"There were flamboyant trees and mahogany trees lining East Street. Government House, the place where the Governor, the person standing in for the Queen, lived, was on East Street. Government house was surrounded by a high white wall—and to show how cowed we must have been, no one ever wrote bad things on it; it remained clean and white and high." (pg. 18)
In the text's second section, Kincaid flashes back to the Antigua of her childhood, colonial Antigua, and describes what it used to look like. She paints a clear image of all the vast, grand colonial buildings, and emphasizes in particular that Antiguans were so trained into submission that they did not even write things on the white walls of Government House, even though they certainly thought bad things about their occupiers.
"But if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big old wooden building painted a shade of yellow the is beautiful to people like me, with its wide veranda, its big, always open windows, its rows and rows and shelves filled with books, its beautiful wooden tables and chairs for sitting and reading..." (p. 28)
Kincaid describes the old library with such tenderness and care that it is clear immediately how large a role this place played in her childhood. She remembers it so strongly, every detail, and this is why it pains her so much that the library does not currently stand. However, she also recognizes that the colonists used this library to brainwash Antiguans into supporting colonialism, which makes her feel guilty for remembering it fondly.
"Or the market on a Saturday morning, where the colors of the fruits and vegetables and the colors of the clothes people are wearing and the color of the day itself, and the color of the nearby sea, and the color of the sky... all of this is so beautiful, all of this is not real like any other real thing there is." (pg. 53)
In the short final section of A Small Place, Kincaid spends much of the time using imagery to emphasize that Antigua is so beautiful it does not seem real. She moves through many different locations on the island and colors them with her descriptions, but then calls this beauty a prison, keeping everything and everybody inside it locked in and everything and everybody outside it locked out.
