behind four boys and the next moment you had to be careful not to stumble over some cinder blocks. Feeling that in this whole incident Mineu had been cruel made me remember something. It was the last time that we had played together. In a game we were making up on the spot, I took off all my clothes and he led me to a spot under a tree, where I was to sit until he told me what to do next. It wasn’t long before I realized that the spot he had picked out was a red ants’ nest. Soon the angry ants were all over me, stinging me in my private parts, and as I cried and scratched, trying to get the ants off me, he fell down on the ground laughing, his feet kicking the air with happiness. His mother refused to admit that he had done something wrong, and my mother never spoke to her again.
* * *
I walked home, cutting through the churchyard of the Methodist church (my own church). Except for two lizards chasing each other across my path, I wasn’t aware of anything on the outside. Inside, however, the thimble that weighed worlds spun around and around; as it spun, it bumped up against my heart, my chest, my stomach, and whatever it touched felt as if I had been scorched there. I thought that I had better get home quickly, for I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me—not even if I cried out.
I walked into our yard, and I could see my mother standing in the kitchen, her back toward me, bent over a bowl in which she was putting some green figs, their skins removed. I walked up to her and I said, “Good afternoon, Mamie. I have just come home from school.”
My mother turned to face me. We looked at each other, and I could see the frightening black thing leave her to meet the frightening black thing that had left me. They met in the middle and embraced. What will it be now, I asked myself. To me she said, “You are late. It would please me to hear an excuse from you.” She was using that tone of voice: it was as if I were not only a stranger but a stranger that she did not wish to know.
Trying to match her tone of voice but coming nowhere near success, I said something about being kept late for extra studies. I then went on to say that my teachers believed that if I studied hard enough, by my sixteenth birthday I might be able to take final exams and so be able to leave school.
As if she knew exactly that I would come up with some such story, she said, “Perhaps if I ask again this time I will get a straight answer.” I was about to make a feeble effort at protest, but then, in a rush, she said that she had been standing inside a store that afternoon, buying some buttons for a Sunday dress for me, when, on looking up, she observed me making a spectacle of myself in front of four boys. She went on to say that, after all the years she had spent drumming into me the proper way to conduct myself when speaking to young men, it had pained her to see me behave in the manner of a slut (only she used the French-patois word for it) in the street and that just to see me had caused her to feel shame.
The word “slut” (in patois) was repeated over and over, until suddenly I felt as if I were drowning in a well but instead of the well being filled with water it was filled with the word “slut,” and it was pouring in through my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. As if to save myself, I turned to her and said, “Well, like father like son, like mother like daughter.”
At that, everything stopped. The whole earth fell silent. The two black things joined together in the middle of the room separated, hers going to her, mine coming back to me. I looked at my mother. She seemed tired and old and broken. Seeing that, I felt happy and sad at the same time. I soon decided that happy was better, and I was just about to enjoy this feeling when she said, “Until this moment, in my whole life I knew without a doubt
* * *
I walked home, cutting through the churchyard of the Methodist church (my own church). Except for two lizards chasing each other across my path, I wasn’t aware of anything on the outside. Inside, however, the thimble that weighed worlds spun around and around; as it spun, it bumped up against my heart, my chest, my stomach, and whatever it touched felt as if I had been scorched there. I thought that I had better get home quickly, for I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me—not even if I cried out.
I walked into our yard, and I could see my mother standing in the kitchen, her back toward me, bent over a bowl in which she was putting some green figs, their skins removed. I walked up to her and I said, “Good afternoon, Mamie. I have just come home from school.”
My mother turned to face me. We looked at each other, and I could see the frightening black thing leave her to meet the frightening black thing that had left me. They met in the middle and embraced. What will it be now, I asked myself. To me she said, “You are late. It would please me to hear an excuse from you.” She was using that tone of voice: it was as if I were not only a stranger but a stranger that she did not wish to know.
Trying to match her tone of voice but coming nowhere near success, I said something about being kept late for extra studies. I then went on to say that my teachers believed that if I studied hard enough, by my sixteenth birthday I might be able to take final exams and so be able to leave school.
As if she knew exactly that I would come up with some such story, she said, “Perhaps if I ask again this time I will get a straight answer.” I was about to make a feeble effort at protest, but then, in a rush, she said that she had been standing inside a store that afternoon, buying some buttons for a Sunday dress for me, when, on looking up, she observed me making a spectacle of myself in front of four boys. She went on to say that, after all the years she had spent drumming into me the proper way to conduct myself when speaking to young men, it had pained her to see me behave in the manner of a slut (only she used the French-patois word for it) in the street and that just to see me had caused her to feel shame.
The word “slut” (in patois) was repeated over and over, until suddenly I felt as if I were drowning in a well but instead of the well being filled with water it was filled with the word “slut,” and it was pouring in through my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. As if to save myself, I turned to her and said, “Well, like father like son, like mother like daughter.”
At that, everything stopped. The whole earth fell silent. The two black things joined together in the middle of the room separated, hers going to her, mine coming back to me. I looked at my mother. She seemed tired and old and broken. Seeing that, I felt happy and sad at the same time. I soon decided that happy was better, and I was just about to enjoy this feeling when she said, “Until this moment, in my whole life I knew without a doubt
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