Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

my feet, in sympathy with the music, tapped at the seat in front of me. I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere.

I’d lost my job, a certain version of my life, my privacy, yet all these things felt small and petty next to this joyful sense I had watching the dance, and following its precise rhythms in my own body.

I saw all my years at once, but they were not piled up on each other, experience after experience, building into something of substance – the opposite.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

And of course that – if you can ignore the passage of time – is exactly what it was.

things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother,

Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet.

And so when she began, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, to outgrow my father, both intellectually and personally, she naturally expected that he was undergoing the same process at the same time. But he carried on as before. Looking after me, loving her, trying to keep up,

I thought it odd that my father should travel eight miles to Lambert’s for comfort when Lambert seemed already to have suffered the kind of abandonment my father feared so badly.

we’d come back too early, she wanted more time, more peace, more quiet, so she could study. We were the vandals in the temple. She was studying Sociology & Politics. We didn’t know why.

I was – I am – in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time to do everything.

But the main consequence of her transformation, for me, was this new and puzzling indirection in her conversation. She always seemed to be making adult jokes just over my head, to amuse herself, or to annoy my father.

Once I tried to write ‘brown eyes’ and Tracey took the pen out of my hand and scratched it out.

I was so completely taken with Tracey’s stories, besotted with their endless delay of narrative gratification,

For just as you thought the happy ending had arrived, Tracey found some wonderful new way to destroy or divert it,

My father’s concern would be some tiny domestic issue: who’d vacuumed what when, who’d gone, or should have gone, to the launderette. Whereas my mother, in answering him, would stray into quite other topics: the importance of having a revolutionary consciousness, or the relative insignificance of sexual love when placed beside the struggles of the people, or the legacy of slavery in the hearts and minds of the young,

In Tracey’s home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they had never really had any hope in him,

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.

I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?

It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself – and isn’t that one useful definition of a happy girlhood?

as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths – they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way – and of course millions of people felt as I did.

patois

Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near?

She smiled at me again: there was a kind of flirtation in the way she spoke to me, as there was in the way she spoke to everybody.

elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

fripperies,

this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.

I looked down at the frenzy below. I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life.

never attached to any boy in particular and yet, in the school’s imagination, freely handled by all.

one day, God willing, this white day will be done.

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time left for anything else, there’s no time to go to the park or get ice cream, no time to put a child to bed, no time to listen to the teary recounting of a nightmare.

Even as I was living them a stubborn part of me never accepted it as anything more than a place I had to survive each day until I was free again.

It was about a quality of attention. He listened and noticed. He was more open.

‘Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.’

At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

‘The struggle to triumph over the division within.’

Hadn’t we been the middle-class ones, in aspiration and practice?

But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.

Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power – local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic – on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine.

Tracey’s affair struck me as a form of revenge upon all that: like watching a house cat capture a lion, tame him, treat him like a dog.

Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.

‘Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning,’

she’s well organized, but she lacks perspective sometimes. She wants to save everybody. And that kind of person does not make the best life partner, for sure, though I will always consider her a very effective administrator.’ It was impressive – and a bit sad. I wondered if some similarly chilly epigraph existed for me: She was not the best daughter, but she was a perfectly adequate dinner date.