‘I live in memory’

Franklin Nelson

Ten or so years ago, Jamaica Kincaid was at home in Vermont reading the New York Times when her eyes fell on an article about the dearth of books for ‘children of color’. ‘That’s the way the article put it: ‘children of color’,’ she tells me on a video call, shelves thick with hardbacks in the background. ‘So I said to myself, ‘Well, look, I’ll write a book.’’

The result is An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (2024), a charmingly produced dive into the plants that define our world and ‘the often brutal history behind them.’ The text is written by Kincaid and its imagery created by the artist Kara Walker, critically acclaimed for her examination of gender, race and violence. 

For the former New Yorker staff writer Kincaid, much of whose prize-winning fiction and non-fiction has been marked by her childhood and adolescence in the then British colony of Antigua, ‘the arrangement of words’ matters as much as that of flora, hence this slim volume’s title. ‘I did not like ‘children of color’. It sounds as if they go out and pick the color themselves,’ Kincaid says. ‘So I thought I would change it.’ 

‘A book for colored children includes children of all colors,’ she adds. ‘White is a color. I wanted to write just a children’s book, of course remembering that when I was a child, I didn’t know I was colored. All the books I would have read were about or even had illustrations of white children, but I didn’t know they were white.’

The Encyclopedia took shape with Kincaid sending her captions on plants, ranging from the apple (malus domestica) to the sunflower (helianthus annuus) and corn (zea mays), to Walker, who would then draw from them. ‘Neither one of us was in charge of anything,’ reflects Kincaid. ‘Whatever the other one did was perfectly fine. I know nothing about art so I could hardly object. It was a rapid process, and I was delighted with everything.’ One of her personal favourites is the illustration for nicosiana, where ‘a little boy lies in what I presume to be a grave, on his back, and lazily looks up at the world, but out of his mouth grows this deadly thing: tobacco.’ 

As attractive as Walker’s drawings are, some of the subjects tackled here – as tobacco evinces – are painful. The cultivation of sugarcane ‘led to the wholesale subjugation and exploitation of many people who were occupants of the area of the world we call Africa’ and has for many left an aftertaste of ‘despair and injustice’, we read. Elsewhere we learn that yucca brevifolia became known as ‘the Joshua tree’ from the violent displacement of indigenous Americans by Europeans settling in the Mojave, and that Haitian-grown indigo ‘produced more wealth for France than the entire East India Company did for England.’ 

H (hibiscus)

To have written the Encyclopedia without broaching such histories of empire would have been to perpetuate the ‘stupidity’ of most literature for children, argues Kincaid, adding that she wrote it ‘for the child I am and was.’ 

‘We think children are stupid. Most children’s books think children are stupid’, she says. ‘When I was a child I did not like children’s books, so if I wrote a book supposedly for children, the complications of the adult world would enter into it. Children are in the world that their parents have helped make, and they ought to know. We ought to know.’

Kincaid has, over time, spilled much ink over the garden, but in the beginning ‘had no idea I would write about it, had no idea it would be a source of knowledge for me’ even as ‘it became so obvious to other people that it was a kind of possession.’ She traces her origins as a gardener to her mother, who ‘did cultivate things but in a very active way.’ 

‘She wasn’t precious about it the way gardening is,’ Kincaid adds of her mother, whose life and deeds have shaped the complex mother-daughter relationships that recur in her œuvre. ‘Gardening now is considered something rich people do, sometimes only for leisure … but she would eat something and if she liked it, she would ask where the seed was and plant it.’ 

V (vaccinium)

Peonies might have been the first flowers Kincaid grew ‘out of instinct’ after moving with her family to Vermont in 1985 – until then, while living in New York City, she dabbled in pot plants – but daffodils have since come to predominate. Eager to make amends with William Wordsworth, whose poem ‘I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud’ she learnt as part of the colonial-era curriculum, Kincaid planted 10 yellow-headed stems on arriving in her new yard. Today there are 25,000, she tells me, ‘and I’ll just keep planting until the whole acre is covered!’

My Garden (Book) is among five titles by Kincaid that Picador re-issued earlier this year. The others are the books, My Brother (1997), Mr Potter (2002) and See Now Then (2013), and Talk Stories (2001), a collection of early magazine columns. Those books deal similarly in difficult subjects –  not least divorce and an AIDS-related death – but twenty-three years after her first book-length exploration of the plants and people that make gardens first appeared, Kincaid is still passionate about what time spent outdoors has to offer the young and the old, the novice and the experienced. 

‘The thing I love the most about the garden is knowing things. The things I know about the garden have no real use to me, they don’t yield anything – certainly financial. But I so love knowing things,’ she says. ‘In a way I like being ignorant, because the possibility of knowing occurs, and when that part of you that was ignorant of something is erased, there’s such joy, such happiness in that erasure. It sounds like I’m having religious revelations. But it is true: to know something that you didn’t know before is the most wonderful thrill, and I happen to find that in the garden.’

Author image courtesy of FMcM

Illustrations courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux