The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

saw in my eyes, but I can say now that I had an instinctive feeling of sympathy for her. I did not know why sympathy, why not the opposite of that, but sympathy was what I felt all the same. It might have been because she looked so much like someone who had gotten something she so very much wanted.
    She had very much wanted to marry Monsieur LaBatte. I was told that by the woman who came each day to wash their clothes. To want desperately to marry men, I have come to see, is not a mistake women make, it is only, well, what else is left for them to do? I was never told why she wanted to marry him. I made a guess: he had a strong body, she was drawn to his strong body, his strong hands, his strong mouth; it was a big wide mouth and it must have covered hers up whenever he kissed her. It swallowed mine up whenever he kissed me. She was not a frail woman when they first met, she became frail only afterward; he wore her out. When they first met, he would not marry her. He would not marry any woman. They would bear him children, and if the children were boys, these boys were given his full name, but he never married the mothers. Madame LaBatte found a way: she fed him food she had cooked in a sauce made up of her own menstrual blood, which bound him to her, and they were married. In time this spell wore off and could not be made to work again. He turned on her—not in anger, for he never became aware of the trap that had been set for him—he turned on her with the strength of that weapon he carried between his legs, and he wore her out. Her hair was gray, and not from age. Like so much about her it had just lost its vitality, it lay on her head without any real life to it; her hands hung at her side, slack. She had been beautiful when she was young, the way all people are, so beautiful when they are young, but on her face then was the person she had really become: defeated. Defeat is not beautiful; it is not ugly, but it is not beautiful. I was young then; I was young, I did not know. When I looked at her and felt sympathy, I also felt revulsion. I thought, This must never happen to me, and I meant that I would not allow the passage of time or the full weight of desire to make a pawn of me. I was young, so young, and felt my convictions powerfully; I felt strong and I felt I would always be so, I felt new and felt I would always be so, too. And at that moment the clothes I was wearing became too small, my bosoms grew out and pressed against my blouse, my hair touched my shoulders in a caress that caused me to shiver inside, my legs were hot and between them was a moisture, a sweet smelly stickiness. I was alive; I could tell that standing before me was a woman who was not. It was almost as if I sensed a danger and quickly made myself a defense; in seeing the thing I might be, I too early became its opposite.
    She liked me. This woman liked me; her husband liked me; it pleased her that he liked me. By the time he emerged from the room where he kept his money, to greet my father and me, Madame LaBatte had already told me to make myself at home, to regard her as if she were my own mother, to feel safe whenever she was near. She could not know what such words meant to me, to hear a woman say them to me. Of course I did not believe her, I did not fool myself, but I knew she meant them when she was saying those things to me, she really meant to say them. I liked her so very much, her shadow of her former self, so grateful for my presence, no longer alone with her prize and her defeat. He did not speak to me right away; he did not care that it was me and not someone else my father had asked him to accommodate. He liked the quiet greed of my father, and my father liked the simple greed in him. They were a match; one could betray the other at any time, perhaps at that moment they already had. Monsieur LaBatte was already a rich man, richer than my father. He had better connections; he had not wasted his time marrying a poor Carib