Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

My favorite part of each day became the early evenings, when I would walk over to Fern’s and have a simple dinner with him in the pink house, cooked for us by the same ladies who fed the school. A single tin bowl, full of rice, sometimes with just a green tomato or garden egg buried in it somewhere, other times with an abundance of fresh vegetables and a very skinny but delicious fish laid on top which Fern graciously let me tear at first. “We are kin now,” he told me, the first time we ate like this, two hands in the same bowl. “They seem to have decided we’re family.” Since our last visit the generator had broken down, but as we were the only ones to use it Fern considered this a “low priority”—for the same reason I considered it a high priority—and refused to lose a day traveling to the city in search of a replacement.