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and said that I had not seen what I had seen, could not have seen what I had seen, did not, did not, did not; but I did, I did, I did. But it was not to him that I insisted on the reality I knew. And I did not tell him of the day when, returning from school alone, I saw a spotted monkey sitting in a tree and I threw three stones at it. The monkey caught the third one and threw it back at me and struck me over my left eye, in the hair of my brow, and I bled furiously, as if I would never stop. I somehow knew that the red berries of a certain bush would stop the flow of blood. My father, when he saw my wound, thought that it had come from the hands of a schoolmate, a boy, someone I was so protective of I would not reveal his identity. It was then that he began to make plans to send me to school in Roseau, to get me away from the bad influence of children who would wound me, whom I was protecting from his wrath, and who, he was certain, were male. And after this outburst of emotion, meant as an expression of his love for me but which only made me feel anew the hatred and isolation in which we all lived, his face again became a mask, impossible to read.
    On that road which I came to know so well, I spent some of the sweetest moments of my life. On a long stretch of it in the late afternoon I could see the reflection of the sun’s light on the surface of the seawater, and it always had the quality of an expectation just about to be fulfilled, as if at any moment a small city made out of that special light of the sun on the water would arise, and from it might flow a joy I had not yet imagined. And I knew a place just off the side of this road where the sweetest cashews grew; the juice from their fruit would cause blisters to form on my lips and make my tongue feel as if it were caught in a bundle of twine, temporarily making speech difficult, and I found this, the difficulty of speaking, the possibility that it might be a struggle for me ever to speak again, delicious. It was on that road that I first walked directly from one kind of weather system to another: from a cold, heavy rain to a bright, clear heat of midday. And it was on that road that my sister, the girl child of my father and his wife, was traveling on a bicycle after meeting a man my father had forbidden her to see and whom she would marry, when she had an accident, falling over a precipice, which left her lame and barren, her eyes unable to focus properly. This is not a happy memory; her suffering, even now, is very real to me.
    Not long after I came to live with them, my father’s wife began to have her own children. She bore a boy first, then she had a girl. This had two predictable outcomes: she left me alone and she valued her son more than her daughter. That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature. This fact of my sister’s life made me feel overwhelmingly sympathetic to her. She did not like me—she was told by her mother that I was an enemy of hers, that I was not to be trusted, that I was like a thief in the house, waiting for the right moment when I would rob them of their inheritance. This was convincing to my sister, and she distrusted me and she disliked me; the first words of insult she could speak were directed toward me. My father’s wife had always said to me, in private, when my father was not there, that I could not be his child because I did not look like him, and it was true that I did not have any of his physical characteristics. My sister, though, did look like him: her hair and eyes were the same color as his, red and gray; her skin, too, was the same color as his, thin and red, not the red of his hair, another red, like the color of the earth in some places. But she did not have his calm or his patience; she