Read Online Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid - Free Book Online

existence exhausted his mother, how he lived so instinctively and complacently, as if he were an insect and this was one of his many stages of metamorphosis, how in that one week, the first after he emerged from his mother’s womb, the reality of his small being was, with certainty, essential to the intricate vastness of all that had been and all that is and all that would be. But
then his mother Elfrida Robinson, in whose womb he had spent nine months, a few days more or less, grew tired of him, lying next to her, feeding from her, and then sleeping next to her, and how she longed to be rid of him. And she got out of her bed and placed him on the floor where she made for him a bed from clean rags, very, very clean rags, a nestlike bed, and she left him alone and went outside and went about in the hot, rainless days, but she could hear him, hear Mr. Potter, crying, sometimes from hunger, sometimes from loneliness, and sometimes her heart broke in two when she heard his cries and sometimes her heart hardened, in imitation of some impregnable mineral. And her breasts became parched, barren of her milky fluids (she had willed them so), and for nourishment she brought Mr. Potter, her only son, the only child she would ever have, some thin arrowroot porridge, or some thin cornmeal porridge, or a porridge made from coarse brown seaweed. And Mr. Potter’s mother Elfrida Robinson grew tired of him, of the demands he made on her: he needed food, he needed clothes, for he was growing, he needed love but that was out of the order of things, neither of them knew that he needed love, for what could that be, love, between two people such as they were, a mother and a son and in a situation like that: essential to life but without meaning to them in particular.
    And looking at that small boy, for he had become a
boy, a small boy, he crawled on the floor of that small room (the house), he sat up, he walked outside of the room (the house), and then he talked, at first in incomplete sentences and then in complete sentences, and when he needed more clothes, she made them with her own hands, for she knew how to do that, and when he got sick and coughed through the night and the breath coming out of his lungs sounded not like breath at all but like the sound of air coming out of the blacksmith’s bellows, she sat up with him all through the night and applied a mixture of camphor and tallow on brown paper to his chest, and made a tea from the leaves of the eucalyptus tree and the leaves of many other shrubs and trees and fed it to him and made him well again. As a small child, Mr. Potter suffered the setbacks so typical to anything living, the many ups and downs, but mainly downs, for he seemed always so pale, so sickly, so often on the verge of death itself, death being as always so unpredictable, so whimsical. And when Mr. Potter was a child, a small boy of five or so, his mother grew tired of him and gave him away to a woman named Mrs. Shepherd, and then she walked into the sea, and walked into it as if in walking she would eventually come to something new, some new place that had no resemblance to what she had known, some new place which would obliterate the memory, no really the actuality, of what she had just known. The sea then just
looked as the sea was itself, an enormous body of water, the water itself so present that it overwhelmed everything that was known, everything that she, Elfrida Robinson, could know, and as she walked into it, the sea, its reality was out of her senses, but what could that be, out of her senses, for she understood herself so very well, she understood herself completely, she understood outside herself and she understood inside herself and she even understood the very boundary between herself and some something else so different, something not herself at all. But this element, so new, was not water as Elfrida Robinson could recognize it. This water was thick and blank (it was a form of darkness), black,