"My mother and I often took a bath together. Sometimes it was just a plain bath, which didn't take very long. Other times, it was a special bath in which the barks and flowers of many different trees, together with all sorts of oils, were boiled in the same large caldron. We would then sit in this bath in a darkened room with a strange-smelling candle burning away."
These baths were a sacred time for Annie and her mother. Engaging all of her senses, she remembers the baths vividly. To be able to experience her mother so dynamically meant everything for Annie. Perhaps it even led her to worship her mom, which explains why she has such a terrible time separating from her mom as she develops to the point of her questioning whether she even loves her mom at all.
"One day, my mother and I had gone to get some material for new dresses to celebrate her birthday (the usual gift from my father), when I came upon a piece of cloth . . . I immediately said how much I loved this piece of cloth and how nice I thought it would look on both of us, but my mother replied, "Oh, no. You are getting too old for that. It's time you had your own clothes. You just cannot go around the rest of your life looking like a little me." To say that I felt the earth swept away from under me would not be going too far."
Annie is growing up. With the many changes that typically accompany this phenomenon, she is forced to unwind her identity from her mother's. Until now, she has enjoyed a sort of mutual self with her mom, as if they were the same being and she merely lacked the same level of consciousness as her older self, but now she learns that this is not true. Almost without warning she is being told that her framework of reality has been faulty and must be altered immediately. Hearing this from her mother -- the very being she worships -- is unspeakably difficult for Annie.
"Once, when showing me a way to store linen, she patted the folded sheets in place and said, "Of course, in your own house you might choose another way." That the day might actually come when we would live apart I had never believed. My throat hurt from the tears I held bottled up tight inside."
Again, Annie is finding it difficult to deal with separation from her mother. She wants things to remain the way they always have, with mutual dependence and innocence on her part, but she realizes now that they can't. Her mom thinks she's merely talking about the natural order of events, but to Annie these ideas are terrifying because they are incompatible with her present system of reality. In order to live apart from her mother or even to behave differently from her mother, she will have to first understand that she is in fact a separate being from her mom.
"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."
As Annie is undergoing to painful process of growing up, she looks for someone to replace the divine position in which she once placed her mother. Since she and her mom cannot remain forever the same being as they were in Annie's mind for so long, she wants to find somebody else with whom to join herself and her sense of identity. When she meets Gwen, she instantly rejoices thinking this is just the person to do that. In a sense she trades one god for the next, in the attempt to avoid taking responsibility for her broken view of reality. What she thinks she is proves incompatible with what she's experiencing as a young girl.
"In the basin with the candles she placed scraps of paper on which were written the names of people who had wanted to harm me, most of them women my father had loved a long time ago. She told my mother, after a careful look around, that there were no spirits in my room or in any other part of the house, and that all the things she did were just a precaution in case anyone should get ideas on hearing that I was in such a weakened condition. Before she left, she pinned a little back sachet, filled with something that smelled abominable, to the inside of my nightie, and she gave my mother some little vials filled with fluids to rub on me at different times of the day."
Annie's mom believes in the power of the obeah. When Annie gets sick, she is believed to be subject to the curse of her grandfather, so her mom calls in the obeah. Here we see another glimpse of how her father's infidelity is weighing upon her mother's sense of security, especially in relation to her daughter. The idea that an ex-lover of her husband's might have cursed her own daughter is the ultimate shame upon Annie's mom. From Annie's adolescent perspective, all of the explanations are plausible. She doesn't prefer the western medicine to the cultural traditions. She accepts everything given to her because she is still shaping her beliefs about herself, her parents, and the world around her. In this way, she merely focuses on her desire to feel better.
