My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.
This opening line immediately draws attention to how Xuela regards herself and her life. Without a mother she feels without direction and vulnerable. This immediate lack of a mother figure haunts her entire life, but it is also what grants her the courage to live her life for herself without feeling shackled by the will of others. In doing so Kincaid also creates allusions between her own life and that of Xuela's, where Kincaid was first able to pursue her own life after leaving her family home behind her.
My teacher was a woman who had been trained by Methodist missionaries; she was of the African people, that I could see, and she found in this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us.
This quote aptly describes how the island's colonial history still plagues its inhabinants. Additionally this quote offers insight into the viewpoints of the older generations and how this "birthright" is passed on and kept alive through the younger generations.
It was these clothes, the clothes of a dead man, that I wore to work each day. I cut off the two plaits of hair on my head; they fell to my feet looking like two headless serpents. I wrapped my almost hairless head in a piece of old cloth. I did not look like a man, I did not look like a woman.
Here Xuela has taken her life into her own hands for the first time in her life. By rejecting motherhood and seeking employment on her own she is also rejecting what society would deem to be her womanhood. By doing so, Xuela becomes neither man nor woman, and instead is simply herself.
[...] he [Alfred] told me that the grapefruit was natural to the West Indies, that sometime in the seventeenth century it had mutated from the Ugli fruit on the island of Jamaica. He said this in a way that made me think he wanted the grapefruit and himself to be One.
Alfred has always sought power and influence, which he feels is his right being half English. He views himself as the grapefruit who started out as a Ugli fruit but has since evolved beyond his native tendencies, similar to his slow but steady rise to influence.
