Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid

disc jockey say that my mother had requested that “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” by Neil Sedaka, be played in honor of me. I didn’t know what to make of it, hearing my name on the radio, but what was worse was that my mother would think that just because I liked rock and roll I liked Neil Sedaka. Then, when I was in my early twenties, I had a boyfriend who would take me for long drives in the country, and while we were driving he would play over and over, on the tape-deck machine, the song “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harum. Afterward, we would go to bars that had electric-blue-lighted jukeboxes. I have known, in fact, many boys who like to drive around and listen to tapes or to the radio and drink beer. I have never known any girls who did this. Not even one.
    My friend from the Midwest has told me about some of his driving adventures. He says that he once drove around the state of Wyoming with a friend for five days with only eight dollars between them, plus his friend’s father’s oil-company credit card. He says that the state of Wyoming is the best for driving. He says that he knows every driving inch of the old logging roads in the state of Michigan. He says that driving around in the summer in an air-conditioned Buick in the flatness
that is Nebraska is the only boring thing he has found to be a complete pleasure. He says that stretches of Ohio were made for driving around with nothing in mind. It is the memory of these things that makes him hate a future of economy cars and gasoline shortages. He curses the modern age and people with too many children. In the meantime, he continues to drive around for no reason at all in his big car that uses up a lot of gasoline. Just the other night, a nice summer evening, we went for a drive up around the Woodstock area. Suddenly, on the car radio we heard “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” by Marvin Gaye. My friend turned to me and he smiled, because he knows that I know that this is one of his super-favorite driving songs. At the end of the song, he turned around and we came home.
    â€” July 18, 1977

Notes and Comment
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    A young woman we know writes:
    I grew up on an island in the West Indies which has an area of a hundred and eight square miles. On the island were many sugarcane fields and a sugar-making factory and a factory where both white and dark rum were made. There were cotton fields, but there were not as many cotton fields as there were sugarcane fields. There were arrowroot fields and tobacco fields, too, but there were not as many arrowroot fields and tobacco fields as there were cotton fields. Some of the fifty-four thousand people who lived on the island grew bananas and mangoes and eddoes and dasheen and christophine and sweet potatoes and white potatoes and plums and guavas and grapes and papaws and limes and lemons and oranges and grapefruits, and every Saturday they would bring them to the market, which was on Market Street, and they would sell the things they had grown. This was the only way many of them could make a living, and, though it
sounds like farming, they weren’t farmers in the way a Midwestern wheatgrower is a farmer, and they didn’t think of the plots of land on which they grew these things as The Farm. Instead, the plots of land were called The Ground. They might say, “Today, me a go up ground.” The Ground was often many miles away from where they lived, and they got there not by taking a truck or some other kind of automotive transportation but by riding a donkey or by walking. A small number—a very small number—of the fifty-four thousand people worked in banks or in offices. The rest of them—the ones who didn’t grow the things that were sold in the market on Saturdays or work in the factories or the fields, the banks or the offices—were carpenters or masons or servants in the new hotels for tourists which were appearing suddenly all over