“Girl,” as Kincaid acknowledged in a 2008 interview, is her most anthologized piece of writing. I first read it as a senior at Barnard College, not in this magazine but in an anthology of contemporary women writers. The story was taught both as a piece of “flash fiction” and, because of its refrain-like style, as a prose poem. I was not yet a mother then, and I read “Girl” as a daughter. I was grateful for the two moments in the story where the daughter speaks up to defend herself (“but I don’t sing benna on Sundays”), interruptions that allow her to be defiantly present in the way that daughters are in Kincaid’s later works, including her novels “Annie John,” “Lucy,” and “The Autobiography of My Mother.” In these books and others, the daughter never stops speaking, making one wonder what kinds of instructions, if any, she will pass on to her own children.