Read Online My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid - Free Book Online Page A

said I remembered too much (“You mine long, you know”). By then it was too late to tell me that.
    That sun, that sun. On the last day of our visit its rays seemed as pointed and as unfriendly as an enemy’s well-aimed spear. My mother cooked a delicious lunch for her grandchildren, a stew of corned beef from a tin with tomatoes and carrots and macaroni; they ate it so eagerly, as if they were starved, as if they could be called greedy. My brother said he would like to go for a walk with me alone. I was pleased by this and I also wondered what of mine he wanted; whenever he made a special point of being with me alone, it was to ask me for something I had that he wanted; earlier he had taken me aside to ask me for the pair of shorts that I was wearing; they were a pair of khaki shorts I usually wear when I go hiking in the mountains. I gave them to him, and even though I could easily replace them, I did not like giving them to him at all. I did not want them back, I wanted not to have had to give them in the first place. We walked up a road, past a monument to commemorate a slave who had led a revolt. The monument was surrounded by a steel fence and the gate was locked; the fence made of steel and the locked gate weren’t meant to be a part of this particular commemoration to this slave’s heroism. We walked past an old lighthouse. We walked past the place where my old school, an all-girls’ school, used to stand. We walked past two ponds called Country Pond, and the origin of that name I do not know, but they have played a small, significant part in my own personal history: when I was about nine years old or so and a student at that same girls’ school, the other girls thought of me as a bookish favorite of my teachers and as someone who could not defend herself, and was stuck-up; a particularly aggressive group of them would waylay me after school as I walked home and pin me to the ground while they took turns beating me up. There was no reason for it, I was not malicious, I was not a tattletale, I was not pretty. I was just very weak-looking, thin, and too tall for how thin I was. One day my mother, wondering why I was so late from school, came looking for me, saw from a distance a group of girls huddled over something lying on the ground, got closer, realized it was me, and gave the girl she found beating me an even worse beating. The girl’s mother, on hearing about this, told my mother that she would set evil spirits on me and they would cause me to drown myself in one of these ponds. My mother did not doubt this girl’s mother for one moment and I was immediately sent to visit my grandparents and aunt in Dominica, because it is well known that spirits cannot cross water, and in any case, the obeah practiced in Dominica was far superior to the kind practiced in Antigua. This began a long and painful separation from my family that ended when it became clear that I could not adjust very well to my mother’s absence. When I returned, my second brother had already been born and the bitter, cruel mother I now know had just begun to take hold; the beautiful, intelligent person that I knew and this brother whom I was walking with was born too late to know, and when I described this person to him, this woman who read biographies of Florence Nightingale and Louis Pasteur, who knew all the symptoms of all the known tropical diseases, who knew about vitamin deficiencies and what foods could alleviate them, he thought it was something I was saying to amuse him, he thought I was making it up. I told him then, It is hard for us to leave our mother, but you are thirty years old, you are a grown man, you must leave; this one thing you should do before you die, leave her, find your own house as soon as you are well enough, find a job, support yourself, do this before you die. He said he understood what I was saying, he said that he had been thinking along the same lines. Earlier that day, my mother