improperly mended sails and landed on the island of Antigua, the island where her own father, Alfred John Richardson, was born, and she left her home after a quarrel with her father over the way she should pursue her unfolding future, and after that quarrel, he made her dead in the realm of his fatherly love, he disinherited her. And why is it that joy, encountered unexpectedly and fully, will have at its core a replication of your own sorrow, will in the very near distance cause
you to feel disemboweled, lost, as if your own self was somewhere else, while at the same time you can see yourself in front of you, you are far away and you are right there nearby and how lost, how lost you are and you go searching for that joy, that original joy, but your joy is your sorrow, your joy has not turned to sorrow, your joy was always sorrow, a form of sorrow, just sorrow.
nd my own mother Annie Victoria Richardson left her home in Mahaut, Dominica, and she passed through the Windward Passage, which was a corridor of violent winds trapped in a swirling torrent of motion, moving, moving toward a cluster of islands, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla, and she left Dominica on a boat with improperly mended sails and landed on the island of Antigua, the island where her own father, Alfred John Richardson, was born, and she left her home after a quarrel with her father over the way she should pursue her unfolding future, and after that quarrel, he made her dead in the realm of his fatherly love, he disinherited her. And why is it that joy, encountered unexpectedly and fully, will have at its core a replication of your own sorrow, will in the very near distance cause
you to feel disemboweled, lost, as if your own self was somewhere else, while at the same time you can see yourself in front of you, you are far away and you are right there nearby and how lost, how lost you are and you go searching for that joy, that original joy, but your joy is your sorrow, your joy has not turned to sorrow, your joy was always sorrow, a form of sorrow, just sorrow.
And my mother Annie Victoria Richardson, her hair then, as a young woman of sixteen and then seventeen and then eighteen and then still a young woman at twenty-five when she met Mr. Potter, her hair then was long and black and waved down her back past her shoulders, and sometimes she wore her hair in two plaits pinned up around the crown of her head and sometimes she wore her hair captured in a black hairnet and the hairnet and the hair were the identical shade of black and her hair then seemed as if she had pinned the fat black tail of an unheard-of mammal at the nape of her neck. How beautiful she was then, I have been told so by her and by other people who knew her then, but not by Mr. Potter, for he never spoke to me of her, he never spoke to me of anything, he never spoke to me at all. And then when she was sixteen, and then seventeen, and then eighteen and up to just before she met Mr. Potter when she was twenty-five, she began living in the city of St.
John's in that place called Grays Farm and she lived in a house, a room really, with four windows and two doors and she lived all alone then, not with one child, girl or boy. She lived in this house all alone and got up every day for five days of the week and went off to work, sometimes keeping orderly the houses, proper houses, of people who needed and could afford such a thing, sometimes washing their clothes, sometimes bathing and feeding their children, but when she had been a girl and living under the harsh care of her father, he had sent her to school, he had insisted that she go to school, that she know how to read and write, and so eventually she grew tired of the houses that needed to be kept orderly and the people who lived in them and of the clothes they wore and their children and whether their children were hungry or dirty. She went to work in the surgery of a friend of her father's, a doctor, and then this doctor decided to go and live in St. Kitts, for all his wife's family were there, and my mother then went to work for Dr. Weizenger, scrubbing and sterilizing with boiling water the steel instruments he used for extracting teeth, scrubbing and sterilizing the needles and syringes he used for administering medicines of one kind or the other, making sure that the fingernails of the patients he would see were not dirty and that their hair was freshly combed and that they had just taken a bath and had just
brushed their teeth, for all these things, if they were not just so, would make the doctor, Weizenger, irritable and sometimes they might make him so irritable that he would send the patient away, send the patient away without seeing him or her at all. And Dr. Weizenger practiced medicine, applying the little knowledge he had about the diseases of the mouth to dentistry, applying the little knowledge he had regarding childhood diseases to the illnesses that plagued children, applying the little knowledge he had of the workings of the mature human body to adult men and women who came to him with pain in their backs and heads and feet and all the other places where pain could be lodged in the human body; and he spoke English perfectly, but as if this language was lodged in the deepest recesses of his brain and was in some way hard to get to; he spoke English as if he was in pain, as if it was something he was being forced to do, and this was so, for Dr. Weizenger came from far away, from a place where the English language existed in another sphere, and in that place where he was from, he had taken up speaking English as a hobby, something to do in his spare time, something full of pleasure in the middle of the sad landscape into which he was born. And my mother Annie, who was not my mother yet and had not met Mr. Potter yet, but was my mother all the same, I can see that now, regarded Dr. Weizenger with much disdain, for he was ignorant and could not
speak properly the language in which he found himself alive; she spoke English and French and a language that combined the two and she felt herself free and without boundaries and without obligations, but she was not without boundaries or obligations, she already was my mother and Mr. Potter was my father.
John's in that place called Grays Farm and she lived in a house, a room really, with four windows and two doors and she lived all alone then, not with one child, girl or boy. She lived in this house all alone and got up every day for five days of the week and went off to work, sometimes keeping orderly the houses, proper houses, of people who needed and could afford such a thing, sometimes washing their clothes, sometimes bathing and feeding their children, but when she had been a girl and living under the harsh care of her father, he had sent her to school, he had insisted that she go to school, that she know how to read and write, and so eventually she grew tired of the houses that needed to be kept orderly and the people who lived in them and of the clothes they wore and their children and whether their children were hungry or dirty. She went to work in the surgery of a friend of her father's, a doctor, and then this doctor decided to go and live in St. Kitts, for all his wife's family were there, and my mother then went to work for Dr. Weizenger, scrubbing and sterilizing with boiling water the steel instruments he used for extracting teeth, scrubbing and sterilizing the needles and syringes he used for administering medicines of one kind or the other, making sure that the fingernails of the patients he would see were not dirty and that their hair was freshly combed and that they had just taken a bath and had just
brushed their teeth, for all these things, if they were not just so, would make the doctor, Weizenger, irritable and sometimes they might make him so irritable that he would send the patient away, send the patient away without seeing him or her at all. And Dr. Weizenger practiced medicine, applying the little knowledge he had about the diseases of the mouth to dentistry, applying the little knowledge he had regarding childhood diseases to the illnesses that plagued children, applying the little knowledge he had of the workings of the mature human body to adult men and women who came to him with pain in their backs and heads and feet and all the other places where pain could be lodged in the human body; and he spoke English perfectly, but as if this language was lodged in the deepest recesses of his brain and was in some way hard to get to; he spoke English as if he was in pain, as if it was something he was being forced to do, and this was so, for Dr. Weizenger came from far away, from a place where the English language existed in another sphere, and in that place where he was from, he had taken up speaking English as a hobby, something to do in his spare time, something full of pleasure in the middle of the sad landscape into which he was born. And my mother Annie, who was not my mother yet and had not met Mr. Potter yet, but was my mother all the same, I can see that now, regarded Dr. Weizenger with much disdain, for he was ignorant and could not
speak properly the language in which he found himself alive; she spoke English and French and a language that combined the two and she felt herself free and without boundaries and without obligations, but she was not without boundaries or obligations, she already was my mother and Mr. Potter was my father.
And my mother then was flames in her own fire, not waves in her own sea, she would be that later, after I was born and had become a grown woman, she would become that to me, an ocean with its unpredictable waves and undertow; she was then flames in her own fire and she was very beautiful and her beauty was mentioned sometimes with admiration and affection by others, sometimes with disapproval and scorn by some others, and it was as if her beauty was a blessing in the world sometimes, and as if her beauty was a sign of evil in the world sometimes. And when she was young my mother thought herself beautiful and loved being so and would invite other people into the atmosphere of her beauty and would, with her beauty, create little events that would make people who had witnessed her pause (she walked down the length of Scot's Row with her hair carelessly piled up on her head as if she had just stepped out of the darkness of her house without meaning for anyone to see her), and these people liked her and these people did not like her and there were many of them, one hundred or so. And in the middle of this, something that might
become me appeared in her womb, clotting and swelling up, tissue which remained only tissue, for she would not allow it to become otherwise, she would not allow it to become me or anyone else, it would remain mere tissue in her womb. Four times this thickening of fluids gathered in her womb, four times before she was thirty years of age she managed to throw it out, and these fluids gathered up in her womb, clotting and then swelling and then were expelled before they became someone or something. And when my mother tried to force her menstruation unnaturally for the fifth time, she failed and that failure was because of me, I could not be expelled from my mother's womb at her own will. All this my mother told me when I was forty-one years of age and had by then become the mother of two children, the only two children my womb now will ever bear. And my mother was Annie Victoria Richardson, not my mother at all, not my mother yet, and she was my mother even so, for I was suspended within her, even though the world, which included her and Mr. Potter, did not know of me and did not know of the other thickenings and would never care for the thickened substance in her womb and eventually would never really care for me. But here I am and I can read and I can write my own name and much more than that, I now can tell myself of Mr. Potter in the written word and I now can tell Mr. Potter of his life with my
mother Annie Victoria Richardson and Mr. Potter is now dead and so too is Annie, who came from Dominica to Antigua when she was sixteen years of age, against her father's wishes.
become me appeared in her womb, clotting and swelling up, tissue which remained only tissue, for she would not allow it to become otherwise, she would not allow it to become me or anyone else, it would remain mere tissue in her womb. Four times this thickening of fluids gathered in her womb, four times before she was thirty years of age she managed to throw it out, and these fluids gathered up in her womb, clotting and then swelling and then were expelled before they became someone or something. And when my mother tried to force her menstruation unnaturally for the fifth time, she failed and that failure was because of me, I could not be expelled from my mother's womb at her own will. All this my mother told me when I was forty-one years of age and had by then become the mother of two children, the only two children my womb now will ever bear. And my mother was Annie Victoria Richardson, not my mother at all, not my mother yet, and she was my mother even so, for I was suspended within her, even though the world, which included her and Mr. Potter, did not know of me and did not know of the other thickenings and would never care for the thickened substance in her womb and eventually would never really care for me. But here I am and I can read and I can write my own name and much more than that, I now can tell myself of Mr. Potter in the written word and I now can tell Mr. Potter of his life with my
mother Annie Victoria Richardson and Mr. Potter is now dead and so too is Annie, who came from Dominica to Antigua when she was sixteen years of age, against her father's wishes.
Temper it, temper it, I now say to myself as I sit here in the middle of the night, the dark blue and black of the night, blackest black of the night, the night so still, as if it had never known disruption, as if the most hideous and disturbing deeds had never occurred in the deep stillness of night: birth and death, being born and becoming dead, in the deep stillness that is the night, the blackest of black that is the night. And in my mind, I turn over Mr. Potter and Annie Victoria Richardson, and they are in my memory, though that does seem an impossibility, that I could have known them before I was born of the two of them, and yet it is so: I have in my mind a memory of them from before the time they became my mother and my father, and I can see them breathing at the time they were being born and struggling into living and being, and I can see them passing through their lives as children and then into being the two people who came together and made me, and through all of this I see them in substantial particularity and I see them as specters, possibilities of the real, possibilities of the real as it pertains to me. And my name when I was born then was Elaine Cynthia, and Annie Richardson was my mother, and that is my substantial
particularity and Mr. Potter is my specter. Looking, looking, searching, searching, and I find that I am extraordinary and then I am not so at all, I find that I am the opposite of extraordinary, and then I find that I am spectacular and then I am not so at all, spectacular, that is; and the wind blows, and the sun shines, and the surface of the earth rises up and falls down in violent activity, and the inhabitants of the surface of the earth are often defeated by the shifting of the earth's varying and constantly changing contours, and my mother Annie Victoria Richardson and my father Roderick Potter were, just then, at the time before I would be born, and even at the time I was born, were without interest in the world, were without interest in the world and the forces that cause it to spin from one end to the other. And I, halfway to being myself, lay between my mother Annie Victoria Richardson and Roderick Nathaniel Potter, who really was my father. And the weight that I was then, and the volume of sound that I could make then, and the amount of space that I occupied then, and the extent to which I was conscious then, and the sorrow I knew then, and the absence of permanent joy or spontaneous joy or frequent joyâall of this has remained unchanged from then to now, as I write this; the contents and the volume and the weight of my joy and sorrow were the same then as they are now. And I believe now that all aspiration is futile and I knew then that to violently
demand and make a change was essential and I see now that all change is its same self and all different selves are the same, and my father, Mr. Potter, could not read or write, and my mother, Annie Victoria Richardson, could read and write but did not think that the one had anything to do with the other, and so I can say to myself and I can say to anyone that this is that and that is a series of things, all of them wrong and all of them never to be resolved satisfactorily, and all wrongs inspire justice and then again all wrongs will eventually succumb to defeat. “You can com' go Mooma, you can com' go Poopa,” Mr. Potter sang to himself as he drove Mr. Shoul's car, as he walked to his job as a driver of a taxi that belonged to Mr. Shoul, as he walked from the house which was only one room with four windows and two doors and in this house lived one woman or another and they had borne him girl children. Or Mr. Potter sang, “Pennywheeler! Uhm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm Pennywheeler! Uhm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm Pennywheeler,” repeating the words to this tune over and over, as he tossed a farthing into the air and always caught it with the king's profile facing up, or as he stood before a looking glass and with his hand tried to make his rigidly curled hair stay close to his scalp, or as he buckled his belt, or as he listened to the endless stream of memories that Mr. Shoul had of the
Lebanon and going back and forth to Syria and parts of the world nearby. And “Why ya, why ya, why ya lef you big fat pomm-pomm outside, lef you pomm-pomm outside, lef you pomm-pomm outside, why ya lef you big fat pomm-pomm outside,” sang Mr. Potter, to himself and only to himself, as he went to see a woman who had not yet become the mother of one of his many girl children, or as he went to see the mother of one of his girl children but the child was somewhere else, as if she had not yet been born and if she was born, as if it had never been so. And all the songs that he sang to himself, and all the songs as they went through his head in silence, meant nothing, they were only something random that occupied his mind and then again all of them meant something, but what? Mr. Potter did not care to know an answer.
particularity and Mr. Potter is my specter. Looking, looking, searching, searching, and I find that I am extraordinary and then I am not so at all, I find that I am the opposite of extraordinary, and then I find that I am spectacular and then I am not so at all, spectacular, that is; and the wind blows, and the sun shines, and the surface of the earth rises up and falls down in violent activity, and the inhabitants of the surface of the earth are often defeated by the shifting of the earth's varying and constantly changing contours, and my mother Annie Victoria Richardson and my father Roderick Potter were, just then, at the time before I would be born, and even at the time I was born, were without interest in the world, were without interest in the world and the forces that cause it to spin from one end to the other. And I, halfway to being myself, lay between my mother Annie Victoria Richardson and Roderick Nathaniel Potter, who really was my father. And the weight that I was then, and the volume of sound that I could make then, and the amount of space that I occupied then, and the extent to which I was conscious then, and the sorrow I knew then, and the absence of permanent joy or spontaneous joy or frequent joyâall of this has remained unchanged from then to now, as I write this; the contents and the volume and the weight of my joy and sorrow were the same then as they are now. And I believe now that all aspiration is futile and I knew then that to violently
demand and make a change was essential and I see now that all change is its same self and all different selves are the same, and my father, Mr. Potter, could not read or write, and my mother, Annie Victoria Richardson, could read and write but did not think that the one had anything to do with the other, and so I can say to myself and I can say to anyone that this is that and that is a series of things, all of them wrong and all of them never to be resolved satisfactorily, and all wrongs inspire justice and then again all wrongs will eventually succumb to defeat. “You can com' go Mooma, you can com' go Poopa,” Mr. Potter sang to himself as he drove Mr. Shoul's car, as he walked to his job as a driver of a taxi that belonged to Mr. Shoul, as he walked from the house which was only one room with four windows and two doors and in this house lived one woman or another and they had borne him girl children. Or Mr. Potter sang, “Pennywheeler! Uhm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm Pennywheeler! Uhm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm Pennywheeler,” repeating the words to this tune over and over, as he tossed a farthing into the air and always caught it with the king's profile facing up, or as he stood before a looking glass and with his hand tried to make his rigidly curled hair stay close to his scalp, or as he buckled his belt, or as he listened to the endless stream of memories that Mr. Shoul had of the
Lebanon and going back and forth to Syria and parts of the world nearby. And “Why ya, why ya, why ya lef you big fat pomm-pomm outside, lef you pomm-pomm outside, lef you pomm-pomm outside, why ya lef you big fat pomm-pomm outside,” sang Mr. Potter, to himself and only to himself, as he went to see a woman who had not yet become the mother of one of his many girl children, or as he went to see the mother of one of his girl children but the child was somewhere else, as if she had not yet been born and if she was born, as if it had never been so. And all the songs that he sang to himself, and all the songs as they went through his head in silence, meant nothing, they were only something random that occupied his mind and then again all of them meant something, but what? Mr. Potter did not care to know an answer.
And on all the days of Mr. Potter's life the sun shone, even when it rained the sun shone, for the sun was a constant, if it went away for three hundred and sixty-five days, it would remain constant, for it was all that made up this landscape. And it was all Mr. Potter would ever know ever, it was all Mr. Potter would ever know, and the sun, a planetary body, indifferent to the significance or insignificance of individuals and Mr. Potter's ups and downs, shone down in its usual way, with a heat so ferocious that it could bear up or tear down a person, and Mr. Potter walked through his days that were sunlight and his nights that were dark
with waiting for the sun, and the gentleness that is sometimes part of life would embrace Mr. Potter but he did not know that; and the harsh brutality that was life reigned over Mr. Potter, reigned not like an earthly monarch who would come and go, but like something celestial.
with waiting for the sun, and the gentleness that is sometimes part of life would embrace Mr. Potter but he did not know that; and the harsh brutality that was life reigned over Mr. Potter, reigned not like an earthly monarch who would come and go, but like something celestial.
And Mr. Potter experienced the depths of feeling that made up life and the smooth surfaces of pleasant exchanges that made up life in the same way, “Eh, eh, me ah tell you mahn,” and he straightened his cap and ran one of his fingers across the collar of his shirt and smoothed down the front of his pants and took some saliva from his mouth and smeared it across his shoes and his cheeks and the world was so nice and how everything all went his way, for he, even he, had a way and my mother interrupted it. This way, this world, of Mr. Potter's, with its smooth turns and steady revolving of the mothers of his girl children and their lives, mothers and girl children, all swathed up in a cocoon that would never burst open and metamorphose into anything other than what it already was, all this way of certainties is what my mother interrupted. And my mother, herself already a series of beautifully poisonous eruptions, a boiling cauldron of strange fluids, a whirlwind of sex and passion and female beauty and deception and pain and female humiliation and narcissism and vulnerability, met Mr. Potter as he stood in the vicinity of Mr. Shoul and Mr. Shoul's cars and
the street, which was named after a king of England or a saint from somewhere, George or Mary, and I, writing all this now, came into being just at that moment and I, who am writing all this now, came into being a very long time before that.
the street, which was named after a king of England or a saint from somewhere, George or Mary, and I, writing all this now, came into being just at that moment and I, who am writing all this now, came into being a very long time before that.
Other books
The Last Storyteller by Frank Delaney
Sin Límites by Alan Glynn
Neighborhood Watch: The Adventures of Dick Ryder by Candy Nytes
Stage Fright by Pender Mackie
My Soul to Keep by Sharie Kohler
Inferno by Adriana Noir
Cimarron, Denver Cereal Volume 4 by Claudia Hall Christian
Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne
Being Dead by Vivian Vande Velde
Screwdrivered (Cocktail #3) by Alice Clayton