Mr. Potter

by Jamaica Kincaid

  And breeze or no breeze, no wind or wind wreaking havoc on the world, not a thing made Mr. Potter uncomfortable as he walked toward Mr. Shoul and Mr. Shoul’s garage, where, lying quietly and so still as if they could never know movement, were Mr. Shoul’s cars. And one of them, the navy blue Hillman with brown leather seats, had so often been assigned to Mr. Potter that it was always referred to as “Potter’s car,” but it was not Mr. Potter’s car, it belonged to Mr. Shoul, this car. And when Mr. Potter sat at the wheel of this car, the navy blue Hillman with brown leather seats, he felt himself one with the car, he felt he possessed the car and that the car possessed him, and the car had no feelings, because a car can never do such a thing, have feelings of any kind, and the car really did belong to Mr. Shoul, and when Mr. Potter felt at one with Mr. Shoul’s car, he placed himself with blissful ignorance in Mr. Shoul’s possession. “Eh, eh, Potter, me ah tell you” was how Mr. Shoul would greet Mr. Potter as they met so early in the morning in the space that was between the street and the entrance to the garage, and Mr. Shoul greeted Mr. Potter with a warm feeling, a loving feeling, a feeling so expansive and filled up with love that the whole known world could have been healed by it, if only the whole world knew that it needed to be healed by it, this greeting of love and some of its permutations from Mr. Shoul to Mr. Potter. And many years later, many, many years later, when I was about four years old, I saw Mr. Potter standing in the space that was between the street and the entrance to the garage, and that was the first time I can remember seeing him standing between the street which led to me and the world beyond and the entrance to the garage, which held inside it all the darkness of the world when it has been reduced and made small and powered by evil; and at that time I waved to Mr. Potter, for I could see his face (or I could see what I thought was his face, though I never saw his face at all, not then, not later when he was standing in front of me), and I could see his hat sitting on his head just above his face, and he must have had arms and legs and a body to go with all that, and all of these things that made up Mr. Potter to me, this little girl child of four, who was innocent, all of those things made up Mr. Potter to me and I was in a state of ignorance, for I did not know something that was crucial to understanding my position in the world: when I had seen Mr. Potter, standing between the street and the entrance to Mr. Shoul’s garage, I had waved at him, I had stood before him and wished him a good morning, and I had said, through gestures only, that he was mine and I was his, that the world, in all its parts, was complicated, with plates beneath its surface shifting and colliding, with vast subterranean cauldrons of steam and gases mixing and then exploding violently through the earth’s crust, that the seemingly invisible spaces between two people who shared a common intimate history were impossible to destroy. And when Mr. Potter saw me wave he did not frown on me, he did not dismiss me with a wave of his hand, he did not curse under his breath my very existence, he only rolled his shoulders, both at the same time, forward and backward, backward and forward, and looked at the spot on the street which I occupied, the street that was filled up with many things, the hustle and bustle of life, the foolish things that make some people’s lives laughable and those same foolish things that make some other people’s lives a call to death. Not only did he ignore me, he made sure that until the day he died, I did not exist at all. Only waving at him, not crying out of hunger for him, not wanting a roof over my head from him: not anything did I ever come to mean to him, nothing close to his heart did I come to mean to him, and I remember this incident of waving to him because my mother has told me about it and through my mother’s words, I have come to see myself waving to Mr. Potter, waving and waving to Mr. Potter as he stood in the space between the openness that was the street and the dark closed space of the garage in which lay all the world of Mr. Shoul, who was from the Lebanon and the areas surrounding that place. And Mr. Potter could not read and he could not write and that time when I stood in the sunlit street waving to him and he refused to see me and then turned and entered the closed dark of Mr. Shoul’s garage, I had been sent by my mother to ask him for sixpence to buy a tablet of lined writing paper, for at four years old I could read and I could write but I did not know that Mr. Potter was not capable of doing so, I did not know Mr. Potter at all. I only waved at him and then he turned his back to me. And all this is what my mother has told me and her name was Annie Victoria Richardson and she was born in Mahaut, Dominica, and she is now dead.

  And all this my mother has told me, all of this my mother has told me, my entire life as I live it is all my mother has told me. She is now dead, she is dead now. There is a wide undulating plateau filled with yellow grass growing thickly and straight up from the moist dark earth, and the yellow grass grows determinedly beneath a clear blue sky and birds are flying and singing in the morning right after they fall out of sleep and then flying and singing in the evening just before they fall into sleep and their sleep is without trouble and this world of undulating plateau filled with yellow grass and moist earth and blue, blue sky and existence without threat is not the world into which I was born. There is a very large room, it is a house really, and this room is filled up with the treasures of the world, maps and jewels and chairs covered in silk and tables made from the trunks of species of trees that are very hard to find and this room is filled with species of people that are very hard to find and animals that can no longer be found and this room is filled with many things that have been subdued and with people who have been subordinated, and this room is filled with comfort and earthly joy, but I was not born into such a room. I was born in the Holberton Hospital in St. John’s, Antigua, on the twenty-fifth of May, nineteen hundred and forty-nine, at five o‘clock in the morning. I had by then been in my mother’s belly for nine months and I caused her so much discomfort, the nine months I spent in her belly introduced to my mother much pain, a pain she had not known existed or a pain she did not know could exist, and that pain was made up of loving someone whose face was not familiar to her and missing someone whose existence she had not wished for or longed for, and that pain, even as it registered in every part of her body, was also registering somewhere else, somewhere outside her and yet inside her, over there and yet right here, present as if she could touch it, and yet what was it, for it was new and unfamiliar and it came with me, this pain, and the newness of this pain brought a warm feeling and my mother called it love when she could manage it, bear it, and she felt these feelings of pain which she could not control as a violation when she could not manage it, and all of these feelings, love, violation, hatred, came to my mother and they were new to her and I was new to her and as I came into the world on that Wednesday morning at five o’clock so new with that pain, her self, her physical self, being split open, not into two pieces, just her one self being split open, and I came out of this split and for the rest of her whole life she could not be wholly and only one, just herself, just Annie Victoria Richardson, for the rest of her whole life I stood between her, between this one part that had been split open. And it was through this opening from which I came, this opening that once becoming so could never join up together again, it was because of this opening that an unbridgeable gulf rested between my mother, Annie Victoria Richardson, and myself, and this gulf was not caused by Mr. Potter, Mr. Potter was not central to this gulf, and yet he was an essential element of it, profoundly incidental and so arbitrarily essential, for he was my father. And on that day I was born, at that moment, there existed no love between Mr. Potter and Annie, for she was called only that then, Annie, though later she was called Miss Annie and then Annie Drew, but then she was called Annie, and Annie and Mr. Potter hated each other but it was a hatred with no real consequence for they had done nothing that would result in the death of each other, it was not a hatred with a power to harm either of them, it was only a hatred which caused me much suffering, a hatred which caused Mr. Potter to deny me the protection of his patrimony; a hatred which because I do not know their past as they had lived it to
gether, their past when they had lived it apart from each other, their past when I was just a figure in the distance, a figure unknown to them; this hatred that existed between them became a part of my own life as I live it even today and I do not understand how this could be so, but it is true all the same. And Mr. Potter had no patrimony for he did not own himself, he had no private thoughts, he had no thoughts of wonder, he did not have a mind’s eye in which he could wander, he had no thoughts about his past, his future, and his present which lay in between them both—his past and his future—and he was not ignorant, he was not without a conscience, he could not read and he could not write and he could not render the story of life, his own in particular, with coherency and I can read and I can write and I am his daughter.

  And my own mother Annie Victoria Richardson left her home in Mahaut, Dominica, and she passed through the Windward Passage, which was a corridor of violent winds trapped in a swirling torrent of motion, moving, moving toward a cluster of islands, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla, and she left Dominica on a boat with improperly mended sails and landed on the island of Antigua, the island where her own father, Alfred John Richardson, was born, and she left her home after a quarrel with her father over the way she should pursue her unfolding future, and after that quarrel, he made her dead in the realm of his fatherly love, he disinherited her. And why is it that joy, encountered unexpectedly and fully, will have at its core a replication of your own sorrow, will in the very near distance cause you to feel disemboweled, lost, as if your own self was somewhere else, while at the same time you can see yourself in front of you, you are far away and you are right there nearby and how lost, how lost you are and you go searching for that joy, that original joy, but your joy is your sorrow, your joy has not turned to sorrow, your joy was always sorrow, a form of sorrow, just sorrow.

  And my mother Annie Victoria Richardson, her hair then, as a young woman of sixteen and then seventeen and then eighteen and then still a young woman at twenty-five when she met Mr. Potter, her hair then was long and black and waved down her back past her shoulders, and sometimes she wore her hair in two plaits pinned up around the crown of her head and sometimes she wore her hair captured in a black hairnet and the hairnet and the hair were the identical shade of black and her hair then seemed as if she had pinned the fat black tail of an unheard-of mammal at the nape of her neck. How beautiful she was then, I have been told so by her and by other people who knew her then, but not by Mr. Potter, for he never spoke to me of her, he never spoke to me of anything, he never spoke to me at all. And then when she was sixteen, and then seventeen, and then eighteen and up to just before she met Mr. Potter when she was twenty-five, she began living in the city of St. John’s in that place called Grays Farm and she lived in a house, a room really, with four windows and two doors and she lived all alone then, not with one child, girl or boy. She lived in this house all alone and got up every day for five days of the week and went off to work, sometimes keeping orderly the houses, proper houses, of people who needed and could afford such a thing, sometimes washing their clothes, sometimes bathing and feeding their children, but when she had been a girl and living under the harsh care of her father, he had sent her to school, he had insisted that she go to school, that she know how to read and write, and so eventually she grew tired of the houses that needed to be kept orderly and the people who lived in them and of the clothes they wore and their children and whether their children were hungry or dirty. She went to work in the surgery of a friend of her father’s, a doctor, and then this doctor decided to go and live in St. Kitts, for all his wife’s family were there, and my mother then went to work for Dr. Weizenger, scrubbing and sterilizing with boiling water the steel instruments he used for extracting teeth, scrubbing and sterilizing the needles and syringes he used for administering medicines of one kind or the other, making sure that the fingernails of the patients he would see were not dirty and that their hair was freshly combed and that they had just taken a bath and had just brushed their teeth, for all these things, if they were not just so, would make the doctor, Weizenger, irritable and sometimes they might make him so irritable that he would send the patient away, send the patient away without seeing him or her at all. And Dr. Weizenger practiced medicine, applying the little knowledge he had about the diseases of the mouth to dentistry, applying the little knowledge he had regarding childhood diseases to the illnesses that plagued children, applying the little knowledge he had of the workings of the mature human body to adult men and women who came to him with pain in their backs and heads and feet and all the other places where pain could be lodged in the human body; and he spoke English perfectly, but as if this language was lodged in the deepest recesses of his brain and was in some way hard to get to; he spoke English as if he was in pain, as if it was something he was being forced to do, and this was so, for Dr. Weizenger came from far away, from a place where the English language existed in another sphere, and in that place where he was from, he had taken up speaking English as a hobby, something to do in his spare time, something full of pleasure in the middle of the sad landscape into which he was born. And my mother Annie, who was not my mother yet and had not met Mr. Potter yet, but was my mother all the same, I can see that now, regarded Dr. Weizenger with much disdain, for he was ignorant and could not speak properly the language in which he found himself alive; she spoke English and French and a language that combined the two and she felt herself free and without boundaries and without obligations, but she was not without boundaries or obligations, she already was my mother and Mr. Potter was my father.

  And my mother then was flames in her own fire, not waves in her own sea, she would be that later, after I was born and had become a grown woman, she would become that to me, an ocean with its unpredictable waves and undertow; she was then flames in her own fire and she was very beautiful and her beauty was mentioned sometimes with admiration and affection by others, sometimes with disapproval and scorn by some others, and it was as if her beauty was a blessing in the world sometimes, and as if her beauty was a sign of evil in the world sometimes. And when she was young my mother thought herself beautiful and loved being so and would invite other people into the atmosphere of her beauty and would, with her beauty, create little events that would make people who had witnessed her pause (she walked down the length of Scot’s Row with her hair carelessly piled up on her head as if she had just stepped out of the darkness of her house without meaning for anyone to see her), and these people liked her and these people did not like her and there were many of them, one hundred or so. And in the middle of this, something that might become me appeared in her womb, clotting and swelling up, tissue which remained only tissue, for she would not allow it to become otherwise, she would not allow it to become me or anyone else, it would remain mere tissue in her womb. Four times this thickening of fluids gathered in her womb, four times before she was thirty years of age she managed to throw it out, and these fluids gathered up in her womb, clotting and then swelling and then were expelled before they became someone or something. And when my mother tried to force her menstruation unnaturally for the fifth time, she failed and that failure was because of me, I could not be expelled from my mother’s womb at her own will. All this my mother told me when I was forty-one years of age and had by then become the mother of two children, the only two children my womb now will ever bear. And my mother was Annie Victoria Richardson, not my mother at all, not my mother yet, and she was my mother even so, for I was suspended within her, even though the world, which included her and Mr. Potter, did not know of me and did not know of the other thickenings and would never care for the thickened substance in her womb and eventually would never really care for me. But here I am and I can read and I can write my own name and much more than that, I now can tell myself of Mr. Potter in the written word and I now can tell Mr. Potter of his life with my mother Annie Victoria Richardson and Mr. Potter is now dead and so too is Annie, who came from Dominica to Antigua when she was
sixteen years of age, against her father’s wishes.