Jamaica Kincaid by Annie John Page A

as we imagined it, and so we had gone to the trouble of finding old furniture to make a desk for the judge and a place for the jury to sit, and we set out some stones facing the judge to represent both where the spectators might sit and the spectators themselves. When it came to the hanging, we wanted that to be real, too, so Mineu had found a piece of rope and tied it to the top bar of the gate to his yard, and then he would make a noose and put his head in it. When the noose was around his neck, he would grab the rope from above and then swing on it back and forth to show that he was hanged and already dead. All of our playing together came to an end when something bad almost happened. We were playing in the usual way when we came to the part of the noose around the neck. When he lifted himself off the ground, the noose tightened. When he let go of the rope to loosen the noose with his hands, that only made matters worse, and the noose tightened even more. His mouth opened as he tried to get breath, and then his tongue began to come out of his mouth. His body, hanging from the gate, began to swing back and forth, and as it did it banged against the gate, and it made a sound as if he were swinging on the gate—the very thing we were always being told not to do. As all this happened, I just stood there and stared. I must have known that I should go and call for help, but I was unable to move. Slam, slam went the gate, and soon his mother began to call out, “Children, leave the gate alone.” Then, hearing the gate continue to slam, she came out to us in a fury, because we were not obeying her, and she was just about to shout at us when she saw her child swinging from the gate by his neck. She screamed and rushed over to him, calling out to a neighbor, who came immediately with a cutlass and cut the rope from around Mineu’s neck. When his mother came and started to scream, only then could I scream, too, and I ran over to him with her, and we both cried over him as he fell to the ground. Much was said about my not calling for help, and everybody wondered what would have happened if his mother hadn’t been nearby. I didn’t know what to make of my own behavior, and I could not explain myself, as everybody kept asking me to do. I could see that even my mother was ashamed of the way I had behaved.
    It was this that I remembered as I saw Mineu’s face across the street, and so I walked over and said in my best, most polite young-lady voice, “Hallo, Mineu. I am so glad to see you. Don’t you remember me?” It was true that I was glad to see him. For just remembering all the things that he and I used to do reminded me of how happy I had been and how much my mother and everyone else adored me and how, when looking at me, people used to say, “What a beautiful child!”
    At first, he just looked at me. Then he said, “Oh, yes. Annie. Annie John. I remember you. I had heard you were a big girl now.” As he said this, he shook my outstretched hand. His friends stood off to one side, a little bit apart from us. They stood in that ridiculous way of boys: one leg crossing the other, hands jammed deep into pockets, eyes looking you up and down. They were whispering things to each other, and their shoulders were heaving with amusement—at me, I could only suppose. I thought that since he was someone I knew, he couldn’t really be like them, but as we stood, more or less speechless, in front of each other, I saw him glancing at them out of the corner of his eye, smiling in a knowing way and then looking back straight at me, a serious look on his face.
    Feeling ashamed, for I could tell that they were making fun of me, I said to him, “Well, goodbye then,” and I offered him my hand again.
    He and his friends walked off, their backs shaking with laughter—at me, no doubt. As I watched them, I wished that right there I could turn them into cinder blocks, so that one moment if you were walking behind them you were walking