The Autobiography of My Mother Read Online Free PDF Page B

a small boy to his death was the belief of the illegitimate, the poor, the low. I believed in that apparition then and I believe in it now.
    *   *   *
    Who was my father? Not just who was he to me, his child—but who was he? He was a policeman, but not an ordinary policeman; he inspired more than the expected amount of fear for someone in his position. He made appointments to see people, men, at his house, the place where he lived with his family—this entity of which I was now a sort of member—and he would make these people wait for hours; at times he never showed up at all. They waited for him, sometimes sitting on a stone that was just inside the gate of the yard, sometimes pacing back and forth from inside the yard to outside the yard, causing the gate to creak, and this always made his wife cross, and she would complain to these people, speaking rudely to them, the rudeness way out of proportion to the annoyance of the creaky gate. They waited for him without complaint, falling asleep standing up, falling asleep as they sat on the ground, flies drinking from the saliva that leaked out of the corners of their open mouths. They waited, and when he did not show up they left and returned the next day, hoping to see him; sometimes they did, sometimes they did not. He suffered no consequences for his behavior; he just treated people in this way. He did not care, or so I thought at first—but of course he did care; it was well thought out, this way he had of causing suffering; he was a part of a whole way of life on the island which perpetuated pain.
    At the time I came to live with him, he had just mastered the mask that he wore as a face for the remainder of his life: the skin taut, the eyes small and drawn back as though deep inside his head, so that it wasn’t possible to get a clue to him from them, the lips parted in a smile. He seemed trustworthy. His clothes were always well ironed, clean, spotless. He did not like people to know him very well; he tried never to eat food in the presence of strangers, or in the presence of people who were afraid of him.
    Who was he? I ask myself this all the time, to this day. Who was he? He was a tall man; his hair was red; his eyes were gray. His wife, the woman he married after my mother died while giving birth to me, was the only daughter of a thief, a man who grew bananas and coffee and cocoa on his own land (these crops were sold to someone else, a European man who exported them). She came to my father with no money, but her father made possible many connections for him. They bought other people’s land together, they divided the profits in a way satisfactory to them both, they never quarreled, but they did not seem to be close friends; my father did not have that, a close friend. When he met the daughter of his sometime partner in crime I do not know. It might have been a night full of stars, or a night with no light at all from above, or a day with the sun big in the sky or so bleak it felt sad to be alive. I do not know and I do not want to find out. Her voice had a harsh, heated quality to it; if there is a language that would make her voice sound musical and so invite desire, I do not yet know of it.
    My father must have loved me then, but he never told me so. I never heard him say those words to anyone. He wanted me to keep going to school, he made sure of this, but I do not know why. He wanted me to go to school beyond the time that most girls were in school. I went to school past the age of thirteen. No one told me what I should do with myself after I was finished with school. It was a great sacrifice that I should go to school, because as his wife often pointed out, I would have been more useful at home. He gave me books to read. He gave me a life of John Wesley, and as I read it I wondered what the life of a man so full of spiritual tumult and piety had to do with me. My father had become a Methodist, he attended church every