My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  I cannot now remember the day on which the house we used to live in was sold; and I cannot remember the day on which Robert Woodworth’s house became our house. I can only remember that not one of the heirs’ domiciles could accommodate Helen’s piano. It was offered to us for purchase, but we could hardly afford the down payment on the house and so had to decline. It now sits in our living room waiting for permanent settlement with one of Helen’s grandchildren. My children practice their piano-lesson assignments on it all the time. Many quarrels are had over Helen’s piano. They do not like to practice their piano lessons, apparently no child who lives in the culture of piano playing and who has imposed on him and her the love of music through the piano ever likes practicing the piano. And so this piano is yet another reminder of the people we call the Woodworths.

  If you must go through your life being reminded of people you have never met, Bob and Helen Woodworth would be the ideal people with whom to have this experience. At Robert Woodworth’s memorial service there were many people from the small village of North Bennington. Some of them were colleagues of his from the college where he taught, others were just local people whom he had known from being a resident of the village. I’m not sure they noticed how many of their memories of Robert Woodworth were like this: “Bob and I were chopping wood” or “I gave Bob some wood” or “That day Bob called me about some wood.” I was sitting in the audience and I believe I was the only person who had never met Bob Woodworth, and so that must have been why I noticed that there were a lot of memories about wood connected to a man named Woodworth. I desperately wanted to stand up and point out the connection between the wood and the name of the person being commemorated. I did not. All the people who talked about him mentioned how close he was to Helen and how much they all loved Helen, too. He played Dixieland music with a group of men every Tuesday night. One night, the last Tuesday night before he died, he said goodbye to them and one man said to him, “See you next week, Bob,” and Robert Woodworth said, “I don’t think so.” And that was true. He died sometime between that Tuesday night and the next Tuesday night when they would meet. The man he had the exchange with told that story at his memorial service. After we bought the house, we went through it and found a lot of wood ready for the fireplace in the basement. In the basement also was a wood-burning stove and it was hooked up to the furnace. We realized that the entire house could be heated with wood, but no one in my family is capable of cutting it.

  When Dr. Woodworth died in the room in which I now write, he was alone. Helen had died two years earlier. His spirit does not haunt the room. His spirit does not haunt the house. One night, during the first winter we spent in the house, I was lying in my bed, when suddenly I smelled smoke. I ran into every room, I ran into the attic, I ran into the basement, trying to see where the smell of smoke was coming from, trying to see if I could find the thing burning. The smell of smoke was not to be found in any other part of the house, only in my bedroom. The phenomenon of the smell of smoke occurs only in the wintertime and only in that one room.

  When I lived in the yellow house, I used to pass other houses and imagine myself in them. I used to see the other houses and love some of them; sometimes I wished I lived in them. Some of them were very beautiful all by themselves, or they were beautiful and in an extraordinary setting to boot. I never do that anymore. I never want to live anywhere else or in any other house.

  But I do not believe that I know how to live in a house. I grew up outside. All my meals were cooked outside on the top of a stove-like implement made from clay called a coal pot. Then we must have grown a little more prosperous, for we acquired a kerosene stove; it had a wick that it was my duty to keep trimmed. There isn’t a room in my house now that is as small as the house I grew up in. I can hardly believe that this is so, but it is really, really true. We lived outside. When we started to do things together inside our house, things other than sleeping, it was a sign of some pretension. I remember when I started to eat my meals inside with my family. I was taught to set the table. When I did anything bad, I was banished from the table and had to eat my meals outside under a soursop tree. I still do not like this fruit. Most of the things inside the house in which I grew up were thought to be very valuable. I was not allowed to touch them. Our good things were in trunks or in a mahogany cabinet that my father had made. My mother had a set of six china teacups and matching saucers commemorating the coronation of some monarch of England or another and they were locked up in that cabinet. My father made wonderful furniture, but we didn’t have his best furniture. His best furniture was in the house of the wife of the man with whom he had apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, and he and my mother had almost as many quarrels about him retrieving that furniture as she and I had when she found me almost removing her coronation tea set. It was as if the house in which his furniture was kept from my mother were the cabinet that kept her china from me.

  When I go to other people’s houses, I am amazed at the order there. Their sinks are clean, the countertops are neat, the curtains match something or other and they are a nice length. Their children have never battled imaginary adversaries on the sofa with their shoes on. Their books are all in place on their bookshelves. My house looks quite like the outside in which I grew up. The outside in which I grew up had an order to it, but this order had to be restored at the beginning of each day. This restoring was done by my mother and by me as I grew up, for my mother was training me to do things the way she had done them (there was nothing sinister in that, everyone who is good at anything likes an apprentice). In the middle of my yard stood the stone heap, and this was covered with soapy white clothes on Monday mornings. This stone heap was a mound of stones about a foot high, and I do not now know its diameter but it was properly wide; the stones, which were only stacked one on top of the other with no substance to hold them together, would come apart, it seemed during the night, and from time to time they had to be rearranged. In my yard was a latrine, and on Wednesday nights the night-soil men would come and take away its contents; they came on horse-drawn carts, and the clop-clop of the horses and their loud talk always woke everyone up. They were very disrespectful of the sleepy comfort of the people inside, but such consideration would have been possible only if they had been saints; they were not, they were merely night-soil men. They never locked the gates behind them, they trampled on things even when they were not directly in their way, the yard had to be tidied up after them. In the yard, too, was the soursop tree, and it was under these branches that I was banished to after I had committed some infraction, the most memorable for me being the time I dropped my brother in what seemed an accident to me but not to my mother, shortly after he was a year old. There was also a clump of sugarcane that was desirable to my mother at first but later fell out of her favor, and since she could not simply get rid of it, she would pour boiling water constantly over its crown; and a pawpaw tree and a dumps tree and a coconut tree; and there was a coal pot and in it a fire made from charcoal that my mother had bought from a woman named Mrs. Roberts, who lived in a village called Old Road, and this woman and her husband, a Mr. Roberts, made the charcoal from the wood of trees that they had cut down, and I do not believe that they, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, worried about the management of woods and their effect on the general arrangement of things in the small world in which we lived, never mind the small world of the yard. On the soursop tree grew a squash vine (crookneck squash), the seeds of which I now see are offered for sale in distinctive vegetable catalogues; this was an important vegetable in our daily diet, and naturally, I could not stand it. I liked it as much as I liked breadfruit, but at the time I could not have known that my dislike of breadfruit was perfectly reasonable. A breadfruit tree grew in our yard, and my mother, who was obsessively familiar with such things as the nutritional value in kinds of food, knew of the breadfruit’s nutritional value; I did not know of the breadfruit’s history, but all the same my palate had a revulsion to it that was shared by every Antiguan child I h
ave ever met.

  My mother would preside over the yard with an agitation that perhaps is endemic to people in her situation. The dishes are clean, then they are dirty, and then they are clean and then they are dirty. The stone heap will not stay in its immaculate mound. The night-soil men will never close the gate, it must always be closed after them, for if it is not, evil spirits will find it much easier to enter our yard and wreak havoc with our lives. The leaves never stay on the trees, they are always yellowing and eventually falling down and then have to be swept up in a pile and then taken away. Nothing behaves, nothing can be counted on to do so. Everything eventually becomes smudged, falls out of place, waiting to be restored. All of this was my yard. And all of this continues outside my house today, only the details have changed. The collection of stones has been made into a wall; the trees are different, but they provide more or less the same function of usefulness and pleasure. Only, this area outside my house today is called the garden.

  The inside of my house looks like my yard; it is smudged with dirt, it is disorderly for an inside of a house, though it would look wonderful and memorable if it were the outside of the house I grew up in, even though perhaps it would not be appreciated by anyone I grew up with, their standards being on a level I can never meet, and even more deeply, fervently hope never to meet. The standards of my past are marvelous for the people I left behind and anyone else wishing to join them. They are good standards, they are admirable standards, only they do not fit me anymore.

  “Harold,” I can hear my husband say, “no playing with that stick.” Harold is our son and he is playing outside, roasting marshmallows on a fire built in a coal pot, the very same kind of coal pot on which all my meals used to be cooked, only now on a visit to the place in which I grew up I sought one out and bought it the way a tourist would. “Harold,” I can hear my husband say again, “don’t play so near the fire with that stick.” I hear shrieks of pleasure from Harold, which can only mean that he is getting near the fire, nearer than his father finds comfortable, but the closer to danger is the closer to pleasure for a child, and perhaps for everybody who has ever been a child, and perhaps again, almost no one quite forgets this. I can remember that my mother was once ironing my clothes and that the irons, all four of them, were kept hot by the fire in the coal pot. I was dancing around the coal pot in an imaginary Maypole dance and my mother kept saying, “Don’t dance around the coal pot, you might fall into the fire,” when suddenly I did fall into the fire, and to this day the scars from that burn are visible around my elbows. What did I learn about fire that I did not already know? Fire burns flesh; if you are a child you will feel it. Harold never did fall into that particular fire.

  What does one teach a child, what should a child know? In our home we are not sure. Robert Woodworth must have known; his children are all safe and sound and no one has anything but good to say about them. We live in Robert Woodworth’s house, the home he gave to his children; they can do their best and pass something of it on to their children, but when they sold us the house, they could not sell us the home also. A home is not tangible, a home is not the Douglas-fir beams, the cedar shingles, the windows from an admiral’s house in Massachusetts.

  Is this a home? One day, when Harold was just a baby, really a baby, and so Annie would have been just over four years old, Annie overheard her father and me discussing the various opinions of a man, and in this discussion we decided that the man was a homophobe. I can remember that her father said, “I’m afraid he’s a homophobe, there’s no doubt about it.” And I said I agreed. At that moment Annie was sitting on the kitchen table, something she was not allowed to do for a reason that even now that she is almost eleven years old is not at all clear to me; only that it seems a child should not sit on the kitchen table. We knew of her presence, but we did not think of her as we spoke, we did not think that the things we were saying would mean anything to her. There is a moment when you are the parent of a child and you forget this, you still think you are alone in the world and you behave as if you are, and you act as if you are. When Annie said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, what is a homophobe?” we were shocked to hear her voice, we thought we were talking to each other alone.

  It was her father, Allen, who said—and these were his exact words, I so far have never forgotten them—“Well, you see, Annie, it’s like this. Two men meet and they fall in love with each other and they decide to get married. That’s homosexual. Then over here, you have some people who don’t like the two men who have fallen in love and decided to get married. They are afraid of it. When you are afraid of something, that’s a phobia. So the people who are afraid of two men who decide to get married, they are homophobic.” And Annie said in reply to all this, “Wait a minute, two men get married, right.” Her father said, “Yes.” And she said, “Just tell me one thing, who wears the veil?” Her father said, “They decide.” And Annie said, “Oh.”

  In our home, which is in a house that Robert Woodworth built, a man none of us have ever met, a man no one will ever really know, for it turns out that no one can ever be really known, we wish that someone had told us what to do, but no one has left a blueprint. We wish someone had. We wish we could say, Well, Bob Woodworth did it this way and it was very satisfactory, because one of his children is a podiatrist, and another is a professor of biology, and another is a scientist and lives a life of stability somewhere south of Burlington, Vermont, and that seems so manageable from our point of view as parents, because those three people are people we are able to have a conversation with, even though all three of them are people we would have been afraid of becoming, if only because the stability of such lives reminds us of our own youth. Oh, how we wish that someone, but perhaps Robert Woodworth in particular, had given us a recipe for how to make a house a home, a home being the place in which the mystical way of maneuvering through the world in an ethical way, a way universally understood to be honorable and universally understood to be ecstatic and universally understood to be the way we would all want it to be, carefully balanced between our own needs and the needs of other people, people we do not know and may never like and can never like, but people all the same who must be considered with the utmost seriousness, the same seriousness with which we consider our own lives.

  THE SEASON PAST

  I was putting the garden to bed for the winter when, looking over the empty spaces that had not so long ago been full of flowers and vegetables, I was overcome with the memory of satisfaction and despair, two feelings not unfamiliar to any gardener. Satisfaction was seeing the tips of the asparagus poke through the earth, coming all the way up, wonderfully whole, real, and without blemish, just the way they should be really, from the trenches into which I had placed their roots. Even after many years of gardening, I never believe a live plant will emerge from the seed I have put in the ground; I am always surprised, as if it had never happened to me before, as if every time were the first time. And a moment of despair was when I realized that none of my squash and pumpkin seeds were germinating, so no plants would appear, because some beings, full of malice, had carefully scratched the seeds out of their hills and eaten them. I plotted the demise of the offending beings, and finally did catch one of them, a raccoon, in that ridiculous pantywaist contraption, the Havahart trap. But when I was about to drown him in a barrel of water, the three whining pacifists I have somehow managed to find myself living with (my husband and our two children) made such a fuss that I ended up setting him free in wilderness far away from anyone’s garden. (I do believe, though, that some natural instinct, not fully understood by any scientist, will lead him back to mine.)

  My ‘Reine des Violettes’ and ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’ roses, planted just last April, were glorious in the summer; the perfume of the ‘Violettes’ in particular was extremely pleasing, really faultless; I kept burying my nose in its petals as if they were someone’s neck. And the ‘Madame Isaac’ was remontant, it bloomed on and on. The dimensions of my foray into rose growing were un
known to me until the beginning of April, when they started arriving; by early May, there was a total of thirty-three bushes. I had not ordered them all at once; the excess came about because last winter was so long and cold and I had so much time to stare at catalogues that I lost track of what I had already ordered and ended up with sometimes two or three schemes for the same spot. I had ordered my roses from Jackson & Perkins, Wayside Gardens, and Park Seed (Park has the cheapest roses, and they seem just as good as the others, but the selection is more limited; my wonderful ‘Reine de V.’ came from them, it was five dollars less than in the Wayside catalogue), and from a nursery in Maine called the Roseraie at Bayfields, run by a very pleasant man named Lloyd Brace. (I know that he’s nice only from talking to him on the telephone.) When the rosebushes arrived, I had not yet prepared the ground properly for them, because it was still freezing and snowing. So they were badly mistreated before planting, and looked half dead by the time they were planted, except for the ones from Lloyd Brace, which came with fresh sprouts of green leaves on them and looked exceptionally promising when they were finally in the ground. All the roses did well, anyway, making me think—contrary to my expectations—that abuse must be a part of growing roses.