In Search of Annie Drew by Dance Daryl Cumber;

Author:Dance, Daryl Cumber;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

6

THE SILENT YEARS AND THE RECONNECTION

Your mother is so sad you never answer her letters.

—Family friend to Kincaid character (Lucy)

I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.

—Kincaid character alluding to nineteen unopened letters from her mother (Lucy)

As Jamaica Kincaid struggled to become a writer and found herself hungry and broke and living in whatever cold New York apartment she could find, even sleeping on apartment floors, she wrote to her mother, who retorted, “It serves you right.” The mother went on to castigate her for always attempting more than she could achieve (MB 17). The coldness of this response and the mother’s lack of sympathy for her plight are among Jamaica’s most painful memories, a blow that she can never forget, another of the indications, according to her, that her mother is incapable of loving her children as “grown-up people—adults” (MB 17).

Kincaid resolved never to speak to her again.

For the rest of Annie Drew’s life, she and her daughter would have protracted periods when they were not speaking to each other, neither ever knowing when they would start speaking again and then when they would once more stop speaking. Of these years, Kincaid told me: “We corresponded some in that time. But it had a kind of life of its own. It would stop. It would start again.” Indeed, Annie Drew’s casual comment during her first meeting with Connie Rabinowitz in 1983 or 1984, “I’ve got to call Lainy,” clearly indicates that there was some communication. In 1977 Kincaid disclosed that she did not write to her family for two years after her mother’s “serves you right” response (NY 73). Elsewhere there are many references to a silence of nineteen or twenty years. The fact is that there were intermittent, infrequent correspondences during this period, but Mrs. Drew and Kincaid did not see each other from the time Jamaica left Antigua on June 5, 1965, until she returned to Antigua for a visit in January 1986 (MB 111).

During these years of silence, the once fearful, angry, and impoverished emigrant whom people laughed at on the street became the revered and lionized international author whom people flocked into university halls to hear read. In 1979 she married Allen Shawn, a talented musician and a college professor who suffers from agoraphobia, the son of her revered New Yorker editor William Shawn and his wife, Cecille Lyon Shawn. Like her mother, the six-foot-tall Kincaid chose a man who was much shorter than she (he is five foot two, according to Joyce Wadler [1]), acknowledging that she was used to the idea of a man being shorter: “Listen, I am my mother [exasperatedly] Ahhhh! Aaahhh!!!” It looked better for a wife to be taller than her husband, the Kincaid character, Lucy, argued [47]).

Allen Shawn and Jamaica Kincaid clearly appeared an odd couple, he a short, shy, soft-spoken, fearful, Jewish geek; she a tall, outspoken, impulsive, Black Antiguan; but by all accounts it appeared to be a good marriage—at least for twenty-plus years.

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