Jamaica Kincaid's lyrical West Indies patois echoes throughout this bittersweet tale of the father she never knew. As a carefree, womanizing chauffeur and taxi driver, MR. POTTER, as he is known to one and all, rambles through a life bereft of emotional entanglements or responsibilities.
We meet Mr. Potter's father, a man of similar inclinations, who leaves offspring scattered here and there, who causes a line to be drawn through Mr. Potter's name in the birth registry as testimony to his fatherlessness. And we meet his employers, both of whom are bits of the human flotsam and jetsam washed up on Antigua's shores, refugees from the mid-20th century upheavals in Europe. Kincaid's rhythmic prose draws a poignant portrait of the abyss between the white refugees and the islanders. You see through the disillusioned eye of the narrator that an understanding of their differences will never be reached yet they will coexist in some earthly limbo, never touching one another's lives.
Mr. Potter is introduced as he waits to pick up a new arrival to Antigua:
"And on that day Mr. Potter drove Mr. Shoul's car to the jetty to await a large steamer coming from some benighted place in the world, someplace far away where there had been upheavals and displacements and murder and terror. Mr. Potter is not unfamiliar with upheavals and displacements and murder and terror; his very existence in the world in which he lived had been made possible by such things, but he did not dwell on them any more than he could dwell on breathing. And so Mr. Potter met Dr. Weizenger.
"And who was Dr. Weizenger? And just who could answer that question accurately, or who could answer that question with any completeness? No one, really, not the same person who could give an accurate account of any single human being on this earth and all that they might be made of. Dr. Weizenger could not give an accurate account of himself, for an accurate account of himself would overwhelm him."
We meet Mr. Potter's woman friend, Annie, one of many but set apart in this story because she is the mother of the narrator, who tells this tale through an eloquent but deep seated rage. Beneath the musical phrases lie the dark and brooding history that is Antigua. Mr. Potter is only one link in a long chain of humans who have suffered injustice, violence, deprivation, illiteracy, and sorrow brought about by that fateful year of 1492.
The narrator revels in the knowledge that she alone of all of Mr. Potter's daughters --- whom she recognizes as sisters but never knows, identified only by their broad noses --- can read and write. Her mother and her mother's mothers, her father and her father's fathers could not --- indeed did not care to --- read and write. The narrator returns to Antigua after her father's death to tell this story with equal measures of distance and compassion.
Kincaid has shared the pain that is Antigua in several prior books: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER, the award winning MY BROTHER, AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER, ANNIE JOHN, LUCY, and MY GARDEN. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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