The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

too, that I could cause the demise of others with the same complete calm. It was seeing my own face that comforted me. I began to worship myself. My black eyes, the shape of half-moons, were alluring to me; my nose, half flat, half not, as if painstakingly made that way, I found so beautiful that I saw in it a standard which the noses of the people I did not like failed to meet. I loved my mouth; my lips were thick and wide, and when I opened my mouth I could take in volumes, pleasure and pain, awake or asleep. It was this picture of myself—my eyes, my nose, my mouth set in the seamless, unwrinkled, unblemished skin which was my face—that I willed before me. My own face was a comfort to me, my own body was a comfort to me, and no matter how swept away I would become by anyone or anything, in the end I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my own mind.
    It was in this way that I lived, alone and yet with everything and everyone that I had been and had known, and would be and would know, apart from my present—and yet to be apart from my present was impossible. One day I saw my father. He saw me also. Our eyes did not meet. We did not speak words to each other. He was riding a donkey. He was wearing his jailer’s uniform, the same one he always wore, khaki shirt and khaki pants, so well ironed; only, on the shoulder of his shirt there was a new green-and-yellow stripe. It meant he had been elevated to new levels of authority. He was bearing a summons for someone; his presence as always was a sign of misfortune. Wherever he was, someone was bound to have less than they’d had before my father made an appearance.
    He looked so much as if he were born that way: erect; back stiff and straight, lips held tightly together, eyes clear as if they had never been clouded with tears, footsteps never faltering; even the beasts he rode never stumbled. He did not look as if he had ever been a baby and caused anyone to worry that he would die in the middle of the night of a fever, a cough, the breath suddenly leaving his body and never returning. To grow powerful became him, and as he grew more powerful, he did not grow fat and slovenly; he grew sleek, finely honed. You had to look into his eyes to see what he was made of, something deeply satisfying to him; and he would not tell you what that was, you had to look into his eyes. His eyes were the first thing everyone wanted to see about him; and people who saw him for the first time, who did not know him at all, looked for his eyes without thinking that they wanted to see them.
    He was making a visit to the site at which I worked. He came to where I was sitting, taking a short break from my labor, and left a bundle at my side. I did not open it immediately, I took it to my house and opened it that night. His gift to me was one Ugli fruit and three grapefruit. I remembered then that once, when I was a child, he had taken me to ground with him, wanting to show me the new land he had just acquired, which conveniently adjoined his old property. Without knowing why, I held my young self away from my inheritance, for that was what was being shown to me. On the new land he had planted many young grapefruit trees, and showing it all to me with a wide sweep of his hand—a gesture more appropriate to a man richer than he was, a gesture of all-encompassing ownership—he told me that the grapefruit was natural to the West Indies, that sometime in the seventeenth century it had mutated from the Ugli fruit on the island of Jamaica. He said this in a way that made me think he wanted the grapefruit and himself to be One. I did not know what was on his mind at the time he told me this.
    After I had been living in this way for a very long time, not a man, not a woman, not anything, not gathering, only living through my past, sifting it, trying to forget some things and never succeeding, trying to keep the memory of others more strongly alive and never succeeding, I received a