Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

I watched the cricket being played, a game I don’t understand, it offered no real distraction, but still it was better than looking at the interior of that apartment, a luxury condo, in which everything had been designed to be perfectly neutral, with all significant corners rounded, like an iPhone.

had been offline for seventy-two hours and can remember feeling that this should be counted among the great examples of personal stoicism and moral endurance of our times.

Our shade of brown was exactly the same—as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both—and our freckles gathered in the same areas, we were of the same height. But my face was ponderous and melancholy, with a long, serious nose, and my eyes turned down, as did my mouth. Tracey’s face was perky and round, she looked like a darker Shirley Temple, except her nose was as problematic as mine, I could see that much at once, a ridiculous nose—it went straight up in the air like a little piglet. Cute, but also obscene: her nostrils were on permanent display. On

My mother was a feminist. She wore her hair in a half-inch Afro, her skull was perfectly shaped, she never wore make-up and dressed us both as plainly as possible. Hair is not essential when you look like Nefertiti. She’d no need of make-up or products or jewelry or expensive clothes, and in this way her financial circumstances, her politics and her aesthetic were all perfectly—conveniently—matched.

Accessories only cramped her style, including, or so I felt at the time, the horse-faced seven-year-old by her side. Looking

was a rare mother whose curiosity extended to calling the number written on the homemade flyers stapled to the local trees. Many girls who might have made fine dancers never made it across that road, for fear of a homemade flyer.

My mother was rare: homemade flyers did not scare her. She had a terrific instinct for middle-class mores.

The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I’d hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat’s tongue, and there were no long pink satin ribbons to criss-cross over the ankles, no, only a sad little elastic strap which my father had sewn on himself.

Singing came naturally to me, but things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth.

My own mother’s focus was always elsewhere. She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. She might arrive at the beginning of class with, say, The Black Jacobins in hand, and by the time I came over to ask her to swap my ballet shoes for tap she would already be a hundred pages through. Later,

Oh, it’s very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on—it’s what I’ve always demanded myself—but as a child, no, the truth is it’s a war of attrition, rationality doesn’t come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over.

When I was young her refusal to submit to me confused and wounded me, especially as I felt none of the usual reasons for refusal applied.

My earliest sense of

her was of a woman plotting an escape, from me, from the very role of motherhood.

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.

I watched my autodidact mother swiftly, easily, outstrip my father. The shelves in our lounge—which he built—filled up with second-hand books, Open University textbooks, political books, history books, books on race, books on gender, “All the ‘isms,’” as my father liked to call them, whenever a neighbor

He had raised my mother and the rest of her brothers and sisters, back on the island, when their mother left for England to work as a cleaner in a retirement

home. He knew what my father was dealing with.

They shared a dry sense of humor and a mutual lack of ambition, of which my mother took a dim view, in both cases.

was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything. Lambert lived all alone there, and it felt to me like a dying place. Even at that age 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.

any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive—as

my mother had—she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing.

My mother—who never visited Lambert, except at Christmas—was strangely insistent that my father and I do so, though always with the proviso that we remain alert, never allowing ourselves to be “dragged back.”

“Cyan do nuttin wid dat woman. I knew it from time she was small. Her will is a will of iron.”

But to me a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved. The rest of it, all the detail, fell away.

Each syllable found its corresponding movement in the legs, the stomach, the backside, the feet. In ballet hour, by contrast, we danced to classical recordings—”white music” as Tracey bluntly called it—which Miss Isabel recorded from the radio on to a series of cassettes.

I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined. In films and photographs I had seen white men sitting at their pianos as black girls stood by them, singing. Oh, I wanted to be like those girls!

became aware that my voice—as long as I did not deliberately sing underneath the volume of the piano—had something charismatic in it, drawing people in. This was not a technical gift: my range was tiny. It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could “put it over.” I made sad songs very sad, and happy songs joyful.

Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul. But no one sane could quarrel with her technique. I was—I am—in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time to do everything.

knew my mother, so charming with strangers, had a short temper with her kin, and that “Stay there!” meant exactly

Tiffany jumped up high to kiss her prince and pointed her toes oh she looked so sexy but that’s when the bullet went right up her thigh.

one was surprised by Tracey’s father’s failure to foment revolution or do anything else. Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.

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.

Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.

but then we heard somebody half yelling and half whispering, and we recognized panic and caution fighting each other. It was a man’s voice, he was saying: “Let me in. Let me in! You there? Open up, woman!”

And I can see that our mothers must have seemed a little careless when, informed by a teacher of some misbehavior in the playground, they would—instead of reprimanding the child—begin shouting at the teacher.

A deep anxiety about “being told off”—for who they were, for what

they had or hadn’t done, and now for the deeds of their children—this fear never really left our mothers, many of whom had become our mothers when they were not much more than children themselves. And so “Parents’ Evening” was, in their minds, not so distant from “detention.” It remained a place where they might be shamed. The difference was now they were grown and could not be forced to attend.

say “our mothers,” but of course mine was different: she had the anger but not the shame. She went...

“These children deserve more!” Not me in particular—“these children.” How I remember her doing that, and how wonderful she looked, like a queen! I was proud to be her child, the daughter of the only mother in the neighborhood free of shame. We swept out of the hall together, my mother triumphant, me in a state of awe, neither of us any the wiser as to how I was doing at school.

Tracey had an ambition to one day re-create that whole routine herself—this seems to me now like looking at the Sistine Chapel and hoping to re-create it on your bedroom ceiling—though she only ever practiced the male part, it never occurred to either of us to learn Ginger’s part in anything.

Instead of seeing my mother bent over her books, earplugs in, oblivious to me, I found her gazing out of the window, her face wet with tears. When she saw me she jumped a little in her skin, as if I were a ghost.

And the shame that she felt, I think, was the shame of no control: she could not dominate this situation nor protect me from it as, for once, it had nothing much to do with her. She hurried instead to the living room and told Tracey to

ran after her, not my father or my mother. She was still crying and she came to the boy and they hugged and, still hugging, walked across the grass and out of the estate. Snow was lightly falling. I watched them go. I didn’t see them again until my father died and they were never spoken of during my childhood. For a long time I thought the whole thing was a hallucination, or perhaps something I’d lifted from a bad film.

I did not let this vision penetrate my fantasy. By then I had come to share my friend’s insusceptibility to reality. And now—as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time—neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist. I could have my evil ballerina if she could have her backing dancer.

She held herself apart, always.

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

though she was serene and anthropological

about these matters in her college essays—or while lecturing me and my father across the dinner table—I knew in her real life she was often exasperated. She didn’t pick me up from school any more—my father did that now—because the scene there aggravated her too much, in partic...

My mother didn’t fit into all of that any longer. She still cared for the group—intellectually, politically—but she was no longer one of them.