The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel by Jamaica Kincaid

Author:Jamaica Kincaid [Kincaid, Jamaica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Coming of Age, Fiction, Antigua, Women of Color, West Indies
ISBN: 9781466828841
Google: I2d3_jRIgJUC
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1996-01-15T06:00:00+00:00

In the moments when Philip was inside me, in those moments when the pleasure of his thrusts and withdrawals waned and I was not a prisoner of the most primitive and most essential of emotions, that thing silently, secretly, shamefully called sex, my mind turned to another source of pleasure. He was a man that was Philip’s opposite. His name was Roland.

His mouth was like an island in the sea that was his face; I am sure he had ears and nose and eyes and all the rest, but I could see only his mouth, which I knew could do all the things that a mouth usually does, such as eat food, purse in approval or disapproval, smile, twist in thought; inside were his teeth and behind them was his tongue. Why did I see him that way, how did I come to see him that way? It was a mystery to me that he had been alive all along and that I had not known of his existence and I was perfectly fine—I went to sleep at night and I could wake up in the morning and greet the day with indifference if it suited me, I could comb my hair and scratch myself and I was still perfectly fine—and he was alive, sometimes living in a house next to mine, sometimes living in a house far away, and his existence was ordinary and perfect and parallel to mine, but I did not know of it, even though sometimes he was close enough to me for me to notice that he smelled of cargo he had been unloading; he was a stevedore.

His mouth really did look like an island, lying in a twig-brown sea, stretching out from east to west, widest near the center, with tiny, sharp creases, its color a shade lighter than that of the twig-brown sea in which it lay, the place where the two lips met disappearing into the pinkest of pinks, and even though I must have held his mouth in mine a thousand times, it was always new to me. He must have smiled at me, though I don’t really know, but I don’t like to think that I would love someone who hadn’t first smiled at me. It had been raining, a heavy downpour, and I took shelter under the gallery of a dry-goods store along with some other people. The rain was an inconvenience, for it was not necessary; there had already been too much of it, and it was no longer only outside, overflowing in the gutters, but inside also, roofs were leaking and then falling in. I was standing under the gallery and had sunk deep within myself, enjoying completely the despair I felt at being myself. I was wearing a dress; I had combed my hair that morning; I had washed myself that morning. I was looking at nothing in particular when I saw his mouth. He was speaking to someone else, but he was looking at me. The someone else he was speaking to was a woman.

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