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They were touched by the same inheritance. And if Louie’s dancing happened not to be famous like Michael’s, well, this was, to Tracey, only a kind of technicality—an accident of time and place—and now, thinking back on his dancing, writing it all down, I think she was exactly right. Afterward we decided
“All that matters in this world,” she explained, “is what’s written down. But what happens with this”—she gestured at my body—“that will never matter, not in this culture, not for these people, so all you’re doing is playing their game by
their rules, and if you play that game, I promise you, you’ll end up a shade of yourself. Catch a load of babies, never leave these streets, and be another one of these sisters who might as well not exist.”
busy woman—but never once did she come out to talk to me. By some obscure pre-teen logic, I decided my body was to blame. I was still a lanky, flat-chested child,
lurking in the doorway, while Tracey, dancing in the light, was already a little woman. How could she have any interest in the things that still interested me?
over. Tracey’s nose shot in the air, sniffing out praise. “Well, that was smashing,” he said. “Was it good, really?” “Smashing. You dance like a dream.” He smiled and patted her on the shoulder, and a flush of happiness passed over her face. It was the kind of praise I got from my own father daily, no matter what I did, but for Tracey it must have been very rare, for hearing it seemed to
change everything, including how she felt about me, in that moment. As Mr. Booth made his way slowly out of the church, she smiled, slung her dance bag over her shoulder and said: “Let’s go.”
The song reached its chorus, he told them that swing was here to stay, that there was no avoiding it, and so they must choose their partner—and dance. Then Cantor blew his whistle and the wonderful thing happened. It was a girl—a girl arrived. I made Tracey sit as close to the screen as she could, I didn’t want there to be any doubt about it. I looked across: I saw her lips part in surprise, as mine had done the first time I watched it, and then I knew that she could see what I saw. Oh, the nose was different—this girl’s nose was normal and flat—and there was, in her eyes, no hint of Tracey’s
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compact body and yet the long limbs, these were all Tracey. The physical resemblance was so strong and yet she didn’t dance like Tracey. Her arms wheelbarrowed as she moved, her legs flew back and forth, she was a hoofer, not an obsessed technician. And she was funny: walking on her toes or freeze-framing for a second in an absurd comic attitude, on one leg, arms in the air, like the hood ornament of an expensive car. Dressed like the rest—grass skirt, feathers—but nothing could diminish her.
Michael used wires and, a few years later—when he wanted to achieve the effect live on stage—he wore a pair of “anti-gravity” shoes, they had a slot in the heel that engaged with a peg in the stage, and he was their co-inventor, the patent is in his name. The Africans of Ali Baba nailed their own shoes to the
Under the influence of this state of unreality, I kept seeing versions of my mother’s face everywhere, in young girls running down the street, in old women selling fish in the markets, and once in a young man hanging off the side of a minibus. When we got to the ferry it was empty but for us and our cars. I wondered what Lamin made of it all.
This element of roadside rolling chaos that so affected and disturbed me, like a zoetrope unfurled and filled with every form of human drama—women feeding children, carrying them, talking to
kissing them, hitting them, men talking, fighting, eating, working, praying, animals living and dying, wandering down the street bleeding from their necks, boys running, walking, dancing, pissing, shitting, girls whispering, laughing, frowning, sitting, sleeping—all of this delighted Aimee, she leaned so far out of that window I thought she might fall right through her beloved matrix and into it. But then she was always happiest in ungovernable crowds. Until her insurance company stopped her doing it she often crowd-surfed, and it never frightened her, as it did me, to be suddenly swarmed by
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We all three knew that in divorces the father left, but my father could not leave, there was no question of that. Who, in his absence, would tape up my knee when I fell, or remember when my medicine was to be taken, or calmly comb the nits out of my hair? Who would come to me when I had my night terrors? Who would wash my stinking, yellow sheets the next morning? I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind.
The fundamental skill of all
mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. 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 t...
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“Your dad and me—we’re going to live as brother and sister.” I can remember thinking this was the most perverse thing I’d ever heard: I was to be left an only child, while my parents became siblings to each other. My father’s initial reaction must have been similar, because for several days after that it was warfare in the flat, all-out warfare, and I had to sleep with two pillows pressed to my ears. But when he at last understood that she was not joking, that she would not
change her mind, he fell into a depression. He began to spend whole weekends on the sofa, watching television, while my mother kept to the kitchen and to her high stool, busy with the homework for her degree. I went to dance class alone. I ate my tea with one or the other of them, no longer with both.
No, I really didn’t care what either of my parents thought of me any longer. Only my friend’s judgment counted, now more than ever, and sensing this, I suspect, more and more she chose to withhold it.
But it’s a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream.
heard her tell the Rolling Stone reporter how important it was to stay “in the real world, among the people,” and the next morning, alongside the formal photographed events—soil-breaking, schoolgirls dancing—many images were taken of Aimee in this real world, eating from the communal bowls, crouching down with ease alongside the women—using the muscles she had developed indoor-cycling—or showing off her agility, climbing the cashew trees with a group of young boys.
was not, for example, standing at this moment in a field with my extended tribe, with my fellow black women. Here there was no such category. There were only the Sere women, the Wolof, and the Mandinka, the Serahuli, the Fula and the Jola, the last of whom, I was told once, grudgingly, I resembled, if only in basic facial architecture: same long nose, same cheekbones.
Here where Christmas was celebrated with a startling fervor, and all the people of the book were considered “brothers, sisters,” while I, representing the utterly godless, was nobody’s enemy, no, just someone who should properly be pitied and protected—so one of the girls I shared a room with explained to me—as you would a calf whose mother died in the having of her.
“Yes, we’re always struck by how much the women and girls do here,” said the woman from DfID, sotto voce, following my line of sight. “They do the housework, you see, but then also all the field work, and as you’ll see it’s largely
women running both the school and the market. Girl Power indeed.”
“Many of them should be in school, of course, but unfortunately their mothers need them here. Then you think of those young boys we just saw, lounging about in a hammock among the cashews
Why does the headmaster have two wives, why do some girls wear scarves and some
not, why are all the books torn and dirty, why are they being taught in English if they don’t speak English at home, why do the teachers spell the words wrong on the board,
if the new school is for girls what will happ...
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Still I was told there was “no time for dancing” or, in a variation, that “this was not the time for dancing,” as if the historical moment itself forbade it. I had “responsibilities,” they were tied to my “intelligence,” which had been recently confirmed by a young supply teacher up at the school who had thought to ask our class to bring in “whatever we were reading at home.”
The teacher looked my mother over—her bra-less vest and jeans, the kente-cloth head-wrap, a pair of huge earrings shaped like Africa—and asked if the father would be joining us. The father’s at work, said my mother. Oh, said the teacher, turning to me, and what does your father do, dear, is he the reader of the house, or . . .? The father’s a postman, said my mother. The mother’s the reader. Now,
And wasn’t I so much freer than any of them—born in England, in modern times—not to mention so much lighter, so much straighter of nose, so much less likely to be mistaken for the very essence of Blackness itself? What could possibly stop me traveling on? Yet when I sat down in my own school hall, on a stifling July day, outside of normal school hours—an unnatural time to be at school—and opened those test papers, to read through the opportunity my mother wished I would “grab with both hands,” a great, sullen fury came over me, I didn’t feel like traveling on their train, wrote a few words
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Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the difficult middle passage—in those years I really didn’t see much of her. Her new life swallowed her up.
Even when I heard, a little later on, from my mother and others in the neighborhood, that she was having difficulties, more and more frequently in trouble, I couldn’t imagine why that would be, her life was perfect as far as I was concerned, and this is one side-effect of envy, maybe, this failure of imagination. In my mind, her struggles were over. She was a dancer: she’d
“All you did was humiliate a teacher. In front of her class.” His voice was quiet but his face very red. He took off his glasses and glared at me, and looked so gravely handsome it lent a certain weight to his position, as if those who are right are always more beautiful. “But—it’s—I mean, I’m not saying it’s a question of ability, it’s a ‘structural issue’—you always say that yourself—and I’m just saying maybe we could have an English lesson, OK, of course, but let’s teach them in their own languages in their own country, and then they can—they could, I mean, you know, take English tests
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I’d get into her car and bitch spectacularly about this arrangement while always, secretly, feeling grateful it existed.
I looked down at all those disaffected suburban white kids dressed in black, hurling themselves at each other, and imagined in their place G. H. Elliott, “The Chocolate-Colored Coon,”
dressed head to toe in white, singing of the silvery moon.
From where I sat I could see up the side street to the Jazz Café and was struck by what a different crowd was gathered at its doors, not on their way out but on the way in, and not at all drunk, as these were people who loved dancing, who did not need to be drunk to convince their bodies to move.
no one sat on the ground, on the contrary all effort had been made to separate the clientele from the ground: the men’s trainers had two inches of air built into them, and the women’s shoes had double that in heel.
saw my drab black uniform and absurd dusted face—of course, I’d seen it all before, but not under that stark hospital lighting, and now it was no longer the face of a girl, now a woman stared back. The effect was very different from anything I had seen before by the light of the dim purple bulb in my black-walled room. I was over the threshold: I gave up the gothic life.
OK, Michael, she said, then let’s go to the thing that is most discussed about you, I think, is the fact that the color of your skin is obviously different than when you were younger, and so I think it has caused a great deal of speculation and controversy as to what you have done or are doing
He looked down, began his defense. My mother didn’t believe a word of it, and for the next few minutes I couldn’t hear a thing either of them said, there was only my mother, arguing with the television. So I’m a slave to the rhythm, he
said, and smiled, though he looked bewildered, desperate to change the subject, and Oprah let him change it and the conversation moved on. My mother walked out of the room. Afte...
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Sometimes my mother spoke: on those nights the room was packed. Her subject was pride, in all its forms. We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over
Sometimes I had the idea that complaining to my father about my mother might be a form of entertainment for us both, something we could share, but this never went well,
because I severely underestimated how much he continued to love and admire her. When I told him about the meeting space, and of being forced to speak there, he said: “Ah, well, that sounds like a very interesting project. Something for the whole community.” He looked wistful. How happy it would have made him, even now, to be schlepping chairs across the road, adjusting the microphone, shushing the audience in preparation for my mother to come on stage!
The incident even turned out to be useful, in a way, for her campaign: it was the visual, literal confirmation of the “urban nihilism” of which she had often spoken and partly built her campaign around. Not long after, she became our local councilor. And here the second act of her life, the political act—which I’m sure she considered the true act of her life—began.
Running underneath all this noisy planning there was something else, a low rumble of suspicion and resentment, which I couldn’t hear at first but which Fernando recognized at once. For no one knew exactly how much money Aimee’s people
Fern—as I also called him now—was disgusted by the general ineptitude: he’d never worked with such idiots as these idiots in New York, they made only problems and had no conception of procedure or local realities. He too became a proverb-producing machine: “In a flood the water goes everywhere,
