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 Bloom's Modern Critical Views
African-American G.K. Chesterton Miguel de Cervantes
Poets: Volume I Gwendolyn Brooks Milan Kundera
African-American Hans Christian Nathaniel Hawthorne
Poets: Volume II Andersen Norman Mailer
Albert Camus Henry David Thoreau Octavio Paz
Aldous Huxley Herman Melville Paul Auster
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Hermann Hesse Philip Roth
Alice Walker H.G. Wells Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Women Hispanic-American Ray Bradbury
Poets: 1650–1950 Writers Richard Wright
Arthur Miller Homer Robert Browning
Asian-American Honoré de Balzac Robert Frost
Writers Jamaica Kincaid Robert Hayden
The Bible James Joyce Robert Louis
The Brontës Jane Austen Stevenson
Carson McCullers Jay Wright Salman Rushdie
Charles Dickens J.D. Salinger Sinclair Lewis
Christopher Marlowe Jean-Paul Sartre Stephen Crane
Contemporary Poets John Donne and Stephen King
C.S. Lewis the 17th-Century Sylvia Plath
Dante Aligheri Metaphysical Poets Tennessee Williams
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Fyodor Dostoevsky Marcel Proust William Wordsworth
Gabriel García Margaret Atwood Zora Neale Hurston
Márquez Mark Twain
Geoffrey Chaucer Mary Wollstonecraft
George Eliot Shelley
George Orwell Maya Angelou
 Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

JA M A I CA K I N CA I D
New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Jamaica Kincaid, New Edition

Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom
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Jamaica Kincaid / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. – Updated ed.
p. cm. – (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9812-7
1. Kincaid, Jamaica–Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.

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 Contents

Editor’s Note vii

Introduction 1
Harold Bloom

A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 3

Moira Ferguson

Caribbean Writers and Caribbean Language:

A Study of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John 23
Merle Hodge

Authorizing the Slut in

Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River 31
Antonia MacDonald-Smythe

Jamaica Kincaid’s Writing

and the Maternal-Colonial Matrix 53
Laura Niesen de Abruna

Under English, Obeah English:

Jamaica Kincaid’s New Language 63
K. B. Conal Byrne

The Daffodil Gap: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy 79

Irline François

Death and the Diaspora Writer:

Hybridity and Mourning in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid 97
Ramón E. Soto-Crespo
vi Contents

Imaginary Homelands in
Jamaica Kincaid’s Narratives of Development 127
Maria Helena Lima

In the Beginning There Was Death:

Spiritual Desolation and the Search for Self
in Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother 141
Elizabeth J. West

“Like Him and His Own Father before Him,

I Have a Line Drawn through Me”:
Imagining the Life of the Absent Father in Mr. Potter 159
J. Brooks Bouson

Escaping the Colonizer’s Whip: The Binary Discipline 175

Colena Gardner-Corbett

“What If He Did Not Have a Sister

[Who Lived in the United States]?”:
Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother as Remittance Text 189
Kezia Page

Chronology 207
Contributors 209
Bibliography 211
Acknowledgments 217
Index 219
 Editor’s Note

My Introduction praises Jamaica Kincaid’s prose poetry and her skill at

fantasia, which places me at odds with all the contributors to this volume,
who value her primarily upon an ideological basis.
It is difficult for me to distinguish clearly between the dozen essayists,
and I am too old not to speak my mind. Their targets are the usual suspects:
colonialism, maternalism, racism, economic exploitation. All the essayists are
virtuous, and I respect their moral intensity. Here they are: this is how and
why Jamaica Kincaid is now esteemed.

vii
 HAROLD BLOOM

Introduction

Most of the published criticism of Jamaica Kincaid has stressed her political
and social concerns, somewhat at the expense of her literary qualities. This is
inevitable at this time, but fashions change, and Kincaid will not always be
esteemed primarily upon ideological grounds. Her second book, Annie John
(1985), so far remains her best (in my judgment), but this writer is likely
to go beyond her earlier work. “Girl” (1984) is one of her briefest stories;
I have commented upon it elsewhere and return to it here both because of
my affection for its prose and also because it qualifies the critical emphases
upon her writing. Ideologues insist that Kincaid has broken with all Western
canonical standards, which they associate with such patriarchal malefactors as
Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. Were this true, Kincaid’s audience would
consist of academic feminists and postcolonial rebels. Since her public is
rather larger than that, it is likely that Kincaid’s fictions, however original,
extend canonical traditions even while attempting to subvert them, which
is one of the oldest and most prevalent of literary procedures. Here is my
favorite paragraph from “Girl”:

This is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra
tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure
it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when
you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you
sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how
you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you

1
2 Harold Bloom

smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to
someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea;
this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table
for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for
lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how you
behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and
this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned
you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with
you own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not
a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch
something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not
be a blackbird at all . . .

The fantasy narratives we associate with the literature of childhood frequently

have employed a prose poetry akin to Kincaid’s highly evocative chant. The
girl’s voice, speaking to itself, repeats the oppressive mother’s litany of
admonitions, with the rhythms of repetition shrewdly working to protest
the mother’s authority. This mode of travesty is fundamental to much of
children’s literature, whenever the relatively helpless child has to sustain
impositions and injunctions. Kincaid’s style here is highly individual, but
it recalls many narratives in which a young girl at once submits to and yet
undermines parental codes of behavior. In some ways, Twain’s Huck Finn
provides a large analogue, since he adopts the language of the adult world
while keeping firmly to a stance all his own. Kincaid’s intricate blend of
overt submission and implicit defiance repeats (with great skill) immemorial
Western modes in which a child’s voice wins out over the stale continuities
of adult authority.
Kincaid’s fierce protest against “touristic” values has its own value and
integrity, but would not engage much of her readership if it were not allied to
a considerable art of storytelling, and to a prose poetry capable of sustained
eloquence. Passionate sincerity, like ideological correctness, is not in itself
a literary virtue. Fortunately, Kincaid transcends many critical accounts of
her achievement to date. She is a stylist and a visionary, and imaginatively is
essentially a fantasist. So far, her best work has emerged from recollections
of childhood and of her complex relationship to her mother. Her recent
meditations upon gardening have implicit in them a new development in her
work, which her admirers, common readers and critics together, are likely to
welcome.
 MOIRA FERGUSON

A Small Place:
Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion

Free is how you is from the start, an’ when it look different you got to
move, just move, an’ when you movin’ say that it is a natural freedom
that make you move.
—George Lamming, quoted in C. L. R. James,
“The Making of the Caribbean People,” p. 189

I n Annie John and A Small Place Jamaica Kincaid intertwines discussions

of gender relations with colonial and postcolonial rebellion. Annie John
(1985) narrates eight stories, about Annie John’s childhood and burgeoning
womanhood from ten to seventeen years of age on the island of Antigua
in the eastern Caribbean, a British Crown colony at the time.1 In A Small
Place (1988) Jamaica Kincaid’s political expose glosses and intertextualizes
Annie John;2 it represents a version of Annie John’s “revisionary struggle” as
Jamaica Kincaid reexamines conflicts that Annie John intimated but could
not identify.
Annie John opens on Antigua roughly a year after the first major race
riots, precipitated by discrimination against Caribbean immigrants, erupted
in London in 1958. In contrast to events at the metropolitan center, Antigua
seems peaceful, at least on the surface. Jamaica Kincaid is open about the fact
that Annie John has a personal dimension and has stated that the feelings in

From Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East
Caribbean Connections. ©1993 by Columbia University Press.

3
4 Moira Ferguson

it are autobiographical.3 Written as a polemic, A Small Place betrays no such

ambiguity about its autobiographical content.
Both texts extend the discussion of Antigua since Jamaica Kincaid was
born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. Johns, Antigua, in 1949. Her father
worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker; her mother was a homemaker and
a well-known political activist. At seventeen Elaine Richardson left Antigua
for the United States and eventually became a staff writer for the New Yorker
as Jamaica Kincaid.4
Annie John records a maturing girl’s experiences growing up in an
artisanal family similar to Jamaica Kincaid’s, in the midst of the seemingly
paradisal world of Antigua. Annie John, however, quirkily obsesses on death.
This fascination that Annie John initially expresses marks certain subterranean
debates as she struggles with adolescence and colonial reality. In partial
response to her rebellious nature and as her mother tries to encourage a more
independent existence, Annie John succeeds well in school but refuses to bow
to authority. Continually negotiating contradictory positions from the center
to the margins and back, sometimes occupying both spots simultaneously,
she fuses sexual and cultural innocence with a finely honed bravado and self-
justifying duplicities.

Gender Rel at ions

Annie John sublimates feelings of abandonment into conflicted bitterness

toward her mother, her dislike magnifying as she mentally augments the gap
between them. In her torment she envisions her mother as a manipulative
tyrant, characterizing her as a crocodile one moment and in the next as the
prey of murderous snakes—overlapping projections of her frustration. The
nurturing of hatred, a fear of alienation, and a craving to return to intimate
bonding plague her by turn. She secretly harbors a self-conception so
monstrous that she has induced a desire for separation in her mother; this
negative self-image further indicates that she projects a growing self-hatred.
In another sense Annie John displaces onto her mother an antagonistic
representation of her agonized feelings of rejection that in turn engender
psychic fragmentation. Since her birth she has lived in her mother’s shadow and
now that she has to fend for herself in her own spotlight, as it were, she seeks
shade, assuming she cannot live up to her mother’s level of competence; since
she cannot conceptualize her mother’s cultural construction, she ceaselessly
tries to fashion a subjectivity in opposition. All of this she internalizes.
When Annie John reads aloud to her classmates about idyllic times
spent with her mother vacationing on Rat Island as a small child, she alters
the story to hide current mother–daughter disaffection. She confides her
pain to the reader: “I placed the old days’ version before my classmates
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 5

because, I thought, I couldn’t bear to show my mother in a bad light before

people who hardly knew her. But the real truth was that I couldn’t bear
to have anyone see how deep in disfavor I was with my mother” (p. 29).
Notably, the paradisal story involves water and simple childhood pleasures
as if she were not only retelling a favorite story but imagining, too, a return
to primal, undifferentiated harmony.5 In Hélène Cixous’s terms she desires
her mother’s milk.6
Deliberately shunning and depriving herself of a female model, fixating
on her mother as treacherous, she molds herself into an exciting, desirable
subject who obeys and disobeys at will. Her unconscious battle with social
conditioning, an already constructed subjectivity, explains much of the
subsequent tension. In an extensive account of the fight between herself
and her mother over dominance and autonomy, symbolized by marbles, the
issue emerges as palpably gender-specific when her mother tells her, “I am
so glad you are not one of those girls who like to play marbles” (p. 61). She
is trying to create a lady-like daughter. In direct defiance Annie John stays
behind after school and arranges to play with the dirty, unruly, nameless Red
Girl who punches, then kisses her in an adolescent sexual merry-go-round.
She admires the Red Girl’s nonconformity and her apparent ability to act
as she pleases; she constitutes an alter ego of sorts, certainly a projection of
who Annie John would like to be if only to anger her mother.7 Annie John
eventually succeeds in becoming a champion marbles player against express
maternal wishes, a thinly veiled metaphor for personal power and successful
experimentation.
Annie John secretes her marbles under the bed away from her mother’s
prying eyes and, by faking homework assignments, she meets clandestinely
with the Red Girl. To please herself and trick her mother, she steals money to
buy seductive gifts for her friend: “multi-colored grosgrain ribbon or a pair of
ring combs studded with rhinestones, or a pair of artificial rosebuds suitable to
wear at the waist of a nice dress . . . I simply loved giving her these things . . .
it was a pleasure to see they [the parents] didn’t know everything” (p. 64).
Playing marbles is a self-directed, symbolic apprenticeship at a time
when she already loathes being apprenticed to a seamstress picked out
by her mother.8 Disobeying and abandoning her mother emotionally—a
qualified revenge, a victory over surveillance—she becomes an artist in her
prowess at marbles and in her appreciation of their appearance. At one level
the marbles are embryos of the breasts all her adolescent female friends
covet, but they are also beautiful orbs of defiance that proliferate; they have
to be concealed, are exchangeable and always desirable. At another level
marbles resemble the stolen library books Annie John conceals, treasures
that signify rebellion against constraining gender roles, a personal power
gained by outwitting authority, and an obsession with knowledge that
6 Moira Ferguson

rivals her previous obsession with death. By stowing books and marbles
away she breaks from the adult world and begins to build an alternate
way of knowing and doing. Declining to be a gracious object, a lady for
the community to admire, or even mother’s helper around the house, she
constructs herself against the cultural grain through subterfuge. She will
not and cannot renounce desire and self-determination.
At other points Annie John edges toward even more overt intimations
of subversion, agony, and sexuality. As early as chapter 2, tellingly entitled
“The Circling Hand,” the twelve-year-old describes her relationship with
her parents and their relationship with each other. She recalls old events
that wounded her parents: accounts of her mother arguing with her father
(Annie John’s grandfather), then leaving the childhood home in Dominica,
of Annie John’s own father waking up in bed with his grandmother dead
beside him. Annie John also notes how she once came home from church to
discover her parents “lying in their bed” (p. 30). To announce her presence,
she aggressively rattles knives and forks, vociferously denying how much this
scene affects her. Nevertheless, she obsesses on her mother’s hand in a sex-
and death-related fantasy that unduly fascinates her; she imagines the hand
that caresses her father’s back to be that of a skeleton.
These inchoate emotions, stemming from unconscious jealousy, even
a buried matricidal wish, explode in a painful remark to her mother as she
arranges the cutlery just after the scene. Her mother “looked at me, . . . and
walked away. From the back, she looked small and funny. She carried her
hands limp at her sides. I was sure I could never let those hands touch me
again; I was sure I could never let her kiss me again. All that was finished”
(pp. 31–32). Minutes later she disrupts a weekly arrangement. She declines
a quiet father–daughter harmony they enjoy on their Sunday walk together:
“On our walk, my father tried to hold my hand, but I pulled myself away
from him, doing it in such a way that he would think I felt too big for that
now” (p. 32). She masks and compensates for her anger and insecurity by
designating proximity as her mother’s privilege. Parental sexuality bothers
the adolescent child; her entry into adolescence and the foreign feelings
this generates transform the stirrers of these feelings into “alien parents.”9
The next day she figuratively transfers her overweening maternal love to her
friend Gwen, whom she has met at school: “At the end of the day, Gwen
and I were in love, and so we walked home arm in arm together. When I
got home, my mother greeted me with the customary kiss and inquiries.
I told her about my day, going out of my way to provide pleasing details,
leaving out, of course, any mention at all of Gwen and my overpowering
feelings for her” (p. 33).
Eventually Annie John becomes severely ill. Feeling deprived of
maternal care she forgoes all sustenance, akin to stressing self-sufficiency
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 7

and denial. Yet her refusal affirms her impotence, keeps sexual growth at
bay, and attracts hyperattentiveness as she becomes temporarily anorexic.10
During this prolonged, cryptic illness she experiences unfamiliar sensations
after she becomes drenched in bed. As her parents bathe Annie John and
change her bedclothes, her distressed father, dressed in his underwear,
holds her in his lap:

Through the folds of my nightie, I could feel the hair on his legs,
and as I moved my legs back and forth against his the hair on
his legs made a swoosh, swoosh sound, like a brush being rubbed
against wood. A funny feeling went through me that I liked and
was frightened of at the same time, and I shuddered. At this, my
father, thinking I was cold, hugged me even closer. It dawned on
me then that my father, except for when he was sick, slept in no
clothes at all, for he would never sleep in clothes he had worn
the day before. I do not know why that lodged in my mind, but
it did. (pp. 112–13)

Masturbatory fantasy and the involuntary sexual arousal for her

father coexist with a regression to infantilism, a reenactment of pre-oedipal
immersion in amniotic fluid; water is the primary signifier. By inscribing
Annie John’s psychic watershed in the title of the chapter, “The Long Rain,”
Kincaid provides a dense, elemental metaphor to represent the terrifying
feelings that threaten to engulf Annie. Illness accentuates her longing for
motherly attention. To put the case more forcibly, grief has engendered
sickness because she equates separation with annihilation. In the earlier Rat
Island episode, when she can no longer discern her swimming mother, “a
huge black space then opened up in front of me” (p. 43). Anguish blots
out the light, conveying a temporary abdication from life. Thus during her
illness she recapitulates a primal scene in which water, womblike, surrounds
her and engages the undivided attention not only of her mother but also
(unwomblike) of her father. This pre-oedipal merging encompasses a strange
form of sexual difference, a means of bonding with both parents, a refusal to
allow them as a pair to be separate from her as the one. A bizarre incident
symbolically illuminates and further problematizes her inner turmoil. As
she lies in bed, family photographs agitate her to such a degree that she
feels compelled to wash them, both “the creases in Aunt Mary’s veil” and
“the dirt from the front of my father’s trousers” (p. 120). Meaning slides
metonymically from washing to a sexual sign; purity dissolves the possibility
of birth.11 She then lays the saturated photographs to rest in a perfumed
bed of talcum powder, a miniature erotic grotto. The performance of this
purification-obliteration ritual soaks her nightgown and sheets. She has
8 Moira Ferguson

enveloped herself in a primal reprise, rubbing out faces that speak the life of
family members: “None of the people in the [ironic] wedding picture, except
for me, had any face left. In the picture of my mother and father, I had erased
them from the waist down” (p. 120). Immersion has become self-definition
as she metonymically recites herself in the security of the womb. In and
with this water she can gain freedom. She creates a path to communication
and love. Effacing her father’s sexuality, she can reclaim oneness with her
mother. This revocation, however, can never transpire because she already
exists in the symbolic order.
She continues: “In the picture of me wearing my confirmation dress,
I had erased all of myself except for my shoes” (p. 120). These particular
shoes specify a tense altercation between Annie John and her mother. For
the ceremony in which she would be received as an adult into the Methodist
church, she selected shoes pronounced too risqué by her mother; they
sported cut-out sides that exposed the flesh of Annie John’s feet, marks of
the virginity that her mother sought to protect. Thus she operates in a state of
nonclosure, of confusion, even. Her public, religious induction acknowledges
imminent adulthood while the reversion to infantilism infusing her sickness
signals a refusal of that very acknowledgment. So in the photos her shoes
emphatically remain.
An earlier incident throws further light on Annie John’s complex
relationship to developing sexuality. After a harmless and unexpected
conversation with a boy on the way home from school, her mother denounces
her as a slut:

The word “slut” (in patois) was repeated over and over, until
suddenly I felt as if I were drowning in a well but instead of the
well being filled with water it was filled with the word “slut,”
and it was pouring in through my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my
mouth. As if to save myself, I turned to her and said, “Well, like
father like son, like mother like daughter.” (p. 102)

Her mother’s accusation threatening Annie John’s already fragile identity,

her sense of “moral” equality, the word slut suffuses her senses. Once again,
as in the ocean story and her illness, water scripts betrayal. The seeming
irrationality of the mother’s charge suggests some overwhelming fear, a link
to the mother’s adolescent argument with her father—perhaps concerning
sexual freedom—her subsequent departure from home and giving birth. In
other words the incident might be explained by the fact that Annie John’s
mother is drawing on personal shame. This hypothesis would also explain
why Annie John recollects this particular memory upon seeing her parents in
bed. An intimidating sexuality becomes the womb’s fluid, her body’s fluid.
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 9

She halts this frightening transformation with words that claim a threatening
sexuality as parental heritage. Her father’s sexual popularity is pointedly
included. They engage each other in emotional pain, then retreat to cope
individually with the serious aspersions Annie John has cast:

At that, everything stopped. The whole earth fell silent. The

two black things joined together in the middle of the room
separated, hers going to her, mine coming back to me. I looked
at my mother. She seemed tired and old and broken. Seeing
that, I felt happy and sad at the same time. I soon decided that
happy was better, and I was just about to enjoy this feeling when
she said, “Until this moment, in my whole life I knew without
a doubt that, without any exception, I loved you best,” and then
she turned her back and started again to prepare the green figs
for cooking. (pp. 102–3)

This hurtful statement and the issue of the shoes claim the daughter’s right
to be as sexually independent as her parents; they defy her mother’s warped
pronouncement. As markers of the mobility she lacks at the moment, they
concurrently pinpoint a dread of the adult world and a means of reentry.
At this point another odd break occurs in the text. When her parent’s
friend Mr. Nigel, the fisherman, visits her sick bed and laughs at a remark
she makes, that laughter spontaneously threatens to engulf her. This
complex eruption signals that a gap is opening up: Abject passivity and even
degradation are transforming into their opposite, a moment of liberation,
her laughter an overmiming, a ridiculing of what she feels they have done
to her. She is dissolving her trancelike state through a vivid connection with
the everyday world of sight and smell. The invitation to laugh back/with the
fisherman secures relief, offers a vital safety valve that has remained beyond
her grasp. This feeling of self-disappearance is accompanied by memories of
Mr. Nigel’s domestic happiness. Desperately, she leaps on him, fells him to
the ground, and garrulously pours out thoughts that crowd her head. Not
long after this, grandmother Ma Chess comes:

[She] settled in on the floor at the foot of my bed, eating and

sleeping there, and soon I grew to count on her smells and
the sound her breath made as it went in and out of her body.
Sometimes at night, when I would feel that I was locked up in
the warm falling soot and could not find my way out, Ma Chess
would come into my bed with me and stay until I was myself—
whatever that had come to be by then—again. I would lie on
my side, curled up like a little comma, and Ma Chess would lie
10 Moira Ferguson

next to me, curled up like a bigger comma, into which I fit. In

the daytime, while my mother attended my father, keeping him
company as he ate, Ma Chess fed me my food, coaxing me to
take mouthful after mouthful. She bathed me and changed my
clothes and sheets and did all the other things that my mother
used to do. (pp. 125–26)

Annie John has changed herself into a sign of language without voice. This
and her grandmother’s obeah practices and “ancestral presence” locate her in a
historically perilous border area between speech and magic.12 Note, too, since
obeah has been a source of deep contention between slaves and slaveowners,
Annie John is using insurrectionary tools to recover and vanquish the likes
of her school teacher, Miss Edwards. Through her grandmother Annie John
accepts the intervention of an aboriginal world, part of the identity she has
fought for. Ma Chess’s success affirms the old ways and denies the validity
of paternal disapproval of obeah. After this the illness mysteriously vanishes,
coinciding with the cessation of the rain. In her first trip outside Annie John
establishes her reemergence in the symbolic order:

The sounds I heard didn’t pass through me, forming a giant,

angry funnel. The things I saw stayed in their places. My mother
sat me down under a tree, and I watched a boy she had paid
sixpence climb up a coconut tree to get me some coconuts. My
mother looked at my pinched, washed-out face and said: “Poor
Little Miss, you look so sad.” Just at that moment, I was not
feeling sad at all. I was feeling how much I never wanted to see a
boy climb a coconut tree again . . . how much I never wanted to
see the sun shine day in, day out again, how much I never wanted
to see my mother bent over a pot cooking me something that she
felt would do me good when I ate it, how much I never wanted
to feel her long, bony fingers against my cheek again, how much
I never wanted to hear her voice in my ear again, how much I
longed to be in a place where nobody knew a thing about me
and liked me for just that reason, how much the whole world
into which I was born had become an unbearable burden and I
wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold
underwater until it died. (pp. 127–28)

Through physical illness Annie John has navigated to a place where

she can start over without feeling stifled. She transcends a shying from
independence, now aware that without a sense of autonomy she will die.
Having externalized her distaste for the fantasy and hypocrisy of her world,
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 11

she recommences a slow, lopsided dance into adulthood. In order to live, she
apprehends from this point on that consciously or not, she has to abandon
the island to dispel its power over her.
Her return to school points to her reinforced, dual position in the
world as insider and outsider. As if play-acting, she dresses quaintly, beating
an inward retreat, while enjoying lavish undue attention through eccentric
behavior; ontologically dislocated, she buttons up her developing person to
hide the mismatch of her physical, cultural, and psychic subject-positions.
With this self-imposed outsider status Annie John rejects maternal definition,
or rather refashions a sense of pride in her own terms.
Kincaid’s inscription of Annie John as a conflicted adolescent operating
in a series of psychodramas is further complicated by Annie John’s resistance
to yet another externally imposed construction of herself as a colonial
subject. In response Annie John tries to contextualize pre-1834 colonial life
in terms of her own experiences; she revivifies the past by rendering it part
of the present. Leaving aside quarrels with her mother, she attributes her
smothered emotions to the consequences of imperial relationships, not always
consciously realized. She refuses to accept assumed epistemological “realities,”
nonsensical formulations of a happy colonial world. Despite teachers’ efforts
to render her a subject who “works by herself,” she revolts.13
A book entitled Roman Britain, we learn, is a customary school
prize as well as an inside joke to anyone who stands outside metropolitan
indoctrination: Romans, after all, colonized the British who are still
attempting to condition Antiguans to accept imperial ideology. In addition
students are reading A History of the West Indies, chronicling the colonizer’s
hagiographical version of Caribbean history, generally unchallenged by the
students.14 Annie John, on the other hand, manifests her awareness of cultural
contradictions, refuses to be silenced, and tries to counter the complicities of
colonialism and its aftermath. She stresses personal affection for Ruth, “the
minister’s daughter [who] was such a dunce and came from England and had
yellow hair” (p. 73), separate from her political response:

Perhaps she wanted to be in England, where no one would

remind her constantly of the terrible things her ancestors had
done; perhaps she had felt even worse when her father was a
missionary in Africa. I could see how Ruth felt from looking
at her face. Her ancestors had been the masters, while ours had
been the slaves. She had such a lot to be ashamed of, and by being
with us every day she was always being reminded. We could look
everybody in the eye, for our ancestors had done nothing wrong
except just sit somewhere, defenseless. Of course, sometimes,
what with our teachers and our books, it was hard for us to tell
12 Moira Ferguson

on which side we really now belonged—with the masters or the

slaves—for it was all history, it was all in the past, and everybody
behaved differently now; all of us celebrated Queen Victoria’s
birthday, even though she had been dead a long time. But we,
the descendants of the slaves, knew quite well what had really
happened. (p. 76)

It is no coincidence that Ruth’s dunce cap appears to Annie John’s conflictual

gaze—mocking yet sympathetic—as a regal crown, a synthesis of stupidity
and power, not unlike the teacher, Miss Edwards.
Under the picture of a chained-up Columbus in the history text, Annie
John has derisively written: “The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up
and Go.” Literally and metaphorically she punctures-punctuates Anglo-
Saxon historical reality, attuned to the fact that the Italian adventurer
symbolizes all those who have limited, diluted, and even tried to dissolve
the political and cultural life of African-Caribbeans.15 She refuses to sound
herself through a white middle-class imaginary. The history lesson that
teaches the date of Columbus’s “discoveries,” we are led to conclude, is
neither authentic, nor “all in the past” (p. 76). Since fictions in this culture,
she has learned, are called and taught as facts, she plays around with
the,“facts” and defaces white culture, or rather revises it to bring it more in
line with historical events.16
Annie John resists received imperial interpretations and a prescribed
subject position, however, and functions as the singular representative
of historical maroons, slave rebels whose name derives from the Spanish
term cimarron—wild or untamed. She declines to be mentally manacled by
Miss Edwards, whose name conjures up Edward VIII, a king who recently
abdicated from a life of duty to a country bent on territorial acquisition.
Later the characterization of Miss Edwards as a “bellowing dragon” (to
Annie John’s knight, presumably) duly underscores the ethnocentric history
lessons (p. 78). Annie John battles Miss Edwards’s defense of a holy ground
that her pupil, proud of a lineage that includes many insurrectionists, rejects
with disdain.
Annie John’s defiance stems not only from the exercise of power as
an adolescent teetering between childhood and adulthood but also from
a calculated political rebellion that she attempts to name: her resistance
identifies lies about the colonial past, a distorted present, and an unpredictable
future. She disrupts the “veneer of family harmony,” the advantages of a
traditional education.17 Although she is doubly suppressed and branded as
a tough-minded girl and as an ignorant and presumptuous colonized object
in the eyes of colonial gazers like Miss Edwards, she refuses obliteration in
either sphere.
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 13

The choices of other white protagonists differ drastically. Fanny

Price refuses to marry Henry Crawford, but in the play-acting episode she
conforms to Sir Thomas’s values: she does not break the “dead silence” that
greet Sir Thomas’s account of Antigua. Antoinette personally withdraws in
order to cope with post-emancipation resentment and disorder but she is
manipulated into marriage with Rochester. She is unable to ally with the
black community, and although she identifies with Tia and Christophine
emotionally, suicide is the only choice or recourse she can imagine to defeat
Rochester and gain agency.18
The episode’s symbolic significance is finely encapsulated in the
punishment the authoritarian Miss Edwards metes out to Annie John. The
pupil is commanded to write out Paradise Lost.19 Having located herself
on the edge of naughtiness—nuanced opposition to European invasion of
the region—she has surrendered primal innocence. Paradise slips away as
she recognizes its limitations. We never learn what happens afterward; this
indeterminate closure underscores the multiple lost paradises emblemized by
Columbus’s presence in the Caribbean.
Not by chance the Columbus incident is associated with an earlier
escapade in Annie John’s life. While Miss Edwards stares at Annie John’s
deliberate textual defacement, the student flashes back to memories of herself
and her friends dancing “on the tombstones of people who had been buried
there before slavery was abolished, in 1833.” There they would “sit and sing
bad songs, use forbidden words, and of course, show each other various parts
of our bodies. [Some] would walk up and down on the large tombstones
showing off their legs” (pp. 80–81). A ringleader in these exploits, Annie
John thus links Columbus and the white student’s unforgotten, plantocratic
forerunners to historical memory and her self-confident reclamation of
unnamed ancestors. The reverberation within her present situation of these
earlier audacious acts recalls the narrator’s ongoing struggle for personal
freedom and political integrity. It stresses, too, the consistency and dialectic
of oppression and rebellion.
This episode, which recapitulates the students’ wild dance on the graves
of slaves, is compounded by telling references to Queen Victoria’s birthday,
the Union Jack, the presence of Methodist missionaries, and Jane Eyre. In
identifying with Jane Eyre, with whom Annie John has one name (loosely) in
common, she betrays certain gaps in her insights about colonial Antigua.20
For the time being—though this state of affairs changes—Kincaid appears to
accept Jane Eyre’s struggle with the disruptive presence of the white creole.
Hence Annie John accepts this received reading; she does not always see
beyond an educational system that trivializes the cultural context of colonized
countries. That young Antoinette Cosway (later Bertha Rochester and Jane
Eyre’s “rival”) is a character—the madwoman in the attic, whose “type”
14 Moira Ferguson

would be historically well-known in Antigua—remains unstated. Annie

John desires and identifies with Jane Eyre’s status as an independent female,
a solitary, fearless subject who visits Brussels, a cold place and the home of
colonizers—the antithesis of Antigua, familiar and despised.
Annie John covets Jane Eyre’s voluntary exile, her ability to challenge
authority. She craves something akin to what appears to her as Jane Eyre’s
self-crafted autonomy. In ironic reversal Eyre is the exotic outsider and feisty
heroine whose gender painfully impedes her.
In the chain of colonial signifiers also appears the name of Enid Blyton,
a popular British writer of children’s stories. Blyton’s presence insinuates
something about Annie John’s experiences as a black pupil in a colonized
society. Long before the writing of Annie John, controversy had arisen in
Britain over Blyton’s ethnocentric texts. In Here Comes Noddy, for example,
three nasty “golliwogs” mug “poor, little” Noddy.21 In 1977 Bob Dixon in
Catching Them Young: Sex, Race and Class in Children’s Fiction was one of many
British critics to object to Blyton’s racist characterizations.22 Miss Edwards’s
hagiographical depiction of Columbus as a metropolitan hero bears a second-
cousin resemblance to Noddy, pompous white hero of internationally known
British children’s fiction; the adulation accorded Blyton’s characters—like
the reverence in which Columbus has been held for centuries—is legend.
Blyton’s texts were an inevitable component of the storybook repertoire of
thousands of British children growing up in the thirties, forties, and fifties.
This Blytonian intertextualizing reminds readers of subtle but insistent
metropolitan-colonial propaganda about African-Caribbean culture.
Thus Annie John’s revolt is indicated through chronological
discontinuities that suggest the ubiquity of oppression and indirect revolt
in response to colonial lies. Moreover when new information about Annie
John in the form of a stream-of-consciousness flashback is introduced in the
final chapter as she embarks on her journey to London, these reminiscences
enable a rounding out of Annie John’s character; its presence through space,
time, and place provides some context for what the reader, has been invited
to see: a young woman claiming agency for herself. The building of Annie
John’s narrative through association complements the form: sections follow
no consistent chronology; rather they track the narrator’s circuitous coming
to terms with her environment and her final exit. Through cumulative
impressions and anecdotes governed by an informing intelligence, Annie
John faces down narcissistic colonial myths.
After her metamorphosis following rain and resolution, a postlapsarian
Annie John walks to the jetty with her parents. This time the topos of water
represents purification of a different sort. She literally will throw herself into
deliberate departure (at the jetty-jeté). Having gained a form of freedom, of
temporary transcendent agency, she says goodbye and sails for cold London.
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 15

Since Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid has published another text that permits us
to see Annie John from enhanced vantage points, especially how colonization
constructed Annie John’s particular self. Put differently, Jamaica Kincaid
recontextualizes in A Small Place crucial experiences in Annie John’s life.
Reasons for Annie John’s barely disguised repression, her sense of being
trapped within a “First World” modality, for example, become palpably
obvious as Kincaid deliberately strips away colonial complicities. The question
that inevitably arises about author–narrator and fiction–history relationships
is intricate, fraught with the danger of essentialist oppositions. Let me put it
this way: In Annie John the narrator in “her own” voice plays a large part in
conveying what is going on; in A Small Place the author forthrightly presents
a point of view that demands some mediation. Thus the polemical perspective
in A Small Place complements and enriches the play of signification in Annie
John. Kincaid exemplifies her own social conditioning through specifying
the constitution of Annie John as an individual. At the same time the many
suppressed voices in A Small Place—past colonists and present exploiters, for
example—convey diverse perspectives. Moreover, the narrator of Annie John
and Jamaica Kincaid—as she outlines certain experiences in the exposé—
have so much undisguisedly in common that the reader is invited to equate
them.23 In that sense Annie John functions as Jamaica Kincaid’s avatar. At
some points—with respect, say, to understanding parental influence—I avail
myself of this invitation.24
In A Small Place Kincaid denounces Antigua as an island with a legacy of
corruption where the mimicking of colonialism has become institutionalized.
Part of her diatribe involves identifying the Union Jack and celebrations of
Queen Victoria’s birthday as corrosive signposts of colonizers, techniques
for reinforcing ideological subjection. As such, what lurks suggestively in
the innuendos and interstices of Annie John are given body and validated
through the later narrative.
Additionally, A Small Place reilluminates Annie John’s father as a
glamorous cricketer, a man loved by women long after relationships end.
Annie John’s mother emerges in a much more focal and public role as a feisty
activist who challenges the Antiguan premier himself: “It so happens that in
Antigua my mother is fairly notorious for her political opinions” (p. 50). In
the earlier text Mrs. John appeared in various guises, often oppositionally
to Annie John, so that the adolescent could gradually come to terms with
herself, to become, in effect, a writer; she also had to be the mother who
extends unconditional love to her daughter. In A Small Place, then, the
photograph-washing scene in which Annie John sublimates a tumultuous
complex of love, anger, and sexual desire takes on a sharper focus. So does
her detestation for Columbus. In A Small Place tourists are a collective
Columbus, new colonists, brash cultural invaders. They are enjoined to forgo
16 Moira Ferguson

customary mindlessness, to accept some responsibility for halting ongoing

deterioration. Mediated compassion for someone like blonde Ruth has no
place in this uncompromising text. Contemporary prime minister Vere Bird’s
hegemonic dynasty is post-British collaboration at its worst; the corruption
of this administration, Jamaica Kincaid takes pains to point out, originates
in a colonizing ethic. A Small Place permits us to read Annie John’s turmoil
as adolescent confusion that often sprang from what she felt but could not
name—insecurity, as well as repulsion and fury at being treated as a latter-day
colonial object. Yet this is not to deny the intricacy of the reader’s position
in the trap of fiction-exposé: we move through various forms and stages of
identifying, with Annie John to viewing Annie John at a greater distance,
as an interpellated subject in realpolitik. We see multiple intersecting
textualities, “the process of producing [texts] through the transformation of
other texts,”25 that help to explain an often invisible, tyrannical world order,
the “planned epistemic violence of imperialism.”26
To put this matter another way, Annie John foretells the mature,
radical politic of A Small Place. At one level A Small Place is Annie John,
part 2. Kincaid’s disclosures validate Annie John’s dimly felt sense of being
indoctrinated and condescended to. Earlier disquiet becomes withering
sarcasm. In yet one more sense Annie John problematizes A Small Place,
enables us to see that no last word exists. Together the texts help to
reconceptualize contemporary definitions of female sexuality, motherhood,
and race/gender intersections through the gaze of an African-Caribbean
woman:27 “A full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist
fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system masquerading
as Law as such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of
human sciences busy establishing the ‘native’ as self-consolidating other.”28
As the main topos of A Small Place, colonialism marks Kincaid’s candid
characterizations of Horatio Nelson, Sir Francis Drake, and other renowned
heroes of British naval history as “English maritime criminals” (p. 24). In
A Small Place the slippery, dissolving paradise of Annie John could be only a
fantastic memory of childhood in which a sophisticated yet horrified narrator
pointedly intertwines contemporary abominations with past atrocities:

You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of

your lavatory when you flushed it. You must not wonder where
your bath water went when you pulled out the stopper. You must
not wonder what happened when you brushed your teeth. Oh, it
might all end up in the water you are thinking of taking a swim
in; the contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently
against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, as you see,
in Antigua, there is no proper sewage-disposal system. But the
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 17

Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean is even bigger;
it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this
ocean has swallowed up. When you sit down to eat your delicious
meal, it’s better that you don’t know that most of what you are
eating came off a plane from Miami. And before it got on a
plane in Miami, who knows where it came from? A good guess
is that it came from a place like Antigua first, where it was grown
dirt-cheap, went to Miami, and came back. There is a world of
something in this, but I can’t go into it right now. (pp. 13–14)

Unilaterally excoriating the reigning Antiguan dynasty of Vere Bird,

Kincaid exposes endless vestiges of colonialism. She mocks the idea of a
“British God” (p. 9); she ridicules tourists who think Antiguans are specially
bonded with nature or act as monkeys just out of trees (p. 29). Tourists
themselves are denounced categorically—each one is “an ugly, empty thing,
a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish” (p. 17) who circulates in a malevolent
miniworld. In response Kincaid asserts: “This empire business was all wrong”
(p. 23). Such unabounding ire radiates elsewhere, as in “There is a world of
something in this, but I can’t go into it right now” (p. 14) and “Do you even
try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive
and cannot forget?” (p. 26).
Incontestable denunciation in A Small Place has replaced the implicit
jabs of Annie John: “We were taught the names of the Kings of England.
In Antigua, the 24th of May was a holiday—Queen Victoria’s official
birthday.”29 One of the colonized coerced into ostensible celebration, she
specifies the perniciousness of “bad post-colonial education” (p. 43) and “an
appropriate obsession with slavery.” Black teenagers, she argues, “generally
[make] asses of themselves. What surprised me most about them was not
how familiar they were with the rubbish of North America—compared to
the young people of my generation, who were familiar with the rubbish of
England” (pp. 43–44).

In Antigua, people speak of slavery as if it had been a pageant

full of large ships sailing on the blue water, the large ships filled
up with human cargo—their ancestors, they got off, they 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, there were many other bad things, and then suddenly the
whole thing came to an end in something called emancipation.
Then they speak of emancipation itself as if it happened just the
other day, not over one hundred and fifty years ago. The word
18 Moira Ferguson

“emancipation” is used so frequently, it is as if it, emancipation,

were a contemporary occurrence, something everybody is familiar
with. (pp. 54–55)

Not to put a fine point on it, Kincaid holds colonialism responsible for
everything noxious that she hints at and intuits in Annie John:

Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have

learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be
tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault. . . .
You imprisoned people. You robbed people. You opened your
own banks and you put our money in them. The accounts were in
your name. The banks were in your name. There must have been
some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is
the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home. But still,
when you think about it, you must be a little sad. The people like
me, finally, after years and years of agitation, made deeply moving
and eloquent speeches against the wrongness of your domination
over us, and then finally, after the mutilated bodies of you, your
wife, and your children were found in your beautiful and spacious
bungalow at the edge of your rubber plantation—found by one of
your many house servants (none of it was ever yours; it was never,
ever yours)—you say to me, “Well, I wash my hands of all of you,
I am leaving now.” (pp. 34–36)

Together these texts build a heady opposition to past and present

Antigua. Annie John and A Small Place produce a “strategic formation”; in
a limited way these exposes “acquire mass, density, and referential power
among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large.”30 They construct
themselves as a textual other, as a counterdiscourse to dominant culture and
ideology. As an African-Caribbean writer Kincaid speaks to and from the
position of the other. Not only does she identify confrontations along race/
gender axes, she unmasks “the results of those distortions internalized within
our consciousness of ourselves and one another.”31
Kincaid signals the degeneration of the public library as the transcendent
symbol of outsider devastation, the silencing of a cultural institution that
has traditionally been one of the sole and free instructors of the people. It
has rendered the people voiceless:32 “But what I see [ironically at a royal
procession] is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans:
no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground,
no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love
sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue” (p. 31).
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 19

Library books, which Annie John felt guilty about stealing, are resymbolized
as critical cultural items that have been commandeered by an imperial culture
to deprive former slaves of self-education. In Marlene Nourbese Philip’s
words: “Silence welcomes the hungry word.”33 Colonizers and their servants,
not Annie John, were and are the thieves who try to cut off, as colonizers of
old, the people’s tongue.34 Jamaica Kincaid sounds the voice of the people
into the void. A postcolonial narrative and reevaluated site, A Small Place
demystifies Annie John’s bewilderment about unnamed oppositions.

In the novel bearing her name Annie John charts a complex journey into
adolescence, a slow initiation into adulthood; she discerns simultaneous
oppressions but refuses to “become” a lady or be a tool of surrogate
colonizers. Instead she devises a means to Independence and challenges
readers to reexamine old models of what autonomy means for women.35 She
tries to mediate so many different representatives of herself that she speaks
in several voices, including a silent or a self-silenced voice. Disrespectful in
society’s eyes, she records a coming to power that demystifies (to herself, at
least) colonial and gender alienation, the stifling realities engendered by a
predator’s legacy. Initially, until the age of twelve, she assimilates wholesale
the given “master narratives” about family, education, and culture. Then she
backs off to take a closer look and eventually withdraws. She does not know
how else to face cultural worlds and hegemonic practices that she cannot
reconcile; she has few tools to cope with such a complicated subjectivity.
The seemingly neutral zone of rain becomes the sign of social and psychic
self-alienation, an agonized splitting from childhood, her last farewell.36 In
declining to internalize the given epistemology of appearance and reality,
she forges a unique identity. Struggle, then, is at the core, is the core of
Annie John. Having forcibly cracked open the hitherto homogenized,
gendered, and colonial space, she maintains herself shakily on several planes,
her reconciliations restless and incomplete. Fighting on public and private
fronts, Annie John negotiates her way through alienation to choice. She sails
off to wrestle an elusive subjectivity and chart an adult identity.
Jamaica Kincaid’s subsequent jeremiad about Antigua, A Small Place,
evokes the repressed subtexts of Annie John by openly indicting historical
domination, recontextualizing earlier hesitant responses to cultural role-
playing, and encoding insensitive tourists as updates of Christopher Columbus.
The villains of Annie John’s adolescent naïveté—particularly her mother—
are reconfigured more authentically to include their status as subalterns in
Antiguan society; contemporary leadership is forthrightly condemned.
Kincaid’s recognition that colonialism is to blame for social corruption only
slightly mitigates her rage at the present state of affairs. However, at the end
of Annie John these articulations are barely a whisper. Annie John’s surname,
20 Moira Ferguson

resonating with biblical overtones and sexual innuendo, symbolizes the creative
potential she has frequently expressed, the beginnings she has recreated with
words, her struggle between male and female modalities. Embarking on the
journey to London is simultaneously the end of adolescence and the beginning
of her future life as a cultural demystifier.

Not e s

1. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (New York: New American Library, 1983), p. 29. All
references are to this edition.
2. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (London: Virago, 1988). All references are to this
edition.
3. Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers, p. 220.
4. For concentrated biographical information on Jamaica Kincaid, see particularly
Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers, pp. 215–32, and Dance, ed., Fifty Caribbean Writers,
pp. 255–63. See also Garis, “Through West Indian Eyes.”
5. Sigmund Freud discusses the relationship between water and pre-oedipal harmony
(The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 434–37).
6. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” p. 251.
7. For issues of projection and displacement, see Anna Freud, Ego, vol. 2, especially
ch. 5.
8. This information comes directly from Jamaica Kincaid, who talks about her life
in several interviews. See, for example, Perry, “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” and
Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers, p. 220 and passim.
9. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: Women Writers and
the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 269.
10. See, for example, Marilyn Lawrence, The Anorexic Experience (London: Women’s
Press, 1984), pp. 32–39 and passim; Suzanne Abraham and Derek Llewellyn-Jones, Eating
Disorders: The Facts (Oxford University Press, 1984); and Felicia Romeo, Understanding
Anorexia Nervosa (Springfield, Ill.: Charles Thomas, 1986).
11. See Cora Kaplan, “Language and Gender,” in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and
Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), especially pp. 78–80.
12. See Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, The Last Years of the English Slave Trade, Liverpool,
1750–1807 (New York: Cass, 1968), p. 156. For obeah, see also Goveia, Slave Society, pp.
245–47, and Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers, pp. 225–31. The telling phrase comes
from Carole Boyce Davies, “Writing Home,” p. 65.
13. For the discussion of Annie John’s conditioning, her construction of subjectivity, see
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Other Essays
(New York: Monthly Review, 1970), pp. 127–86.
14. It is conceivable that Jamaica Kincaid is referring to an abridged version of Bryan
Edwards’s notoriously racist text, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies
in the West Indies, 2 vols. (London, 1793). Edwards was a well-known planter and English
politician.
15. Todorov talks extensively about Columbus as the signifier of colonial power and the
anxieties of the colonizer in The Conquest of America, especially pp. 3–50.
16. In a reading at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, November 9, 1990, Marlene
Nourbese Philip stated that “playing around with fiction and fact is a black thing.”
 A Small Place: Glossing Annie John’s Rebellion 21

17. Valerie Smith in “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other’ ” in
Cheryl Wall, ed., Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black
Women (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 55.
18. James, The Ladies and the Mammies.
19. Paradise Lost is a clever choice on several fronts. Apart from the references to
Milton and the implications of the British literary canon, paradise could also refer to
Columbus’s “most striking” belief in the earthly paradise. He is looking for this place when
he stumbles on the Caribbean (Todorov, The Conquest of America, pp. 16–18).
20. Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers, p. 218.
21. Enid Blyton, Here Comes Noddy (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Richards
Press, 1951).
22. Bob Dixon, Catching Them Young: Sex, Race, and Class in Children’s Fiction—Political
Ideas in Children’s Fiction (London: Pluto, 1977), 2: 56–73. For Here Comes Noddy, see
particularly Sheila G. Ray, The Blyton Phenomenon: The Controversy Surrounding the World’s
Most Successful Children’s Writer (London: Andre Deutsch, 1982), p. 104.
23. Garis, “Through West Indian Eyes,” pp. 42–44, 70–91.
24. For my discussion in this section, I am indebted to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
discussions in “Draupadi,” in In Other Worlds: Essays on Cultural Politics (New York:
Methuen, 1987), pp. 179–87, and in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,”
in The Feminist Reader: Essays on Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, edited by
Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 175–95.
25. For an elaboration of this point, see Mary Jacobus, “A Difference of View,” in
Mary Jacobus, ed., Women Writers and Writing About Women (New York: Barnes and Noble
Imports, 1979), pp. 10–21. For a valuable discussion of textuality, see Elizabeth Meese,
Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1986), p. 44.
26. Spivak, “Three Women’s texts,” p. 187.
27. Barbara Christian, “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of
Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History,” in Wall, ed., Changing
Our Own Words, p. 73.
28. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” p. 187.
29. Kincaid, A Small Place, p. 30.
30. Said, Orientalism, p. 20.
31. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press,
1984), p. 147.
32. In his analysis of Sahagun, Todorov underlines the anxieties generated in
imperialists by the fear of the colonized peoples’ literacy, The Conquest of America, p. 221 and
passim. In a slightly different context, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., evaluates the crucial roles of
literacy among slaves in Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self (London: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
33. Marlene Nourbese Philips’s poem entitled “Discourse on the Logic of Language,”
in Nasta, ed., Motherlands.
34. Goveia, Slave Society, pp. 134–36, 156–57, and passim.
35. Donna Perry, “Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,” in Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean
Women Writers, p. 253.
36. This argument borrows from Jacques Lacan’s ideas about psychosexual development
in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977),
especially pp. 1–7.
 MERLE HODGE

Caribbean Writers and Caribbean Language:

A Study of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John

C aribbean writers operate in a language situation which is both problematic

and full of possibility, and the relationship between the Caribbean writer and
the language of the people who are the focus of Caribbean literature is an
area of study yet to be fully explored by literary critics. In most Caribbean
countries the main medium of spoken communication is a Creole language
which is the product of contact between European and West African
languages. However, in every case the official language, the language of
education and the written word, is a European language. The pattern is, by
and large, that the Creole spoken in a particular place shares the lexicon of the
official language, while in its sound system and its grammatical structure it
owes more to Africa than to Europe. The essential features of this underlying
grammatical structure are the same across all the Caribbean Creoles.
The Anglophone Caribbean presents not a cut-and-dried bilingual
situation of two languages confined to separate compartments, but a spread of
variations which can more accurately be likened to a continuum, with Creole
at one extreme and Standard English at the other, and a range of nuances
between. In speaking situations West Indians produce different admixtures
of Creole and the standard which may reflect differences in education,
social class, or age, or may give other important information about speakers
and the context of communication, such as self-concept, mood, attitude,

From Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, edited
by Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek. ©1998 by Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New
York.
23
24 Merle Hodge

relationship. Writers may therefore effectively use these nuances of language

for the purposes of characterization and the development of theme and plot.
The language situation is in itself a resource not available to creative writers
in societies where language variety is less complex.
Using this resource, however, is not without its challenges. The language
forged out of a people’s experience may be the medium which most accurately
describes that experience and most faithfully records the worldview of that
people. Yet unlike the artist of the oral tradition (storyteller, calypsonian,
dub poet) for whom the Creole is the natural medium, the writer of novels
and short stories has entered a tradition shaped by the culture of the official
language. The Creole is something of an intruder into that tradition.
Moreover, Caribbean writers are themselves the product of an education
process which may have alienated them from their first language so that they
are not as proficient in it as in the standard language. Or, education may have
produced at worst contempt, at best a certain discomfort with the Creole
which does not allow one to take it seriously or to see it as having artistic
potential. Some Caribbean writers in exile are simply not able to accurately
reproduce a Creole language, and in our literary history there can be found
some truly disastrous attempts at creating Creole-speaking characters from
imperfect memory. (Such disasters are not, however, the exclusive preserve
of writers in physical exile.)
Then there is the problem of audience. Who are the targeted readership
of the Caribbean writer? And who are the real readership? We cling fondly
to the ideological position that our primary audience is our own people. But
for the moment it is only a small fraction of “our own people” who read our
works. And our people are only a small fraction of the Anglophone world,
so that when the revolution comes and Caribbean people turn to consuming
Caribbean literature, they will probably still constitute an audience too small
to sustain the writer. Our audience, therefore, is the larger English-speaking
world, which is to say that we write largely, overwhelmingly, for foreigners.
This imposes certain kinds of constraints on the use of our native language,
which in turn compromises our relationship with our wished-for primary
audience.
Caribbean writers of prose fiction have approached the question of
language in a number of different ways, and some writers use more than one
approach. The most traditional and most enduring language strategy is to
render the speech of Caribbean people realistically in dialogue but to use the
standard for the narrative voice. Beginning with the work of Samuel Selvon,
there is also a whole tradition of Caribbean fiction in which Creole is used as
the medium of both dialogue and narration. There are also Caribbean writers
who do not attempt realism but who might simply translate the dialogue of
Creole speakers into the standard language, or use an avoidance strategy such
 A Study of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John 25

as affecting some form of stylization in order to indicate that the language

being spoken is different from the standard.
There can be no imposed orthodoxy of language use for the Caribbean
writer. The language situation offers writers not only a rich range of
expression, but also a variety of options regarding how one responds to this
language situation. One of these options is not to engage with the language
situation at all. This is the option exercised by Jamaica Kincaid, who has lived
outside of the Caribbean and out of earshot of Caribbean language for all of
her adult life, having left Antigua at the age of seventeen.
Kincaid’s writings contain occasional references to language and
language issues which allow us some insight into the level of her awareness of
the Caribbean language situation as well as her attitude to it. In a number of
places Kincaid refers to the French-lexicon Creole which her mother (who is
from Dominica) spoke to her.1 This Creole remains part of Kincaid’s language
repertoire, although today she might have only passive competence in it.
Kincaid’s essay on Antiguan society, A Small Place, contains a few reflections
on language, most of which are asides, physically enclosed in parentheses,
but quite passionate in their tone. In two places she seems to bring into focus
the highly developed Caribbean art of open-air verbal confrontation:

Since we were ruled by the English, we also had their laws.

There was a law against using abusive language. Can you
imagine such a law among people for whom making a spectacle
of yourself through speech is everything? When West Indians
went to England, the police there had to get a glossary of bad
West Indian words so they could understand whether they were
hearing abusive language or not.2

and
Here is this: On a Saturday, at market, two people who, as far
as they know, have never met before, collide by accident; this
accidental collision leads to an enormous quarrel—a drama,
really—in which the two people stand at opposite ends of a street
and shout insults at each other at the top of their lungs. (56)

Elsewhere in the essay she speaks of colonialism as having robbed “millions of

people” of culture and tradition, and her comment does not seem to indicate
a recognition that Caribbean people have a language of their own:

and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn’t it odd that
the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the
language of the criminal who committed the crime? . . .) (31)
26 Merle Hodge

In another aside she comments on the English language competence of

young Antiguans, again based on the premise that Standard English is their
first and only language:

In Antigua today, most young people seem almost illiterate. On

the airwaves, where they work as news personalities, they speak
English as if it were their sixth language. . . . What surprised me
most about them was . . . how unable they were to answer in a
straight-forward way, and in their own native tongue of English.
(43–44)

Toward the end of Annie John, the adolescent describes her overwhelming
feelings of unhappiness and a desire to turn her back on the environment
of her growing up: “. . . the world into which I was born had become an
unbearable burden” (128).
There is enough in published interviews given by Jamaica Kincaid to
establish the closely autobiographical nature of her writing and in particular
the intensity of these feelings of alienation from her milieu. In Annie John
she seems to indicate that part of her act of withdrawal was a deliberately
cultivated change in her language: “. . . I acquired a strange accent—at least,
no one had ever heard anyone talk that way before—and some other tricks”
(129).
In Lucy, which takes up where Annie John leaves off, the language of the
newly arrived West Indian girl working au pair in a New York household draws
the mistrust of the housemaid who deduces from her speech mannerisms a
wider renunciation: “One day the maid who said she did not like me because
of the way I talked told me that she was sure I could not dance. She said
that I spoke like a nun . . .” (11). The girl has cast off the pronunciation and
intonation patterns (“accent”) of Antiguan speech and concocted a special
dialect that began to set her apart from her speech community even before
she physically took her leave of this community.
Yet in the essay A Small Place Kincaid’s last word on language in her
native land is an expression of fondness. In a lyrical passage near the end
she reflects on the beauty of Antigua (although her ultimate point is the
impression of unrealness), and she sees as part of this beauty the language of
Antiguans:

. . . and the way people there speak English (they break it up) and
the way they might be angry with each other and the sound they
make when they laugh, all of this is so beautiful, all of this is not
real like any other real thing that there is . . . (79)
 A Study of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John 27

Perhaps the major achievement of Jamaica Kincaid is the beauty of

the language that she herself has created, the diamond-like clarity and
precision of her English prose. In appropriating the work of this outstanding
writer into Caribbean literary history, we might seek to trace her verbal
ability to the stimulating language environment of her childhood, when she
functioned in three languages: the French-lexicon Creole of Dominica from
her mother, the English-lexicon Creole of Antigua spoken all around her,
and the Standard English acquired through formal education and hours of
immersion in books. It is quite conceivable that close analysis of Kincaid’s
language might yield deep affinities and influences attributable to her Creole
foundation, but on the surface there is very little that seems to connect her
written English to a Caribbean vernacular.
Kincaid’s language in Annie John, which is set in Antigua, is only
minimally sprinkled with Creolisms. In the narration there are certain
adverbial set phrases not found in Standard English. For example, “it was
her duty to accompany her father up to ground on Saturdays” (68). Or,
“the unhappiness of wanting to go to cinema on a Sunday” (85). Standard
English would require that the singular countable nouns ground and cinema
be preceded by an article or some other determiner. (Creole has extended the
English “irregular” pattern of to bed, to school, to church to a larger group of
countable nouns. In this pattern the noun refers to a concept, an abstraction
rather than a single item, and therefore cannot in this context strictly be
categorized as “countable.”) The narrator calls bananas by the name they carry
over a large part of the Caribbean, “figs” (68, 101), and once uses “dunce”
as an adjective, which is Creole usage: “Ruth sat in the last row, the row
reserved for all the dunce girls” (73). The protagonist in one place addresses
her mother as “Mamie” (101), and she and her school friends chant in Creole
as they dance: “Tee la la la, come go. Tee la la la, come go” (81).
For dialogue, Kincaid does not attempt to reconstruct Creole speech.
All discourse is translated into Standard English, with a very few notable
exceptions. The rare occurrences of Creole speech are poignant in their
isolation and unexpectedness. These flashes of dialogue in Creole seem to
come as part and parcel of certain intimate and unprocessed memories,
preserved in such detail that the actual language used is indelibly recorded,
resisting translation. During a prolonged illness, the young girl wakes up
one night in her father’s lap and sees her mother changing the bedsheets.
Her father explains: “You wet, Little Miss, you wet” (112). What makes the
incident memorable to the child is her experience of sexual arousal associated
with this physical contact with her father, although the child is unable to
account for her own train of thought at the time: “I do not know why that
lodged in my mind, but it did” (113).
28 Merle Hodge

Recall of another, related incident also pulls up an intact recording of

Creole speech. The speaker is one of a pair of fishermen who seem to have
been a source of fascination for the young girl and who turn up again in
Lucy. One of them particularly engages the girl’s attention. In both novels,
but more explicitly in Lucy, the protagonist remembers this man in details
and images suggestive of her awakening sexuality. During the same period of
illness this man delivers fish to the home and looks in on her:

As I was thinking of how much he reminded me of my father, the

words “You are just like Mr. John” came out of my mouth.
He laughed and said, “Now, mind, I don’t tell him you say
that.” (121)

Another piece of Creole emerges during the same recollection of Mr. Earl.
It has been preserved as part of a family legend about her great-great-
grandfather who was also a fisherman, and whose dying words were: “Dem
damn fish” (122). This last utterance is indisputably intended to be Creole
because the writer has used the phonetic spelling for “dem.” The other two
leave room for ambiguity in their interpretation. “You wet, Little Miss,
you wet” could be read as English, with “you” as the subject of the sentence
and “wet” a verb in the past simple tense. Heard as Creole, however, “wet”
is here an adjective, or more precisely a Creole adjectival verb, indicating
not an action but a state. “You wet” is formed on the Creole sentence
pattern which involves a subject followed by an adjective functioning as
the predicate.
The other Creole sentence, “Now, mind, I don’t tell him you say
that” (121) is punctuated in a curious way. The word “mind” is followed by
a comma which makes no sense, and suggests an editorial “correction” by
someone reading the sentence as English. The comma separates “mind” from
the rest of the sentence, making this word a mere interjection attached to a
declarative sentence in the present habitual tense/aspect: “I don’t tell him
you say that.” In the Creole interpretation the sentence is not declarative—
it does not give information. “Mind” is a verb in the imperative mood, it
gives, or pretends to give, a warning. Then, the meaning of the unmarked
verb “say” is perfective, not habitual. The man is playfully threatening to
tell her father what she has said, not informing her that he habitually does
not tell him something that she habitually says. “Mind” is the main verb,
not a spliced-in, nonessential element. The comma, which assumes that
the sentence is English, enforces a quite different intonation pattern and
a different meaning from the Creole structure. The ambiguous identity of
these two sentences has its advantages. They can be recognized as Creole by
those who know Creole, and they can equally well pass for English on the
 A Study of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John 29

page, escaping the notice of the English-speaking reader. That is to say, to

the majority of readers they are unobtrusive.
There is overall very little direct speech in Annie John, and only one
exchange between speakers prolonged enough to be called a conversation
(65–66). Direct speech is largely restricted to utterances of one sentence,
one phrase or even one word, punctuating at wide intervals the flow of the
narrative. Instead, the writer favors reported speech:

When I got home, my mother asked me for the fish I was to have
picked up from Mr. Earl, one of our fishermen, on the way home
from school. But in my excitement I had completely forgotten.
Trying to think quickly, I said that when I got to the market Mr.
Earl told me that they hadn’t gone to sea that day because the sea
was too rough. “Oh?” said my mother. (12)

One might be tempted to see in the low incidence of direct speech an

avoidance strategy, a way around the language of Kincaid’s prototypes who
would have been mostly Creole speakers, except for the fact that Lucy, set in
an English-speaking environment, shows the same scarcity of dialogue.
This is simply a feature of Kincaid’s narrative style in which the
main speaking voice is the voice of the protagonist/narrator, and the main
dialogue is with her own, searching self. Kincaid’s fictional works are novels
of introspection, only one central character is drawn in depth. The other
characters are experienced by the narrator, and therefore by the reader, only
insofar as their behavior has an impact upon her development. This applies, I
think, even to the portrayal of the mother with whom the child is so intensely
involved. Our perception of the mother remains quite limited. We gain only
a partial view of her. The subject is the girl’s journey, her inner life, and there
is no attempt at complete and detailed characterization in the case of the
other actors in her life story. Not much attention is therefore paid to their
individual speaking styles. The predominance of reported speech signifies
that the content of her characters’ speaking is more important than anything
their speech might reveal about them individually. There is no obvious
differentiation of characters’ language.
The fact is that neither the personal speech patterns of individual
characters nor the distinguishing features of Antiguan speech are relevant to
the writer’s purpose. Certainly the decision (if conscious decision there was)
not to attempt realism in creating dialogue for her Creole-speaking characters
is a judicious one. An artist cannot successfully use a medium that s/he does
not completely control. It is very likely that Kincaid’s competence in her native
language has succumbed to amnesia induced not only by the passage of time,
but possibly also by the deliberate distancing of her adolescent years.
30 Merle Hodge

Kincaid’s medium is English, a register of English far removed from

the Creole end of the continuum. Out of this medium she has produced a
distillation so rarefied that to juxtapose with it any vernacular at all would be
unwise. Vernaculars are by definition spontaneous, unself-conscious, uncut.
The speech of Kincaid’s characters even shies away from the more informal,
conversational varieties of Standard English, and in Annie John all dialogue
displays to some extent the fine-tuned precision and educatedness of the
narrator’s language. There are, for example, sentences such as this one spoken
by mother to child: “Until this moment, in my whole life I knew without a
doubt that, without any exception, I loved you best” (103).
The novels of Jamaica Kincaid actually sit on a cusp between fiction and
essay. They are a genre unto themselves in which both narrator and fictional
characters may be said to speak in the reflective style of the essayist. Dialogue
in Creole would have set up such a contrast of codes as to create a focus
which is not part of the writer’s theme. Code-shifting invites attention to
issues such as class and cultural difference, issues which are not central to the
novel. Creole speech in the context of Kincaid’s fiction would simply seem
idiosyncratic, distracting, except for Creole speech that is not too obviously
another language, such as the snatches of dialogue discussed earlier (Annie
John, 112, 121).
There is sufficient reference, in Annie John, to details of the physical
environment and the indigenous culture to ground the novel in a specific
place. This is very important, for completely disembodied fiction does not
work. But the specificity of Antiguan experience is not in itself a major
preoccupation of the writer. Annie John is not primarily about collective
experience. It is about individual experience, which in the telling expands into
universal experience, often approaching the mythological in its dimensions.
Kincaid’s is a different kind of writing from that which concerns itself
with exploring and affirming the experience of a specific collectivity, a task
which has informed a large part of Caribbean writing to date. Yet both kinds
of writing rejoin the universal, if the writer achieves truth. Both kinds of
writing are valid, and necessary.

Not e s

1. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 102; Lucy
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 90. Subsequent references to Annie John and Lucy are cited
by page numbers within the text.
2. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 25. All subsequent
references will be indicated within the text.
 ANTONIA MACD ONALDSMY T H E

Authorizing the Slut in Jamaica Kincaid’s

At the Bottom of the River

. . . prevent yourself from looking, like the slut I know you are so bent on
becoming; . . . and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I
have warned you against becoming.
(Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River 4)

J amaica Kincaid, as she has herself established, is no respecter of rules,

literary or otherwise. She has, in her countless interviews, detailed the ways
in which she has chosen to authorize herself through a change of name
and a separation from the small island on which she was born. Kincaid has
spoken at length about the process of her becoming a writer at a time when
she had no literary models to follow, when she didn’t even know that there
were West Indians like herself who wrote and published. Her readers have
not only been privy to her literary emergence; Kincaid has also provided
many accounts of her social adventures in North America as she struggled to
establish her own personhood within a landscape where her mother’s mores
and morality had no scope or relevance. The public persona who is Jamaica
Kincaid seems willful and unorthodox.
Key to all her circulating narratives of an emerging, self-invented
author is the notion of an empowering transgressiveness. Specifically, these
narratives feed into a sustained self-mythologizing which has as its core a
nonpenitent and contrary consciousness. This paper argues that, in her first

From MaComère 2 (1999). ©1999 by Jacqueline Brice-Finch.

31
32 Antonia MacDonald-Smythe

published collection At the Bottom of the River, the persona with whom this
writer identifies manifests this consciousness through a negotiation between
two resisting modes of being: the jablesse1 (she-devil), and the jamette 2 (slut).
Moreover, this first collection of stories, given its strong autobiographical
nature, can be read as the working through of these modalities towards the
creation of an authorial self. While this negotiation is an ongoing one and is
not limited to this collection, in At the Bottom of the River the writer comes to
privilege one modality as allowing her greater scope for the expression of an
emergent consciousness. The manner in which she arrives at this position and
the factors which shape that decision constitute the argument of this essay.
In At the Bottom of the River Kincaid invokes the magic of her mother’s
lore, the power of the folk world and its contradictory rhythms. The powerful
presence of obeah as a way of life is one example of the natural accessible
magic that is part of the richness of the folk world into which Kincaid has
entry. Obeah is presented as a folk practice which manipulates supernatural
forces in order to either protect oneself from evil or to achieve evil ends. Thus
obeah, accessible and indiscriminate folk magic, becomes a marker both of
promise and of danger. For the unknowing, the uninitiated, and the fearful,
obeah reduces the folk world to an impenetrable blackness. For the knowing,
the initiated, and the brave, obeah illuminates the possibilities of the folk
world. The jablesse, homed in this magical space, participates in the power of
the folk-based world and is a figure who commands both fear and respect.
She is both a part of and an outsider to community life.
The story “In the Night” provides a rich delineation of that folk world
and its myriad inhabitants. The night soil men who have the task of removing
human waste are, like the Kincaid reader, also privy to the flux and flow which
constitute community life. In the daytime, the night soil men participate in
the dreams and ambitions of their community. They love and are loved; have
children; betray their wives with their mistresses; make promises to their
children which they do not keep; indulge in small vanities. At night, they
are observers and silent participants in another drama, another reality. They
witness the nightly perambulations of the jablesse who “has removed her kin
and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies” (6).3 They observe
the various manipulations of the magical to service the mundane. They are
seduced by the jablesse whom Kincaid, in a later story, describes as a beautiful
woman, “a person who can turn into anything. But you know they aren’t real
because of their eyes” (9). And in this folk world, the real and the non real
occupy the same space. This is emblematized in the ghost of Mr. Gishard—
the non real—as it stands under the cedar tree looking at and yearning for
the life left behind—the real.
Initially, Kincaid seems comfortable with the real/non real paradox
which characterizes this creole space. The self-identification as jablesse allows
 Authorizing the Slut in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River 33

her many creative possibilities. It becomes the occasion to re-arrange the

facts of her personal history; it makes a space for an alternative rendering of
experience—one which, like the transformative magic of obeah, allows for
truth to be identified as other than factual or locatable. Like the blackbird
in the story “Girl” which is not really a blackbird, like the beautiful woman
who is really a jablesse, Kincaid’s autobiography, as represented in At the
Bottom of the River, gestures at a truth which is not absolute and which
requires no authentication except that it lies chimerically embedded in her
own experiences. Even while self remains the center of narrative interest, it
is never a fixed or identifiable self. Rather, it imitates the mother persona
who in an unguarded moment, very much like the jablesse, “grew plates of
metal-colored scales on her back, . . . uncoiled her hair from her head and
then removed her hair altogether, . . . taking her head into her large palms,
she flattened it so that her eyes . . . sat on the top of her head and spun
like two revolving balls” (55). From this vantage point, the jablesse is able
to view the world from myriad perspectives. Similarly, the mode of jablesse
allows Kincaid to participate in the folk world inhabited by her mother—a
world where she can deploy a fluid, hypnotic prose; a world where the rich
melody of mother-tongued words, the inexplicable magic of maternal ways
of coming to know are co-opted as the power to alter existing literary forms
into new modes of self-representation.
These positives notwithstanding, the solid pervasiveness of the mother’s
presence, simultaneously reassuring and threatening, is presented as what
the persona wants to both participate in and undermine. This paradoxical
negotiation is at the heart of Kincaid’s narrative enterprise. She has often
admitted that her ambiguous relationship with her mother constitutes her
inspirational springboard. In an interview with Kay Bonetti, Kincaid insists:
“It was the thing I knew. Quite possibly if I had had another kind of life I
would not have been moved to write. That was the immediate thing, the
immediate oppression, I knew. I wanted to free myself of that” (133). It
is her mother for whom Kincaid writes, it is her mother’s voice which she
attempts to capture in her prose and it is her mother from whom she needs to
free herself. Kincaid writes to escape the lure of that jablesse. But its insidious
power is not so easily negated and the stories in At the Bottom of the River
shuttle back and forth, seeking a way out, another resolution, an alternative
way of being.
The circulating contradictions: the vacillation between joy at belonging
and fear of separation—between desire for selfhood and the pain of
remembered separation—are captured in the short story “My Mother.” The
relationship between the mother and daughter is an injurious one, and the
child dreams of freeing herself from the tyranny of her mother’s love. She
wishes her mother dead, yet cannot imagine a world without her mother.
34 Antonia MacDonald-Smythe

She feels suffocated by the constancy of her mother’s devotion and plots
self-indulgent escapes from a “climate not suited to [her] nature” (57). In the
narrator’s growing anger, pits, traps, poisons, strangulation and alternative
magic are fantasized as ways to bring about the mother’s demise. The child
narrator longs to grow her “own bosoms, small mounds at first, leaving a
small, soft place between them, where, if ever necessary, [she] could rest
[her] own head” (53).
Nonetheless the narrator is cognizant that there is still much she can
learn from her mother, particularly the ways in which the mother/mentor’s
powers can be annexed and extended. Indeed, she dreams of a world where
she is bigger and more dominant than her mother. She pretends frailty in
order to ascertain the source of the mother’s strength. “I sighed occasionally—
long soft sighs, the kind of sigh she had long ago taught me could evoke
sympathy. In fact, how I really felt was invincible. I was no longer a child
but I was not yet a woman” (56). But to become truly invincible, she needs
to reconfigure the space wherein the mother and daughter wrestle to assert
their selfhood. The folk world, dominated by the jablesse and her chameleon
magic, is ultimately the mother’s milieu and must necessarily be rejected by
the narrator/writer as she seeks another site wherein she can sport mastery.
To remain in the mother’s world is to be forever caught between a “horrible
roar . . . [and] a self-pitying whine” (56).
Apprenticed to her mother, having learned how to work her mother’s
special kind of obeah, the narrator sets about transforming the terms of her
location in her mother’s oral world. She is as much the initiate as she is the
challenger. She is both a child and a woman. She loves her mother, yet she
is constantly seeking to destroy her. She glories in her mother’s presence,
yet yearns to escape into exile.4 The child imagines herself growing into her
mother, yet never achieving the power: “I had grown big but my mother was
bigger” (56). “My mother has grown to an enormous height. I have grown to
an enormous height also, but my mother’s height is three times mine” (58).
While the child narrator can never approximate the mother’s power, Kincaid
achieves a successful annexation because of the tactics of intervention she
deploys—her judicious use of the magic of language.
A novice in the jablesse world, learning how to make creative use of
the magic and power inherent to the folk world, Kincaid can take her place
alongside her literary creations. In that spirit, “Wingless” offers an example
of how to survive that world. Exploring the ways in which survival in that
world depends on submitting to a larger maternal authority, “Wingless”
advocates an acceptance of dependence as necessary and inevitable. The
story details a life apprenticed to the instructions of others, a life where
she is “a defenseless and pitiful child” (23). But the paradox of submission
and resistance remains. The inquiry “But how can my limbs that hate be
 Authorizing the Slut in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River 35

the same limbs that love? How can the same limbs that make me blind
make me see? I am defenseless and small” (22) is followed by “My hands,
brown on this side, pink on this side, now indiscriminately dangerous, now
vagabond and prodigal, now cruel and careless, now without remorse or
forgiveness . . .” (27).
“Wingless” offers surrender as a means of survival. In the safety of
her mother’s presence, the protagonist can survive the co-existence of the
fearful and the mysterious. Now keeping a safe distance she can follow the
woman she loves, can witness the encounter between Papa Bois, ruler of the
forest, who “wore clothes made of tree bark and sticks in his ears” (25)5
and the woman—the jablesse who roams the forest and the mountains, the
lowlands and the valleys. The child can hear Papa Bois say forceful things to
the woman, can watch him blow himself up until he looks like a boil, and
can remain unafraid. She is safely aligned to the woman who “instead of
removing her cutlass from the folds of her big and beautiful skirt and cutting
the man in two at the waist, . . . only smiled—a red, red smile [at the man]
and like a fly he dropped dead” (25). In this game for dominion, the power
of the jablesse is uncontested and the frightened child’s choice of alignment
assures her safe survival. But there can be other negotiations, ones which do
not assure the same degree of protection or survival.
The story “Blackness” reiterates the inconstancies of the mother’s
world—a world where one is erased, annihilated, one’s form made formless.
However, this story suggests a different strategy for charting the geography
of that seemingly immeasurable world—surrender to its boundaryless silence.
“Living in the silent voice, I am no longer ‘I.’ Living in the silent voice, I am
at last at peace. Living in the silent voice, I am at last erased” (52). There
is power in this surrender because it allows the persona to move towards
claritas and the blackness which threatened erasure now assumes a lambent
potential. There is a suggestion that the power contained in blackness can be
accessed by being absorbed into it, even while this absorption means that the
creative voice is as yet silent.
Nevertheless, the reader is assured that the voicelessness is only
temporary, for the persona is not “one with it” (48) only as yet isolated within
it. Indeed, this isolation is at the polar opposite to the earlier community
which was loud with voices and indomitable wills which endangered the
embryonic Id. Now community wears many conflicting faces, and blackness
comes in different ways. In the new world which is marauded by “bands of
men . . . [with] guns and cannons” (48), blackness becomes the metonym
for colonial conquest. Community, presented then as the antithesis of
blackness, evokes the oral rhythms of the world, its beauty, its power, as
they were before they were blackened and destroyed by colonial adventures.
Community can bring one to voice. It can provide a counternarrative to
36 Antonia MacDonald-Smythe

what Moira Ferguson6 describes as “linguistic alienation, feelings of loss and

censorship that threaten to annihilate . . .” (23).
In “Blackness” the child which the persona has made becomes the
writing self, a newly empowered, writing Id who appropriates the power of
the monstrous mother. Out of the womb-like blackness comes this child, a
powerful, pitiless and unimperiled, still silent self. “Though I have summoned
her into a fleeting existence, one that is perilous and subject to the violence
of chance, she embraces time as it passes in numbing sameness, bearing in
its wake a multitude of great sadnesses” (51). Blackness expands to a space
of silence waiting to be filled, a place without boundaries, without limits, a
blank space wherein and upon which new narratives can be written. Silence
is now bigger than blackness, yet part of it. Silence is also non-threatening
and welcoming. Silence is a progression of blackness. There is safety in it.
Silence, safety, blackness, all these constituents of the jablesse world
notwithstanding, the expansive reality of the folk world is ultimately
insufficient to the aspirations of the persona. In her experimentation with
the jablesse as a mode of being, Kincaid comes to the realization of its limits
even while she concedes that it allows for what María Lugones describes
as “weaving [which] reveals the possibility and complexity of a pluralistic
feminism, a feminism that affirms the plurality in each of us . . . as richness and
as central to feminist ontology and epistemology” (390). Indeed, the jablesse,
once she has taken off her skin, is free to go anywhere, become anything.
She is now mysterious and magical. She is intrusive and intimidating. She is
beautiful, yet fearsome. But to be all these things she must take her skin off,
and it is this act which renders the jablesse non real. In taking off her skin
she becomes anything only because now she is nothing; she lacks shape and
substance. While the jablesse may provoke fear, that fear is deconstructed
by classification of the jablesse as the mere phantom of the imagination.
Similarly the mother’s power can be neutralized by the recognition that its
range of influence is limited to the yard. It is not real elsewhere. Outside
the folk world the jablesse ceases to be; the mother’s powers cease to matter.
Both have limited transferability and in fact depend on the child/narrator for
their continuance. It has limited transferability and in fact depends on the
child/narrator for its continuance.
Thus, in spite of its potential for playful traveling, the jablesse modality
remains nonviable; its lack of ontological status confines the jablesse to
gallivanting in the mountains (9). It is therefore displaced by a more viable
alternative—the jamette. The jamette is as intrusive and intimidating as the
jablesse; she too can smile a red, red deadly smile, but she is offensively real.
Moreover the jamette is everything the mother has rejected as a viable mode
of survival and is therefore the marker of filial rejection, rebellion and power.
Both of and outside the folk world, the jamette has wider gallivanting range.
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előtt, hogy abban az állapotban és akaratban tartsa fenn a
nemzetet, hogy egy napon a gyámfia, a király hatalmát nemcsak a
szép részében a királyságnak: de egész Magyarországon is
helyreállíthassák. S a míg e hazafiui dicsvágyat ébren tartá a
nemzetben, nem feledkezett meg annak a kényelméről és
biztosságáról. A saját jövedelmét is feláldozva, emeltetett
középületeket, haszonra és mívelődésre, építtetett erősségeket
Erdély védtelen pontjain s Nagyvárad környékén azokat megrakta jól
begyakorolt zsoldos hadakkal, a kik fölé derék, hű kapitányokat
helyezett; az urak közül pártfogolta azokat, a kiknek eszük és
érdemük volt, s különösen kegyelte a székelyeket, a kik a
legharcziasabb és legkifáradhatlanabb népek, mindig készek a
felhivásra hadirendbe állni.»
Igy ir a részrehajlatlan franczia tudós Fráter Györgyről.
A magyar kortársak azonban más véleményen voltak. Nekik
Fráter György kormányzása kiállhatlan zsarnokság volt. Mindenki
irigykedett rá s ezek az alattomos torzsalkodók, meg a
cselszövényben felnőtt olasz udvarhölgyek, az élvhajhászó lengyel
udvaronczok úgy felingerelték Fráter György ellen a királynét, hogy
Izabella elhatározta megszabadítani magát e nehéz ember
zsarnoksága alól, a ki őt mulatságaiban, fényüzésében akadályozza.
A királyné már a saját jegypénzét költé: azt a bizonyos tizezer
aranyat.
A Zápolya-kincsek mind Petrovics kezébe vándoroltak zálogba. A
jó nagybácsi adogatott a királynénak azokra pénzt, szaraczénus
uzsora mellett.
A királyné azon kezdte Fráter György ellen a támadást, hogy
felszólitá, adjon számot, hová tette az ország jövedelmeit egész
kincstárnokságának az ideje alatt.
Fráter György erre röviden válaszolt. János király haláláig a
számadások Verbőczy Istvánnak lettek átadva megvizsgálásra. Azok
ott elégtek a kanczellár padlásán Buda ostromában. Az azóta
felszaporodott számadásokat majd befogja mutatni János királynak,
mihelyt az olvasni megtanul. (Már hét esztendős volt.)
És Fráter Györgynek igaza volt. Abban az időben nem volt szabad
nyilvánosságra hozni sem a jövedelmeit, sem a kiadásait az
országnak. A közjövedelmek legnagyobb része mind olyan volt, hogy
ha felfedezik a forrását, rögtön bedugul. Még nagyobb veszedelem
támadt volna belőle, ha a kiadásokat dobra ütik: a titkos
ajándékozások a török nagyvezéreknek, tolmácsoknak, magának a
szultánnak; a titkos ügynökök fizetése Bécsben, Rómában,
Toledoban, Jászvásárban; az új erősségek emelése, a hadak
felfegyverzése, különösen a nagyváradi ágyuöntő mühely, mihelyt
közhir szárnyára kap, egyszerre rázudítja Erdélyre a török haragját.
Ezt vétek volt kérdezni, s bűn lett volna rá felelni.
Majd ha a király olvasni tud! Az pedig még az öreg Á-t sem
ismerte.
Ekkor a királyné összehivta az erdélyi országgyülést, hogy az
lásson törvényt a barát feje fölött.
Fráter Györgynek vesztett ügye volt az országgyülés előtt. A
főurakat bántotta az, hogy fölöttük egy barát uralkodik; a szász
követek keseregtek ellene a rajtuk behajtott adó miatt. Batthyányi
Orbán haragudott rá, hogy nem ő rá bizta az ország főkapitányságát
s nyilt ellensége lett. Török János, a Bálint fia el volt keseredve
ellene atyjának török rabságban elhunyta miatt, a kiről azt hirlelték,
hogy Fráter György okozta az elfogatását. Majláth Istvánnak a hivei
mind ellene esküdtek, mert azt hitték, hogy ő tartja vissza a
vezérüket a Jedikulában; de legnagyobb ellensége volt a királyné, a
ki a zordon, rideg erkölcsü papi gyámban világi örömeinek
megcsorbítóját látta. Török János készült az országgyülésen a
királyné ügyét védelmezni, s Fráter Györgynek ugyan el volt készítve
az útja a vérpadhoz, ha ezen az országgyülésen megjelenik.
Hanem a barátnak megint segítségére jött a saját édes esze.
Nem az országgyülésre ment el; hanem a királynéhoz.
 Izabella fejedelmi haraggal fogadta a barátot. Szemére hányta,
hogy dicsőült férje, János király, minő alacsony sorsból emelte őt fel
a legmagasabb méltóságra! Eszébe hozta a haldokló szavait,
melyekkel nejét és gyermekét a barát oltalmába ajánlja; s ő most
háládatlanul, szivtelenül eltüri, hogy királynéja és királyi gyermeke
szükséget szenvedjen: maga kincseket gyüjt halomra, s a királyi
asztalra csak morzsákat juttat.
Végzé keserves sirással.
Fráter György engedé a feje fölött lezugni a királyi harag
menyköveit s a rájuk következett záport egyaránt.
Akkor aztán elővette az ékesenszólását s világos képet rajzolt az
ország állapotairól a királyné elé; de legékesebb beszéd volt az, a
midőn előszólítá apródjait s azok egy vasszekrényt czipelének be,
melynek kulcsait átadá Fráter György Izabellának.
– Ime lássa felséged, hogyan sáfárkodtam az ország vagyonával,
felséges asszonyom és királyi gyámfiam javára.
A királyné által felnyitott vasszekrényben tizezer darab lizimakhus
arany volt felhalmozva.
Hát ez már okos beszéd! Az ilyen czáfolattól rögtön felszáradtak a
királyi könyek. Izabella kezét nyujtá Fráter Györgynek, sőt az arczát
is megcsókolta. Végre nevetni kezdett s azt mondá, hogy előre tudta
ő, milyen jó ember a barát, s most már fel lévén világosítva, átlátja,
hogy mindent az ország javára cselekedett.
Itt rendbe hozván a dolgát, Fráter György Mineróna úrhölgy felé
fordult, a ki nagyon duzzogni látszott.
– Kegyelmednek pedig, bájos szép amazon, szintén meghoztam
azt, a mit igértem: egy délczeg vőlegényt, az előkelő Zborniczky
Miklós herczeget, a ki ime általam küldi kegyelmednek a
jegygyürüjét – és a jegypénzt, két ezer darab oroszlános tallérokban.
 Erre aztán Mineróna úrhölgy is zokogásra fogta a dolgot; de
ügyelt rá, hogy a könnyei kárt ne tegyenek az arcza hajnalszinében.
Eként mind a két asszony meg lévén nyerve, Fráter György ismét
ura volt a helyzetnek.
A két, jókedvre derített hölgy kétfelül karonfogva a kedves
zsarnokot, átvezeté őt a királyi gyámfiának a szobájába, hogy annak
is bemutassa hódolatát.
A gyámi feladat aként volt felosztva a két tutor között, hogy
Fráter György vezette az ország ügyeit, jó Petrovich Péter pedig a
királyi gyermek nevelését.
Mikor a gyermek-király szobájába benyitottak, épen ebben a
foglalatosságban találták a gyámot és növendéket.
Petrovich négykézláb mászott a földön, János Zsigmond pedig a
hátán ült, mint egy lovon s pattogatta a korbácsát fölötte, kiabálva:
«deh te ráró!»
Fráter György nagyon restellte ezt a dolgot.
– Uram, Petrovich Péter; temesi gróf uram. Ez már mégsem
kegyelmedhez méltó pozitura.
A temesi gróf mérgesen felelt vissza.
– Hát mi köze ahhoz kegyelmednek, ha én a királyommal lovast
játszom?
– Megigazítom magamat. Nem kegyelmednek illetlen, hanem a
királynak, hogy ilyen lovat választ magának. Majd adok én a
királynak egy szép kis tatár lovat, a min hetykén lovagolhat.
Erre a gyermek-király rögtön leugrott a nagybátya hátáról s
odafutott Fráter Györgyhöz.
– Hol van az a kis ló?
 – Az a kis ló itt van már az udvaron felnyergelve. Hanem annak
az ám a szokása, hogy az olyan gyereket ledobja a hátáról, a ki nem
tudja elmondani az Úr imáját: a miatyánkot.
– Én pedig nem tudom. Péter bácsi azt mondja, hogy az
embernek kipotyog a foga az imádkozástól. Aztán minek nekem az a
«miatyánk»? Az én atyám király volt. A «mindennapi kenyerünkért»
sem könyörgök én, mert én kenyeret nem eszem: csak hust, meg
tortát.
Fráter György kemény dorgáló szóval fordult gyámtársa felé.
– Uram, temesi gróf uram, ez nem jó nevelés! Nem így bizták
kegyelmedre a királyt.
Petrovich durván förmedt vissza.
– Ne tanítgass engem, te barát móresre! Én királynak nevelem az
öcsémet, nem papnak!
Azzal tele pofával fujtatva eltávozott a szobából, engedelmet sem
kérve a királynétól.
A barát aztán ölébe vette a kis királyt s elkezdett neki szép
meséket mondani: mig az annyira megszelídült, hogy össze hagyta
tenni a kezeit, s elmondta Fráter György után a miatyánkot végig.
Másodszor aztán már elmondta magától. Olyan tűz-esze volt – a
gyermeknek!
Az egybegyült rendek várták ezalatt nagy gyürkőzéssel Fráter
Györgyöt az országgyülésen.
Nagy lehetett az elbámulásuk, a midőn érkezni látták a biborszínü
hintót a nyolcz fehér lóval: a hintóban a királynét a hátulsó ülésben,
mellette a kormányzót, Fráter Györgyöt, vezéri öltözetben, kardosan,
szemben az első ülésen Mineróna herczegnőt; a hintó mellett pedig
a miniatur paripán lovagolva a kis királyt, a szultántól kapott arany
buzogánynyal a kezében.
 Az országgyülés termébe Fráter György vezeté fel a királyt és
királynét kézen fogva. Az esztrádon három baldakinos szék volt
felállítva: a középsőbe ült János Zsigmond, ő volt a főszemély,
jobbról a királyné, balról Fráter György. – Petrovich már nem fért el.
Neki oda alant Mineróna herczegnő mellé kellett ülni; a ki egyre
azzal boszantotta, hogy milyen derék ember ez a barát!
A felriadó üdvkiáltás után a királyné szólalt fel: előadva szép latin
nyelven, hogy a «főbiró» már ő neki teljes számadást terjesztett elő
kincstárnoki hivataláról. Ez előterjesztés világ elé nem hozható, mert
akkor az ellenségeink is megtudhatják; a rendek nyugodjanak meg
abban, hogy a királyné az ország és a király jóvoltára történteknek
találta a főbiró által tett kiadásokat.
Hát ha ilyen hatalmas szószólója akadt Fráter Györgynek, mint
Izabella királyné, akkor ki szólhatott volna ellene? A rendek egy
lélekkel kiáltának a királyné szavaira helyeslést; s Fráter György
legmérgesebb ellenfele, Batthyányi Orbán (lelkében igaz hazafi) állt
fel azzal az indítványnyal, hogy ha a királyné ily bizalommal
ragaszkodik Martinuzzihoz, akkor kiáltsák őt ki a rendek Erdély
kormányzójának. Ez meg is történt, s e naptól fogva Fráter György
alkotmányosan megválasztott kormányzója, valódi fejedelme volt
Erdélyországnak.
A jó Petrovich mérgesen rugta ki a széket maga alól e választás
után.
– Hát akkor én mi vagyok? A király lova?
Azzal nagy mérgesen ott hagyta az országgyülést, kocsijába
vetette magát s dúlfúlva vágtatott haza Temesvárra.
Az országgyülés e pillanat hatása alatt egészen megfordult.
Irmagja sem maradt annak a pártnak, mely Fráter György ellen
szövetkezett, s mely még egy nap előtt eltipró többséget számított.
Bizonysága ennek a csodaváltozásnak az, hogy ugyanazon
országyülés, mely az eddigi adók miatt a fejét akarta kérni Fráter
Györgynek, a kormányzó bölcs beszéde után új adót szavazott meg,
a hogy Tinódi Lantos Sebestyén diák énekli:
«Egy pénz héával egy forintot szörzének, Hogy török császárnak
adót szörzenének, Mert mindenkor ez törvénye Magyaroknak.
Forintot héával az adóban szednének!»
Hej, de okos törvényök volt a régi magyaroknak! Minden
adóforintból egy pénzt visszatartani magnak!
Nemsokára e nevezetes országyülés után megtartották Mineróna
herczegasszony lakodalmát, a jeles Zborniczky Miklós lengyel főurral,
a mely alkalommal az ország is hozzájárult az udvarhölgy
kelengyéjéhez (Tinódi szerint): «Mineróna asszony elházasításában,
Zborniczky Miklóssal törvényházasságban. Ott szép ajándékot az
ország mutata. Szegény köznemes nép kit váltiglan bána».
A menyegzői tánczvigalomban a királyné kezdé meg a tánczot:
együtt lejtvén el a szép palotást a kormányzóval. A barátról az irigyei
is elismerték, hogy még «dali tánczot járni» is jobban tud, mint
valamennyi fiatal leventék.
Mineróna nagyon meg volt elégedve, úgy a kelengyével, mint a
vőlegénynyel, ki őt magával viendő volt haza, Lengyelországba.
A vánkostáncz végzi a lakodalmat, mely abból áll, hogy egy
selyemvánkost, zeneszó mellett vándorolni küldenek, férfi viszi
hölgyhöz, hölgy viszi férfihoz; arra letérdepel: hölgy megváltja magát
egy csókkal, férfi egy aranynyal; kiki azt választja magának, a ki neki
tetszik. Ebből a tánczból a királyné sem vonta ki magát s bizony ő
kapta a legtöbb – aranyat váltságban. De a ki a legtöbb aranyat
fizette, az bizonyára Fráter György volt. Azért, hogy ősz szakálla volt.
Mikor végre Mineróna vitte a selyemvánkost Fráter Györgyhöz, s
letérdelt a vánkosra, az egész udvar gonoszkás mosolylyal nézte ezt
a példát. Mindenki tudta jól, hogy minő halálos ellensége Mineróna a
barátnak, azt is tudta, hogy a remete azért boronálta össze ezt a
házasságot, hogy a viperamérgü udvarhölgyet eltávolítsa a királyné
mellől. Azért is a világ truczczára olyan hangos csókot adtak
egymásnak, hogy azt meg lehetett hallani az egész teremben.
A csókváltságban Fráter György egy, a rendes aranypénznél
nagyobb aranyat adott Minerónának. Az egy KOZON arany volt,
melynek egyik lapjára a figura alá három X volt verve.
Mineróna elérté a czélzást: odasugott a barát fülébe.
– Ez a XXX jelenti a «harmincz ezüstpénzt». – Ez a Judáscsók
dija. Ne legyen igaza kegyelmednek. Én nyilvános ellensége voltam.
De itt marad utánam egy roszszabb ellensége, mint én. Nem visel
asszonyruhát, de azért még sem férfi. Ott van a Judás!
– Látom én azt, pedig nincsen itten. (Petrovichot érték.)
A vőlegény azonban megelégelte a vánkostánczot, s élt azzal a
jogával, hogy a táncznak véget vessen, a trombitásokkal a
menyasszonykisérő nótát zendíttetve rá takarodóul.
 XIX. FEJEZET.

«VITÉZ TÖRÖK JÁNOSRÓL

EMLÉKEZEM.»

Ez országgyüléstől fogva, Fráter György tudott élni a maga

méltóságával. Elhagyta a remetei egyszerüséget, váradi székhelyén s
új Bálványos várában egészen kormányzóhoz méltó udvart tartott, a
hol a fejedelmek követeit fogadhatá. Bécsben, úgy mint
Augsburgban, Toledóban úgy, mint Versaillesben, Velenczében,
Rómában tudták azt jól, hogy Magyarország ügyeit Nagy-Váradról
intézik. A szultán is elismerte a barátot kormányzónak. Az ő követei
forgottak minden külföldi hatalmasságnál.
Azok pedig folyvást harczban álltak egymással, s ezekben a
harczokban számítottak a magyarok fegyvereire is. Viszontag ők is
bejöttek egyszer-egyszer Magyarországra a török ellen harczolni s itt
sok vért elvesztegettek, úgy hogy akkoriban Magyarországot a
«németek czimeteriomának» nevezték.
Ferdinánd király a magyar ezredeket felhasználta a protestáns
német fejedelmek elleni hadjárataiban, a helyett, hogy a török ellen
fordította volna a vitézségüket. A szász fejedelmet, Frigyes Jánost,
Wittenbergánál magyar ezredek győzték le, s egy magyar huszár:
Luka Józsa megsebesíté és elfogta, sőt, mint Pethő Gergely
krónikásunk feljegyzé: Szentgyörgyi Miklós gróf, egy jeles hadviselő
vitéz, fogta volt meg a gallus királyt, Ferenczet, a Ticinum város
alatt. Mire volt ez jó a magyaroknak?
Ebben a minden politikai és vallásos izgalmak általános
khaószában kellett Fráter Györgynek keresni az utat a maga
nemzete számára. Az igazságosan itélő történetbuvár előtt Fráter
György nem csak korának, de nemzete történetének legnagyobb
diplomatájaként fejlődik elő.
Azt mondják, hogy mindenkit megcsalt: hát őt nem akarta
mindenki megcsalni? Ez a diplomaczia. Csakhogy ő jól értesítteté
magát Európa minden hatalmasságainak szándékairól s nem hagyta
magát véletlenek által meglepetni: azt pedig, hogy ő mit tervez?
senki sem találta ki. Még sejteni sem tudták, hogy ő váraiban egy
egész hatalmas hadsereget tartogat, a mivel minden órában ott
csaphat le, a honnan a veszély közelít.
Legtöbb vesződsége volt magával a királynéval. Annak Gyalu
várát rendezte be fejedelmi székhelyül; hanem ott a királyné unta
magát. Bécsből szüntelen küldöztek le hozzá magyar főurakat, a kik
megujították az alkudozásokat Erdély és fél Magyarország
átengedése végett. Most már a szepesi herczegség helyett az
oppelni herczegséget kinálták János Zsigmond királynak; Izabellának
gazdag évdijat.
Fráter György helyeselte az alkut; de elébb azt követelte, hogy
Ferdinánd hagyjon fel a német fejedelmek elleni áldatlan háboruval,
s hozza ki seregeit Magyarország védelmére: különben az egész
országot elfoglalja Szolimán. Valamennyi magyar főúr, a ki Ferdinánd
pártján volt, ugyanazt követelte, a mit Fráter György.
Izabella azonban türelmetlen volt: minden módon menekülni
akart Erdélytől, a magyar koronától, a magyar fájdalmaktól.
Egyszer már el akart szökni fiastul Erdélyből, Petrovich és Patóczy
biztatására. Fráter György azonban, a ki a királyné minden lépését
őriztette, gyorsan parancsot küldött az erdélyi városoknak, hogy a
királynét be ne bocsássák, s a derék szászok a kormányzó parancsát
fogadták meg, leeresztették a sorompókat a királyné hintója előtt, s
annak egész udvarával vissza kellett térni Gyalu várába. Volt aztán
hét országra szóló panasz: hogy a gonosz barát fogolyképen bánik a
királynéval s még a várából sem engedi kimenni.
És Fráter Györgynek erre igen erős oka volt. Ferdinánd király,
midőn végre egy hatalmas, csataképes hadsereget hozott össze,
midőn minden magyar készen állt a török rabiga ellen feltámadni,
akkor egy olyan nagyszerü meglepetést szerzett a magyaroknak, a
mi túltett még a «fekete herczeg» lángeszü retirádáján is. Ferdinánd
király a legnagyobb hadi készülődés közepett egyszerre csak békét
kötött a török szultánnal hét esztendőre, a legmegalázóbb föltételek
mellett. A magyarok le voltak verve egész a fekete földig!
Egész Európa följajdult erre a békekötésre; a pápa, a császár
szemrehányó leveleket irtak Ferdinándnak, de ő azt felelte, hogy már
lekötötte a szavát. S keresztyén fejedelemnek a szavát meg kell
tartani.
És Izabella akkor akarta átadni az országot Ferdinándnak! A
midőn a legjobb hivei is elpártoltak a királytól. A hűséges főurak ott
hagyták Bécset és Pozsonyt, mind Erdélybe siettek, s Fráter
Györgygyel conventiculumot tartva, olyan határozatot hoztak, hogy
János Zsigmondot megkoronázzák királynak s Erdélyt és
Magyarországot a szultán fenhatósága alá bocsátják. Ezt a
határozatot tiz magyarországi főúr irta alá és egy asszony: a
fogságban tartott Perényi Péter neje; egy élő férj özvegye: – így
küldték el a szultánnak.
Ha ekkor János Zsigmondot megkoronázzák, Ferdinánd elveszti
egész Magyarországot. Ezért kellett Fráter Györgynek erőszakkal
visszatartani Erdélyben Izabellát és a fiát. A miért kegyetlen zsarnok
lett a neve. Azt tette, a mit a helyzet parancsolt. Nem ő rontotta el a
Ferdinánddal való egyezkedést, hanem Ferdinánd szerencsétlen
békekötése a törökkel.
 No, de jól adta a sors, hogy nincsen olyan rossz a világon, a
minél még rosszabb is ne jöhessen: így aztán a kisebb rosszból jó
lesz.
Szolimán szultán a tiz főúr ajánlatára azt a választ adta, hogy
kész beleegyezni János Zsigmond megkoronáztatásába; ha a
magyarok átengedik neki Temesvárt, Becse és Becskerek várait, –
melyeket ezennel követel is tőlük; ha nem adják: elveszi.
Ez annyit jelentett, hogy adják át még a temesi bánságot is török
szandzsákságnak.
Erre a pokolbeli követelésre aztán nem maradt más kijárásuk a
magyaroknak, mint az áttérés a Ferdinánd hűségére, mindenestül.
Fráter György lemondott a török pártfogásról; széttépte nagy
terveit: egy nemzeti király alatt felvirágzó Magyarországról. A
hajótöröttnek a part felé kell menekülni, akárki országa van ott. Most
már ő mondta, hogy át kell adni Ferdinándnak a Zápolyák országát.
Így legalább megnyeri a békét az ország. Ferdinándnak hét évre van
békekötése Szolimánnal. Ha a magyar Alföld, a Bánság és Erdély
Ferdinánd birtokába száll át, akkor ennek az országrésznek is
biztosítva lesz a békessége hét esztendőre. S ez a hét év is élet!
Mindenki ezt akarta már. A török kényúri követelés után nem
maradt más választás.
Ferdinánd király végre valahára elérte azt a vágyát, hogy senki
sem ellenezte a nagyváradi kötés végrehajtását: maga Fráter György
minden föltételbe beleegyezett; a királyné mehet már a fiával az
opuliai herczegségbe, a hová nem rég szökve akart menni.
Ámde ekkor egyszerre egy új ellenség támadt. Maga a királyné.
A mint Petrovich megtudta, hogy Fráter György beleegyezett a
Ferdinánddal való kiegyezésbe, s Ferdinánd őt megerősíti Erdély
helytartója állásában, egyszerre támadt benne az ostoba emberek
nagyravágyása: a legveszedelmesebb indulat, mert ez nem nézi
hogy mit gyujt fel a tüzzel, a mit lángra szított.
 Legelőször is a királyné szivében gyujtott fel egy nemtelen
haragot. Ő, a ki mindig futni akart Ferdinándhoz; a ki kulcsolt
kezekkel rimánkodott neki, hogy kisértesse ki innen, most egyszerre
az ellenkezőre fordult, egy olasz udvaronczát (Salvazzit) futtatá
Szolimánhoz: elárulva a szultánnak, hogy Fráter György megalkudott
Ferdinánd királylyal, Erdély és a korona átadása végett, hogy őt és
fiát megakarja fosztani trónjától, országától: kéri a szultánt, küldjön
seregeket az oltalmára, s törje össze az ő zsarnokát, Fráter
Györgyöt!
Izabella királyné hitta fel Szolimán szultánt, hogy Fráter Györgyöt
pusztítsa el a világról!
Egyetlen igaz barátját, a legnagyobb magyar hazafit,
gyermekkora óta jóltevőjét, kiadta az ő maga, az országa, a
keresztyénvilág ellenségének!
Nem jöhetett ez a szivéből. Nem támadhatott ez az ő lelkében. A
nagy hájfejű Petrovich, meg az a sok ármánykodó olasz, lengyel
udvaroncz tette ezt az ő nevében.
De meg volt téve.
Magyarok is járultak hozzá. Batthyány Orbán haragosa volt a
barátnak, Losonczy Pál gyűlölte, mint papot.
Aztán volt a királyné udvaránál két fiatal levente, Török János és
Patóczy Ferencz, a kik mind ketten halálosan szerelmesek voltak a
királynéba.
Nem volt ez világi szerelem, hanem az a mesevilágbeli rajongás a
sárkányölő lovag részéről az üldözött hölgy iránt. Gyönyörűségnek
tarták érette meghalni. S azon versenyeztek egymással, hogy melyik
fogja kettőjük közül hamarább ontani a vérét szive bálványáért.
Török János, mint fiatal suhancz, atyjának Török Bálintnak török
rabságba hurczoltatása után, felmene Bécsbe, s ott Ferdinánd király
udvarában vállalt szolgálatot. Lovaglásban, de különösen tőrrel való
vivásban mindenek fölött kitűntette magát. A magas udvar gyakran
gyönyörködött az achillesi alkatú ifjúban, mikor az a lovagjátékokon
egyedűl két ellenlovaggal szemben elfogadá a tornát. Az egyikkel
vivott görbe karddal, balkézzel, a másik ellen hosszú háromélű
egyenes tőrrel a jobbjában, a lovát csak a térdeivel irányozta.
Mikor aztán Ferdinánd leküldözé a követeit Izabellához alkudozni,
a jó Nádasdy Tamás kiséretében egyszer Török János is lejött, s
akkor esett bele abba a tündéri szerelembe a királyné iránt, ott is
maradt annak a szolgálatában.
Majd megismerkedve a korra nézve egyivásu Patóczy
Ferenczczel, midőn ifjak módjára sziveiket egymásnak kitárták,
megtudták, hogy mind a ketten a királynéba szerelmesek.
Ettől fogva aztán örök fegyverhűséget esküdtek egymásnak s
felfogadták, hogy vérüket, életüket Izabellának fogják szentelni.
Tehát ezek is szaporíták a királyné vakon követő hiveinek táborát.
Török Jánosnak volt százhatvan huszárja, mind aképen gyakorolva,
hogy egyszerre karddal és tőrrel vivjon, és hatvan muskétása, a ki
egyúttal karddal vívó hajdú is volt.
A török szultán első hallásra nem akarta hinni, hogy Fráter
György az ő hatalma ellen szarvakat merjen emelni, előbb
csauszokat külde a baráthoz, annak az örve alatt, hogy szerezzenek
tőle szelindek (molosszusz) kutyákat és nyulhajtó agarakat. Ezek
nem tudtak a barátból kivenni semmi okosat. Ellenben a szultán
tolmácsa Mahmud, a kit Bécsbe küldött, azzal a bizonyos hirrel tért
vissza, hogy bizony átadta Fráter György Ferdinánd királynak Erdélyt,
fél Magyarországot: hozzá is nyulna a király, ha forró nem volna a
gesztenye.
Ekkor aztán Szolimán szultán, a maga haragjának teljességében,
visszaküldé Mahmud béget Ferdinándhoz és Izabella királynéhoz,
mind a két vazalljának megparancsolva, hogy a rebellis barátot, azt a
Fráter Györgyöt, a hol kapják, megfogdossák, lánczra verjék, úgy
küldjék Sztambulba; ha élve el nem foghatják, a levágott fejét
utaztassák a szultánhoz.
É
 És egyúttal, parancsolatja nyomatékául elrendelé a szultán, hogy
a királyné nagybátyja, Petrovich támadja meg a rácz hadaival Nagy-
Váradon Fráter Györgyöt; Péter vajda törjön be Moldvából a
Székelyföldre, István vajda török-oláh dandárral rontson be a
Királyföldre; végre a budai beglerbég: Kászon basa, az egész török
hadsereggel nyomuljon Szegeden, Aradon, Déván keresztül
Erdélybe. Négy felől indítá meg a nagy úr, a királyok királya! a
fegyveres támadást, a szegény fehér barát ellen, a kinek ötödik
ellenségül ott volt maga a királyné, Petrovichcsal és vakbuzgó
magyar testőrvitézeivel.
Ekkor mutatta aztán meg magát a barát a maga egész titáni
nagyságában.
Karddal rontottak rá, karddal felelt vissza! S egy rövid hónap alatt
szétverte mind a négy támadó ellenséget, hogy sebeit nyalva futott
valamennyi vissza a hazájába, s megtrágyázta a magyar földet a
hulláival!
De tartsunk rendet.
A mint Fráter György meghallá, hogy a királyné visszautasítja a
Ferdinánddal kötött egyességet, s az országot fegyverfogásra hivja
fel Fráter György kormányzó ellen, minden haladék nélkül megindítá
új Bálványos várban gyüjtött hadait Erdélybe: a két Mártonffyt, a kik
Marosvásárhelyen hadakat gyüjtöttek ellene, megfogatta s
lenyakaztatá. A hadserege saját zászlói alá esküdött; melyeken az
Utyessenovich czimer a pálosok rendczimerével volt egyesítve: az
egyszarvú veres mezőben és a kenyeret hozó Illésholló kék alapon. A
királynénak még ekkor nem volt több, mint kétezer katonája, azokkal
nagy sietve Gyulafehérvárba vonult vissza. Fráter György a
nyomában. Harminczezer főnyi rendes serege volt, ellátva ágyúkkal.
Ott körülzárta a várban a királynét és hivei seregét. Aztán várta,
hogy mely oldalról fogják hát megtámadni?
A királyné udvarában nagy lett erre az ijedség. Senki sem
számított arra, hogy Fráter György a fegyverre fegyverrel fog felelni.
A saját honfiai a királynénak nem igen tartoztak a vitéz hadverő
lengyelekhez; azok Tinódy jellemzésekint «hamar megröttenének,
kiknek csak bujaság és táncz kell kedveknek. Esznek, isznak leányok
körül csellyegnek, Királyné asszonynak könyörgeni kezdének: Igen
jók nem vagyunk mű táborban lakni, Kérjük, felségedet, ne akarj
kiküldeni Münket a táborba, ott kin nyomorogni. Jobbak vagyunk itt
ben felségednek szolgálni.»
Eként aztán Izabella a vele tartó őrseregnek a vezetését rábizta
Török Jánosra és Patóczy Ferenczre.
Fráter György Ekemezőn ütött tábort derék seregével.
Gyulafehérvárt csak körülzárta és nem ostromoltatá. A királynét
kimélte. Folyton izengetett be hozzá a várba, de a királyné minden
békeföltételt visszautasított.
A Cunctator rendszerrel még azt is elérte Fráter György, hogy a
királyné által behivott pártfogók mindenütt dulással, a fegyvertelen
nép öldöklésével nyomultak előre: ez által azoknak a magyar és
szász uraknak, a kik a török, oláh, rácz segítséget olyan nagyon
áhították, kegyetlen leczkét szolgáltattak.
Egy kora hajnalban arra ébred Fráter György, hogy ugyancsak
erősen ágyuznak Gyulafehérvár táján. Rögtön lóra ült s odavágtatott
a táborból.
Az történt, hogy a székelyek, megunva a várakozást, minden
vezéri parancsszó nélkül neki fordíták az ostromágyukat a
várfalaknak, s elkezdék azokat rombolni, mire Fráter György
odaérkezék, már akkorra nagy rést lövének a bástyán.
Fráter György haraggal kiálta a pattantyusokra: «Ki parancsolta
nektek az ágyuzást?»
– Magam la! pattogott vissza egy kurta zekés atyafi: még nem is
«lófő», csak afféle «pixidárius». Én mondám, mindnyájan megállták
és teszszük, a hogy illik. Mü nem jövénk ide azért, hogy mogyorót
törjünk a fogunkkal a te királynéd számára. A mi országunkat
kétfelől is háborgassa az ellenség: gyerekünk, asszonyunk fut a
homoród-almási barlangba, mü meg itt süssük a makkot? Azért, ha
te barát létániát mondani jöttél ide, hát akkor «Dominus vobiscum»,
de mü már ott vagyunk, hogy «Secula seculorum Amen!» s úgy
széttörjük ezt a rongy várat itten, királynéddal, királyoddal együtt,
hogy még a pora sem marad: azután megyünk haza ellenséget
verni.
Ez igazán székelyül volt mondva.
Fráter György megtiltá a további ágyuzást, a székelyek táborában
pedig tartott egy hathatós beszédet, a melylyel megnyugtatta őket.
Ő maga fog még ma felmenni a királynéhoz az ostromolt várba,
lelkére fog beszélni, hogy távolítsa el a sok behivott ellenséget az
országból; ha aztán a királyné nem hajlik a szóra: azonnal az
ellenségre fogja vezetni a hadait s kiveri azt az országból.
Ebben a székelyek megnyugodtak.
Fráter György azonnal követet küldött fel a királynéhoz;
személyes beszélgetést kérve tőle: az alatt egyikét a királyné
főkapitányainak kivánva ide küldetni tuszul.
Ketten voltak: Török János és Patóczy Ferencz, mind a ketten
délczeg fiatal vitézek, mind a kettőnek egy volt a szerelme. Olyan
szerelem, mely czélját soha el nem éri.
Mikor Fráter György izenetét meghozá a várba a követ, azt
mondá Török János Patóczynak:
– No czimborám, most itt az óra, a melyben bebizonyíthatjuk a
mi bálványunknak, mennyire imádjuk. Kezünkre adta az Isten az ő
gonosz tyrannusát: ide jön a barát! Kettőnk közül az egyiket leküldi a
királyné a táborba tusznak, a másik itt marad. A többit tudod már. A
ki kettőnk közül itt marad a királynéval, ugyan keresztül rontja a
háromélű tőrét a barátnak a lelkén; a másik, a ki kezesül ment érte,
bizonyos kínhalált szenved. A kit a királyné választ.
Patóczy kezet adott rá.
 A királyné Patóczyt választotta tuszul Fráter Györgyért: azt küldte
le az ekemezői táborba. Török János maradt mellette.
Abban a szobában, a hol a királyné fogadta Fráter Györgyöt, volt
egy rejtett fülke, melyet Hunyady János arczképe takart el,
odarejtőzék el vitéz Török János.
Fráter György a maga egyszerű fehér barátcsuhájában jött fel. A
királyné violaszin gyászban fogadta: atyját Zsigmond királyt
gyászolta, ki ez évben költözött el ez árnyékvilágból.
Mikor a barát a királynéval szemben lett, csak leborult térdre a
lábaihoz, s megragadva a királyné kezét, elkezde neki szemrehányást
tenni, de a szava csupa zokogás volt.
– Óh én édes leányom! én drága királyném! Mit cselekedtél az én
szép országommal? Azért, hogy «engemet» összetöress, behivtad a
magyarnak minden kegyetlen ellenségét, négy oldalon gyujtottad fel
a kies szép hazát.
– Nem tudok felőle. Rebegé a királyné megrendülve.
– Te nem tudsz felőle? Hát ki adta a kardot és üszköt Cserepovics
kezébe, hogy a rácz hadakkal pusztítsa végig a magyar Alföldet?
vegye ostrom alá Csanádot, Hunyad várát? Ki irt levelet Péter
vajdának, hogy rontson be a moldvaiakkal, s a krimi tatárral a
Székelyföldre? Ki nyitotta meg az ország kapuját István vajda előtt,
hogy oláh és tatár hadakkal áraszsza el a Királyföldet? Ki küldött
követet a budai beglerbéghez, Kászon basához, hogy jőjjön az egész
török hadsereggel egyenest Erdélybe? Talán nem is tudod, hogy
útjában végigpusztította a Maros vidékét, s már itt ül az előhada
Déva várában s tanítja a megkínzott szüzeknek a te nevedet átkozni.
A királyné megrettent és sirva fakadt.
– Isten látja: én ezt nem akartam!
– Csak engemet akartál összetörve látni. No, hát töress össze; itt
vagyok a kezedben. Ide hoztam neked ajándékba ezt az én ősz
fejemet. Ne emlékezzél rá, milyen szeretettel, mekkora hűséggel
szolgáltalak mindig. Vágasd le a fejem, s aztán próbáld meg az én
véremmel, meg a te könnyeiddel eloltani azt a szörnyü lángot, a
mivel az országaidat elborítottad!
A királyné a kezét tördelte kétségbeestében.
– Istenem. Jehova szent Atyám! Hisz én nem ezt kivántam.
Fráter György ekkor felállt a térdéről, s nyugodt hangon beszélt.
– Tudom, királyném, hogy te nem sejtetted, minő rémségeket
költesz fel szavaddal. Ha lett volna melletted egy ember, a kinek
helyén van a szive és az esze, bizony nem tetted volna ezt. De a
kikkel körül van véve fölséged, azoknak vagy esze, vagy szive meg
van rontva. Íme itt van az a Török János, felséged hadainak
főkapitánya, a kinek az atyját, a dicső emlékű Török Bálintot a
hitetlen ozmán zsarnok lánczokban hurczolta magával. Isten úgy
legyen a birám a másvilágon, a milyen igaz, hogy én mindent
elkövettem a megszabadítására: meseváltságdijat ajánlék érette.
Most veszem a hirét, hogy az én dicső barátomat megváltotta már a
jóságos Isten, s török rablánczából felvitte magához.
A királyné rémkedve tartá a kezeit Fráter György ajkai elé, mintha
visszaakarná tiltani a beszédét.
A rámában az a festett kép, a hős Hunyady képe hogyan reszket:
hangot ad, mintha zokogna! Fráter György tovább beszélt.
– Én e gyászhirre tábori misét tarték a megdicsőült nagy hazafi
rekviemére, míg a fia, a huszonötéves levente, kardját köszörüli itt
fenn, hogy atyjának gyilkosaival, a pogány törökökkel vérszövetséget
kötve, végig pusztítsa a saját hazáját! Hát ez nem a te munkád
királyné asszonyom?
Ennél a szónál megmozdult a nagy arczkép rámástól, sarkán
elfordulva, s a rejtett fülkéből előlépett ifju Török János. Férfiui
harag lángolt az arczán, gyermeki köny ragyogott a szemében.
Három élü tőre volt a kezében.
 Nem Fráter Györgyhöz, hanem a királynéhoz beszélt.
– Ezt nem mondtad nekem, királyné asszonyom! Oh hogy
imádtalak, mint egy oltárképet! Hűséget esküdtem neked életre-
halálra. De ha tudtam volna, hogy te a törökkel kötél szövetséget,
hogy a hitetleneket hivtad az országba, inkább levágtam volna azt az
esküre felemelt három ujjamat. És most legyek elkárhozva, legyek a
Szentháromság által megbüntetve, de még is megtöröm az én
hűségemet te hozzád királyné, s kardomat, szivemet adom a te
ellenségednek, a te zsarnokodnak, a ki engem apám gyilkosaira
enged rohannom! Fráter György! Vigy magaddal. Kétszáz vitéz
harczos jön utánam. Az egy kivánságom, hogy én ronthassak legelől
kegyetlen bosszut állni apám hóhérain!
A királyné abban a perczben, a midőn Török János előlépett a
rejtekéből, egyszerre odaveté magát Fráter György keblére, mintha a
saját testével akarná őt megvédelmezni. És a midőn az ifjú levente
nemes kifakadását végig hallgatta, arczán a rémület átváltozott
megdicsőüléssé. Átfonta két karjával az ősz ember nyakát, csókolta
az arczát, könyörögve szólt hozzá.
– Atyám! Csodatevő szentem! Mentsd meg az országot!
– Hát nem te hivtad be a törököt az országba? szólt Török János
a királynéhoz.
– Átkozott legyen az az óra, melyben azt tettem. «Mea culpa!
mea maxima culpa!»
– Akkor álld meg ezt a kardot, mely a te bűnödnek a zsoldját
lefogja fizetni.
És a királyné áldva tette a kezét az ifjú hős tőrére.
Fráter György halkan rebegé: «Amen.»
Azután a királynéhoz szólt.
 – Királyné asszonyom. Te parancsoltad, hogy mentsem meg az
országot. Megmentem. Török János, ifjú vitéz: tied legyen az első
diadal.
Az ágyuk még azon órában újból eldördültek, de ez örömjel volt.
A királyné és a kormányzó közötti kibékülés hirmondója. Izabella
magyar csapatjai álltak Fráter György seregének az élére, kardjaik
hegyét a török felé fordítva.
Négy oldalról támadták meg Fráter Györgyöt a szultán vazallusai,
a gyönge királyné kérésére, az erős nagyúr parancsolatjára; Fráter
György egyszerre csapott le mind a négy ellenségnek a fejére. Még
nem is egyiket a másik után, de egy időben verte vissza
valamennyit.
Petrovich rácz hada Cserepovics vezetése alatt tízezred magával
vivta Csanád várát, melynek sánczait Fráter György hadnagya,
Perusich Lázár védte nagy vitézül. Ide Varkocs Tamást küldé Fráter
György a nagyváradi dandárral a vár fölmentésére. A vitéz kapitány
nem sokat haditanácsozott, hanem a mint kora hajnalban
megpillantá az ellenség táborát, rohamra trombitáltatott s megütötte
az álmából riadó ráczságot. Erre Perusich hadnagy is kirohant
Csanádból a védő sereggel, s úgy elpaskolták kétfelől Cserepovich
hadát, hogy az minden ágyuját, zászlóját ott felejtve, futott haza
felé, útközben fele elveszett a diadalmas üldözők fegyvere élétől.
A másik betörő sereg Mihály vajdáé volt, ki tizenkétezer oláhval,
tatárral jött be a vöröstoronyi szoroson a Királyföldre. Ez ellen Kendy
János kapitányát küldé Fráter György négyezer harczossal. Az ojtózi
szoroson betört moldvai vajda, István ellen pedig elbocsátá a székely
hadait. Még maradt egy akkora hadserege, hogy ő maga, személyes
vezénylete alatt szembeszállhatott a budai beglerbég, Kászon basa
derék seregével, mely ágyuk és lovasok nagy ereje mellett jött
Magyarország felől, s előhadával már elfoglalva tartá Déva várát,
Erdély délnyugati kapuját. Fráter Györgynek is volt elég öreg ágyuja,
hogy ezt a várat ostrommal visszavegye. De hát elég volt erre a
diadalra vitéz Török János, a kit a barát, ő nagy kivánságára, a maga
csapatjával előre bocsátott.
A mint az ifju vitéz meghallá, hogy Kászon basa előhada
megszállta Dévát: a válogatott szpáhi lovassága benn van a
városban, Feru aga, Ali csausz, Gyurbát vajda vezetése alatt, egy
zászlóalj szarácsi kinn a mezőn táborozik:
«Erre Török János szólla ilyeket: Régen kértem a felséges Úr
Istent, Hogy adjon éltemben oly jó szerencsét, Törökökkel adjon
nekem ily ügyet. Bátorsággal Török Bálint fogságát, Én
megtorolhassam szörnyü halálát, Nem nézhetöm jószágom
pusztulását, Bizony megkésértöm a basa hadát.»
A Lantos éneke elmondja aztán az egész hőstettet a leghivebb
közvetlenséggel.
Éjfél után indítja Török János a kis csapatját Déva alá. «Nagy
vígan az úr trombitát fuvata, Lovagját, gyalogját elkiindítá.
Száztizenhárom lovagot számlála, Hatvanhét gyaloggal éjjel indula.»
S trombitaszó mellett rohanta meg a várost: három vitéze
fejszékkel berontá a kaput, a többiek a palánkon hágtak keresztül.
Ez a maroknyi vitéz had a legnagyobb tivornya közepett lepte meg a
városban a törököket, kik ott a házakban istentelenkedtek az
elragadozott fiatal hölgyekkel. Keserü halállal fizetének meg a tiltott
édességért: az utczákon, a házakban ölték őket szerte. Egy része a
felriadt török hadnak futott a fellegvár felé; de annak a kapuját már
elállta Török János, ki egyszerre ért oda az igyekező Gyurbát
vajdával: «Jelös fővitéz embör mondják hogy volt, Öltözeti neki mert
szép gazdag volt, Az Feru agának agatársa volt, Egy szablyával
viadalnak állott volt. Egy ő maga Török János már vala; Hegyes
tőrrel derékban úgy találá, Sorompóhoz a törököt nyársalá.»
Magát Feru agát a dévai parasztok kaszabolták darabokra.
A rövid harcz alatt a törökök «kétszer negyvennégy holttestet ott
hagyának» azokon kívül, a kik foglyul esének; míg a magyarok közűl
csak «négy vitézök halálát szánák.»
Igy állt boszút vitéz Török János szívszerette jó édes apjának
szomorú fogságban történt haláláért.
«Csuda-szép nyereséggel ők járának. Török János küldte az
kincstartónak. Egy törököt, egy zászlót az barátnak. – Megköszöné,
mint szerelmes fiának.»
A kik ez öldöklésből megmenekülhetének, a város palánkjain
átugrálva, azok a törökök rémmesékkel riaszták fel a mezőn
táborozó szarácsi zászlóaljat. Arra az is megfutamodék s szaladt
valamennyi lóhalálában vissza a beglerbég táborába.
Vitéz Török Jánosnak azonban még több volt az ész a fejében,
mint a vitézség a két kardhordó karjában. Bölcsen átlátta ő, hogy
nagy bolondság volna neki a maga csipetnyi hadával a törököt
üldözni, Kászon basa derék hadának a torkába futni. – Fordítá a
dolgát: megértve, hogy Kendy Ferencz kapitány az oláhországi
betörő sereggel van szemben, rögtön ő is arra felé indúlt,
valamennyi trombitát és dobot a törökök elhagytak, mind magával
czepelvén, úgy, hogy csaknem minden katonájára jutott egy
trombita vagy dob.
A vöröstoronyi szorosban történt ütközet részleteit a franczia iró,
Bechet jegyezte fel. Kendy (Quendi) négyezer emberével
tizenhatezer főnyi ellenséggel állott szemben. Azt a ravasz taktikát
követte, hogy a seregét megosztá: a nagyobb részét a szorosban
felállítá, a kisebbet pedig egy magas hegyről jártatá alá, zászlókkal,
dobszóval az ellenség láttára: a hegyről leszálló ezredek azonban az
erdőbe jutva, megint áttértek a hegy tulsó oldalára s ugyanazon az
úton megint levonultak: úgy hogy a vajda azt hitte, hogy arról az
oldalról egy egész ármádia közelít ellene; s ő is akként állítá fel a
hadai zömét. Mikor aztán a vajda serege a képzelt ellenséggel fordult
arczvonalban, akkor Kendy János az egész dandárát összevonva,
lelkesen rohant rá a felgombolyított ellenségre. Ugyanekkor
megszóllaltak a dobok és trombiták a betörő had háta mögött,
melyek egy új ármádia megjelenését hirdeték; pedig csak dobok és
trombiták voltak. Török János kis csapatja jött onnan felül. – De
ezzel oly zavarba hozta a betörő hadat, hogy az lelkét vesztve, hátat
adott Kendy Jánosnak, s bár négyen voltak egy ellen, ötezer ember
veszteséggel hagyták ott a csatatért, lovaikat, ágyuikat, zászlóikat, s
a ki elfuthatott, hazáig meg sem állt.
 Kászon basa, a budai beglerbég maga ott táborozott
huszonötezernyi hadával a Marosvölgyén, arra várva, hogy elébb a
másik három oldalon betörő hadoszlopok fogják oldalt és hátba a
barátot: akkor aztán ő csap le a fejére Allah segítségével.
Allah máskép rendelé.
Egymásután jövének futvást a hióbhirnökök a táborába.
A legelső volt a jó Cserepovics, a futó rácz hadaival.
«Nyakunkon a barát! Annyi a serege, mint a mezőn a sáska.
Elfoglalta rohammal Nagy-Lakot, Egrest, Oroszlámost, Petrovich
várait! Száz ágyu van vele!»
A futóhad megtízszerezi a verő ellenséget s ágyuszónak hallja a
mordálydurranást.
Ez még jól ki sem jajgatta magát, midőn jön vágtatva, nagy
ordítással Déva felől a megriasztott előhad, a nagy mészárlásból
megmenekült Kéván vajdával, ki maga sebekkel volt elborítva, feje,
keze bekötözve.
«Hátunkban a barát! Elfoglalta Déva várát! Angyali alakok
harczolnak mellette, a kik az égből repülnek alá! Nincs előttük bezárt
erősség! Nincs előttük emberi vitézség! Még a pánczél sem védelmez
meg ellenük: azt is keresztül rontják.»
S még azon éjjel felverték Kászon basát az álmából a
verestoronyi ütközetből elmenekült tatár lovasok.
– Végünk van! Itt jön a barát! Úgy nőnek ki a földből a magyar
katonák, mint a gomba az erdőn. Oda van a vajda hadserege!
Kászon basa ijedtében «Jézus Máriát» kiáltott. Elfeledte renegát
voltát: a régi szent nevek jutottak a nyelvére.
Hanem aztán helyreállítá a mohamedán hitet.
 – Ez a barát ördög; mert különben egyszerre három helyen nem
adhatna ütközetet. Ördög ellen pedig ember nem harczolhat.
Allahnál a segítség! Így volt megírva a Kizmet könyvében.
S nehogy ő maga is két tűz közé szoruljon: nagy hirtelen
felszedette a sátrait, s a nélkül, hogy Fráter György derék hadát látta
volna, vert hadképen futott haza Buda váráig. Varkocs Tamás ütötte
a hátát egész a Tiszáig.
Fráter György aztán ekkor a negyedik betörő sereg, Illés moldvai
vajda ellen fordult, ki István öcscse vereségét megboszulni jött
második haddal a székelyekre; – de az meg sem várta a találkozást;
hirtelen visszavonult a havasokon a maga országába. – És Fráter
György soha sem üldözött futó ellenséget.
Egy hónap alatt tiszta volt az ország az ellenségtől.
A barát négy hadseregét a szultánnak verte el fegyverével.
És mégsem az volt a legnagyobb csodatette.
Hanem az a bámulatraméltó remeklése, a mit tollal kivívott.
E négyszeres diadal után azonnal levelet írt a szultánnak,
melyben előadta tetteinek okait: magát szépen kimenté, ellenségeit
eláztatta, s annyira vitte a szultánt, hogy az visszaküldé Mahmud
tolmácsát Erdélybe Izabellához és Petrovichhoz, ezzel az izenettel:
«Szót fogadjatok ezután a barátnak: mert ha még fellázadtok
ellene, én megyek benneteket engedelmességre tanítani s azt nem
köszöni meg az ország».
Ezért nevezték Fráter Györgyöt ördögi karakternek.
 XX. FEJEZET.

SIC FATA VOLUNT…

Ugyanakkor, a midőn a török szultánhoz írt levelében azt

bizonyítá Fráter György, hogy mind az, a mit eddig tett, a nagyúr
iránti hódolatból történik, egy a pfalzi fejedelemhez irt levelében «a
Krisztus kínszenvedéseire kéri Károly császárt, küldjön fegyveres
segélyt Magyarországba a keresztény vallás megmentésére».
Tíz év óta sikerült már neki ezzel a kettős arczczal játszani, a
nélkül, hogy a maszkját egyszer is elejtette volna. (Még most sem
tudjuk igazán, melyik volt a maszk?)
Mikor a törökkel beszélt, annak azt bizonyozá, hogy ő csak a
nemzetét szereti jobban, mint a hitét: inkább akarja Mahomed
árnyékában nemzetét magyarnak megtartani, mint a kereszténység
fényében németté átváltozni.
Mikor pedig Ferdinándhoz írt, annak arra esküdözött, hogy ő a
vallásához ragaszkodik inkább, mint a nemzetéhez, s kedvesebb
előtte az oltár, mint a nemzeti czimer hármas halma.
Mind a kettőt el lehetett hinni.
És voltaképen egyiknek sem mondott valót.
Nem kellett neki sem a német, sem a török.
Egyedül akart maradni, maga akart uralkodni Erdélyországban.
 Lángesze és tapasztalatai megtanították rá, hogy ez a kicsiny
ország, mintegy természetadta erősség, hivatva van arra, hogy
egész Magyarország újjáteremtője legyen. Földje gazdag, szirtje
gazdag; de leggazdagabb a népeinek lelkülete. Hazaszerető szivek,
kardhoz és munkaszerszámhoz egyformán szokott kezek. Tanult,
mívelt nemes urak, szolgaságot nem ismerő székelyek és szászok.
Ez a pálos barát, a korszellemet háromszáz évvel megelőzve, irá
e napokban Ferdinánd királynak, hogy hívja össze a magyar
országgyülést és szabadítsa fel a jobbágy népet. (1550! – 1848!)
Ez a nagy nemzetalkotó eszme Martinuzzi György szivében
született.
«A török szabadságot igér a parasztnak s ez által a ráczokat
részben megnyerte magának; mert az elnyomott ember örömest ád
hitelt ilyes igéretnek, habár még nagyobb rabságba sülyed. S mi
vagyunk ennek okai, mert a pórt annyira elnyomtuk, hogy nején és
gyermekén kivül édes mindenétől megfosztatott».
Ezt a magasztos elvet Erdélyben erőre lehetett emelni; ott
székely és szász nem szolgált urnak: de Nagy-Magyarországon
perhorreskálta azt nem csak a nagy király, de még jobban a kis
királyok.
Fráter Györgyöt kikiálták demagognak, Antikrisztusnak, Dózsa
Györgynek.
A király körül csellyengő nemes urak új összeesküvést forraltak
ellene, s mikor már Fráter György annyira vitte a megkezdett tervét,
hogy Izabella királyné és Ferdinánd király teljesen megegyeztek:
amaz a korona és országátadásában, emez a fejedelmi kárpótlásban,
s az ország alkotmányos jogainak fentartásában, sőt Ferdinánd
eljegyzé János Zsigmondnak vele egy idős leányát Johannát,
(egyetlen eset, hogy egy Habsburg fejedelmi ivadék egy magyar
nemes fiával cseréljen jegygyürüt!) a midőn már Ferdinánd király és
Károly császár beküldék hadaikat Castaldo spanyol és Pallavicini
olasz vezéreik alatt, a kikhez csatlakozott Báthory és Nádasdy
magyar serege s ezek már Debreczen alatt táboroztak: akkor
egyszerre összesugtak az elégedetlen magyar nemes urak, s az
enyedi országgyülésen kikiáltották Fráter Györgyöt a haza
ellenségének s Balassa Menyhárttal az élükön, kitűzték a királyné
zászlóit, megtagadva a szerződés elfogadását. Balassa fegyverhez
nyúlt. A ki pedig nem is volt erdélyi főnemes; hanem egyike azoknak
a magyarországi váruraknak, a kiket a mult években Salm Frigyes,
rabló kalandjaik miatt sziklafészkeikből kiforgatott: egy kalandhős, a
kinek a zürzavarban csak nyernivalója lehetett.
Fráter György rögtön ott termett a hadaival s jöttének hirére
szétfutott az országgyülés: a királyné Gyulafehérvárról fiával együtt
Szászsebesre menekült, ott hagyva a várban egész kincstárát, a
koronával együtt.
Fráter György most már félretett minden kiméletet:
ostromágyuival összetörette Gyulafehérvár falait s az elfoglalt várból
a királyné kincseit és a koronát magához véve, személyesen vitte el
azokat Szászsebesre, átadva csorbítatlanul mindent a királynénak.
Ismét előkerültek a régi jelenetek; a szemrehányások, a
könyhullatások, a bocsánatkérések s a kölcsönös kiengesztelődés.
Petrovich nem volt ott. Ő a puskaporfüst elől elhuzódott
Temesvárra, onnan írt dühítő leveleket a szultánnak.
A királyné ráállt a Fráter György által eléje terjesztett egyességre.
Lemondott a koronáról: elfogadta a fia számára az oppelni és ratibori
herczegségeket.
E szerződéssel ment Fráter György Ferdinánd biztosai, Nádasdy
és Castaldo elé.
Fejedelmi pompával tartá felvonulását, nyolcz fehér ló által
vontatott hintóban, kétszáz hajdu és négyszáz huszár által kisérve.
Midőn Castaldo táborába érkezett, kiszállt a hintóból, nyerges
lovára kapott fel, úgy vágtatott a biztosok elé. Castaldo és Nádasdy
ölelkezéssel fogadták a barátot, ki a szerződést velük is aláiratá
Ferdinánd király nevében.
Ekkor aztán a nyolczlovas hintót Izabelláért és a fiáért küldte el
Fráter György. Úgy utazott együtt a királyi udvar a fegyveres haddal
Kolozsvár felé. Fráter György és Nádasdy Tamás két felől a hintó
mellett lovagoltak.
Utközben megállítá a menetet Fráter György s könnyes
szemekkel adott számot a királynénak mind arról, a mit teljes
életében tett a Zápolya családért. Most is az ő javát akarja s lesz
még idő, a mikor neki ezért Izabella köszönetet fog mondani. Legyen
hát a királyné vidám és jókedvű!
Hanem ő maga nem tudta a zokogását visszafojtani.
A királyné is sírt, s csak annyit válaszolt, hogy hinni akar
Martinuzzi szavainak: Isten adjon neki erőt szándékaihoz.
Kolozsváron már egybegyültek az ország rendei, midőn Izabella
megérkezett, s kinyilatkoztatták, hogy elfogadják az egyezményt. Az
országházból a főegyházba vonultak, a hol az egyezség
megtartására letették az esküt, elébb Ferdinánd biztosai, azután
Izabella, saját és fia nevében, végül Utyessenovich Martinuzzi
György, Erdélynek ezentul is kormányzója. A koronát és a szent
jelvényeket azonnal átadták.
Ez országos cselekvény után Kolost-Monostorba ment át az udvar
és az országos rend, a hol a gyermek János Zsigmond király
eljegyzése az oltár előtt egész szertartással ment végbe. – Ilyen
szomoru vőlegényt még nem láttak soha. – Igaz, hogy a
menyasszonyt az öreg Nádasdy képviselte.
Két hét volt adva a királynénak, hogy Erdélyből elutazására
elkészüljön.
De hátra volt még két ember, a kivel számolni kellett. Az egyik
volt a szultán követe, Hali csausz, a másik Petrovich.
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