Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid

so much in common and that is why they despise each other and that is why they show it as soon as they get a chance. Mr. Potter loved the handkerchief in Mr. Shepherd’s pocket and he loved the well-ironed pants and the poplin shirt and the beautifully polished shoes (he had been responsible for them all by himself) and these articles of clothing were all he wore himself, with not too dramatic a variation, for his entire life. And Mr. Potter was born in nineteen hundred and twenty-two and he died in nineteen hundred and ninety-two.

A nd Mr. Potter was born with a line drawn through him, for his father’s name did not appear on his certificate of birth and it was always said about him that he had a line drawn through him, and by this it was meant that he had no father, no father’s name was written in that column on his birth certificate, only a line had been drawn through it, and that line meant no one was his father; this baby, Mr. Potter, had been born to Elfrida Robinson; she was his mother; he had no father. But when walking with his mother Elfrida one day, his small hand holding on to her big dirty skirt, taking two small slow steps to her one big slow step, they passed by a man sitting under a tree surrounded by fish pots and a fishnet and his mother Elfrida hurled out words at this figure, the man sitting under a tree (it was a tamarind tree, the
tamarind tree is native to tropical Asia), and those words were not words of kindness or good wishes or love, and the words came out of his mother’s mouth as if her mouth were a weapon and the words ammunition made especially for that weapon, and the words stopped at the back of the head of the man sitting under the tree surrounded by fish pots and a fishnet, and the words must have wounded him for he turned his head, as if to see the source of the pain he felt raining down on him. And Roderick Potter (my father, but he was not that then, he was only a small boy then) saw his own father’s face, he did not see the color of the eyes, he did not see the shape of the nose, he did not see the outline of the lips: not how thick they were, not how wide they were, not the shape of the brow, not the shape of the cheeks, not the size of the ears; he saw only the face of that man, that man who was his father and who caused a line to be drawn through him. How well he could remember that face, not the eyes or the nose or the mouth or the ears or the brow or the cheeks, just the face, and he was only two years old then, or only three years old then, or four or five or six or seven years old then, or thirty years then, or fifty years then, or seventy years then—and he was seventy when he died—right before he died then he could see his father’s face. That was his father, the man sitting under the tree (it was a tamarind tree) was his father, and no one had told him, he just knew this.
And before this moment of his mother passing the man sitting under the tamarind tree he had never thought of a father and that he did not have one, and at that moment he only knew that man was his father. Looking back, looking over his shoulder then and at three and at four and at five and at seventy years old, just before he died, looking back and just over his shoulder, he could see that face and it was his own face, it was the face he saw when he looked into a mirror, his own face was the face he saw looking back at him from under the tamarind tree or in a mirror. “No use crying over spilled milk” was a saying that he always thought of when thinking of that moment when his mother Elfrida Robinson hurled harsh words at the back of his father Nathaniel Potter and Nathaniel’s face was revealed to him and not Elfrida’s face, he could not remember what her face looked like. And he did not know where he heard that or why it was said, but only those words collected together into that sentence, “No use crying over spilled milk,” came to him as soon as