The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

underneath. His mother believed in obeah. His father held the beliefs of the people who had subjugated him. He was not dead; he was not alive. That he was not one or the other was not his fault: to be brought into the world is not ever anyone’s responsibility, the decision is never your own. He in particular was someone else’s idea. He was an idea of his own mother to make his father forget the woman he had loved before. To make someone forget another person is impossible. Someone can forget an event, someone can forget an item, but no one can ever forget someone else.
    And so my father’s son lay, his body covered with small sores, his entire being not dead, not alive. It was said that he had yaws; it was said that he was possessed by an evil spirit that caused his body to sprout sores. His father believed one remedy would cure him, his mother believed in another; it was their beliefs that were at odds with each other, not the cures themselves. My father prayed to make him well, but his prayers were like an incitement to the disease: small lesions grew larger, the flesh on his left shin slowly began to vanish as if devoured by an invisible being, revealing the bone, and then that also began to vanish. His mother called in a man who dealt in obeah and a woman who dealt in obeah who were native to Dominica, and then she sent for a woman, a native of Guadeloupe; it was said that someone crossing seawater with a cure would have more success. The disease was indifferent to every principle; no science, no god of any kind could alter its course, and after he died, his mother and father came to believe that his death was inevitable from the beginning.
    He died. His name was Alfred; he was named after his father. His father, my father, was named after Alfred the Great, the English king, a personage my father should have despised, for he came to know this Alfred not through the language of the poet, which would have been the language of compassion, but through the language of the conqueror. My father was not responsible for his own name, but he was responsible for the name of his son. His son’s name was Alfred. My father perhaps imagined a dynasty. It was laughable only to someone excluded from its substance, someone like me, someone female; anyone else would understand entirely. He had imagined himself as continuing to live on through the existence of someone else. My father had never suffered the indignity of coming upon his own reflection in some shiny surface by accident and finding it so compelling that he came to believe that his own reflection was his soul also. He thought his son looked like him, and perhaps he did, though I would never have thought so; he thought his son was just like him, and perhaps he really was, but this son of his did not live long enough for me to draw such a conclusion.
    My brother died. In death he became my brother. When he was alive, I did not know him at all. His hair was black like his mother’s. His eyes were brown like hers also. He was kind, he was gentle, but it was the kindness and gentleness of the weak, not out of largesse, not out of instinct. He had a great beauty, but he did not make you want to touch him, not because he repelled you, but because he made you afraid that just to touch him would be to cause him harm, as if he were something vegetable and out of a fable. My father loved him: he was good; he would inherit much; the foul work of acquiring would be unknown to him. How he would keep his inheritance is a thought that would occur and be an irritation only to someone like myself, the disenchanted, and, before that, the disinherited. His father loved him; their names were the same: Alfred. This boy died. Before he died, from his body came a river of pus. Just as he died, a large brown worm crawled out of his left leg; it lay there, above the ankle, as if waiting to be found by a wanderer one morning. It soon dried up and then looked as if all life had left its