The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

question, she could not begin to suspect there might be an answer. Her mother could not look at her, for what a waste she was, she was the wrong one to be alive. Her father had never really looked at her; seeing her after his son died was not so different from seeing her before he had died. Her mother now greeted her always with silence. Her father continued never speaking to her at all.
    She became my sister when shortly after she was expelled from school she found herself with child and I helped her rid herself of this condition. It was not hard to do; I had remembered everything from my own experience. She did not want anything surrounding these events to be advertised, so I hid her in my small room behind the kitchen where I had resumed living. I still cooked my own food. I made her strong potions of teas. When the child inside her still refused to come out, I put my hand up into her womb and forcibly removed it. She bled for days. Her body shrank and crumpled up with pain. She did not die. I had become such an expert at being ruler of my own life in this one limited regard that I could extend such power to any other woman who asked me for it. But my sister did not ask me for it. I never became her sister; she never took me into her confidence, she never thanked me; in fact, the powerful clasp in which she could see I held my own life only led to more suspicion and misunderstanding.
    She was expelled from her school for having a clandestine relationship with a man; it had been described just that way by the headmistress in a letter to our father: Elizabeth has been conducting a clandestine relationship with a young policeman from St. Joseph. This letter lay on a table in that room of my father’s house in which everything looked as if it had been plucked from a picture—a painting, not a photograph, so lustrous, so lifelike, yet so dead. Nothing in the world could have made me resist reading it. It said, Cher Monsieur et Chère Madame, and the rest was in English. My sister had a row with herself, for her mother did not speak to her and her father had never spoken to her. She denied everything. She made up a story that gave me my first insight into the life of childhood and what a real child might say and do. A child looks at the horizon and believes that the world is flat and that when you get to the edge you will fall off into nothingness. Such a belief is a child’s belief. It is not a scientific explanation that makes such a belief laughable; it is the lack of faith, the lack of complexity that makes it so. She believed with all her might that her explanations were transparently true: she had climbed over the wall of the convent to take a walk because the enclosed atmosphere caused her to feel homesick and she missed the openness of her dear Mahaut so; each time she escaped the walls of the convent in the middle of the night, by a strange coincidence she met the same man, a Claude Pacquet, a young man who hoped one day to be a bailiff. Such silliness was laughable only if you lived in a large, comfortable world in which your family’s position could not be questioned, in which your own position could not be questioned. Her mother did not laugh. Her father did not laugh. I did not laugh.
    When she was fully recovered from expelling the child she did not want from her body, the very first thing she did was to spit at the ground in front of me after saying words she thought would do a great injury to my feelings. But even when I was born I was older than her seventeen years of age, so her words did not come as a surprise. I had not expected gratitude, though I would have welcomed it. I had not expected friendship; that I would have regarded with suspicion. The empty space in the small yellow house that had always been her home she could not fill. She looked so much like her father, more so than her brother had: her skin was the same as his, a mixture of people—not races, people—her hair, red