passages from Jamaica Kincaid's "Lucy"
“In books I had read–from time to time, when the plot called for it–someone would suffer from homesickness. A person would leave a not very nice situation and go somewhere else, somewhere a lot better, and then long to go back where it was not very nice. How impatient I would become with such a person, for it would feel that I was in a not very nice situation myself, and how I wanted to go somewhere else. But now I, too, felt that I wanted to be back where I came from. If I had to draw a picture of my future then, it would have been a large gray patch surrounded by black, blacker, blackest.” (pg. 6)
“An ocean stood between me and the place I came from, but would it have made a difference if it had been a teacup of water? I could not go back.” (pg. 10)
“"You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.” How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable? I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letter, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.“ (pg. 90-91)
"Mariah was beyond doubt or confidence. I thought, Things must have always gone her way, and not just for her but everybody she has ever known from eternity; she has never had to doubt, and so she has never had to grow confident; the right thing always happens to her; the thing she wants to happen happens. Again I thought, How does a person get to be that way?” (pg. 26)
“Mariah says, "I have Indian blood in me,” and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?“ (pg. 40-41)
”…do you realize that at ten years of age I had to learn by heart a long poem about some flowers I would not see in life until I was nineteen?“ (pg. 30)
"I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem. That night after I had recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I was buried deep underneath them and was never seen again.” (pg. 18)
