The Autobiography of My Mother Read Free Page B

in him. He took my letters to our teacher. In my letters to my father I had said, “Everyone hates me, only you love me,” but I had not truly meant these letters to be sent to my father, and they were not really addressed to my father; if I had been asked then if I really felt that everyone hated me, that only my father loved me, I would not have known how to answer. But my teacher’s reaction to my letters, those small scribblings, was a tonic to me. She believed the “everybody” I referred to was herself, and only herself. She said my words were a lie, libelous, that she was ashamed of me, that she was not afraid of me. My teacher said all this to me in front of the other pupils at my school. They thought I was humiliated and they felt joy seeing me brought so low. I did not feel humiliated at all. I felt something. I could see her teeth were crooked and yellow, and I wondered how they had got that way. Large half-moons of perspiration stained the underarms of her dress, and I wondered if when I became a woman I, too, would perspire so profusely and how it would smell. Behind her shoulder on the wall was a large female spider carrying its sac of eggs, and I wanted to reach out and crush it with the bare palm of my hand, because I wondered if it was the same kind of spider or a relative of the spider that had sucked saliva from the corner of my mouth the night before as I lay sleeping, leaving three small, painful bites. There was a drizzle of rain outside, I could hear the sound of it on the galvanized roof.
    She sent my letters to my father, to show me that she had a clear conscience. She said that I had mistaken her scoldings, which were administered out of love for me, as an expression of hatred, and that this showed I was guilty of the sin of pride. And she said that she hoped I would learn to tell the difference between the two: love and hate. To this day, I have tried to tell the difference between the two, and I cannot, because often they wear so much the same face. When she said this, I did look in her face to see if I could tell whether it was true that she loved me and to see if her words, which so often seemed to be a series of harsh blows, were really an expression of love. Her face to me then did not appear loving, but perhaps I was mistaken—perhaps I was too young to judge, too young to know.
    I did not immediately recognize what had happened, what I had done: however unconsciously, however without direction, I had, through the use of some words, changed my situation; I had perhaps even saved my life. To speak of my own situation, to myself or to others, is something I would always do thereafter. It is in this way that I came to be so extremely conscious of myself, so interested in my own needs, so interested in fulfilling them, aware of my grievances, aware of my pleasures. From this unfocused, childish expression of pain, my life was changed and I took note of it.
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    My father came to fetch me wearing the uniform of a jailer. To him this had no meaning, it was without significance. He was returning to Roseau from the village of St. Joseph, where he had been carrying out his duties as a policeman. I was not told that he would arrive on that day; I had not expected him. I returned from school and saw him standing at the final bend in the road that led to the house in which I lived. I was surprised to see him, but I would admit this only to myself; I did not let anyone know. The reason I had missed my father so—the reason he no longer came to the house in which I lived, bringing his dirty clothes and taking away clean ones—was that he had married again. I had been told about this, but it was a mystery to me what it might mean; it was not unlike the first time I had been told that the world was round; I thought, What can it mean, why should it be? My father had married again. He took my hand, he said something, he spoke in English, his mouth began to