A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

merchant-importer asked to look at his books. Whatever was wrong with the books the young man did not want the merchant-importer to see, for he took the books and ran with them to the bakery, and, with his incredibly long arms, he threw them into the furnace, where they perished immediately, never to be seen by mortal eyes again. And so they anchor the merchant-importer’s books being burned to the event of the original, honest leaders of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union being maneuvered out of the union they founded and dishonest people taking their place; and they anchor that to the decline of one sort of colonialism and its debasement and its own sort of corruption; and they anchor that to this man, this Prime Minister, who from time to time had seemed like a good man, so well could he spell out the predicament that average Antiguans found themselves in. They anchor all of that to this other event: In Antigua, when a man goes into business, he will put up a sign announcing it, and on the sign he states the sort of business he is open to conducting and he states his own name, followed by the words & SON , so that it might read this way: DAVID A. DREW & SON, CABINETMAKER AND CARPENTER. In Antigua, people say that the man who has headed the government for twenty-five years perhaps by now thinks that the government of Antigua is his own business, for two of his sons are members of his cabinet, holding the most important posts after the post of Prime Minister. They are in charge of the Treasury, Tourism, Public Works—departments of government through which large amounts of money pass. And after they look at the father and the sons, they say, What next? for it occurs to them that a family that has been wielding political power for so many years might not give it up easily, might not give it up if they find themselves defeated at the polls, might not let themselves be defeated at the polls, might not even allow any polls. They note that Antigua has an army of sorts, an army that can only stand around as a decoration, the way it did in Grenada when the United States invaded that island; an army, then, that can only lend legitimacy to illegitimate acts. And though this army cannot really fight a war, is not trained to really fight a war—Antigua, after all, has no enemies—the men in this army can shoot at people, and if they cannot fight a war but can shoot at people, what people will they shoot at? And so people see anchored to this father and his two sons who have wielded power in Antigua for so many years, and who might find it hard to quietly relinquish this power and sit in New York spending the contents of their enormous bank accounts, the event of Haiti and the Duvaliers. The father, they say, is old and weak, and needs daily injections of powerful things to keep him going. They point, then, to one of the sons. They say how much they are reminded of Baby Doc and the opulent and fun-filled life he led in his poverty-stricken country. And they point to the other son and say that they are reminded of Papa Doc himself, for he is the ruthless son, the one who is not afraid of anything, the one who won’t resign his post in government, even though he has been unable to account for large sums of money for public-works projects. But then, sitting with the prospect of that event facing them, they, Antiguans, say, perhaps not, perhaps that event will not be the event to take place, because the Baby Doc-like son who loves opulence and fun really loves opulence and fun, and like Baby Doc, he is not really a leader at all; and the other son, the Papa Doc-like son, is dying of leukemia or some other dreadful blood disease and has to go to New York every month for treatment. And so then they imagine another event, the event of Maurice Bishop in Grenada, and they imagine that such a man will materialise in Antigua and he’ll do Maurice Bishop-like things and say Maurice Bishop-like things and come to a Maurice