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jamaiCa kinCaid
“Girl” (Fiction)
Jamaica Kincaid’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction frequently reflect on
race, colonialism, adolescence, gender, and the weight of family relationships
and personal history. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, in
1949, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973 partly to avoid a nega-
tive response from her family, who disapproved of her writing. She moved to
New York City at 17 and worked as a nanny. She began college but dropped out
to write for Ingenue, a teen magazine, as well as the Village Voice. In 1985, she
became a staff writer for the New Yorker, where she worked until 1996. Her
first published work of fiction, “Girl,” appeared in the magazine in 1978. Kincaid
credits New Yorker editor William Shawn for “show[ing] me what my voice
was. . . . He made me feel that what I thought, my inner life, my thoughts as I
organized them, were impor tant.” The author of Annie John (1985), My Brother
(1997), Among the Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005), and several other
books, Kincaid is a professor at Claremont McKenna College.
Background on slavery and colonialism in the West Indies Europeans
brought Africans to the Caribbean islands in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to work as slaves, primarily on sugar plantations. In her nonfiction
book A Small Place, Kincaid writes searingly of her native island ’s dark colonial
history, the “large ships filled up with human cargo.” The human beings, she
says, were “forced to work under conditions that were cruel and inhuman, they
were beaten, they were murdered, they were sold, their children were taken
from them and these separations lasted forever. . . .” Although the British
outlawed slavery in the 1830s, blacks remained the largest percentage of the
population in the British Caribbean colonies. Antigua remained a British colony
until 1981.
Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap;
wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry;
don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet
oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cot-
ton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it,
because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight
before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna* in Sunday school?; always
eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on
Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on be-
coming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-
rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street — flies will
follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school;
* Eds. note — Form of popular music.
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