And: a curse fell on Nathaniel Potter and this curse took the form of small boils appearing on his arms and then on his legs and then on the rest of his body and then at last covering his face. And the small boils festered and leaked a pus that had a smell like nothing that had ever lived before and all his bodily fluids were turned into the pus that leaked out of him and he no longer cursed at whatever it was that he thought had made him and the world in which he had lived, and he even banished from his mind any thoughts of whatever it was, or whosoever it was, that had made him and the world in which he had lived. And when he died, his body had blackened, as if he had been trapped in the harshest of fires, a fire that from time to time would subside to a dull glow only to burn again fiercely, and each time the fierce burning lasted for an eternity. And he died and his death seemed sudden even though he had been marching toward its inevitability for forty-seven years, he was forty-seven years of age when he died, and his death was a surprise just the way each death is, and his death made all who heard of it and all who knew him pause, stop, and wonder if such a thing could happen to them also, for the living always doubt the reality of death and the dead do not know of doubt, the dead do not know of anything. And Nathaniel Potter died and left many children—he knew of eleven—and when he died he could not read and he could not write, and he had not made any children who could do so. Among the names of his children were Walter and Roderick and Francis and Joseph and David and Truehart and John and Benjamin and Baldwin and Mineu and Nigel, their names taken from the history that has been captured in the written word and also from the history of the spoken word. And Roderick was my father but he could not read or write either, Nathaniel Potter only made Roderick Potter and he was my father but he could not read or write, he only made me and I can read and I am also writing all of this at this very moment; at this very moment I am thinking of Nathaniel Potter and I can place my thoughts about him and all that he was and all that he could have been into words. These are all words, all of them, these words are my own.
And many years after Nathaniel’s death and burying, I was standing in the graveyard in St. John’s, Antigua, looking for the grave of Mr. Potter, Roderick—the son of Nathaniel Potter. He was my own father, and I could not find it. I consulted the grave master, who was just an ordinary man in charge of such an important department, keeping a record of all who had lived and then died, the inevitability of this, dying, making his work constant and predictable, and when I was speaking to him as he was looking into his large black book, a ledger, he did not loom large and grow in importance, not to me and not to himself; he remained just so, ordinary. He could no longer find the exact spot where Mr. Potter had been buried, but it was registered in his book, it was a day, seventy years after he had been born, and the grave master remembered it because three or four, or six or seven, or nine or eleven people had fought with each other at the burial sight, at the very grave, and they had fought with each other because they thought Mr. Potter, my very own father, should have loved them best, this very same man who had not loved anyone in his life, in his own lifetime, should have loved them, each of them, best, better than he had loved anything else or anyone else in this world. Someone named Emma remembered giving him bread to eat when he was a boy and had been hungry; someone named Jarvis said that he had pulled Mr. Potter out of the way of a boiling pot of oil that had been thrown at Mr. Potter by a woman who loved him too much. One of his daughters said that Mr. Potter had raped her but she had loved him so much that not before the moment she saw his coffin being lowered into the ground could she tell of the violence he had perpetrated against her. On and on went the stories of love and hatred, and that was all the grave master knew of Mr. Potter. And the world and its events swirled beneath his feet and the world and its events swirled above his head and the grave master said, while looking at me but not seeing me at all, that no one could be really known until they were dead, only when you are dead can a person be really known, because when you are dead then you cannot modify your actions, you are in a state of such stillness, the permanent stillness that is death, you cannot reply to accusations, you cannot make a wrong right, you cannot ask forgiveness, you cannot make a counteraction so as to make a wrong seem not to have occurred at all, you make the wrong perfect in the imagination, you make the wrong perfect in actuality. All this he said and then he said, “Eh, eh,” and he walked away from me and I followed him not too closely, and he wiped away droplets of glistening moisture that had gathered on his forehead with his hand, and this was not to make himself more comfortable, it had no meaning, this removing of droplets of moisture that had gathered on his forehead. He wore a shirt and trousers, and they were made from cotton, but the source of this particular fabric would not have caused him to think of anything, not a moment’s pause, not the time it took to make a pronouncement, not anything at all. And the grave master took me to a worn-down mound of earth, and this mound of earth was overwhelmed by clumps of a deeply rooted grass and an equally deeply rooted white lily that bloomed only at night in July. And the grave master said, “Eh, eh,” and again he said, “Eh, eh.” And always when he said it, “Eh, eh,” his voice was filled with surprise, as if everything that was happening right then was so unexpected, or as if everything happening then was like a memory, only taking place again. He wanted to show me where Mr. Potter was buried, he remembered the day well, such a commotion was made at the grave site: Mr. Potter’s children on one side but not speaking to each other; the woman he had lived with for many years on the other side, but she not speaking to his children. And they all hurled insults at each other for they had been left nothing. Mr. Potter had left all of his considerable fortune to a distant relative who lived on another island quite far away. And that distant relative from an island quite far away returned to his home with Mr. Potter’s money, but shortly after, he too died, and Mr. Potter’s considerable fortune disappeared before the eyes of his children and the woman with whom he had lived and who had so tenderly nursed him in the last few days of his life. So much suffering was attached to Mr. Potter, so much suffering consumed him, so much suffering he left behind.
The grave master led me through the graveyard looking for Mr. Potter’s grave and I followed him, but not too closely. A small mound under a mahogany tree might be the place, he said, and then he said no, perhaps it was not too far from that flamboyant tree over there, and there were many flamboyant trees, the graveyard had many of that kind of tree growing in it, and so I could not tell which tree in particular he meant. He remembered the day well, he said, the sun was shining very bright, there was not a cloud in the sky, and I did not say to him that the sun always shone very bright here and there was never a cloud in the sky, and is there something to be found in that, the cloudless day, the sun so bright? But I did not say anything to him, I did not agree, I did not disagree. And he remembered the day, he said, the angry people gathered around the grave, the coffin being lowered and people singing hymns for the dead. He heard them sing, he said; they sang, “When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died.” They sang, “Wh-en I sur-vey/the won-drous cross/ On whi-ch the Pr-ince/of Glo-ry died.” And did their voices go astray, I wondered to myself, each leaving the other, bending the melody to suit her purpose and his need. And he said, “Yes!” and he pointed to a mound, an eroded mound, a thinning mound, and he said this is where Mr. Potter was buried, this was where he believed Mr. Potter was buried, and perhaps that is the moment he grew weary of me and wanted to get rid of me, for I had made so many demands, and so he showed me the mound under which Mr. Potter had been buried. And the mound was not bare, it was covered with a wormwood, a plant used by my mother and her friends as the main ingredient in an elixir they drank when they wanted to clean their wombs; it was also covered with a plant I now know as Tradescantia albiflora. And the grave master said, “Did you know Potter?” This is what the grave master asked of me, he said, “Did you know Potter?” And I said, “Mr. Potter was my father, my father�
�s name was Mr. Potter.” And when I had said this to the grave master, in the most straightforward way I knew, concerning my relationship to Mr. Potter, his intimate knowledge of my mother and the way he had made me and had contributed to my appearance in the world, I was transported back to how I began again, nine months lying in my mother’s stomach, warm and curled up and feeding from her own very physical existence, and I knew nothing of Mr. Potter and my own self. And at seven months in my mother’s stomach, I lay coiled up not like something about to strike, not like a thing about to be unleashed, but like something benign and eternal, something for which I do not yet have a name. And I am imagining this and yet it is true, this thing that I now imagine is a fact, is something true, it cannot be denied: I lay in my mother’s stomach for nine months, but when I had been in my mother’s stomach for seven months, my mother, whose name then was Annie Victoria Richardson, left my father, whose name then was Roderick Potter, and this remained his name until his death. And the grave master was not at all interested in my beginnings, for he was concerned only with the well-being of the dead, or at any rate he had only to convince those living that he was a crucial part of their general concern for the dead. And people in the midst of their sorrow and their loss came to him believing that he had never seen such a thing as their sorrow and their loss before, and he did not tell them otherwise and he did not compare so much sorrow and loss here with so much sorrow and despair there. And he asked me, though not speaking to me at all, for he was looking toward the sky or rather toward the heavens, if Mr. Potter was my father (“You Potter pickney?”) and when I said “Yes” he did not show me kindness or unkindness, he remained indifferent. And the grave master’s name was not Hector or Baldwin, and as I was looking at him, standing near the place where he said Mr. Potter was buried, near the place where he thought Mr. Potter was buried, near the place where, because he had become tired of me, he insisted Mr. Potter was buried, I thought of Mr. Potter for he was my father. And Mr. Potter, like his father Nathaniel, could not read and neither of them could write, and their worlds, the one in which they lived and the one in which they existed, ceased, and the small, irregular stumble that their existence had made in the vast smoothness that was the turning of the earth on its axis was no more and was not celebrated or even regretted by anyone or anything. And from Mr. Potter I was made, and I can read and write and even love doing so.
And Mr. Potter was not an original man, he was not made from words, his father was Nathaniel and his mother was Elfrida and neither of them could read or write; his beginning was just the way of everyone, as would be his end. He began in a long day and a long night and after nine months he was born and Nathaniel Potter knew nothing of his existence until one day, when he was on his way to the shade of the tree under which he mended his fishnet, he saw a small boy who walked like him and his face looked like his own face and the boy (Roderick was his name, he would become Mr. Potter) was accompanied by a woman and her name was Elfrida. And on seeing Mr. Potter, Nathaniel looked the other way, for this was his son, but not a son he had wanted, he had never wanted any of his sons, he had never wanted any of his children; and on seeing Mr. Potter walking with his mother Elfrida, Nathaniel thought not of the joy in loving someone, or of the contentedness that comes from a kind and sympathetic companion, nor did he even think of the satisfaction to be had on seeing the sun set on a day in which everything he did was full of purpose and was useful and was complete. On seeing Mr. Potter, the young boy who was Roderick, the boy who would become my father, Nathaniel thought of the many snags that he would find in the thread as he mended the small breaches in his fishnet, he thought of the smallness that was his life, the pain of entering into the beginning of each day, the way fortune had denied him its goodness, his fish pots so often insufficiently filled, his past never holding a different future. Who am I? never entered into his thoughts, not even when he saw the young Roderick, the boy who became my father, and Nathaniel could not read and he could not write.
A very long “Oooooohhhhh!!!” sighed Nathaniel Potter just before he died and many times before that and it was his only legacy to all his children and all who would come from them: this sound of helplessness combined with despair: “Oooooohhhhh,” they all cried and cry, all who came from Nathaniel Potter. And the months were August through September, December through February, and April to the end of July; and the years were the same and the weeks were the same as the years and then so too were the days and the minutes and Nathaniel was trapped in all of that—years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes—and then he died, the way all people do, he died, and he left Mr. Potter, his son, and Mr. Potter was my father, my father’s name was Roderick Potter.
And the end of Nathaniel’s life did not bring a beginning to another life. His life ended in the silence so common to everything and in that way he was extraordinary and in that way he was not. And as he was dying, crazy from pain and misery and not with despair, despair did not enter into it, his whole life did not pass before him, and the faces of his children did not float in the invisible air in front of him and he did not call out any names, not his children’s, not his own mother’s and father’s, not his own name. And he did not curse the day on which he was born, he only cursed the day on which each and every one of his ancestors was born. And if all the diseased efforts of his ancestors could come to a resounding end with his death, what would the world be like then? But it was too late for that, already there existed Mr. Potter, Roderick Nathaniel Potter, and that man, Roderick Nathaniel Potter, was my father.
And Mr. Potter, the man who became my father, the man named Roderick Nathaniel Potter who lived to be seventy years old and who in all that time could not read and did not learn to write, was born on the seventh day in January in nineteen hundred and twenty-two and died on the fourth of June in nineteen hundred and ninety-two. And in those seventy years of his life, he did not wish to be anyone better than himself and he most certainly did not wish to be anyone worse; and in those seventy years, each day held its own peril, and each day’s peril was so unbearable and then so ordinary, as if it were breathing, and in this way suffering became normal, and in this way suffering became life itself, and any interruption in this suffering, be it justice and happiness, or more suffering and injustice, was regarded with hostility and anger and disappointment. And at the beginning of his seventy years, how unimaginable such an expanse of time, seventy years, was to Mr. Potter, and at the end of his life, all he had been seemed like a day, whatever that might be, a day.
And it was in the middle of the night when there was no wind and there had been no rain for a long time, it was in the middle of a drought, on the seventh of January in nineteen hundred and twenty-two, that Mr. Potter was born and his mother’s name was Elfrida Robinson and he was her only child then and he remained her only child for the rest of her life. And in the middle of that long drought and in the middle of the darkest part of the night is how Mr. Potter came into the world and nothing cared and his appearance in the world did not end the drought, the absence of rain, his appearance did not make the world pause. And why should it, why should it be worth mentioning that the world did not pause when Mr. Potter was born, and the world did not ignore his birth, the world was only indifferent to it: to the world, that is, as it is created by God and the world as it is continually created by human activity. And it was in the small village of English Harbour, in the Parish of St. Paul, on the island that was (and still is) Antigua, that Mr. Potter was born, and as he came out of the womb of his mother, Elfrida Robinson was her name, in a small ball of, first, complacency and then exploding into the startling rashness that is a human being, he cried out, but it was not in sorrow, it was only to expand his small, gelatinous lungs, it was only an instinctive effort, his will then being not known to him. And as he emerged from his mother’s womb (her name was Elfrida Robinson) she felt herself as if cast asunder, as if split into many pieces, and each piece flung far away from the other and would not be
united again and she wondered who she was and what she came from and struggled to remember her own name, for that might amount to something, her name was Elfrida Robinson, and she remembered her name and it was Elfrida Robinson. And her son, for this collection of tissue, bones, and blood was her son, was not held gently by the midwife, Nurse Eudelle (her name was Sylvia Eudelle and her services of midwifery were available to anyone living in the villages of English Harbour, Falmouth, Old Road, Liberta, Urlings, and John Hughes, for beyond those distances she felt a great haughtiness toward people who might need her, and so refused to travel toward their environs, their vicinity). Mr. Potter when born was held with contempt by the person who received him into the world, the midwife Nurse Sylvia Eudelle, for she had brought so many beings just like him into the world, in the very same way as Mr. Potter had come into the world, and no sign of any kind had appeared to reveal to her a departure from her routine, no hallowed moment had made her see these many arrivals she witnessed in the world with any awe and reverence, these many arrivals to her were not unlike the yield of the fields, the yield of the sea, and yields of every kind are commonplace, and are taken for granted, except when yields of every kind fail to do so—yield.
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