Edwidge Danticat on Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”
As daughters, we can have a hard time imagining our mothers – especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers – as anything other than the staid women they are so determined to mold us into. We find it hard to imagine that they were little girls themselves, flying kites, climbing trees, playing hopscotch and marbles with their brothers and sisters. As mothers, some of us are so afraid for our daughters that we give them long lists of instructions that we hope will protect them from a hostile and threatening world. For mothers of black daughters, warnings about promiscuity are at the top of the list, to avoid them being seen as “fast” and hypersexualized.
These tensions are brilliantly captured in Jamaica Kincaid’s breathtaking one-sentence short story, “Girl,” first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. This was Kincaid’s first work of fiction at the magazine, to which she was already regularly contributing nonfiction, including many unsigned Talk of the Town pieces. In close-knit communities like Antigua where Kincaid – and, we assume, the mother and daughter in this story – grew up, reputation carries more weight than personal freedom, especially for girls. The girl, to whom a litany of instructions, or rather orders, are addressed, may want to sing Bennatraditional Antigua folk songs, in Sunday school, but she is probably better off, in her mother’s and community’s perception, singing the traditional hymns of the Anglican Church. Growing up in Brooklyn, it was my father, who was a deacon in the Pentecostal church, who once told me that among the more than four hundred members of the church we attended, there would always be at least one watching over me. This proved true when someone reported to my parents that I had been seen eating candy cane in the middle of Flatbush Avenue on a hot summer day. “Don’t eat fruit in the street,” warns “Girl’s” mother. “The flies will follow you.” The flies didn’t follow me, but someone’s gaze did, which earned me lengthy scoldings from my mother.
“Girl,” as Kincaid acknowledged in a 2008 interview, is his most anthologized writing. I first read it when I was a student at Barnard College, not in this magazine but in an anthology of contemporary women writers. The story was taught as both a piece of “flash fiction” and, because of its refrain style, as a prose poem. I was not yet a mother at the time and I read “Girl” as a girl. I was grateful for the two moments in the story where the girl speaks up to defend herself (“but I don’t sing bena on Sunday“), interruptions that allow her to be defiantly present in the manner of the girls in Kincaid’s later works, including her novels “Annie John,” “Lucy” and “The Autobiography of My Mother.” In these and other books, the girl never stops talking, making one wonder what kind of instructions, if any, she will pass on to her own children.
The mother, however, is not just trying to tame a shrew (“the slut you are so determined to become”); it offers a model of survival. When I was fifteen, my mother sent me to take cooking and etiquette lessons from a Haitian neighbor in our building. This same woman taught embroidery to young people in their twenties who were working on their trousseaux – frilly tablecloths and sheets for their future home with their husbands. When I first read “Girl,” I thought of it as a bunch of words. The mother’s advice covers everything from personal hygiene, to cleaning the house and gardening, to how to behave around friends and strangers and how to prepare medicine for colds and “to throw a child.” The girl indicates through her rebuttals that she will choose what to keep and what to ignore. The mother’s parting words concern “how to make ends meet”, which is after all one of life’s defining challenges, and how to choose bread, a kind of food that someone else still controls: “always squeeze the bread to be sure it is fresh”. “But what if the baker won’t let me touch the bread?” asks the daughter. For the mother, it is a rejection of everything that has gone before. “You mean,” she exclaims, “that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman the baker doesn’t let near the bread? ♦
“This is how you love a man, and if that doesn’t work, there are other ways.”
