The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

things had gone wrong, either because of their own actions or through no fault of their own; and there were then many places like Roseau, outposts of despair; for conqueror and conquered alike these places were the capitals of nothing but despair. This did not surprise the ones forcibly brought to live in such a place, but even so, in this place there was some beauty, unexpected and therefore thrilling; it could be seen in the way the houses were all closely pressed together, jammed up, small and crooked, as if ill built on purpose, painted in the harsh hues of red, blue, green, or yellow, or sometimes not painted at all, the bare wood exposed to the elements, turning a bright gray. In this sort of house lived people whose skins glistened with exhaustion and whose faces were sad even when they had a reason to be happy, people for whom history had been a big, dark room, which made them hate silence. And sometimes there was a gentle wind and sometimes the stillness of the trees, and sometimes the sun setting and sometimes the dawn opening up, and the sweet, sickening smell of the white lily that bloomed only at night, and the sweet, sickening smell of something dead, something animal, rotting. This beauty, when I first saw it—I saw it in parts, not all at once—made me glad to be alive; I could not explain this feeling of gladness at the sight of the new and strange, the unfamiliar. And then long, long after, when all these things had become a part of me, a part of my every day, this feeling of gladness was no longer possible, but I would yearn for it, to feel new again, to feel within myself a fountain of joy springing up, to feel full of hope, to feel young again. I long now to feel fresh again, to feel I will never die, but that is not possible; I can only long for it, I can never be that way again.
    Long after my father removed me from his house and the presence of his wife, I came to understand that he knew it was necessary to do so. I never knew what he noticed about me, I never knew what he wanted of me or from me; at the time it seemed to have a purpose, this removing me to Roseau; he wanted me to continue to go to school, he wanted me to someday become a schoolteacher, he wanted to say that his daughter was a teacher in a school. That I might have had aspirations of my own would not have occurred to him, and if I had aspirations of my own, I did not know of them. How the atmosphere in his own house felt to him I did not know. What he saw in my face he never told me. But he took me to this house of a man he knew in business and left me in the care of this man and his wife. I was a boarder, but I paid my own way. In exchange for my room and board in this house I performed some household tasks. I did not object, I could not object, I did not want to object, I did not know then how to object openly.
    I met Monsieur and Madame in the afternoon, a hot afternoon. They were that to me then—Monsieur and Madame. I met her first, alone; he was in a room by himself, in another part of their house, a room where he kept money which he liked to count over and over again; it was not all the money in the world that he had. When I first met Madame LaBatte, she was standing in the doorway of her nice house, the front doorway, with its nice clean yard full of flowers and piles of stones neatly arranged; to her left and to her right were two large clumps of plumbago with blue flowers still in the hot air. She wore a white dress made of a coarse cloth decorated with embroidery stitching of flowers and leaves; I noticed this because it was a dress people in Mahaut would have worn only to church on Sundays. Her dress was not worn out and it was clean; it was not in a stylish cut but loose, fitting her badly, as if her body was no longer of any interest to her. My father spoke to her, she spoke to my father, she spoke to me; she looked at me, I looked at her. It was not to size each other up; I did not know what she thought she