Summary
The next few pages refer to the novella's title, talking about the experiences of people living in "a small place." Every event that happens in a small place is a major event; the people in a small place do not think about the future, nor about the implications of these events, but instead experience the weight of the present event as if it were sitting on top of them. The people in a small place cannot give a complete account of themselves or the events they experience, because they have no interest in pinning these things down. There is no division of past, present, and future in a small place. An event that happened a hundred years ago could be as vivid as if it were happening in the present, and no present action is undertaken while thinking about how it will affect the future.
The section then shifts to a discussion of slavery in Antigua. Antiguans use the word "emancipation" so frequently that it is as if the emancipation of slaves happened yesterday, not 150 years ago. People who live in Antigua today have trouble seeing the parallels between slavery and the existing situation, such as their corrupt government giving their country away to foreigners or their celebration of Antigua's Hotel Training School, which trains Antiguans to be good servants.
Antigua is a small place, Kincaid reminds readers, and based on their unawareness of their own circumstances and the reasons for doing the things they do, she cannot decide whether to compare Antiguans to children, to artists who have not yet achieved fame in a world that cannot understand them, or to lunatics who have built their own lunatic asylum. She then spends the next few pages listing, in rapid succession, various ways in which Antigua is corrupt, all centering on how the government and the island nation's modern systems do not exist to serve the interests of local Antiguans. The government instead allows Antigua's institutions to be manipulated by foreigners, while they pocket the money and grow rich at the expense of local citizens. Antiguans talk about these occasions of corruption without any real sense of urgency.
In the next part of this section, Kincaid talks about different "events" that have happened in Antigua. One of these the 1939 founding of the Antigua Trades and Labor Union, which allegedly sought to bring about a higher quality of life for working people in Antigua. For twenty-five years the president of this union, V.C. Bird, led the Antiguan government and put his sons in positions of high power in its ranks. He was interrupted for only one five-year term by a man about whom Antiguans were optimistic, but who ultimately turned out to be dishonest and corrupt. This man was jailed after losing the next election.
Antiguans feared that V.C. Bird had begun to think of Antigua as his own business, and worried that a family that was in power for so long would not give it up so easily. This group's power has been spurred on by other "events," and has, in turn, led to many other "events," and so the state of modern-day Antigua is a series of "events" that are all interconnected and have all played off of each other in order to create Antigua's troubled present.
The final part of the book takes a different turn and discusses Antigua's beauty. Antigua is so beautiful that its beauty often seems unreal. She says this immense beauty is like a prison, locking people inside it and keeping everyone else out. She questions what being surrounded by this intense setting every day must do to a person, particularly when their poverty is part of the scenery. Antiguans do not have one big event, like an industrial revolution, to mark off the way they were "then" from the way they are "now." Antigua's beauty is just as unreal now as it was when they were slaves, and as unreal as it will continue to be in the future.
Kincaid ends the text with a brief recounting of Antigua's troubled history: it was discovered by Christopher Columbus and settled by what she calls "human rubbish" from Europe, the colonizers, who brought with them oppressed slaves from the African continent. Eventually, the masters left (but, in some ways, they did not truly leave) and the slaves were freed (but similarly, in some ways, they were not truly freed). But once the chains of slavery have been cast off and the master's yoke has been thrown away, both of these kinds of people are just human beings, and they are what is left.
Analysis
Here, Kincaid highlights the issue of modern-day slavery. As she says, in the 1800s slaves were freed "in a way," but the institution of slavery still remained in a lot of subtler—but no less destructive—ways. As was true in times of slavery when Britain occupied the island, Antigua's government is still heavily manipulated by foreigners. Local Antiguans' relationship with foreign visitors is still reminiscent of slavery because they work almost exclusively in servant roles and are banned from many hotels, beaches, and other public places. Slavery may have formally ended, but Antiguans still feel its effects; this is partly why they still speak about emancipation as if it were a recent development.
Kincaid also spends time discussing her fears for democracy in Antigua. Antiguans have democratically elected all of their corrupt leaders, suggesting that they do not yet have the agency to break free of this cycle of dishonesty. They have also kept one man and his family in power for nearly thirty years, which undermines the value of democracy and changing leadership. This is a problem that many developing nations face as they attempt to implement democratic systems. The Antiguan mindset in approaching elections will have to change if democracy is to thrive in this small place, but she fears that corruption is too ingrained in society for Antiguans to ever think anything different is possible.
In this final section of the text, the pace speeds up. Kincaid speaks in fast-paced, rapid accounts that are first about corruption in modern Antigua, and then about the various unchanging elements of beauty in the island's landscape. In each of these cases, she uses little punctuation, which forces readers eyes to move through detail after detail in rapid succession. This is a purposeful assault on readers' mental processing, a small way of punishing them for never thinking about Antigua before by inundating them with so much shocking information all at once. It also highlights constancy in Antigua: corruption is constant, the natural landscape is constant—both of these things are so constant on this small island that Kincaid can go on and on without any pauses because it all keeps repeating, and nothing has ever truly changed.
Kincaid speaks repeatedly about "events," moments in the history of Antigua that are so potent they affect everyone and become the standard by which people keep track of time. In a small place like Antigua, standard metrics of time are not important; more important are the events that dictate Antiguans' life experiences, each spiraling into another so that Antigua's past is merely a chain of memorable events. By organizing the story of her home into different "events," Kincaid determines the way readers will remember Antigua, particularly since most of them knew nothing about the island before reading this work.
At the very end of the piece, Kincaid removes all the markers of slaves and masters from the people who make up modern Antigua and lays them bare, side-by-side, to draw a comparison. Without the titles that so strictly divided them before, these people are just human beings; without slavery, local Antiguans are no longer victims, but rather simple humans. We must view their desires, fears, trials, and mistakes as we would any human, and empathize with their struggle to pick up the pieces of their society broken by racism and colonization. Much of the purpose of this text is to humanize local Antiguans in the eyes of far-removed readers, and Kincaid chooses this point as a way of summing up her piece.
