A Small Place

In this second section, Kincaid expresses her anger more thoroughly, particularly her anger at the entire British imperialist project. She explains that even thinking for a short time about the destruction wrought by the British turns her completely “bitter” and “dyspeptic” (32). She doesn’t understand how people can know what the English did and yet still “tell [her] how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions” (31). She emphasizes the unfairness of this perspective, as those same English, with their history of traditions, actively oppressed and erased the historic traditions of African peoples, like those taken to Antigua. What makes Kincaid angry isn’t just the physical pain of slavery but the mental and emotional pain of having “no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love […] and most painful of all, no tongue” (31). All these things were forced on her people by the English, and she has no cultural connection to her ancestors and the places they came from. She’s especially upset about the loss of language, as she feels that she can’t fully express the extent of her anger with “the language of the criminal” (31). To Kincaid, the English language will never paint the English in the wrong, and it will “explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view” (32), leaving her victimhood unexpressed. Exemplary of this is theory is Kincaid’s revelation that she and her fellow Antiguans didn’t have the language to name the white inhabitants as racist when they were belittled for being Black. Without a mother tongue to express blame accurately, Kincaid feels her anger will never cease.

Kincaid develops the theme of The Lasting Impact of Slavery and English Colonial Rule by alluding to several streets in Antigua that were named after British naval officers, whom she calls “English maritime criminals” (24). She lived on a street named after Horatio Nelson, a celebrated English admiral who was also a staunch advocate for the Atlantic Slave Trade. John Hawkins was an early promoter of the slave trade and one of the first English men to profit from the triangle trade of slaves, raw materials, and finished products. Francis Drake, one of England’s earliest global explorers, was notorious for plundering the lands he found and was often called a pirate. George Rodney and several members of the Hood family worked in the West Indies to defend British colonies from other colonizing nations. All these men received a street named after them in Antigua, and these street names remained even after colonial powers left. Another example is the Barclay brothers, whose bank still stands in Antigua—a bank they created through profits from being slave traders. Therefore, these men who destroyed countless lives in the name of British Empire are a constant presence, reminding Kincaid and her fellow Antiguans of their painful colonial history.

Kincaid describes life in colonial Antigua and the impact of the forced assimilation to English culture on her and her people. She believes that “actual death might have been better” (24) than living under colonial oppressors who pretended to be benefactors. The contradiction of colonial rule that Kincaid sees is that the English wanted to escape England but also wanted to make everywhere just like England—but while the English wanted everyone to become English, they never truly saw the people they colonized as being English. This assimilation caused not only physical but also mental harm to those who were taught that the glorious land of civilization was somewhere “that not even a boat could take us to” and was someplace “that, no matter what we did, we could never be of” (30). When the English finally left, they also left behind their institutions, education, and frameworks, which favored white English people, so that self-governance by Black Antiguans within these institutions began with limitations already in place. Kincaid brings back the second-person perspective on page 35 in a series of short, active sentences, forcing the English to take accountability for the destruction of Antigua and a significant portion of the world:

You murdered people. You imprisoned people. You robbed people. You opened your own banks and you put our money in them. The accounts were in your name. There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home (35).

In this direct address, Kincaid lays out the crimes of the English in plain language. She refuses to let the English ignore their involvement in not only the historic period of slavery but the continued influence of slavery and colonialism on Antiguan life.

The Mill Reef Club is a key symbol that Kincaid introduces in this section. The club was built by “people from North America who wanted to live in Antigua and spend their holidays in Antigua but who seemed to not like Antiguans (black people) at all” (27). The only Black Antiguans allowed within the property are servants. Kincaid sees this institution as a continuance of the colonialist structures that kept white and Black Antiguans apart—and placed white people in a position of power and superiority. The Mill Reef Club occasionally gives charitable donations to the people of Antigua, but they otherwise refuse to interact with their hosts. Because of its members’ money—and thus influence—Antiguans have become somewhat dependent on the goodwill of the Mill Reef Club, even though the Antiguans think these white people “were behaving in a bad way, like pigs” (27). Therefore, Kincaid uses The Mill Reef Club to further explore the theme of the Corruption of Power and Wealth, as well as to symbolize neocolonialism and the continued control of the Antiguan population by outside powers.

Kincaid uses two examples of racist white people in Antigua to prove that despite the colonial propaganda that white people were the most civilized people on the earth, most white colonists were rude, ill-mannered, and poorly behaved. One of these people is the Czech dentist who claimed to be a children’s doctor without any qualifications. Before tending to the children, this doctor made his wife look over the Black Antiguans to “make sure that we didn’t smell, that we didn’t have dirt under our fingernails, and that nothing else about us—apart from the color of our skin—would offend the doctor” (28). Kincaid even recalls that her mother “examined me carefully to see that I had no bad smells or dirt in the crease of my neck” (28) before taking her severely ill child to the doctor out of fear that he’d turning Kincaid away. The other example is the Northern Irish school teacher who called the Black Antiguans “monkeys just out of trees” (29) and wouldn’t let children born out of wedlock into the school. Kincaid now sees that this policy was a method of “keeping black children out of this school” (29), revealing that many colonists like this one didn’t really want to educate the people they were oppressing. The actions of these two people illustrate how white colonists could get away with everyday cruelty because the colonialist ideologies of white supremacy placed them in an unshakeable position of natural superiority. Rudeness and racism toward non-white people were therefore not only tolerated but encouraged and engrained in the colonialist project.