"Poor Visitor"

Lucy, age nineteen, comes from Antigua to be an au pair 1for an upper middle class white family living in an unnamed city much like New York. Upon arrival, she is disappointed because all the landmarks were not as vivid as they were in her daydreams. In reality, these landmarks are worn down and dirty. Lucy goes through a variety of experiences for the first time: riding an elevator, being in an apartment, using a refrigerator. That night Lucy, exhausted from all the change, sleeps soundly.

On her second day, Lucy experiences the difference between the sun in Antigua and the one in America. By mistake, Lucy puts on a thin dress, assuming that in this new place a sunny day in January means warm weather, as it does in Antigua. She is surprised when she steps outside and the air is cold. She notes that "I was no longer in a tropical zone and I felt cold inside and out, the first time such a sensation had come over me" (6). Now Lucy understands why the people she reads about in books are homesick. She expects to leave behind her discontentment and sad thoughts, but her feelings remain.

Lucy often takes comfort in recalling memories from home. She dreams of her grandmother's meals of pink mullet and green figs cooked in coconut milk. As she settles in her small room off the kitchen, she looks at her Bible sitting on the dresser. The Bible was given to her by her cousin just before she left home. Lucy remembers that as young children, she and her cousin would sit under her house and read the book of Revelations to terrify one another. At that time, she never would have imagined a day would come "when these people I left behind, my own family, would not appear before me in one way or the other" (8).

While dealing with her feelings of homesickness, Lucy adjusts to her daily duties. As the au par, Lucy walks the four girls to school, feeds them lunch, and plays with them in the afternoons. Lucy does not have to fulfill household cleaning duties; the family has a maid. The maid feels Lucy is overly pious, speaking and walking like a nun. One day in particular, the maid challenges Lucy to dance. After seeing the maid dance beautifully, Lucy knows she cannot compete. She defends herself by asserting that the maid's music is shallow and meaningless, unsuitable for dancing. The maid's response is repugnance. Lucy says, "From her face, I could see she had only one feeling about me: how sick to the stomach I made her" (12).

Lucy enjoys eating dinner with the family. She observes how pleasant the family is to one another, that the children are free to eat in whatever manner they please, and even that they make up naughty rhymes at the table. It is during mealtime that Lucy earns the name "Visitor" from the family, because Lucy never seems part of things but stares at them strangely as they eat. Lewis, the father, looks at Lucy sympathetically and says "Poor Visitor."

1 A young person, usually a woman, who lives with a family in a foreign country in order to learn the language. An au pair helps in the house and takes care of children and receives a small wage.

The father then tells a story about an uncle who moves to Canada to raise monkeys and eventually enjoys being around the monkeys more than humans. Lucy takes this opportunity to tell the family a story about a dream she has had. In the dream, Lewis is chasing Lucy around the house naked while his wife Mariah is yelling for Lewis to catch her. Eventually, Lucy falls into the bottom of a hole with silver and blue snakes. An awkward silence follows her story. Lucy's intent is to show the family that they are important enough to her to appear in her dreams. Lewis and Mariah, however, are aware of the Freudian implications of Lucy's dream. Lucy does not know who Freud is.

Analysis

Lucy is distinct from other narratives about immigrants coming to America. In this novel, Kincaid writes in the pattern of the traditionally white, male, European or American bildungsroman, but she reinvents the form through a black, female, Caribbean protagonist. Thus, how Lucy processes what happens to her is just as important as what actually happens. Lucy goes through a series of physical adjustments: the novelty of a refrigerator, riding in an elevator, and living in an apartment. These things in themselves are neutral, but they are new to Lucy and represent the cultural shift she is experiencing. In America, Lucy is now bombarded with new ideas, forcing her to adjust the way she thinks about the world. Throughout her first unhappy days Lucy is consistently reminded "how uncomfortable the new can make you feel" (4).

Every day, Lucy encounters things in this new world that disappoint, go outside her expectations, or challenge her fundamental understanding of the world. Going outside in a summer dress in January is a key example of Lucy's difficult adjustment. When Lucy discovers it is cold, her sense of reality is shaken. She says that "something I took completely for granted, 'the sun is shining, the air is warm,' was not so" (5). Sadly, Lucy has to learn that her expectations will not always reconcile with reality. Likewise, Lucy expects the landmarks to be as lucid as they are in her daydreams. In reality, they are crowded, dull, and dirty.

When describing her disappointment, Lucy notes:

In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my drowning soul...Now that I saw these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down by so many people entering and leaving them in real life, and it occurred to me that I could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fixture of fantasy. It was not my first bout with the disappointment of reality and it would not be my last. (3-4)

At the core of Lucy's survival is the dexterity with which Lucy handles disappointment and continues to forge her identity despite it. Although she is disillusioned, Lucy does not forsake dreaming; Lucy's dreams remain her lifeboat during her first days. Even so, she dreams not

about the future but of "pink mullet and green figs cooked in coconut milk" (7). Lucy dreams of home. These memories are the threads that knit together her innermost being but which will continue to haunt her as she attempts to sever all ties to her past.

Lucy's description of her living quarters is a continuation of her quest for independence, a push past the boundaries of race and class that she perceives. Lucy's description of her room demonstrates her alienated state and how she is unable to fit within the categories that society seems to have made for her. She says:

The room in which I lay was a small room just off the kitchen--the maid's room. I was used to a small room, but this was a different sort of small room. The ceiling was very high and the walls went all the way up to the ceiling, enclosing the room like a box--a box which cargo traveling a long way should be shipped. But I was not cargo. I was only an unhappy young woman living in a maid's room, and I was not even the maid. I was the young girl who watches over the children and goes to school at night. (7)

This passage is critical for understanding how Lucy perceives herself. First, she is not cargo. She is not a commodity, not a mere source of labor whose sole value might be crudely linked with her ability to work. Second, she is not a maid. Lucy rejects that job title, which would mark her socio-economic position. In fact, she is not even an au pair. Lucy chooses to describe her duties (watching children and going to night school) rather than allowing a job description, au pair, to define her. Lucy also includes her "unhappy" emotional state as a further testament to her alienation in this new environment.

The title of this chapter, "Poor Visitor," underscores these feelings. Everything is new to Lucy, from the food to the running water. To name herself too soon would be to limit herself unfairly. She has entered bravely into a new world, but now she feels alone in it. She searches for some slice of similarity to home, yet she only finds difference. The family's maid looks familiar, but in reality she is antagonistic and very different.

Although Lucy is also trying to push past boundaries of race, Kincaid does not address the subject directly in this chapter. The novel does not introduce a black-white split but a schism between African-Americans and West Indians. Lucy's encounter with the African-American maid is perceived as an intra-racial incident. Although they may appear similar to outsiders, they know they are different. The antagonistic manner in which the maid challenges Lucy to dance is the maid's attempt to assert power over Lucy. The maid derides the way Lucy walks and talks. Yet Lucy thwarts the maid's attempt, because she does not seek approval from the maid, certainly not on the maid's terms. Instead she asserts pride in her own culture and "burst[s] into a calypso about a girl who ran away to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and had a good time, with no regrets" (12). Lucy demonstrates that she can transcend the boundaries of race without denying or being ashamed of her own heritage.

"Mariah"

It is early March. Mariah is eagerly awaiting springtime and the arrival of daffodils. The mention of daffodils embitters Lucy. She has never seen them, yet as a child at Queen Victoria Girls' School, Lucy was made to memorize a poem about the flower. She remembers having performed the poem well and having received many accolades. At the same time, the young Lucy deeply resented the poem and became determined to erase the poem from memory.

The first day of spring brings a great snow--deeply disappointing Mariah. The snow delays the family's plan to visit their house on the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, Lucy receives several letters from her family and friends. She carries all of them around in her bra. Lucy does not admit to carrying them because she loves them--actually she has quite the opposite feeling about them. Lucy resents these letters, which express or represent her mother's dominating and oppressive presence in her life.

For example, Lucy has written her mother with excitement about her first subway ride. Crushing her enthusiasm and replacing it with fear, Lucy's mother has responded by detailing a horrific murder of a young girl that occurred on that same train. Lucy is terrified and angry that her mother has turned an exciting new experience into an occasion for fear. Lucy resents the fear her mother's correspondence makes her feel.

Lucy begins to compare the fear she feels in this new place to the fear she experienced back home. In Antigua, a young girl is possessed by an evil spirit who beats the young girl continually. The girl eventually has to travel across the sea to escape it. Lucy draws a distinction between the devils you see in America--walking on subways or hiding in alleys--and the ones you cannot see in Antigua. She says, "On the one hand there was a girl being beaten by a man she could not see; on the other there was a girl getting her throat cut by a man she could see. In this great big world, why should my life be reduced to these two possibilities?" (21).

Lucy then remembers her mother's friend Sylvie. Sylvie has a scar on her right cheek from being bitten by another woman. Yet Lucy initially was fascinated by the scar. She describes it as "a half-ripe fruit [that] someone had bitten into" (24) and a "little rosette ... that bound her to something much deeper than its reality" (25). The two women argue over which one of them should live with the man whom they both love. And both women have spent time in jail for public misconduct. Because of this past, tainted especially by incarceration, the friendship of Sylvie and Lucy's mother has not been public.

Lucy contrasts her perception of Sylvie, a woman who lives a "heavy and hard" life, with her perception of Mariah. Standing in the kitchen looking celestial as the sun light falls on her, Mariah seems as if she has never lived a hard life or quarreled over a man.

Soon enough, the cold weather is gone, and Lucy, Mariah, and the four girls make plans to travel to the summerhouse. Lewis stays behind. Before they leave, Mariah takes Lucy to a garden while the girls are in school. For the first time, Lucy sees daffodils. They are beautiful. But Lucy immediately wants to kill them. She later expresses her resentment to Mariah:

I did not know what these flowers were, and so it was a mystery to me why I wanted to kill them. I wished I had an enormous scythe; I would just walk down the path, dragging it alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down where they emerged from the ground. (29)

The day finally arrives when the family goes to the summerhouse. Lucy has never ridden on a train. She observes that all the white people who resemble Mariah's relatives are passengers, while all the people who resemble Lucy's relatives are servers.

Once they arrive at their destination, Gus, a longtime employee of Mariah's family, meets them at the train station to drive them to the summerhouse. The house Mariah grew up in is large and spread out. From Lucy's bedroom she can see the lake. The presence of water comforts Lucy: "I slept peacefully, without any troubling dreams to haunt me; it must have been that knowing there was a body of water outside my window, even though it was not the big blue sea I was used to, brought me some comfort" (35).

Mariah and Gus catch trout one afternoon for dinner. Mariah jokingly makes reference to the Gospel occasion when Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand with four loaves and two fish. Lucy shares with Mariah the first time she heard the story. Instead of being amazed at the story and imagining how grateful the crowd must have been, Lucy inquires whether the fish were boiled or fried. In Lucy's mind, whether someone should feel grateful depends on how the fish are served. At this point, it becomes more clear that Lucy often given a sarcastic, disillusioned twist to many things Mariah is enthusiastic about. Mariah says to Lucy:

I was looking forward to telling you that I have Indian blood, that the reason I'm so good at catching fish and hunting birds and roasting corn and doing all sorts of things is that I have Indian blood.... I shouldn't tell you that. I feel you will take it the wrong way. (40)

Analysis

Mariah accepts many roles as ways of expressing her identity: mother, nourishing employer, and white woman. All of these roles become integral to Lucy's transformation. In her role as surrogate mother, for instance, Mariah provides a point of comparison for Lucy to examine her relationship with her own mother. There is a contrast here, too; as a white woman, Mariah finds it difficult to face Lucy. The harsh reality of Mariah's place in Lucy's experience becomes a lot for Lucy to bear--one more reason to seek full independence.

Mariah's life seems ideal. She is married to a wealthy lawyer who provides for his family and is a good father. She has four beautiful, blond daughters. She is well educated and makes efforts to expose Lucy to Freudian theory, feminism, and many other ideas. Mariah's untainted idealism is immediately apparent to Lucy. Mariah has been fortunate; she has not encountered the debilitating disappointment that Lucy has experienced when her dreams have gone unfulfilled.

When there is a great snow on the first day of spring, Lucy is perplexed at the severity of Mariah's disappointment. Lucy says, "How do you get to be a person who is made miserable because the weather changed its mind, because the weather doesn't live up to your expectations? How do you get to be that way?" (20).

Even Mariah's memories of her childhood are untainted by disappointment. As an adult, Lucy returns to the home she grows up in, recalling the difficulties and disappointments. In contrast, every summer Mariah, along with her husband and four girls, escapes from the city and travels back in time to a joyous childhood: "[Mariah] wants us to enjoy the house, all its nooks and crannies, all its sweet smells, all its charms, just the way she had done as a child" (37).

Having lived a life absent of severe disappointment, Mariah's outlook also lies in sharp contrast to that of Lucy's mother. Mariah has come to expect the best from life, while Lucy's mother consistently expects the worst and imposes those pessimistic expectations on Lucy. Lucy has quit opening letters from home in order to give herself peace from her mother's haunting voice. Lucy explains her reasoning:

I had come to see her love as a burden...I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone. (37)

Lucy wishes to detach herself from the burden of her mother's expectations as well. She wishes to be free to form her own identity. Interestingly, Lucy does not reject her mother in favor of Mariah. She says, "The smell of Mariah was pleasant...By then I already knew I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense" (27). Lucy does not desire an ideal life with no struggle or disappointment. She lives her life with a gravity unknown to Mariah. Postcolonial literary critics trace Lucy's desire to escape her mother's grip, together with Lucy's sense of gravity, to oppressive experiences that resulted from colonialism and decolonization.

Lucy's history persistently pursues her, rearing its head in everyday situations. In a casual conversation with Lucy just before spring arrives, Mariah says,

Have you ever seen daffodils pushing their way up out of the ground? And when they're in bloom and all massed together, a breeze comes along and makes them do a curtsy to the lawn stretching out in front of them. Have you ever seen that? When I see that, I feel so glad to be alive. (17)

Mariah speaks from her cultural milieu; her words are not simply joyous about wonderful experiences but carry the trappings of Romantic poetry. That is, her words go beyond adoration of nature to include personification of inanimate objects and an almost histrionic address to a synthetic audience. Daffodils are euphoric to Mariah. For Lucy, however, they bring back a very specific memory. Lucy remembers having to perform the poem "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud" by William Wordsworth when she was a young girl.

Like most poems, this one asserts a way of seeing the world that is not immediately accessible. In Lucy's experience, the poem did not inspire her to look at nature in a new way, probably because her teachers insisted that she memorize it instead of appreciate its perspective. This forced encounter with an alien culture was generated by the British educational system, which became a form of indoctrination under colonialism that persisted long after the island's legal obligations to the British had ended. For Lucy, the chance to appreciate daffodils has been tainted by the way that she was introduced to them many years ago.

Lucy's own experiences have allowed her to see significance in the many things Mariah takes for granted. Lucy cannot help but "see hundreds of years in every gesture, every spoken word, every face" rather than just taking them as they are (31). Although she does not identify as an African-American herself, Lucy understands the racial climate in America. While dining on a train ride to Mariah's summer house, Lucy observes that "The other people sitting down all looked like Mariah's relatives; the people waiting on them all looked like mine... Mariah did not seem to notice what she had in common with the other diners, or what I had in common with the waiters" (33). In other words, Lucy is immediately aware that the servers and the served are divided along racial lines. She perceives that the history of race in America has resulted in this division. But Mariah, who should know the history of slavery in her own country, does not see this division. She is not perceiving the various people on the train primarily in terms of race. Or, if she does perceive this unpleasant reality, she must be subordinating it to something else, such as memories of an idyllic childhood.

Mariah may be uncomfortable with Lucy's willingness to see reality through the perspective of race, but she offers her own racialized perspective. Mariah wants to tell Lucy that the reason she is good at catching fish, hunting, and roasting corn is because she has Native American ancestry. Her understanding of Native Americans is derived from a romantic notion of "the noble savage," however, rather than the reality of having known and loved a relative of Indian ancestry. Mariah hesitates because she feels that Lucy "will take it the wrong way" (40). As presented, Mariah's assertion seems ridiculous; simply having Indian blood would not be enough for someone to infer that she has inherited culturally learned behaviors such as hunting and fishing. Lucy understands that Mariah is expressing a tension in her racialized comment:

Mariah says, "I have Indian blood in me," and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be vanquished also? (41)

Mariah seems to be looking for pardon from Lucy in claiming the status of a victimized minority in America. But Lucy is not willing to accept Mariah's assertion of victimhood, even if she feels an affinity with people who are truly victimized.

"The Tongue"

At age fourteen, Lucy experienced her first kiss. She kissed her best friend's brother, Tanner. The kiss was not typical of a young child--she sucked Tanner's tongue as if trying to discover its flavor. Lucy now describes how she likes to eat cow's tongue, "served in a sauce of lemon juice, onions, cucumber, and pepper" (44).

Lucy remembers this experience while feeding the girls stewed plums and yogurt. She often tells the oldest girl, Miriam, various tall tales in order to get her to eat. Mariah, in contrast, prefers a straightforward and truthful approach with children: "Mariah thought fairytales were a bad idea, especially ones involving princesses who were awakened by long deep sleeps" (45). Mariah does not want her girls to have the wrong expectations growing up.

By now, Lewis has joined the family at the summerhouse. They will be there from mid-June to mid-September. Lewis often has very little to do there; he seems to come mainly in order to indulge Mariah. Lucy takes a moment to describe what she does know about Lewis. He is handsome. He is also a lawyer who loves to tell fantastic stories. Lucy likes him. But she is quick to clarify, "I was not in love with him nor did I have a crush on him. My sympathies were with Mariah. It was my mother who told me I should never takes a man's side over a woman's" (48).

After observing an intimate moment between Mariah and Lewis, Lucy recalls the sensation she felt when Tanner would place his hands on her breasts and suck them. Young Lucy soon learns that this sensation can be felt with other boys. She begins to meet a particular boy to kiss every Saturday. On a whim, she ends the rendezvous because she has found unpleasant the smell of his hair oil.

Since Lucy cannot drive, the girls walk through the forest on the way to the lake every day. Lucy's favorite charge is Miriam. She cares for Miriam as her own mother cared for her. She says, "I loved Miriam from the moment I met her. She was the first person I had loved in a very long while, and I did not know why. I loved the way she smelled" (53). When walking to the lake, Lucy does not mind carrying Miriam on her back when the young girl tires. During the walk, Lucy remembers that as a young girl her mother used to walk through the rainforest and throw rocks at a monkey. One day the monkey caught the rock and threw it back at Lucy's mother.

The rock hit the young girl on the head and caused a huge scar that remains on Lucy's mother to this day.

When Lucy and the girls arrive at the lake, they meet Mariah's best friend Dinah. Instantly, Lucy does not like Dinah. She thinks that Dinah is conceited, the type of woman who envies other women and their lives. Naïve Mariah adores her best friend, though, loving the way Dinah embraces life.

Lucy has grown to love Mariah. More and more Mariah reminds Lucy of the things she likes about her mother. Mariah desires Lucy to have friends. But she disapproves of Lucy's best friend Peggy. Peggy wears shades, smokes, and hates children. She is precisely the type of influence Mariah does not want Lucy to have. Because she likes the cigar Peggy smokes, Lucy begins to smoke as well. Yet, since Mariah is not Lucy's mother, she only forbids Peggy to come around the house or the children. In the meantime, Mariah has a party for Lucy to meet young people her own age. Lucy does not connect with them. They are all wealthy and well-traveled. Most of them have been where Lucy is from as tourist and only say, "I had fun when I was there" (65).

Lucy does find one person of interest at the party, Hugh, Dinah's brother. He is three years older and five inches shorter than Lucy. Hugh is different from the others because he traveled for a year in Africa and Asia. Hugh and Lucy become intimate--she has not been touched like that in a long time. Lying naked on the grass with Hugh, Lucy remembers the first time she got her period. Lucy's mother laughed when she found out and told her of a time she would wish for it to come. Not having used protection with Hugh, Lucy nevertheless is not panicked by the possibility of being pregnant, because her mother already showed Lucy what herbs to take to make her period come if it were missed. Instead, what Lucy dreads is having to write to her mother to ask for them. Fortunately, Lucy's period comes, so she does not have to write home. With Hugh, Lucy feels wonderful. She enjoys daydreaming about their physical relationship but does not feel in love or attached. When Hugh leaves on the fifteenth of September, Lucy is content to see him go.

Mariah and Dinah are socially engaged. The latest issue they are confronting is that houses are being built on the farmland where they grew up. Mariah writes and illustrates a book and donates the profits to the cause of saving the farmland as it was. One of Mariah's daughters sarcastically asks: what was on the land before their own house was built? Lucy too resents the notion of preserving this aspect of the past. Internally, she dislikes how people like Mariah and Dinah do not see the connections between their own sense of comfort and the decline of the world around them.

During this summer, the first signs of problems in Lewis's and Mariah's marriage surface. A seemingly innocent incident of a rabbit eating shoots from Lewis's vegetables escalates. Over

dinner they discuss whom the culprit might be, and Lewis has such an angry outburst that it causes the children to cry. He screams, "Jesus Christ! The goddam rabbits!" (75). Later that summer, Lewis and Mariah take a drive in the marshlands, and Lewis runs over a rabbit. While Lewis is secretly triumphant, Mariah is hysterical. Lucy reveals that she is able to perceive Dinah as the culprit in an affair long before Lewis confesses to it.

Analysis

Often we can say that key elements of a person's history have already been written before the person is born. As an inhabitant of a colonized island, the employee of Mariah Lewis, and a child of her mother, Lucy already has had much of her history guided by circumstances she could not control. She was born into a native culture influenced by a colonizing power, but now that she generally has escaped it, her experience is shaped powerfully by what her host family chooses to expose her to. In this context, storytelling is the method that Lucy uses to appropriate her own history. Through the medium of storytelling, Lucy grapples with issues of sexuality, making her narrative voice the one common thread that links the complex elements of her past and her present.

We encounter Lucy's sexuality when she remembers experiences of the past and delves into present experiences. Opening the chapter, Lucy tells the story of her first kiss. The opening scene describes fourteen-year-old Lucy:

I was sucking the tongue of a boy named Tanner ... because I liked the way his fingers looked on the keys of the piano as he played it, and I had liked the way he looked from the back as he walked across the pasture, and also, when I was close to him, I liked the way behind his ears smelled. Those three things had led to my standing in his sister's room (she was my best friend), my back pressed against the closed door, sucking his tongue. (43)

Kincaid draws a striking image in this scene. Her diction is jarring. The coarse verb "sucking" displaces the intimacy of "kiss." Lucy's attraction is neither emotional nor romantic; it is purely physical, including the smell behind the boy's ears and the shape of his behind. To the young Lucy, the boy is an object to be tried, tested, and experienced: a novel delicacy. Lucy's narrative voice reveals that she is detached from the emotional aspects of the kiss. Instead, she compares the boy's tongue to boiled cow tongue served with sauce (44). Like all of Lucy's sexual encounters in this book, her sensations are physical rather than emotional.

In this vein, Hugh can be thought of as Tanner's American counterpart. He is the brother of Mariah's best friend, while Tanner is the brother of Lucy's best friend. Different from the rest of the young people at the party, Hugh has gone outside of his milieu, spending time in Africa and Asia. Many of the other people at the party have traveled, but they have been more like mere

tourists, failing to leave behind the conveniences of home to immerse themselves in a new worldview. Lucy feels in a better mood when she is with Hugh (even Mariah notices it). Yet, Lucy knows the she still is not feeling love. Again she focuses on the physical. She explains, "If I enjoyed myself beyond anything I had known so far, it must have been because such a long time had passed since I had been touched in that way by anyone" (67). That is, for now it is enough for Lucy to feel good being touched in a sexual way. She says, "Just thinking about hands and his mouth could make me feel as if I were made up of an extravagant piece of silk" (71). Lucy makes a point to demonstrate that Hugh is not the only person who can produce pleasant sensations for her.

The chapter closes with a characteristic account of Lucy's kind of relationship. She and Peggy

were so disappointed that we went back to my room and smoked marijuana and kissed each other until we were exhausted and fell asleep. Her tongue was narrow and pointed and soft. And that was how I said goodbye to Hugh, my arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, my tongue in his mouth, thinking of all the people I had held in this way. (83)

This merely physical notion of love implies that there is something easily translatable about the person with whom one is intimate. That is, Lucy asserts that her friend Peggy can give her the same sensations that Hugh does. Lucy has set herself on not loving someone uniquely, because that sort of love would be a significant threat to her personal freedom, bringing the kind of attachments that she is trying hard to prevent or sever.

By choosing sex instead of love, pleasure instead of intimacy, Lucy not only demonstrates her independence but also creates a world where men are not part of the center of her world. Neither Tanner nor Hugh is in Lucy's center. Unlike Mariah, she does not romanticize men or her relationships with them.

Immediately upon meeting Mariah's best friend Dinah, Lucy suspects that she is having an affair with Lewis. She says, "A woman like Dinah was not unfamiliar to me, nor was a man like Lewis. Where I came from it was well known that some women and all men could not be trusted in certain areas" (80). Lucy's father is one of these men. He fathered over thirty children but married only Lucy's mother. This act has placed Lucy's mother at the center of much controversy in that jealous women have attempted to murder Lucy's mother. But given her father's experience, Lucy is not surprised when Lewis unmasks his true nature.

In a cruel exercise of his power, Lewis runs over a young rabbit that might be the one eating the vegetables in his garden, but it is a rabbit that Mariah and the children have grown to love. Although the aggressive and wandering aspects of man's nature are known to Lucy, Mariah remains unaware. Lucy notes, "Mariah did not know that Lewis was not in love with her

anymore. It was not the sort of thing she could imagine. She could imagine the demise of the fowl of the air, fish in the sea, mankind itself, but not that the only man she had ever loved would no longer love her" (81). Mariah can face universal tragedy, social injustice, and the exploitation of natural resources, yet she is unwilling to face this calamity within her own life. Mariah's passion for trivial issues and apathy towards pivotal ones is puzzling to Lucy.

Lucy generalizes from Mariah's situation to point out idiosyncrasies in American culture. Mariah is upset about the development of the countryside in which she grew up, but Lucy believes that development is necessary for local progress and that not everything can be preserved. Lucy's propensity for lack of ties influences this point of view. But even Mariah's daughter, Louisa, does not fully understand Mariah's advocacy. Louisa asks, "Well, what used to be here before this house we are living in was built?" (73). Mariah does not grasp how her own consumption and participation in her society are part of the same trend of economic development that she now decries.

"Cold Heart"

Lucy and the family are back in the city apartment. Lucy spends this Sunday afternoon in the park with Peggy while the family is picking apples. At the park, Peggy and Lucy look for men with big hands, thinking that large hands are associated with large penises. After returning from the lake house, Lucy decides she will not attend nursing school. Before leaving home, Lucy's mother encouraged her to be a nurse, but now Lucy feels angry that she was not encouraged to have more responsibility such as by becoming a doctor.

The relationship between Lucy and Peggy is becoming stale. Lucy takes note of some significant differences between them. For one thing, Lucy loves to read and go to the museum (Mariah had taken her for the first time earlier in the year). At the museum, Lucy identified with the yearnings of a French artist, Paul Gauguin, to leave the familiar and travel the world. As Lucy is deep in thought, Mariah looks at the expression on Lucy's face and says in alarm that Lucy is very angry. Lucy responds, "Of course I am. What do you expect?" (96).

While attending a party with Peggy's friends, Lucy meets Paul, an artist. Despite Peggy's warning that he is a creep, Lucy wants to sleep with Paul upon first seeing him. Paul feels the texture of Lucy's hair, and she laughs flirtingly. Peggy catches her and is enraged. While they are in the bathroom, Peggy warns Lucy again. Lucy does not want to provoke Peggy, but she knows their friendship has already changed, and she remains determined to see Paul. Seeing Paul's hand in the aquarium reminds Lucy of the drowning of a fisherman back home named Mr. Thomas. In her memory, Lucy is with a girl named Myrna. Crying hard at the news of his death, Myrna reveals that Mr. Thomas would meet Myrna regularly, molest her, and give her a shilling or sixpence in exchange. Instead of feeling sympathy, Lucy is jealous, wishing such a thing would have happened to her.

Even though they are not getting along, Peggy and Lucy talk about living together. She notes that Mariah has been more than kind to her, buying her things and giving her more money than her salary called for. Yet, she decided long before she met the family that she would live alone at this age. (As a young girl, Lucy's mother would praise her relative Maude Quick. Lucy despised everything about her, especially the fact that she was twenty and lived at home.) Meanwhile, the tension between Mariah and Lewis has escalated; they argue more frequently, and Lucy perceives that their separation is imminent.

One night while Lucy is in her room looking at all the photographs she has taken, she hears a knock on her door from Maude Quick. She gives Lucy a letter from her mother and informs Lucy that her father died a month ago from heart failure. Meanspirited Maude is enjoying Lucy's pain. She pours salt in the wound when she relates how sad Lucy's mother has been when she never received return letters from Lucy. Mariah is there to support Lucy and draws her close. Lucy is about to fall apart until Maude says, "You remind me of Miss Annie, you really remind me of your mother" (123). Hearing that, Lucy collects herself and shoots back a sharp retort. Whether or not Lucy actually says the line is not clear, but the statement enables her to stay composed until Maude leaves.

After Maude leaves, Lucy takes a moment to remember her father. Lucy's father never knew his mother. At a young age, his mother left him to be raised by his father. In order to help build the Panama Canal, his father then left the seven-year-old boy to be raised by his grandmother. Lucy's father never saw his father or mother again. Yet, he held in a safe the few possessions that he had kept from his mother. Lucy's father went on to have many illegitimate children, but her mother was the only one he married.

Now that she has heard the news, Lucy sends all her savings to her mother. Mariah contributes twice as much. Then Lucy writes her mother a cold letter. She blames her mother for marrying a man who would leave her in debt even for his burial. Then she reveals her sexual activity in order to reinforce her mother's failure at preventing her from being a slut. While talking in the kitchen, Mariah asks Lucy a critical question: why does Lucy not forgive her mother for whatever she has done? Now Lucy reveals to someone for the first time the source of her hatred towards her mother: the birth of her three brothers and the subsequent emotional and physical neglect by her mother. Lucy was nine when the first of them was born, and ever since then she has mourned the death of that special relationship with her mother.

Analysis

In "Cold Heart," Lucy revisits the feelings of alienation she had developed upon arrival. Whereas before she was dealing with the dissolution of dreams and goals, now she has come to accept the notion that she will never be completely known by another person. After deciding that she will not fulfill her mother's expectation of becoming a nurse, Lucy says, "As I sat on that bed,

the despair of a Sunday in full bloom, I thought: I am alone in the world, and I shall always be this way--all alone in the world" (93).

Lucy's relationship with her best friend Peggy is no longer progressing forward. At one time, Lucy felt that they were relating well, despite their differences: "The funny thing was that Peggy and I were not alike, either, but that is just what we liked about each other; what we didn't have in common were things we approved of anyway" (61). They often would hang out together, and after seeing Peggy smoke, Lucy too began the habit. Now, however, Lucy notes that "the small differences between us were beginning to loom, sometimes becoming the only thing that mattered--like a grain of sand in the eye" (94). Peggy does not read or go to the museum, cultural experiences that Lucy has become passionate about.

Partly to subvert her attachment to Peggy, Lucy starts dating Paul, a struggling artist whom Peggy has expressly forbidden Lucy to see. Again, Lucy does not become emotionally attached to Paul. Lucy even suggests without very much disapointment that Paul sees her as an exotic object. When Lucy considers this situation, she describes plants from her home that are considered a weed there but exotic in America:

And now here they were, treasured, sitting in a prominent place in a beautiful room, a special blue light trained on them. And here I was also, a sort of weed in a way, and across the room Paul's eyes, a sparkling blue light, were trained on me. (99)

Lucy wants to feel unique even if it means being fetishsized or exploited. Paul's hands remind Lucy of Mr. Thomas's hands, the hands of an old fisherman who molested her friend Myrna. When learning of the pattern of molestation, Lucy is jealous rather than outraged. She wishes such a thing had happened to her, not because of the money but because it would have made her special; she would have received special attention. She says, "Why had such an extraordinary thing happened to her and not to me? Why had Mr. Thomas chosen Myrna as the girl he would meet in secret and place his middle finger up inside her and not me?" (105). This reflection shows that Lucy refuses to conform to normative values about sex, and she apparently does not mind being exploited by men if she can exploit the situation for herself in return.

Lucy describes her relationship with Paul in a conversation with Mariah: "Except for eating, all the time we spent together was devoted to sex. I told her what everything felt like, how surprised I was to be thrilled by the violence of it" (113). Here Lucy asserts that she is not violated by its violence but that she "look[s] forward to it" (113). Again she is making her own moral and sexual choices on her own terms.

Throughout her stay with the family, Mariah has taken on the role of nurturing and cultivating Lucy. She is like a "good mother" to Lucy (111). Mariah often pays Lucy more than the salary

agreed upon or buys things for her when she goes to the store. When Lucy shared a dream she had, Mariah and Lewis gave her a book on Freudian dreams to show her how to interpret her dream. Now, as Lucy is angry at her mother's low expectations for her future, Mariah gives Lucy a copy of Simon de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Mariah also takes Lucy to see Paul Gauguin's paintings.

But after feeling indoctrinated into British culture by the British colonial state, Lucy does not want to feel that she is undergoing more indoctrination in America. What Mariah sees as innocent attempts to expose Lucy to modern philosophy and culture, Lucy sees as a suspect encouragement to take on traditional Western values. Thus, Lucy subverts these attempts. She never accepts Freud's interpretation of her dream at the end of "Poor Visitor." As for Gauguin, Mariah perhaps intends Lucy to relate to the exotic subject matter of some of Gauguin's paintings, but Lucy feels a connection with the artist instead. She sees his independent streak in herself: "immediately I identified with the yearnings of this man; I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with" (95). Whether or not this was the way Mariah wanted her to experience Gauguin, Lucy is determined to find her own meaning in the cultural artifacts she examines.

After asking repeatedly how Mariah has become as she is, Lucy has come to accept that she and Mariah will never truly understand one another. Mariah has asked Lucy why she does not forgive her mother, and in a cathartic moment Lucy reveals the source of her anger: her mother's low expectations for her life, now that her mother has sons to nurture. This is when Mariah gives Lucy a copy of The Second Sex. Lucy stops readingThe Second Sex after the first sentence, because she perceives that feminist theory cannot heal the real pain inflicted on Lucy by her mother. Reading such a book is not the healing method she wants. Lucy says,

Mariah had completely misinterpreted my situation. My life could not really be explained by this thick book that made my hands hurt as I tried to open it. My life was at once something more simple and more complicated than that: for ten of my twenty years, half of my life, I had been mourning the end of a love affair, perhaps the only true love in my whole life I would ever know. (132)

The "love affair" is her relationship with her mother. The death of Lucy's father is now the point at which Lucy must make a decision. As she sees it, she can reconcile with her mother or permanently sever ties. Reconciliation and forgiveness would mean that Lucy forfeits her dream of becoming completely autonomous. The alternative is to turn her back on her own mother, but the issue is not so simple as that. The decisions she makes are influenced by considerations for the wellbeing of others and for her own wellbeing. For Lucy, the consequences of the decision seem greater than the obligations to family that most people are familiar with. Lucy's mother has felt like a foreboding, oppressive force even while Lucy has been in America. Lucy

has started to have headaches during which she "would see her [mother's] face before me, a face that was godlike, for it seems to know its own forging, to know all the things of which it was made" (94). The influence of Lucy's mother is deeply entrenched within Lucy's thoughts and her psyche, so a full reconciliation could overwhelm her.

"Lucy"

A full year has passed since Lucy arrived in the United States. She reflects on the changes that have occurred since then. She sees herself then and now as two separate people. Before, Lucy was a simple girl who wanted to conform to convention, become a nurse, and obey her parents and the law. Now, Lucy is in the process of inventing herself, still becoming aware of who that self is.

Lucy then begins to sort out what she does and does not know about herself through a series of recollections. During an embarrassing conversation with a woman who had visited her homeland, Lucy realizes that even though her family has lived on the small island for generations, she has never really seen more than a quarter of it. Upon further contemplation, she recognizes that the only history of the island she knew was that of its colonization by the British. Lucy contrasts this present awareness of colonization with her experience as a child. As a young schoolgirl, Lucy disliked the British for superficial reasons like their looks, clothes, and choice of music. At the time, she wished to be ruled instead by the French.

At this point, Lucy defines the past as "the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in." She summarizes some of the main changes that have occurred within the past year. Mariah, once perpetually happy, is now sad, since Lewis has left her for Dinah, Mariah's best friend. Lucy no longer lives with the family. She decided to leave after the news of her father's death. Lucy now has new feelings of guilt, recalling that she actually wished her father dead. Yet, Lucy's guilt is self-proclaimed, and she feels "like Lucifer, doomed to build wrong upon wrong."

Lucy notes that she did not regret not opening her mother's letters until after she had learned of her father's death. With that thought, she sends her mother a last letter telling them she is moving and provides a fake address. When Lucy informs Mariah of her decision to move, Mariah feels betrayed, realizing she is truly alone.

The holidays that year are miserable. Lewis gives Mariah a fur coat that she hates but pretends to like, and Lucy receives an African necklace from Mariah. The New Year arrives, and Lucy moves into her new apartment with her best friend Peggy. The apartment is middle class: it has a kitchen, sitting room, two bedrooms, and a bath.

It is a Sunday, and Lucy is glad she does not have to go to church. Sitting at the desk Mariah has given her, Lucy begins to ponder her name: Lucy Josephine Potter. Josephine comes from her

mother's uncle, Mr. Joseph. Supposedly, he was rich from the money he made from sugar in Cuba. After his death, however, the family discovered he had lost his fortune and was living in a tomb. Potter is probably from the English slaveholder who owned her family. Lucy recalls that as a young child, she called herself by different names: Emily, Charlotte, and Jane. One day she announced to her mother that she wanted to change her name to Enid. Lucy's mother became very enraged. Not until later did Lucy discover that an obeah named Enid was hired by her father's lover to kill Lucy's mother and her unborn child. Lucy recalls another time when Lucy's mother was pregnant, malnourished and cranky, and Lucy asked why she had been given her name. Lucy's mother responded under her breath that she was named after the devil himself, Lucifer--a character Lucy had read about in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Later that day, Paul brings flowers as a housewarming gift and takes Peggy and Lucy out for dinner. That night Paul sleeps over in Lucy's bed.

On Monday, Lucy starts her job for Timothy Simon, a photographer who takes pictures of still life but really wants to travel the world. Lucy types, answers the phone, and is allowed to develop film in his darkroom when he is not using it. Life in the apartment with Peggy becomes mundane as they grow apart. Lucy feels increasingly alone and isolated. She suspects Paul is cheating with Peggy, but she does not care.

The book closes as Lucy opens a blank book and writes her name on a page in blue ink: Lucy Josephine Potter. The sight of her name on the page causes her to cry she writes: "I wish I could love someone so much I would die from it."

Analysis

"Lucy" is an highly reflective chapter as Lucy looks back on her year and tries to sort out who she has become and who she is becoming. The physical changes are minor. For example, she now wears her hair closely cut. Yet Lucy knows that a world of change has occurred within, and she tries to process these changes consciously.

Through recollections of past events, Lucy articulates the effects of colonialism on her life. She realizes her ignorance about her homeland when a white tourist describes to her some places on her small island where she has never stepped foot. Lucy resentfully describes what factual knowledge she does have: "I know this: it was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493; Columbus never set foot there but only named it in passing, after a church in Spain" (135). Lucy recalls that even as a young child she resented the notion of imperialism, even though she has never been formally taught or made aware of the modern concept. Lucy remembers refusing to sing, "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never, never shall be slaves," following her natural, logical observation that she was not British and that she "not too long ago would have been a slave" (135).

Lucy's departure from Mariah's apartment begins with the death of her father. She tries to imagine the details of the funeral: the coffin, his clothes. When Lucy goes to Mariah in order to sort out her mixed emotions, she arrives at the notion of guilt. Lucy sees that guilt has been a central emotion in her life, though she has not always understood it:

Guilty! I had always thought that was a judgment passed on you by others and so it was new to me that it could be a judgment you pass on yourself. Guilty! But I did not feel like a murderer; I felt like Lucifer doomed to build wrong upon wrong.

Guilt is not, however, what Lucy feels when she leaves the apartment. Mariah is angry when Lucy announces her decision. Mariah believes that her support and nurturing has merited loyalty from Lucy, especially now that Lewis has left. But Lucy has no sympathy, at least not for Mariah, and she only wants to say to Mariah, "Your situation is an everyday thing. Men behave this way all the time" (141). Once again, Lucy wants Mariah to confront the reality that Lucy and other women from her country have lived with. The guilt belongs to so many men, not to Mariah or to Lucy.

In this context, some of Lucy's statements involve misandry, perhaps a cultural misandry that either oppresses men or gives them license to act immorally: "Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people" (142). After moving into her new apartment with Peggy, Lucy expresses this stereotype once again, suspecting that Peggy and Paul are having an affair. But Lucy does not care. She accepts the possibility not only because it is what she expects, but also because Lucy's primary concerns are not for other people, but for herself.

Naming is a powerful concept in this book. As a young girl, Lucy inquired into how she was named. All parts of her name represent important aspects of her identity. Lucy sees the influence of colonialism in her last name, Potter, which she infers is derived from an English slaveholder who owned her relatives prior to their emancipation. A huge part of Lucy's anger is also related to her name through is her mother's low expectations for Lucy. Her mother encouraged her three brothers to go to college while only expecting Lucy to be a nurse. Lucy's middle name, Josephine, indicates this low expectation, because with this name her mother chose to name her after a supposedly rich uncle who died broke and lived in a tomb. Lucy's mother deals another harsh blow to Lucy when she tells her daughter that she is named after the Devil himself, Lucifer.

The reference to Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost is apt. In the epic poem, the victory of good over evil is clear, but Milton makes Lucifer very sympathetic for his desire to be free from God's control. Lucy revels in being the anti-hero like Lucifer, rejecting normative morality and convention. While Milton makes clear that God's morals are good and therefore have no need of being challenged, merely human conventions are artifacts of human pride in setting one's

own path. Lucy rejects many sets of cultural norms out of the pride that so many readers admire in Lucifer, although she cannot replace those norms with anything but another set of human norms. And it is not clear that she wants any new set of norms as she forges her new identity. Lucy articulates her anthem of radical freedom through self-invention:

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. I did not have anything exactly in mind, but when the picture was complete I would know. (134)

Lucy remains stuck in a contradiction, wanting to be free to love with her whole being, which would mean that she is no longer free. At some point, radical freedom must resolve itself into real commitments, but Lucy is not quite ready for this idea. Lucy's false belief that the past is "the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in" (137) provides her with a great deal of difficulty as she symbolically and literally starts a new page in her journal. After having rid herself of all attachments, her first desire expresses her difficulty: "I wish I could love someone so much I would die from it" (164).