Lucy Josephine Potter

Jamaica Kincaid

At 19, Lucy is sent by her mother to the United States from her native place, the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. She is to be an au pair, that is, to take care of four children and go to school at night. The four children belong to Lewis and Mariah, who are good to Lucy. She has her own room off the kitchen with its own bathroom. She is deeply homesick, which surprises her, as she had wanted to get away from home very badly.

In the spring Mariah shows Lucy a field of daffodils, wanting her to like them as much as she does. But, as a child, Lucy had been made to memorize Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” in which the poet celebrates the host of golden daffodils he sees. At the time Lucy had never seen a daffodil and she resents being made to study British culture. She wants to erase them. Spring snow was lovely, but Lucy weeps because she “could not bear to love one more thing in my life, one more thing that would make my heart break into a million pieces.”

The family takes the train to a cabin near a lake where Mariah spent her childhood summers. Mariah brings back fish she has caught for supper, telling Lucy, “I was looking forward to telling you I have Indian blood, which is why I am good at fishing. But now I am afraid you will take it the wrong way.” Lucy says only “All along I have wondered how you got to be the way you are.”

Things become sour in the household. Lewis has a garden, but rabbits are eating the vegetables. Mariah cries when Lewis kills them. Lucy knows that Lewis is having an affair with Mariah’s best friend, and sides with Mariah whom she loves. Lucy says to herself how surprising it is that having too much could make one unhappy. She has observed the opposite too long.

Meanwhile Lucy is not even opening her own mother’s letters. She longs for her, but she is mourning the death of a love affair with her mother. For her first nine years, she and her mother were inseparable, but then her mother had three sons and she turned away from Lucy, lavishing everything she had on the sons. Lucy is angry that her mother betrayed her own intelligence, and then Lucy’s as well. Lucy thought she could run away from her past, but finds her mother’s blood runs inside her.

Lucy makes friends with Peggy, who introduces her to the artist, Paul. The party at Paul’s house smells of myrrh and marijuana. His paintings are of strange figures in dark colors. Everything the people at the party said mattered. Lucy does not think she is an artist, but she wants to be around people who stand apart. She stays with Paul when everyone else goes home. She also stops going to nursing school at night.

Mariah and Lewis decide to divorce. They go through the motions at Christmas, but it felt like a funeral to Lucy. It was gloomy inside and out. Nevertheless Mariah begins to feel free. She gives Lucy a museum membership and Lucy also buys a camera, taking many photos. 

Though Lucy does not even open the letter from Antigua marked urgent, an acquaintance arrives to tell her her father has died. He left Lucy’s mother a pauper. Lucy gathers as much money as she can and sends it to her mother, but she includes a false address, telling her mother she is moving.

Lucy rents an apartment with Peggy. She has found a job answering the phones at the studio of a photographer. She has no secretarial skills, but she is allowed to use the darkroom at night. She remains a friend of Mariah, who gives her a large notebook full of empty pages, encouraging Lucy to begin her own life.

Jamaica Kincaid, who tells Lucy’s story in the novella Lucy [1990], leaves her here, as Lucy is turning 20. Lucy is not happy, but she has achieved her independence. Happiness seemed to be too much to ask.

And because Jamaica Kincaid says that her extraordinary stories both are and are not autobiographical, we can look at her later life and see what might have happened to Lucy. Kincaid herself has become an influential writer, has married and had two children, and teaches at Harvard. She is also a great gardener. At her home in Vermont, Kincaid began planting daffodils. She began with one thousand and continued until there are now perhaps 20,000 coming up in the spring, “redeeming Wordsworth”!

The experience of reading Kincaid’s writing is profound. Lucy says she is at her most “two-faced,” that is she cannot say many of the things she thinks out loud. But she treats us, her readers, to all of her thoughts, the powerful inner life which roils under her surface. Lucy appears angry to Mariah, but the reader feels enveloped in warmth. One reviewer says, “Kincaid holds you in her arms and rocks you!” You will also get this impression if you watch her speak, such as in this discussion of her career from 2014 at the Chicago Humanities Festival.