Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

such a thing), and Mr. Shoul then entered into his world of the transient, the immigrant, the person without a real home, and he was on ships and the ships were tossed about on the ocean and the seas and when inside the ships he was tossed about, his stomach heaving through his windpipe and up through his nostrils before settling down again the way the ship settled on the ocean and the sea, and then he settled on land and this was in Surinam. But Surinam was not restful; they spoke Dutch there and Dutch seemed so harsh to Mr. Shoul because it was so precise; people always mean what they say, so thought Mr. Shoul, and he
didn’t like Dutch at all or people who spoke that language, and so he moved on to British Guiana and he didn’t like that either, and then he moved over to Trinidad but there were so many people like himself in Trinidad, people from the Lebanon or Damascus, Syria, and they were all selling essential things, like pots and pans and basins and cups made of tin painted with white enamel, and so he moved on, finally coming to Antigua, and there he rested and rested and rested again. He found Mr. Potter and all who looked like Mr. Potter and they were so satisfying, these people who were Mr. Potter and looked like Mr. Potter, that they erased for him the longing for large bolts of silk that could only be compared to petals of roses and the longing to mingle with bangles and bracelets and earrings made of gold or silver and bands of anything studded with precious stones. To win, to capture and so make still, Mr. Potter was everything, everything in the world, everything the world could contain.
    â€œPotter, me ah tell you mahn,” said Mr. Shoul, and Mr. Shoul made the sign of the cross over himself, and Mr. Potter did not like to see that, a man making a crossroads of himself, a man making a meeting place for the devil on his own body, making himself a meeting place for his soul to become a bargain, and without a serious look on his face, so thought Mr. Potter when he saw Mr. Shoul making the sign of the cross upon himself, as if he was dividing himself into a
crossroads, as if he was offering himself up for a sacrifice and to be made a bargain of at that. And Mr. Potter looked at the ground beneath his feet, the ground in front of him, it was what he always did when the world (and the world was everything he could put his hands on and the world was everything from which he could make nothing) was new and so therefore incomprehensible, or when he understood the world perfectly and yet that understanding led to nothing that he could call happiness, a happiness beyond words; and he looked at the ground beneath his feet and the ground that was in front of him and the ground itself was covered with a thin layer of asphalt that came from a lake containing pitch, not water, in Trinidad and on the ground the shadow of Mr. Shoul was very prominent, so prominent it took up all of Mr. Potter’s view. And just then Mr. Potter was thinking to himself, and Mr. Shoul was also thinking to himself, but here is what Mr. Shoul was thinking to himself (for Mr. Potter will always be thinking to himself forever and ever; this is his story):
    There was the shadow of Mr. Shoul, this Mr. Shoul who was a boy in the Lebanon whose mother had died on the road heading toward Damascus or the road away from that city, and whose father had died on the threshold of a doorway; there was his shadow lying slanted and flat on the asphalt in full view of Mr. Potter. And Mr. Shoul said, “Potter,” and he made the o
in Mr. Potter’s name sound as if the letters a and h had been joined together and he made the e and the r in Mr. Potter’s name sound like the letters a and h joined together, and when Mr. Potter first heard his name flying out of Mr. Shoul’s mouth he did not recognize himself as he knew himself through his own name, Potter, Mr. Potter, for out of Mr. Shoul’s mouth came the word “Patah,”