Part I

Kincaid sets the pace for the nonlinear story she tells in the opening paragraph when she describes first visiting Devon in the Gweneth O'Reilly ward of the Holberton Hospital, where he was said to be dying of AIDS; she then skips immediately to the circumstances of his birth. The ostensible connection between these thoughts is tenuous at best: Devon is the only one of Kincaid's mother's four children who was not born in a hospital. The logic of this leap makes increasing sense as the reader learns to follow Kincaid's idiosyncratic and winding thought processes.

Kincaid describes having distanced herself from her family only to have been drawn back into their orbit by her brother's illness. She reminisces about her family, especially her mother, discussing everything from her mother's dislike of her daughter's faculty for remembering to her mother's skill at gardening. She talks of the...