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“My mother . . . was a betrayer of her sex,” Kincaid remarks as she draws a connection between the mother character in her 1990 novel Lucy and her own mother, Annie Drew (Listfield). In Lucy, a novel Kincaid says is filled with “thick female stuff,” she wants to be “very frank,” “unlikable,” and “even unpopular” (Listfield, Perry, “Interview” 506). Lucy, she insists, is not about “race and class” but instead is about “a person figuring out how to be an artist, an artist of herself and of things” (Kennedy). In her ongoing fictional recreation of her early life in Lucy, Kincaid describes her experiences after leaving Antigua and coming to the United States to work as a nanny. Because of the similarities in the experiences and memories of Annie John and Lucy Josephine Potter, who shares Kincaid’s birthday and the surname of her biological father, Roderick Potter, and because of the close connection between Kincaid’s life and that of her characters, informed readers are likely to read Lucy as a sequel to Annie John. In her remarks on the autobiographical sources of the novel, Kincaid comments that her characters are connected but are not identical, for Annie and Lucy are not “meant to be the same person,” and Lucy is not a “continuation” of Annie John, and yet Lucy, like Annie John, is “a continuation . . . in the sense that it’s about my life and it’s the same life I’m writing about” (Vorda 99). Lucy is connected to but represents an important departure from Annie John not only in the physical sense as it records Kincaid’s experiences after her leave-taking from Antigua but 67 4 “As I Looked at This Sentence a Great Wave of Shame Came over Me and I Wept and Wept” The Art of Memory, Anger, and Despair in Lucy also in the emotional sense as it describes Kincaid’s attempt to forge a new invented writer’s identity and become the self-possessed “Jamaica Kincaid” rather than the mother-dominated “Elaine Potter Richardson.” “I was only sixteen years old,” Kincaid recalls as she describes leaving home in 1965 shortly after her sixteenth birthday. “I was a very depressed person, I wanted to leave, I wanted to go to America and . . . make sense of myself to myself.” Even when she became homesick, she did not give up. “I was looking for control of my own life. . . . I was looking to close my door when I want[ed] to, open it when I want[ed], come when I want[ed]. I was looking to have some idea of myself” (Dilger 21). Kincaid recalls with great anger how her high school education was interrupted by her mother, who said that she needed her daughter at home to help care for her three young sons. “Some time before I was sixteen years of age, I might have taken a series of exams that, had I passed them, would have set me on a path that would have led me to be educated at a university, but just before all of that my mother removed me from school” (My Brother 74). Kincaid had hoped to stay in school and then go on to the university in Jamaica. Instead, her education was cut short, and she eventually got her high school diploma and completed some college in the United States. When the sixteen-year-old Kincaid was sent to the United States to be a live-in babysitter for a family in Scarsdale, New York, she was supposed to help her family by sending money home. “It dawned on me that my mother had made a terrible mistake in her life, that she had had children she could not afford, and I was supposed to help. . . . I remember taking it very badly, that feeling. That was the beginning of feeling outrage and injustice in me, that I should bear that burden” (Jacobs). After working for the Scarsdale family for several months, Kincaid took a job on the Upper East Side of New York taking care of the four girls of the New Yorker writer Michael Arlen,1 who would later become her colleague at the magazine—a job she kept for three years and that serves as the basis of Lucy’s experiences in Kincaid’s novel. “That is how I really left my mother,” Kincaid explains. “Because I never told her where I was going, and I ended up not seeing her for nineteen years” (Garis). When...

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