Jamaica’s Transformation: Henry Louis Gates Jr. Explores

“Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid’s first published short story, dropped in June 1978 in The New Yorker. Back then, that magazine was my summer escape, devoured cover-to-cover in my parents’ backyard. I stumbled upon “Girl” without even clocking the author’s name. Fresh off submitting my doctoral thesis at Cambridge, I was on pins and needles waiting to hear if I’d be teaching English and Afro-American studies at Yale. Leafing through those glossy pages was a welcome distraction. I expected literary flair, maybe a bit of a thrill – never did I imagine a story that would blow my mind about what fiction could be.

Cambridge wasn’t exactly a hub for Black lit. African and African American literature? Non-existent in the curriculum. Dissertations on living writers, especially Black ones? Unthinkable. Wole Soyinka, who’d later win the Nobel Prize, was denied a visiting spot because African literature wasn’t considered *English* literature. Instead, we dissected English and American poetry and Greek tragedies.
I was slated to teach a class on the Afro-American novel, and my reading list was…sparse. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer—that was it. So, I dove in headfirst, starting with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula. Then came James Alan McPherson, Ishmael Reed’s wild satire, Leon Forrest, Charles Johnson, Gayl Jones, David Bradley, and Reed’s take on the slave narrative. Even as a newbie, it was clear: African American literature was having a moment, a surge of fresh voices bursting onto the scene.

Each writer felt like they were building on Ellison’s literary modernism. Ellison’s protagonist writes himself into existence, shedding forced identities. Wright, on the other hand, used third-person narration for static protagonists doomed by racism and capitalism. In Wright’s world, Black politics are embedded in the form itself – aesthetic value tied to the message. It’s no wonder Black aesthetic critics like Addison Gayle championed Wright over Ellison, a slight Ellison never forgot.

Growing up in the Sixties, I watched Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for integration give way to Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power Movement. By the early Seventies, Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, led by figures like Amiri Baraka, were at their peak. Baraka and his crew weren’t fans of Ellison, whose “invisible” protagonist lives in a hole; they saw him as anti-revolutionary, the opposite of Wright’s visceral, action-driven character. (Let’s not forget that Wright’s character accidentally kills a white girl, then dismembers her.)
Graduate school introduced me to a new wave of African American writers, especially Black women like Morrison and Alice Walker. They cared about form, aesthetics, and self-expression just as much as Black liberation or fighting racism. By the time I finished my dissertation, critics were searching for a new language to describe this exciting literature.

I’ll never forget a conversation with Eleanor Traylor, a scholar and friend of Morrison, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She told me it was time for Black writers to “assume their propositions, and stop feeling the need to claim them.” In other words, make Blackness the default and write about being human while *also* being Black—or not! Stop pleading our case, refuting racist stereotypes, and just make art. It hit me hard. Leave the revolution to the politicians and activists.

That’s the mindset I had when I discovered “Girl”:

This is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?

I was floored. This wasn’t Native Son. Was the author Black? *Could* they be Black? She refused to say outright. There were hints, like pumpkin fritters, salt fish, and “benna,” but you had to look it up to understand. This author wasn’t pandering to anyone, not even Caribbean readers. The world she created was complete within itself.
Only the first name, Jamaica, convinced me she might be a Black woman. For a second, I wondered if she was white, throwing us off the scent. Could someone actually be named Jamaica?

Jamaica’s way of assuming the Blackness of her characters without spelling it out—like white writers assume whiteness—felt like a game-changer. (Soyinka does this too, his characters are primarily Yoruba from Nigeria.)

The big three of African American literature after the war—Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—broke through racial barriers long after the Harlem Renaissance. For them, “Blackness” was *the* subject. Negro literature was by and about Negroes. (Mostly men, though Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, a protofeminist novel, was ignored then but later reclaimed by Black feminist critics like Mary Helen Washington.)
On page one of Native Son, Wright paints the scene: “light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow space between two iron beds, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands.” (And his memoir was called, of course, Black Boy.) Baldwin, Wright’s protégé, made race clear early in Go Tell It on the Mountain, describing the members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized:

a round, black man named Deacon Braithwaite…a genial, well-fed man with a face like a darker moon…. [John] watched the black skin glisten while they lifted up their arms and fell on their faces before the Lord.

And Ellison’s whole concept in Invisible Man hinges on the inability to tell one’s own story.
To be fair, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison didn’t have much choice. They wrote during Jim Crow, the lowest point in American race relations. It’s not surprising that their characters’ Blackness was clearly marked, given what was politically demanded of Black literature then. Look at Morrison, Jamaica’s predecessor, whose Song of Solomon came out in 1977. She uses “black” to describe her characters around forty times.

In November 1983, The New Yorker published Jamaica’s “The Circling Hand,” one of my absolute favorite short stories, showcasing that assumed proposition. It’s about growing up and the adult world crashing into childhood, breaking the bond between Annie John (a fictionalized Jamaica) and her mother. The story begins with a memory of them bathing together. Later, Annie comes home early from school and sees something between her parents that makes her a stranger to her mother and herself:

When I got to our house, I rushed into the yard and called out to her, but no answer came. I then walked into the house. At first, I didn’t hear anything. Then I heard sounds coming from the direction of my parents’ room. My mother must be in there, I thought. When I got to the door, I could see that my mother and father were lying in their bed. It didn’t interest me what they were doing—only that my mother’s hand was on the small of my father’s back and that it was making a circular motion. But her hand! It was white and bony, as if it had long been dead and had been left out in the elements. It seemed not to be her hand, and yet it could only be her hand, so well did I know it. It went around and around in the same circular motion, and I looked at it as if I would never see anything else in my life again. If I were to forget everything else in the world, I could not forget her hand as it looked then. I could also make out that the sounds I had heard were her kissing my father’s ears and his mouth and his face. I looked at them for I don’t know how long.

That fall, I got a chaired professorship at Cornell. I was connecting Invisible Man and Mumbo Jumbo through “signifying” in Black vernacular—how Black writers riff on each other, like links in a chain, representing “Blackness.” Black writers read and revise each other, often pretending they didn’t, claiming white fathers over Black ones, like Ellison did to downplay Wright’s influence.

For Wright, all Negroes were Black. Morrison, on the other hand, explored the range of browns in our skin. (Despite Ellison’s unpopularity back then, many later Black writers—Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Jamaica herself—followed his modernism. Wright, championed by Black Aesthetic critics, has fewer descendants, though I’d count Sapphire, Kiese Laymon, NWA, and Chief Keef among them.)

Before Jamaica, no Black writer had zoomed in on a tiny moment to reveal the complexities of being human—like the inevitable distance between mother and daughter in “The Circling Hand”—without tying it to Black-white relations. It had never been done.

That’s what “The Circling Hand” is about: the emotion between mother and daughter. Not a Black mother and daughter on some hard-to-pronounce Caribbean island. It’s about itself—language, first and foremost. That’s both remarkable and revolutionary. “We must write less of issues that are particular and more of feelings that are general,” poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote in 1861. “We are blessed with hearts and brains that compass more than ourselves in our present plight.”

Then came Jamaica: a striking, irreverent, generous voice. She blends reporting and personal experience with history, showing how the outside world impacts the inside. “Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please don’t come,” she wrote in a Robinson Crusoe introduction. She laughs at what’s meant to scare her. “Once,” she wrote in Rolling Stone in 1977:

as I was walking down a street and just about to pass by a man, he said to me, “Hey sugar, you coming at me like a fresh baked cake.” When I didn’t say anything but kept on walking he crept up behind me and whispered in my ear, “Speak Devil, speak.” I looked at him and I laughed out loud.

I wanted more. I wanted to meet her, to talk about her work. In 1986–1987, my colleagues and I invited her to Cornell. I remember she loved our garden. When I moved to Duke in 1989, I invited her again. And when I was hired to rebuild Afro-American Studies at Harvard, she was our first long-term appointment. I wanted to study and celebrate great Black writing, and who better to turn to?
We’ve become friends. After I published Colored People in 1994, Jamaica invited me to give a joint reading at her synagogue in Vermont. And when my wife and I bought our house in Cambridge, Jamaica designed our garden.

Gardens are now a major theme for her, along with race, racism, colonialism, and literature itself. These themes connect to the maternal: biological, colonial, social. Her great subject is her mother, Annie Victoria Richardson, who gave birth to Jamaica (Elaine Potter Richardson) in Antigua on May 25, 1949.

Jamaica learned she was born out of wedlock because she was christened on a Thursday, not a Sunday, due to English colonial practice. Annie was thirty, “old” by Antiguan standards (Jamaica suspects she had abortions).
Annie was born in Dominica. Jamaica’s father, Roderick Potter, was an Antiguan taxi driver she barely knew. She doesn’t know how her parents met. “I do know,” she wrote me:

that when she was 7 months pregnant with me, she took money he was saving up to open his own business and left him. He seemed to have held me responsible for that and along with other reasons (Colonial Law, for one) his name does not appear on my birth certificate. The column where his name should be has a line in black ink drawn through it.

Jamaica was raised in St. John’s by her mother and stepfather, David Drew. Annie doted on Jamaica, teaching her to read and making sure she got an education. Annie became a leading character in Jamaica’s work, from Annie John to Mr. Potter. In Jamaica’s nonfiction, “mother” appears over three hundred times, “my mother” over two hundred.

Jamaica’s relationship with her mother changed after her three brothers were born. Annie lost interest in her, caring for her sons and ill husband instead. Jamaica resented being pulled out of school to help at home and then sent to the U.S. as an au pair, ordered to send money home (which she refused).

In My Brother, the narrator’s mother burns her books in a rage. We feel the tension in that relationship. “Then again,” Jamaica wrote in Harper’s in 2009, “I am always thinking of my mother; I believe every action of a certain kind that I make is completely influenced by her, completely infused with her realness, her existence in my life.” Their estrangement—Jamaica didn’t see her mother for twenty years, until her daughter, Annie, was born—remains a source of deep grief and the foundation of her work.

Jamaica’s self-examination extends to her other themes, even gardening. Following a New Yorker tradition, she wrote “In the Garden” from 1992 to 1996. She published My Garden (Book) in 1991, Among Flowers in 2005, and An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children with Kara Walker last year.
Her gardens are full of Hibiscus moscheutos and hidden dangers. In My Brother, red ants attack her brother on his first day. “It is no surprise to me,” she writes in “The Disturbances of the Garden” (2020):

that my affection for the garden, including its most disturbing attributes, its most violent implications and associations, is intertwined with my mother. As a child, I did not know myself or the world I inhabited without her. She is the person who gave me and taught me the Word.

Jamaica explores racism, colonialism, and appropriation with intimacy, calling the reader in without the scaffolding of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Her work is modest, never grandstanding. It gets to the heart of motherhood, childhood, and femininity under colonialism by showing the simple struggle to be human. That’s why Jamaica hasn’t needed to mark her characters by race.

Her irreverence, humanity, vulnerability, and modesty add up to something special: literary, not political. It’s not even secondarily political, even when addressing colonialism. The fight against racism, sexism, and colonialism never overshadows the urgency of being alive.
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described a “double-consciousness,” forced on Black Americans by “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” It’s a key concept in African American literature, from James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man to Morrison’s Beloved. Double-consciousness is caused by anti-Black racism, which “yields [the American Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
In “Biography of a Dress” (1992), Jamaica depicts a primal separation, from herself, through her mother, as her two-year-old self tries to recover from having her ears pierced with hot thorns. Was that pain intentional, a passing on of childbirth pain? Or was it

meant to express hostility or aggression toward me (but without meaning to and without knowing that it was possible to mean to). For days afterward my earlobes were swollen and covered with a golden crust (which might have glistened in the harsh sunlight, but I can only imagine that now), and the pain of my earlobes must have filled up all that made up my entire being then and the pain of my earlobes must have been unbearable, because it was then that was the first time that I separated myself from myself, and I became two people (two small children then, I was two years old), one having the experience, the other observing the one having the experience.

This self-division and Jamaica’s awareness of it—because of her mother—gave her a voice and ultimately liberated her work.