The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

body thousands of years before. They became inseparable then, my brother and the worm that emerged from his body just as he died. My father did not stop living then, nor did he lose the desire to continue living, he only came to believe that there was a secret purpose to all his suffering and he longed for it to be revealed to him.
    My brother died and the seas were still, but not in the usual way; the wind did not blow, the leaves of the trees were still, the earth did not shake, the rivers did not swell, the sky was blue in that eternally deceptive way—innocent, as if it could never change; everything was itself, just the way it would be no matter what happened, but the world had changed for my father, and I believe now that he felt small again, insignificant, helpless against life itself taking a course indifferent to his own wishes. A sheen of calm came over him then, the sheen of calm that is seen in a saint, but I am sure no real saint ever looks like that; it is something seen only in paintings.
    My brother was buried in the churchyard of the Methodist church in Roseau. His mother was silent in her grief; she had longed for something also. It centered around her son, his importance; his strength and accomplishments would be a source of pride to her. He looked like her; his beauty was her beauty also. So closely did she see herself tied up with him that when he died, she felt she had died, too; she could not bring herself to actually die; she could be among the living only in body, her spirit now was with her dead son. I felt sorry for her then but not enough to forgive and forget that she had once tried to make me dead also, and most certainly always wished me dead and would make me dead if she could ever bring herself alive enough to accomplish this. Hymns were sung, prayers were offered; they were prayers asking for forgiveness and they were prayers acknowledging an acceptance of events that were ultimately disappointing. But such is the lot of the defeated: in the end what is was meant to be, in the end the other outcome, the outcome of triumph, would have been a tragedy, a consequence far more devastating than the defeat being experienced now. Such is the consolation of the defeated.
    My father and his wife and his daughter, the girl who was not me, his wife who was her mother, formed a triangle of pain, of blame, of suspicion, of revenge. To my father none of it had a personal, intimate nature. He did not quarrel with his wife. She, too, was now a source of disappointment. I was only a reminder of disappointment, on the one hand; on the other, I was of the flesh of someone he believed he had loved. My father could not love, but he believed he could, and that must be enough, because perhaps half the world feels that way. He believed he loved me, but I could tell him how untrue that was, I could list for him the number of times he had placed me squarely within the jaws of death; I could list for him the number of times he had failed to be a father to me, his motherless child, while on his way to becoming a man of this world. He loved, he loved; he loved himself. It is perhaps the way of all men. Having lost that small vessel through which he had hoped to perpetuate himself, he then became his own legacy. He was his own future. When he died the world would cease to exist.
    To his daughter, the one who was not me, my presence was such an irritant that even when I was not standing in front of her she arranged her face in the disfiguring frown she had created solely for me. She insisted that I was not my father’s child, and that even if I was his child, I was illegitimate. The look of awe and bewilderment that alternately crossed her face when she realized that I welcomed this characterization made me pity her. I wished somehow she would draw inspiration from me. Why am I not valued? is the question she wanted to ask the world, the world as constituted by her mother and her father; but she could not ask such a