Read Online My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid - Free Book Online

all; and then my brother, too, came out of the water and he and my mother started to talk about how clever he was at growing things and my mother reminded him of “the fern.” Not so very long ago, my mother paid a visit to Dominica, the place where she was born and where she lived until she was sixteen years of age, to see the last of her living relatives. Her mother, a Carib Indian of Dominica, is dead; her father, part Scot, part African, of Antigua, a policeman who emigrated to Dominica, is dead; her sister is dead, her brother is dead. The people she visited were related to her mother through various people I do not know, I have never met them. She had not been back to Dominica since years before I was born in 1949, and she did not say what made her want to return at that time. She had a wonderful visit, so she said, and while there and walking about, she found a fern that was unusual, something rare; she recognized it and she picked it up and put it in her bag, bringing it back to Antigua with her, where it throve quite happily in an old, leaky, white enameled chamber pot in a shady part of the yard. One day when my brother was in the most extreme grip of his drug addiction, he wanted some cocaine but had no money to buy some. He took my mother’s fern and sold it. As she told me this, she laughed; he was sitting near her and she reached out to rub the top of his head; he truupsed and looked away, he was embarrassed; she meant to embarrass him, he and I knew this. He should not have taken her fern and sold it; I should not have been told about his selling the fern in just this way. I wanted to say to him, She doesn’t know what she is doing, but I have never been able to say this to myself, I have never been able to forgive her for any of the things she did not know she was doing when she did them to me. I was looking at his face. She does not like memory, I wanted to tell him; you have no memory, I wanted to tell him, she taught you that. Some time before I was sixteen years of age, I might have taken a series of exams that, had I passed them, would have set me on a path that would have led me to be educated at a university, but just before all of that my mother removed me from school. There was no real reason for me to be removed from school, she just did it, removed me from school. My father was sick, she said, she needed me at home to help with the small children, she said. But no one would have died had I remained in school, no one would have eaten less had I remained in school; my brother would have been dead by now had this act of my mother’s been all that remained of my life. Had my life stayed on the path where my mother had set it, the path of no university education, my brother would have been dead by now. I would not have been in a position to save his life, I would not have had access to a medicine to prolong his life, I would not have had access to money to buy the medicine that would prolong his life, however temporarily. And as we sat there, not face-to-face at all, she rubbing his head, telling humiliating stories about him, telling me some God or other would bless me, she did not remember this, she did not remember that if it had been up to her, I would not have been in a position to be blessed by any God, I might in fact be in the same position as my brother right now. When I was a child, I would hear her recount events that we both had witnessed and she would leave out small details; when I filled them in, she would look at me with wonder and pleasure and praise me for my extraordinary memory. This praise made an everlasting mark and nothing anyone could do made me lose this ability to remember, however selectively I remember. As I grew up, my mother came to hate this about me, because I would remember things that she wanted everybody to forget. I can see clearly even now the moment she turned on me with that razorlike ability to cut the ground out from beneath her children, and