Jamaica Kincaid Wants You to Know She Shaved Her Eyebrows First

“I didn’t want anyone else to look like me,” says Jamaica Kincaid, laughing. It’s a long-standing refrain in our meandering conversation on a recent afternoon in August. We are speaking via phone ahead of the paperback release of Putting Myself Together, a career-spanning collection of her essays. In conversation, the same wryness, irreverence, and piercing desire to question comes through—even over a crackling connection that is threatened by a summer storm outside her door in Vermont. Kincaid got her start as a writer for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section in the 1970s. She had come from Antigua to work as a domestic, but in one of those twists in life that seem magical now but were commonplace in the energetic world of New York in the ’70s, she fell in with the writer George S. Trow, who introduced her writing to the legendary editor William Shawn.

Kincaid wrote observations, reviews, and personal essays at the magazine. Her novels Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother became classics of late-20th-century literature, while her essay collection that explored the violence of tourism in the Caribbean, A Small Place, became a classic of postcolonial writing.

Kincaid has never pulled punches and, in conversation, is boisterous and quick to laugh. Here, she talks about her early days as a writer and the ways fashion and personal style helped define her identity as an artist.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length.

I wanted to talk a little bit about creating a persona because this book is called Putting Myself Together and the theme of so many of the pieces in it is the construction of self. There’s a piece in there all about this, through the lens of Diana Ross. Do you think of your life as an author as one of personas?

No. I mean, it certainly wasn’t conscious.

I came to America as a servant girl. I’ve always wanted to write, but I didn’t know that one did that. When I think about it, I don’t know what I would’ve done with this sort of interest, with the kind of curiosity I had. I don’t know what I would’ve done without writing. But I didn’t know that you could do it in public or you could let people know what you are thinking. But when you say “constructing yourself,” I must have been doing that. The Diana Ross piece … I haven’t reread any of the pieces in the book because they frighten me.

What frightens you?

That I was so arrogant. I was penniless. I am an immigrant and I’m Black, which is something I never seemed to have taken into consideration. So the Diana Ross piece, for instance, she fascinated me because the first thing I ever bought for myself with money I earned was Meet the Supremes. And I still have the album. … I don’t mean to malign her. And it wasn’t that I was disappointed in her. I was just observing things. I would write these things and they would be published. And I was quite grateful, but not grateful enough to change anything [I wrote]. I mean, if someone hadn’t liked it and said, “If you change this or that …” I would never have changed anything.

Really? You’ve really never taken an editor’s suggestion?

Yeah. And that includes Mr. William Shawn [longtime editor of The New Yorker].

Once I had a long argument and a long back and forth with him because he wanted me to change a sentence in one of my short stories, and I said no. And he was very upset. And he gave me a list of five authors. He said—I think it was John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth. Oh, gosh, there were five. Sometimes I can remember all five of them. Sometimes I can only remember four. And he said, “All of these”—they were white men, of course—“had changed pieces for The New Yorker’s sensibilities. But when they published them in a book, they would revert to the way they had wanted it.” I remember saying to him, “Well, they shouldn’t have.”

And I didn’t change it, and he published it the way I had it. It was a short story in my first collection. I mean, I didn’t know that you couldn’t do that. Now that I know, I still would. I think you have to.

I don’t know why I was so arrogant. My friend Sandy [the writer Ian Frazier] remembers this. I would do things like … I met Jacqueline Onassis many times privately, and so on. And then one time I met her in public and we were introduced again and she [acted as if we had not met before] and said, “How do you do?” I was so offended, so young and silly. I remember saying to her, “We have met,” and I walked away because we had met. Why pretend we hadn’t, or why do this nonsense?

I remember thinking, “If you are going to go out, you should remember people. And if you don’t remember them, don’t do that.” I just walked away. It’s just something you do when you’re young and rude and full of yourself.

Do you think that so much of that audacity and being so certain of yourself came from a place of “I have nothing to lose, so I should just go straight ahead. There’s no safety net here, so let me just keep going”?

Well, you could interpret it that way now. I just had a belief in right and wrong always. I would apply it to silly things like not shaking her hand. I sat next to her sometime and my friend George S. Trow had taken me everywhere with him. So I’d met her; I’d met his friends and people he wrote about. I talked to her, and I thought it was rude of her not to remember people. In my sense of justice, I thought she was in the wrong. Yeah, it was just youthful arrogance.

Of course, I didn’t know a young Black woman shouldn’t be arrogant no matter what. I didn’t seem to consider that I was a young Black woman. Nobody really reminded me of it. Or maybe they did and I didn’t notice. I really didn’t know how to interpret racial slights.

Except: Once I had interviewed Barbara Walters, and at the end of it, she said to me, “Well, I’d be very interested to see how you turn out, how you end up.” And I thought it was a strange thing to say. Then I understood all the implications. I think she was saying, “How did you get this far? I’m interested to see how far it takes you.” She was actually rather a petty, unkind person, but as I later could see, she had her own difficulties and insecurities growing up in basically a bar with her father and being Jewish and being a woman and being slighted herself. So in some way, she might have wanted to put me down or something. But I remember noticing, feeling at the time when she said that, “Oh wow, this is not kind.” But I didn’t know how to interpret it right away. I only came to understand it later.

But I was quite … I mean, I cut off my hair and bleached it. It was not really fashionable for people to do that.

Why did you do that?

I hadn’t seen anyone do it. And then I remember seeing a woman who was a backup singer for David Bowie later did it, and I was really upset because I didn’t want anyone to look like me. And then I just forgot about it.

Can you say a little bit more about not wanting anybody to look like you?

Yeah, I wore shorts. As you can see, the clothes you see on the cover of the book, those were my clothes. I wore shorts. Even in winter, I would wear shorts over my pantyhose, and then I eventually stopped wearing pantyhose because I was so tall and thin. But I wore old clothes and hats—funny hats.

One thing I never had really written about, I was a backup singer for Holly Woodlawn. I can send you a picture.

Please do. But how did that come about?

Oh, I knew a lot of gay men, and I would pose for them. And I think I might have written something for that magazine Interview when it was edited by a woman named Rosemary [Kent]. Oh, she was a very fun person who used to write for Women’s Wear Daily. She wrote about rich women—rich, thin women. So then I was introduced to Holly and she was forming a band, and I was one of the backup singers. And we had a performance at Reno Sweeney’s, and it got terrible reviews.

I was also writing, trying to write. I said to myself, “I don’t really want to be a singer. I want to write. I can’t waste my time doing this.” The band broke up. Then it started again, and my replacement was Deborah Harry. You can read about it in Holly’s memoir.

Do you remember what you wore as a backup singer?

A person I knew had given me her old clothes, two things, a prom dress. This woman was from Indiana, and her prom dress was a navy blue. I still have the dress. It’s sort of in patterns. But when I send you the picture, you see, it was made in France, and it was a navy-blue prom dress that you would wear with thin straps, and it was made of blue with a pink underskirt. So it was fairly elegant. I wore that for the performance, and my hair was bleached then. And, oh, I had no eyebrows. I shave off my eyebrows and color them in.

What was the inspiration for shaving off your eyebrows?

I don’t remember. I think I just wanted to be different. I wanted to write in a certain way. I wanted to say things like the Diana Ross piece. I thought it was all part of the same effort to say something that I really thought. This is how I really thought. And in fact, part of the reason I don’t really read it is because I can’t believe I let people know what I was really thinking. I still have a problem today writing. The idea of telling people, “This is what I really think about my garden, about colonialism.”

I just like thinking to myself.

I had this exact conversation with my therapist the other day. I hope this is not oversharing, but she asked me why I never journal. I said, “I don’t necessarily want to share my thoughts in that sort of way. I enjoy thinking a lot. I enjoy thinking about things, but the mapping of it feels a little pointless sometimes.” And she said, “Well, you’re a writer.” And I said, “I know, but I can’t explain it.”

I understand completely. And you have to get over that, pretend it’s something else, and then never read it again. And you still have your thoughts to yourself, even though you hope at the same time everybody reads it, because how are you going to support yourself?

It sounds like you’re a very original person.

Who, me?

Yeah.

Oh, I don’t know about that, but I think about it a lot. I think about all these sorts of things about constructing the self. And I come back to your story about Barbara Walters because I think she came from a generation of women who believed there could only be one woman. And so she had a lot of animosity toward all these completely remarkable women around her.

Yes, you could see it.

But I wanted to distinguish between that idea of “there can only be one of me in this particular profession” and what you’re describing, which is finding a way to establish oneself as an individual as much as possible.

Well, I think because I wasn’t originally American, Black American, I didn’t understand all the things that you are brought up to take in. So I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to exist in a confrontational way, that I wasn’t allowed to assert myself.

When I was at The New Yorker, the young white women who all had jobs as more or less secretaries—they’d all had great educations; they’d gone to Radcliffe and places like that. And then they applied for a job at The New Yorker.

And they’d ask me, some of them, how did I get my job at The New Yorker? And I would explain George Trow introduced me to Mr. Shawn and so on. And they would say, “No, no, how did you get your job?” And I was so tired of it. I said to George, “People are always asking me how I got my job at The New Yorker. And when I tell them, they don’t believe me.” And he said, “Oh, well, just tell them your father owns the magazine.” And I did, and it stopped. It just stopped.

But in fact, what I could see is that if I wanted to be a writer and I was offered a job as a secretary, I wouldn’t have taken it.

[Those women] shouldn’t have taken the jobs that they didn’t want to do. And then they became very bitter. But all of that was a lesson for me, because I came to see something that I think is now widely acknowledged: the way white women undermine themselves and then are very jealous of a Black woman’s success. There were women who were very jealous of me, and I never paid them any attention because I thought they were silly. I thought there were things so many people did that were silly.

They wanted one thing, they exchanged it for another, and then were bitter. I was never going to be bitter.

I talk about this a lot with writer friends. There’s no set path to do this career. To compare yourselves to other people, it’s maddening.

Of course it’s all changed now because there seems to be so little support for a writer. For a young writer, there are no magazines left, no real readers left. Everyone wants to be entertained.

Do you worry about that?

Well, I don’t worry about readers. I worry about writers. The New York Times has a best-romance-novels list. What does that mean? “This is what you should read at the beach this week.” The things we writers used to look down on, because they were written for women who weren’t thinking.

So you don’t subscribe to the guilty-pleasure discourse?

You have a guilty pleasure and it’s your guilty pleasure. When it becomes mainstream, then it’s no longer a guilty pleasure. The point of a guilty pleasure is that it is private.

We shouldn’t indulge in these things, we writers. I have a guilty pleasure and I will tell my friend maybe, but not really.

I remember not too long ago, a writer I really respect was asked by a magazine to “describe your underwear.” And I said to myself, No, no, no. Describe your favorite cooking utensil or something … not your underwear.

You live in Vermont now, and I’m wondering if you miss living around Black people.

This is interesting. Well, I live with Black people in my head so much. I don’t think of them as Black. I just think of them as people.

I think about where I come from and the people there all the time. It was pointed out to me. But I never described the people I’d be writing about as Black. [That’s] the whole thing about race that I think Baldwin understood more than he’s given credit for. It’s not really about race. It’s about who has a gun and who has the bigger gun. And then once you have the biggest gun, you get to define everything.

But I don’t find Vermonters white. They might find me Black, but they’re either horrible people or they’re not.

The great thing about Vermont is that many people don’t go to church. It has the least number of churchgoers of all 50 states. It also has the lowest number of murders and crime in general. And I think people ought to pay attention to that. People who go to church are going to church for a reason, because they’ve done bad things. Vermonters seem to do the least number of bad things. So are they white?

I never gave my son the talk [about being around white people]. And then that young man who went out with his white friend and he was murdered … I never told Harold not to go be the lone Black person. I mean, evil comes up with all sorts of ways for you to look at it. And surely one of the most evil things is to have to tell your child, “Don’t trust.” It might be necessary to do it, but surely to make a child have to think that he can’t relax and have a good time with his friends is one of the most evil things. And we just have to start saying that people who consider themselves white or who participate in this thing called whiteness are really evil. Just look at Clarence Thomas. He’s just such an evil man. And yet his skin is not. He looks like me. I don’t know what you look like.

Clarence Thomas looks closer to me. He looks like my dad actually. They look very similar.

Oh my God. Oh, that’s so funny. I love that.

The Black thing … I never took in that a young Black woman didn’t do this, didn’t wear shorts to work, tap-dancing shoes and ballet shoes to work, that I wasn’t supposed to. It never occurred to me. Or sometimes I would wear jodhpurs. There is a book by a man named Ben Yagoda [About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made]. I’m just telling you all this so that I don’t seem so vain, but it’s a book about The New Yorker. And in it, he discusses the way I dress and he said I “invented the Annie Hall look.”

Where did you shop in the city when you were buying jodhpurs and all these sorts of things?

Early Halloween was a shop on Ninth Avenue and 21st Street. Harriet Love was another store, but she had expensive things. I would only shop at her shop when I had a little extra money. Then there was a shop, I think, on Third Avenue run by a woman named Enid. I have a bunch of dresses from the 1930s that a housewife in Kansas would wear, and I would transform them.

Do you still like to look in thrift shops?

No, I don’t do that. I have all the clothes that I used to wear. They won’t even fit around my little finger now. I was so thin. But no, I actually stopped buying clothes because I’m 77. What do I need new clothes for? The last clothes I bought were from Toast, but I’ve stopped buying clothes the last few years. I don’t need any new clothes. I wear my son’s old clothes a lot.

I have to tell you, my son and my daughter and I are very close. Sometimes our interests meet because my son [keeps me informed of pop culture and hip-hop]. The Jay-Z album that he made with Kanye, I remember Harold and I driving around in the Mojave Desert listening to it. Or when The Black Album came out, I remember us driving around in New Jersey listening to it.

But that’s my newest look right now … wearing my son’s old shorts over leggings.