Edwidge Danticat for “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid

As girls, we may find it difficult to imagine our mothers – especially if they were strict Caribbean mothers – as anything other than the poised ladies who were determined to mold us. We struggle to imagine that they were little girls, flying kites, climbing trees, and playing hopscotch and marbles with their siblings. As mothers, some of us are so afraid for our daughters that we issue long lists of instructions that we hope will protect them from a hostile and threatening world. For mothers of black girls, warnings about promiscuity are at the top of the list, to prevent them from being viewed as “fast” and hypersexual.

These tensions are brilliantly depicted in Jamaica Kincaid’s dazzling one-sentence short story “Girl,” first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of Girl magazine. The New Yorker. This was Kincaid’s first piece of fiction for the magazine, to which she regularly contributed nonfiction, including several unsigned Talk of the Town pieces. In close-knit communities like the one in Antigua where Kincaid grew up—and, we assume, the mother and daughter in this story—reputation carries more weight than personal freedom, especially for girls. The daughter, who is being given a series of instructions, or rather, commands, may long to sing Between ustraditional folk songs of Antigua, in Sunday school, but she is probably better off, in the eyes of her mother and the community, singing the traditional hymns of the Anglican Church. During my childhood in Brooklyn, it was my father—who was a deacon in a Pentecostal church—who once told me that out of the over four hundred church members we attended, there would always be at least one person watching over me. This was proven true when someone told my father that he had seen me eating sugar cane in the middle of Flatbush Avenue on a hot summer day. “Don’t eat fruit in the street,” warns the mother in “The Girl.” “The flies will follow you.” The flies did not follow me, but the gaze of one did, which elicited a long reprimand from my mother.

“Girl,” as Kincaid admitted in a 2008 interview, is her most anthological work of writing. I first read it when I was a senior at Barnard College, not in this magazine but in an anthology of contemporary women writers. The story has been taught as a piece of “flash fiction” and, because of its refrain-like style, as a prose poem. I wasn’t a mother yet, and I read “The Girl” as a daughter. I was grateful for the two moments in the story where the daughter spoke up for herself (“But I don’t sing banna on Sundays“), interruptions that allow her to be as defiantly present as the daughters were in Kincaid’s later works, including her novels “Annie June,” “Lucy,” and “The Autobiography of My Mother.” In these and other books, the daughter never stops talking, making one wonder what kind of instructions, if any, she will pass on to her children.

However, the mother is not only trying to tame the shrew (“the slut she tends to become”); It provides a model for survival. When I was 15, my mother sent me to take cooking and etiquette lessons from a Haitian neighbor in our building. That same woman taught embroidery to twenty-somethings, who were working on tablecloths and brocade sheets for their future homes with their husbands. When I first read The Girl, I thought of it as a device of words. The mother’s advice covers everything from personal care to cleaning the house and gardening to how to behave with friends and strangers and how to make cold medicine and “get rid of a baby.” The daughter indicates with her rebuttal that she will pick and choose what to keep and what to ignore. The mother’s parting words concern “how to make ends meet”, which is ultimately one of life’s defining challenges, and how to choose bread, a type of food that someone else still has control over: “Always squeeze the bread to make sure it’s fresh.” “but What if the baker won’t let me touch the bread?” asks the daughter. For the mother, this is a rejection of all that has come before. “Do you mean to say that in the end you really will be the kind of woman whom the baker will not let near the bread?” she exclaimed. ♦

“This is how you love a man, and if that doesn’t work, there are other ways.”