“My brother and I didn’t like Barbados. In the summers, we were sent there, with packages of clothes and food as gifts, but we preferred to imagine the island through my mother’s memories of it.” When Als said this, he describes how Barbados wasn’t what he thought it would be. His mother had described how the beaches were perfect, and the way the sun reflected off the water. His mother’s memories about the island made it seem like a paradise that everyone would want to go to. But Als and his brother didn’t like the island so much, which may have been because their mother hyped it up so much that it didn’t deliver. Als found his mother’s description promising but it failed to deliver. Maybe that disappointment is what led him not to follow his ill mother when she left to Barbados for the last time. 

  “All the women in my family wanted me to become a black male for the same reason: they wanted to define themselves against me.” This was another significant quote Als says in the essay that the women wanted to separate themselves from Als. Since he identified as a woman more than a man, the women of the family wanted to identify him as “other”. And in order to do that, Als couldn’t be a part of their group. He was looked down upon for being an auntie man, which is a term Barbadians used to dehumanize men who identified as women. This was significant in the essay because it was similar to Francie in a Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where she found herself trapped by where she was from. Als aspired to be a writer, but found himself trapped by the family that saw him as “different”. This lack of connection with his family led Als to feel estranged, different, and feel that he had to hide himself.