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Publisher: McFarland, NC, 2008, $39.95.
ISBN: 978 0 7864 3580 7. McFarland Literary Companions, 6
The subject, born in Antigua, Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, was the oldest child of Annie Victoria Richardson Drew who married the carpenter and cabinet maker, John Drew, after her daughter was born. The child's biological father, a man she never knew, was a cab driver and chauffeur named Roderick Nathaniel Potter. He abandoned Annie two months before her daughter was born. Her mother's marriage to Drew produced three sons. Annie Drew, who was born in Dominica, shipped her daughter back and forth from Antigua to Dominica, sometimes for schooling, sometimes for punishment and sometimes to escape black magic or obeah, a Caribbean form of voodoo.
Despite being passed back and forth in the family, Elaine demonstrated an excellent mind, always the best student in any school she attended. Elaine had an intense love of books and reading. Her love for books led to hoarding them, stealing them, unable to part with any book she had read. She would hide away from her mother, reading books in secret instead of performing chores or helping to look after her younger brothers. When the author was 15, her mother, tired of her daughter's lack of cooperation, made a bonfire of her daughter's books and set them on fire in the yard.
At the age of 16, to help support her family, Elaine moved to the United States to become an au pair , or what she would later define as a "servant". It would be over...