A Walk to the Jetty Study Guide

Born Elaine Potter Richardson, Jamaica Kincaid grew up in Antigua with her mother, stepfather, and three younger brothers. Kincaid garnered much success in the British education system that existed in Antigua during her youth. At 17, Kincaid left home to work as an au pair in Scarsdale, New York after her stepfather became ill and her mother insisted that she financially contribute to their family. This forced move, in addition to Kincaid’s resentment at her mother for prioritizing her sons over her daughter, ultimately culminated in Kincaid’s estrangement from her family. In 1973, Kincaid changed her name upon her first magazine publication in hopes of redefining herself. She later married composer and professor Allen Shawn, though they divorced in 2002. Kincaid now lives in Vermont and teaches African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Christopher Columbus surveyed the island of Antigua in 1493, naming it “Santa Maria de la Antigua” after the Spanish church of the same name. In 1632, the British formally colonized Antigua and took control of the nearby smaller island of Barbuda by 1678. With British colonial rule came the rise of slavery in the islands, as the British enslaved millions of native Africans to provide free labor for their lucrative sugar plantations. In 1834, the British passed the Slave Abolition Act, which granted freedom to approximately 750,000 enslaved people in the West Indies. Despite the legal abolition of slavery, however, the newly freed populations found themselves remaining economically dependent on white plantation owners and still subjected to the same race- and class-based hierarchies that existed alongside slavery. Finally, in 1981, Antigua and Barbuda achieved independence from the United Kingdom and became recognized as one country.         

Following Annie John, Kincaid’s first novel (of which this story is an excerpt), Kincaid continued to write about young girls leaving their homes in the Caribbean. She also built on similar themes of migration, independence, and gender in her second novel, Lucy. Published in 1990, Lucy features a young female protagonist who must learn to adjust to life in America after leaving her Caribbean island, much like Annie John. My Brother, a work of nonfiction that Kincaid published in 1997, gives insight to Kincaid’s youth in Antigua with her family, which may help contextualize some autobiographically inspired moments in Annie John, such as Annie’s father’s illness. Looking to other authors from the West Indies, British-Dominican author Jean Rhys’s famous 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea similarly investigates themes of race, gender, and assimilation. The daughter of a father who immigrated from Barbados, Paule Marshall was another writer who, in her 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, portrayed the experiences of Barbadian immigrants in New York.