“Girl” was first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected and is currently most readily available in At the Bottom of the River (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The first time I read this story, I read it as my students do. I was a student myself, unmarried, without children, and I laughed and disparaged the speaker—the mother—as my students still do. What a bossy know-it-all, my students say and I said when I first read it. Telling her daughter what to do, not allowing the daughter to make up her own mind and so horribly old fashioned. My students snicker.

Some of them nod knowingly. The young women especially hear their mothers’ voices. They recognize the cadence and the chiding, Mother fully expecting her daughter to screw up and already disappointed, unhappy in advance. Although the particulars of the mother's instructions are unique to Antigua and Barbuda, the tone is universal. It's a story about trust, and the mother definitely does not trust her daughter to know what is the right thing to do.

As a young student, I too heard my mother's voice. “Do you hear me?” That was my mother's refrain. When she was angry. When she was telling me I'd made another mistake. Do you hear me? Meaning was I listening? Was she being understood? Pay attention, she was saying, this is important. And in the single line that is the daughter's interjecting voice in “Girl,” “I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday School,” we hear the typical teenager replying none of this is important, Mom, you obviously know nothing about me or my life or how I behave.

In 690 words Jamaica Kincaid tells the trajectory of an entire relationship, complete with expectations of the future, but obliquely. She avoids the traditional storytelling, “Once there was a girl and she lived in Antigua and her mother was always telling her what to do” and does it in voice, in rhythm, in the precise choice of each word. Without being told directly, we know the girl thinks she will never measure up and also that ultimately she will leave her mother behind.