Annie John

“No small part of my life was so unimportant that she hadn’t made a note of it, and now she would tell it to me over and over again.”

This line is indicative of Annie’s feelings in early childhood, and it illustrates the sense of importance and fulfillment to which she constantly longs to return. She is the center of her mother’s world and cannot conceive of ever being displaced from this position. Her mother makes her feel so loved that Annie believes her mother remembers even the minutiae of her young life.

“To say that I felt the earth swept away from under me would not be going too far. It wasn’t just what she said, but the way she said it. No accompanying little laugh. No bending over and kissing my little wet forehead.”

When Annie’s mother tells Annie that it is time for them to stop dressing alike, it is a watershed moment for the protagonist. Annie’s metaphor conveys that her sense of the world and her place within it changes irrevocably, starting with this moment. She is not ready for the shift, let alone the alterations to her sense of self that follow. The fact that Annie’s mother does not try to soften the unexpected and discomfiting news makes it even more shocking to Annie and that much more indicative of the harsh lessons to come.

“Sometimes we would both forget the new order of things and would slip into our old ways.”

This line shows that Annie’s mother struggles with the way she feels she must parent to prepare Annie for the world. Because Annie’s mother sometimes returns to relating to Annie in an overtly loving and affectionate manner, these shifts demonstrate this she would prefer to preserve this version of the relationship and only introduces a sense of distance in order to prepare her daughter for the world. Annie’s lack of awareness that her mother is doing something difficult for Annie’s own good is an example of dramatic irony.

“What should I do, finding myself in a world of new girls, a world in which I was not even near the center?”

At her new school, the revelation that Annie is not the most important person initially troubles her. This epiphany represents the first time that Annie consciously recognizes and labels her feelings about the changed relationship with her mother. She has an intense desire to be the center of someone’s world, and this is fertile ground for her new friendship with Gwen, who is like her mother in so many ways.

“Often I had been told by my mother not to feel proud of anything I had done and in the next breath that I couldn’t feel enough pride about something I had done.”

This line represents the conflicting expectations to which the girls in Annie’s community are subjected; it is impossible for her to develop self-confidence if she is told never to feel proud of herself. Conversely, it is impossible to avoid feeling proud of a job well done when she is rewarded for her efforts. The paradoxical injunction to eschew pride and embrace it thus serves as a miniature example of the many other societal contradictions that plague her life in Antigua. This paradox is also similar to the double standard that restricts her during and after Mineu’s accidental hanging, as during the game itself, she is taught to submit to his will, but she is later punished for her inability to act without instruction. These social patterns demonstrate the fact that in patriarchal communities, women often inhabit untenable positions.

“I told her that when I was younger I had been afraid of my mother’s dying, but that since I had met Gwen this didn’t matter so much.”

In this line, Gwen’s symbolic significance as a replacement for Annie’s mother becomes explicit. No longer the obvious center of her mother’s world, Annie takes consolation in the fact that she is, for now, the center of Gwen’s. She has no inkling, at this point, that their friendship cannot sustain her forever.

“When I got home, my mother came toward me, arms outstretched, concern written on her face. My whole mouth filled up with a bitter taste, for I could not understand how she could be so beautiful even though I no longer loved her.”

Sent home after fainting on the first day of her first period, Annie does not expect her mother to care, given how dismissive she was of Annie’s concerns that morning. Her mother brushed off Annie’s anxiety about the incomprehensible blood and pains that the girl was experiencing for the first time, and this leads Annie to construe her mother’s actual distress as merely another example of her duplicity. This is the first time that Annie acknowledges how dramatically her own feelings about her mother have changed.

“Oh, what an angel she was, and what a heaven she lived in!”

To Annie, the Red Girl seems so perfect as to be divine, and the lawless “heaven” in which the Red Girl lives replaces the paradise that Annie used to share with her mother. Likewise, the concept of “Eden” changes from the all-encompassing warmth and presence of her mother’s love, from which Annie has been cast out, to the relative freedom and lack of structure that the Red Girl enjoys. Such allusions to heaven and the Garden of Eden, or “paradise,” occur repeatedly throughout the novel.

“And now I started a new series of betrayals of people and things I would have sworn only minutes before to die for.”

Enamored of the Red Girl because of her independence, Annie begins to prioritize freedom over everything else. She even begins to find Gwen terribly dull, when, not long before, she had declared herself to be in love with the girl. Now, Annie is only too happy to lie to, steal from, and betray the people she once loved in order to be with the Red Girl and experience the vicarious sense of freedom that the Red Girl confers.

“Every day after I finished my chores, each chore being a small rehearsal for that faraway day, thank God, when I would be the mistress of my own house, that faraway day when I would have to abandon Gwen, the Red Girl, meetings behind cistern and at lighthouse, marbles, places under the house, and every other secret pleasure.”

Here, Annie equates marriage with an absence of pleasure. She takes pleasure in her secret meetings with the Red Girl, in playing with the forbidden marbles, in hiding her spoils under the house, and even—though to a much lesser degree than before—in Gwen’s friendship. She is glad that the day of her future marriage and full induction into adulthood is still “faraway” because she equates such developments with the necessity of relinquishing every aspect of her life in which she takes any small joy. She is not ready to play the young lady, secure a husband, and devote the rest of her life to caring for him and his home.

“We sent confusing signals to the ships, causing them to crash on some nearby rocks. How we laughed as their cries of joy turned to cries of sorrow.”

Annie’s dream of living alone on a deserted island with the Red Girl and bringing about the deaths of hundreds of vacationing white English people illustrates just how much the Red Girl’s influence has changed Annie. She is so different now that she imagines she would feel only glee upon seeing the people with whom she associates her oppression drowning in the sea. Annie will never be able to think of the routines and rules by which she lives as necessary or proper; she will only ever interpret them as restrictive and disempowering.

“Of course, sometimes, what with our teachers and our books, it was hard for us to tell on which side we really now belonged—with the masters or the slaves—for it was all history, it was all in the past, and everybody behaved different now.”

This line shows how successfully the English authorities are at obscuring the power dynamic in which Black Antiguans continue to be oppressed by the powerful, ruling English, despite the abolition of slavery. At this point in the narrative, the young Annie believes that the racism and materialism that contributed to the enslavement of her ancestors is all in the past, and this belief prevents her and other Antiguans from questioning current examples of social injustice.

“What just deserts, I thought, for I did not like Columbus. How I loved this picture—to see the usually triumphant Columbus, brought so low, seated at the bottom of a boat just watching things go by.”

Annie does not consciously realize that racism is still present in her society rather than being relegated to the past. However, her joy at seeing a powerless Columbus shows that the hero worship pervading her textbook and her teachers’ lessons betrays the fact that her colonial indoctrination is not complete. She feels about Columbus the way her mother feels about Pa Chess, indicative that patriarchal authority is closely bound to colonial authority and every bit as marginalizing.

“When she laughed, her mouth opened to show off big, shiny, sharp white teeth. It was as if my mother had suddenly turned into a crocodile.”

Annie’s mother lies to her and tricks her into eating breadfruit, the taste of which Annie strongly dislikes, only confessing the truth after Annie has eaten the whole plate. Her reason for doing this is because, as she tells Annie, it is good for her. It is not uncommon for parents to insist that their children eat healthy foods that the children do not favor. Annie, however, only recognizes that her mother has deceived her and is unapologetic about this deception, and this incident adds to the girl’s growing sense of her mother’s betrayal.

“My unhappiness was something deep inside me, and when I closed my eyes I could even see it.”

At age 15, Annie experiences a misery so extreme that it feels tangible to her. She can see it and feel it like a ball of metal inside her. She has been defining herself in relation to her society and has found this process so difficult for so long that she no longer has any sense of who she truly is; she simply does things in a manner opposite of her mother’s without actually figuring out what she herself likes best. She feels lost and takes no enjoyment in the things she used to love.

“Satan was wearing a smile, but it was one of those smiles that you could see through, one of those smiles that make you know the person is just putting up a good front. At heart, you could see, he was really lonely and miserable at the way things had turned out.”

Annie sees her own young face in a shop window and is struck by how old and miserable she looks. The sight prompts her to recall a picture of a young Lucifer that she saw recently. Annie begins to relate to Lucifer, thinking of him as misunderstood and an outcast for desiring to feel again the love he once felt. She thinks of his smile as a mask: something that he uses to hide the real pain he feels. This, too, is familiar to her. Whereas she had once felt favored and loved by her mother and secure in her position in the world, she now feels alone and lost. Kincaid’s allusion to Lucifer emphasizes just how intense and enormous Annie’s alienation seems to her.

“The word ‘slut’ (in patois) was repeated over and over, until suddenly I felt as if I were drowning in a well but instead of the well being filled with water it was filled with the word ‘slut,’ and it was pouring in through my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my mouth.”

Annie’s mother misinterprets Annie’s behavior when she sees Annie speaking with the boys, and she mistakenly accuses the protagonist of acting in a sexually promiscuous manner. Her mother’s repetition of the slur overwhelms Annie, again leading to her feelings of being misunderstood and powerless, without a chance to defend herself. The word—and everything it encompasses—is so abhorrent to Annie’s mother that she speaks it, and only it, in another language, as if it is too dirty to say in English. The undeserved epithet adds to Annie’s sense of hopelessness, for even when she behaves as she has been taught, her actions are still judged to be wrong and are weaponized against her.

“None of the people in the wedding picture, except for me, had any face left. In the picture of my mother and father, I had erased them from the waist down. In the picture of me wearing my confirmation dress, I had erased all of myself except for the shoes.”

By washing her aunt’s wedding picture, Annie erases every face but her own, as if to symbolize the fact that her family’s acceptance of English religion, morality, and patriarchal social codes has eroded their identities. In the picture of her father and mother, Annie erases the parts of their bodies where their sex organs would be, symbolizing her disgust with oppressive gender roles and expectations. She also erases their legs, perhaps criticizing their choice to remain in Antigua despite the oppression they endure or, alternatively, highlighting their lack of freedom to “get up and go,” as Annie once wrote of Columbus.

“Ma Chess and my father kept out of each other’s way—not so much because they didn’t like each other but because they didn’t see the world in the same way.”

Annie’s father is similar to Pa Chess in that he has also embraced English culture and medicine. For example, he leaves the house on the day the obeah woman comes, and he prefers to visit the English doctor instead, just as Pa Chess once elected to avoid folk medicine when his son, Johnnie, was ill. Ma Chess’s subsequent rebellion against her husband illustrates her rejection of English social norms and marriage conventions, which are fully embraced by Annie’s father. Thus, they do not take issue with one another for personal reasons; instead, their mutual enmity arises from their respective acceptance or rejection of English customs and values.

“[T]he whole world into which I was born had become an unbearable burden and I wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold underwater until it died.”

Annie does not die of her illness, though the part of her that once wished to find a sense of belonging in Antigua does. When she recovers, she wishes that she could eliminate her home so that she would never have to contend with its existence or influence again.

“I could see that everything about me aroused envy and discontent, and that made me happy—the only happiness I knew then.”

After her illness, Annie does as she pleases, dressing how she wants rather than how her mother or society expects her to. Her adoption of a stoop and a strange accent, along with her unrivaled and unapologetic intelligence, cause others to avoid her. She no longer tries to fit in, nor to mask her individuality or her disdain for those who conform. Now, though, she is an outcast by choice rather than an unwitting victim of society’s judgment or rejection. Having taken back some power by refusing to try to belong, Annie experiences happiness for the first time in a long time.

“They were eating away as they talked, my father’s false teeth making that clop-clop sound like a horse […] my mother’s mouth going up and down like a donkey’s.”

Though Annie hardly used to notice her father and saw only beauty in her mother, even when their relationship soured, she now sees her parents in a ridiculous and even comical light. She is disgusted by them because she no longer thinks of them as ideals or even as people. Instead, her metaphors suggest that she views them as pack animals who do the bidding of whoever controls them. To Annie, her parents are now simple, docile, and complacent creatures: mere puppets of the English colonizers.

“[M]y heart swelled with a great gladness as the words ‘I shall never see this again’ spilled out inside me. But then, just as quickly, my heart shriveled up and the words ‘I shall never see this again’ stabbed at me.”

Annie seems surprised by the mix of feelings she experiences when it is time to leave home. She is happy to be leaving this place that has resulted in such misery for her, but something like sadness affects her too. Annie’s grief, which she compares to a knife wound, suggests that there are aspects of her home that she does love, and she also begins to recognize her mother’s love as the catalyst for the changes in their relationship.