Read Online The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid - Free Book Online

I sat there I touched various parts of my body, sometimes absentmindedly, sometimes with a purpose in mind. I was running the fingers of my left hand through the small thick patch of hair between my legs and thinking of my life as I had lived it so far, fifteen years of it now, and I saw that Monsieur LaBatte was standing not far off from me, looking at me. He did not move away in embarrassment and I, too, did not run away in embarrassment. We held each other’s gaze. I removed my fingers from between my legs and brought them up to my face, I wanted to smell myself. It was the end of the day, my odor was quite powerful. This scene of me placing my hand between my legs and then enjoying the smell of myself and Monsieur LaBatte watching me lasted until the usual sudden falling of the dark, and so when he came closer to me and asked me to remove my clothes, I said, quite sure of myself, knowing what it was I wanted, that it was too dark, I could not see. He took me to the room in which he counted his money, the money that was only some of the money he had. It was a dark room and so he kept a small lamp always lighted in it. I took off my clothes and he took off his clothes. He was the first man I had ever seen unclothed and he surprised me: the body of a man is not what makes him desirable, it is what his body might make you feel when it touches you that is the thrill, anticipating what his body will make you feel, and then the reality becomes better than the anticipation and the world has a wholeness to it, a wholeness with a current running through it, a current of pure pleasure. But when I first saw him, his hands hanging at his side, not yet caressing my hair, not yet inside me, not yet bringing the small risings that were my breasts toward his mouth, not yet opening my mouth wider to place his tongue even deeper in my mouth, the limp folds of the flesh on his stomach, the hardening flesh between his legs, I was surprised at how unbeautiful he was all by himself, just standing there; it was anticipation that was the thrill, it was anticipation that kept me entralled. And the force of him inside me, inevitable as it was, again came as a shock, a long sharp line of pain that then washed over me with the broadness of a wave, a long sharp line of pleasure: and to each piercing that he made inside me, I made a cry that was the same cry, a cry of sadness, for without making of it something it really was not I was not the same person I had been before. He was not a man of love, I did not need him to be. When he was through with me and I with him, he lay on top of me, breathing indifferently; his mind was on other things. On a small shelf at his back I could see he had lined up many coins, their sides turned heads up; they bore the face of a king.
    In the room where I slept, the room with the floor of dirt, I poured water into a small tin basin and washed the thin crust of blood that had dried between my legs and down the inside of my legs. This blood was not a mystery to me, I knew why it was there, I knew what had just happened to me. I wanted to see what I looked like, but I could not. I felt myself; my skin felt smooth, as if it had just been oiled and freshly polished. The place between my legs ached, my breasts ached, my lips ached, my wrists ached; when he had not wanted me to touch him, he had placed his own large hands over my wrists and kept them pinned to the floor; when my cries had distracted him, he had clamped my lips shut with his mouth. It was through all the parts of my body that ached that I relived the deep pleasure I had just experienced. When I awoke the next morning I did not feel I had slept at all; I felt as if I had only lost consciousness and I picked up where I had left off in my ache of pleasure.
    It had rained during the night, a rain that was beyond torrential, and in the morning it did not stop, in the evening after the morning it did not stop; the rain did not stop for many, many days. It fell