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“I was born in 1949. My twenty-sixth birthday was the birthday when I felt old and used up—I had left home when I was sixteen, and ten years in a young life is a long time,” Kincaid comments as she remembers her early days as a writer in New York City (“Putting Myself Together” 93). “I changed my name, and started telling people I knew that I was a writer. This declaration went without comment” (“Putting” 94). In her third-floor, two-room apartment on West Twenty-second Street, she slept on the floor in one room, first on newspapers and then on an old mattress she had found. The other room contained a large desk, a typewriter, and books stacked on the floor. Living the spare life of the would-be artist, Kincaid spent the little money she had in used-clothing stores buying vintage clothing. “I would wear a lot of old clothes and sort of looked like people from different periods—someone from the 1920s, someone from the 1930s, someone from the 1940s,” she recalls (Cudjoe 216). “Being very thin . . . I looked good in clothes. I loved the way I looked all dressed up. I bought hats, I bought shoes, I bought stockings and garter belts to hold them up, I bought handbags, I bought suits, I bought blouses, I bought dresses, I bought skirts, and I bought jackets that did not match the skirts. I used to spend hours happily buying clothes to wear.” Kincaid would also spend hours getting dressed as she decided which “combination of people, inconceivably older and more prosperous” than she was that she wanted “to impersonate” on any particular day (“Putting” 98). In a similar way, she changed her hair, cutting off her long, black, tightly curled hair and making it short, blond, and tightly curled. “[S]hould I say that transforming my hair was a way of transforming myself? I had no 19 2 “I Had Embarked on Something Called Self-Invention” Artistic Beginnings in “Antigua Crossings” and At the Bottom of the River consciousness of such things then” (“Putting” 100). As she later came to recognize, in changing her hair and wearing various styles of once expensive and stylish vintage clothing, she was attempting to refashion not only her appearance but also her identity. “I did not know then that I had embarked on something called self-invention, the making of a type of person that did not exist in the place where I was born—a place far away from New York and with a climate quite unlike the one that existed in New York. I wanted to be a writer; I was a person with opinions, and I wanted them to matter to other people” (“Putting” 100). Unlike the wellordered domestic life that she would eventually establish in Vermont and take pride in as a writer, Kincaid spent her early years in New York City engaged in the same kinds of risky behavior she later observed—and condemned —in her youngest brother, Devon, who died of AIDS: she drank, used drugs, and had a series of sexual partners. “My youth was exhausting , it was dangerous, and it is a miracle that I grew out of it unscathed,” as she remarks (“Putting” 101). As Kincaid recalls her early days in New York, she emphasizes not only her determined act of self-invention but also her good luck in being recognized by George Trow and William Shawn, the two white men who figure prominently in the story she tells and retells about her beginnings as a writer. With her bleached blond hair, her shaved-off eyebrows painted in with gold eye makeup, and her attention -grabbing, costume-like clothing, the almost six-foot-tall Kincaid thought of herself as “an interesting person” only to be reminded of her painful Antiguan past when she was ridiculed by young American blacks. “I had grown up in a place where many people were young and black . . . and I had been stared at and laughed at, and insulting things had been said to me: I was too tall, I was too thin, I was very smart; my clothes had never fit properly there, I was flat-chested; my hair would not stay in place” (“Introduction,” Talk Stories 7). Unlike American blacks, who were “cruel” to her, those who were “most kind and loving” were white people (Snell). Recounting the happy set of events that led to her writing for The New...

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