The Visitor

A moving story that grasps the position of a immigrant coming from their home land to the U.S. is "Lucy" by Jamaica Kincaid. It was about a young girl immigrating  from a West Indian country.  Lucy came to the U.S. to have more opportunities than back at home. She stayed with a family, went to school and was a part time nanny for the kids she lived with.  She tells about her hard time getting used to the United States because it was so different from her homeland. She had a problem dealing with the fact that she was deceived of the thought of America and realized it was just a fantasy. In this story you can see how the different cultures make it extremely difficult for Lucy to feel comfortable and actually enjoy her new life. Through this story Kincaid shows that starting a new life is difficult leaving all that you know for all that you don't know. Lucy was eager to have a new home and better chances of having a great life but when she gets there she realizes how making that change wasn't easy and really expresses emotions through out her transition.

When Lucy came to the United States she realized the technology here was much more advanced than back at home. She tells of her first time being in an elevator and being able to have a refrigerator. These were things she liked about this new place, she was also going to discover different things. She speaks about feeling the winter air for the first time “The sun was shining but the air was cold. It was the middle of January, after all. But I did not know that the sun could shine and the air remain cold; no one had ever told me”(pg 5). These seem to be small changes in her environment but to her they were first time experiences that meant she was not home anymore.  In these 2 examples alone we see an immigrants perspective much differently then ours. The fact that things we take for granted such as an elevator or refrigerator are things she was amazed by. This shows where Lucy came from was not where she wanted to stay, even though she would be going through a big change and some difficulties adjusting.

Lucy felt fooled when she first arrived to the city, before she had made this journey she dreamed of it to be amazing and something out the ordinary. Her thoughts on her way from the airport to her new home were “Now that I saw these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down by so many people entering and leaving them in real life, and it occurred to me that I could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fixture of fantasy”(pg 4). Kincaid sets the tone right in there in the beginning of the story, she gives you a visual and emotional window through the eyes of Lucy.

Kincaid makes it easy to see that Lucy feels alone in her new home. She admits to being unhappy and missing people at home, even people she didn't think shed miss or wasn't too fond of, just people she was used to. Even though she was in a house with people who wanted to get close with her it was hard to find common ground. She tells of many differences, such as tastes in music, the way children are brought up, how easy the weather alone could effect Mariah's attitude. These differences made it almost impossible for them to act as a family or for Lucy to feel that way, They felt she acted like a visitor, so they called her one.

The last thing in this reading Lucy brings up is letters between her and her mother speaking about how dangerous it was in the city and how there was a different kind of dangerous in the West Indies, this idea of trading in the known for the unknown is what she was going through. She says “In this great world, why should my life be reduced to these two possibilities?”(pg 21).  I believe this was Lucy's realization that either way she would be struggling. She knows home will always have sentimental value but she had made herself a new home. Kincaid tells a story of struggle in a new place, she breaks down and helps you understand an immigrant's point of view.