Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

A flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.

“You are idiot, this we know,” said Bahram, and then turned to me, behind the counter: “But you are smart, and this makes you more idiot.” When I said nothing he came right up to me and slammed his fists on the counter: “This man Shelton—he won’t win. He can’t.”

“Tennis not black game. You must understand: every people have their game.” “What’s your game?” I asked, genuinely curious, and Bahram pulled himself up very tall and proud in his seat: “Polo.” The kitchen exploded in laughter. “Fuck all of you sons of bitches!” Hysteria.

The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead.

“What? I’m working.” “Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.” “I’m working.” “Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.” I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled. “Half-winner,” he said. I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.

“You are jealous?” “I wish I could fool myself the way she can. I’m jealous of anyone that oblivious. A little ignorance never stopped her. Nothing stops her.” Fern emptied his glass and placed it awkwardly on the ground. “I should not have spoken. I believe I have misinterpreted the situation.”

Two minutes later the only question remaining was whether it was fact or fiction. It had to be fiction: to believe otherwise was to make everything in my present life impossible as well as destroying much of the life I had led up to this point.

He tapped a cigarette out of a packet, lit it and looked the theater up and down. “Well . . . you wanna go see it?” “But you don’t like musicals, do you? Nobody serious does.” He shrugged. “I’m in London, it’s a show. That’s what you’re meant to do in London, isn’t it? Go see a show?”

But if some part of all this pleased me, another part, equally large, was incensed at the idea that this bio of Tracee Le Roy could be fairly compared—by any of the people in the theater presently reading it, or by any of the actors in the cast—with any of these other stories. What did Tracee Le Roy have to do with these people? With this girl right next to her in the program, the girl with the endless biography, Emily Wolff-Pratt, who had studied at RADA, and who couldn’t know, as I did, the huge statistical unlikelihood of my friend standing on this stage, or any stage at all—in any role, in any context—and who perhaps had the temerity to think that she, Emily

Wolff-Pratt, was a true friend of Tracey’s, just because she saw her every night, just because they danced together, when in fact she hadn’t the slightest idea of who Tracey was or where she had come from, or how much it had cost her to get here. I turned my attention to Tracey’s headshot. Well, I had to

In the dim light, in the middle of this ridiculous melodrama, I checked the bio of the actress playing Julie. She had a Greek last name and was no darker than Kramer.

“Actors like you?”

“What?” “You said: actors like me.” “No, I didn’t.” “Yeah, you did.” “My point is: that role should be Tracey’s.” “You just said she can’t sing. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty much a singing role.” “She sings fine!” “Jesus, why are you shouting at me?” We sat through the second half as silent as we had been in the first but this time the silence had a new texture, chilled with the iciness of mutual contempt.

I thought unavoidably of my mother, and of her line in Dahomey stories: the proud history of the kings; the shape and feel of the cowrie shells, used as money, the Amazon battalion, made up solely of women, taking prisoners of war

as slaves for the kingdom, or else simply severing their enemies’ heads and holding them up in their hands. The way other children hear tell of Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks, I heard of this “Black Sparta,” the noble kingdom of Dahomey, fighting to hold off the French to the very end. But it was almost impossible to reconcile these memories with the farce presently happening, both on stage and off, for most of the people I sat among did not know what came next in the show and consequently, I realized, they felt they were watching some kind of shameful minstrel show and were willing the scene to end.

The steps were familiar to me—they would have been to any dancer—and I wished I was up there with her. I was stuck in London, in the year 2005, but Tracey was in Chicago in 1893, and Dahomey a hundred years before that, and anywhere and any time that people have moved their feet like that. I was so jealous I cried.

he’d climbed the steps of the ferry with this single bag on his back, Fern’s simplicity, his frugality, had seemed to have something noble in it, I’d aspired to it, but here in Greenwich Village the idea of a forty-five-year-old man with a single rucksack to his name struck me as merely sad and eccentric.

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

It was very difficult for me, at the time, to understand a person who spoke like that. It was alien to me, as an idea—I hadn’t been raised that way. What response could such a man—the type who gives up all power—possibly expect from a woman like me?

which Aimee, Jay and Kara were being dressed up to resemble Asante nobles—I’d hesitantly brought up the matter of appropriation. Judy groaned, Aimee looked at me and then down at her own ghost-pale pixie frame wrapped in so much vibrantly colored cloth, and told me that she was an artist, and artists have to be allowed to love things, to touch them and to use them, because art is not appropriation, that was not the aim of art—the aim of art was love. And when I asked her whether it was possible both to love something and leave it alone, she regarded me strangely, pulled her children into her body and asked: Have you ever been in love?

Tracey had taken this image, expanded it many times, cropped it, so only the triangle and the eye were still visible, and underneath this image she asked the question: LOOK FAMILIAR?

wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t mind skipping lunch, who could power through, like Fern often did, replicating the practice of the poorest families in the village by eating only once, in the late afternoon. But I was not that kind of person: I couldn’t miss a meal without getting aggravated. We

For the first time in many weeks Fern managed a half-smile in my direction. “I think what he is saying is that you are like a tree—” “Yes, Fern, I got it, thank you.”

I will not even need to get a new dress,” she said with practiced brightness, and I felt so sad suddenly, for if I knew anything at all about Hawa it was how much she loved weddings and wedding dresses and wedding feasts and wedding parties.

“No, I never mean to do that.” He looked down at the pattern he had made on the floor. “Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning,” he said, speaking slowly. “This is what I mean to say. At least, this has been my experience.”

Hawa took a step toward him: he shrank back into himself. As well as being in love with her, I thought, he is a little afraid of her. I understood that—I was a little afraid of her myself.

“You were lucky, you had this wonderful father. She didn’t have that. You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really you were born lucky—but I know. And she was a part of our family, practically!” She was pleading with me. The tears that had been gathering now fell. “No, Mum . . . no, she wasn’t. You’re misremembering: you never liked her. Who knows what went on in that family or what she needed protecting from, if anything? No one ever told us—she certainly never did. Every family on that corridor had secrets.” I looked at her and thought: do you want to know ours?

“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.” She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks. “That’s true,” she said. “Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”

Stage three: it had begun in her spine. Partially successful

surgery, back in February (where was I, in February?). Now she was in remission, but the last bout of chemo had left her frail. She should have been resting, allowing herself to recover. It was crazy that she was still going to the House, crazy that she was going out to dinner, crazy that I had let her. “How could I know? She didn’t tell me.” I heard Miriam kiss her teeth at me. “Anyone with any sense just needs to look at the woman to know something is wrong!”

couldn’t stand this vision of myself as a person my own mother would rather die than disturb. To avoid it, I cast around for dramatic gestures, and without even knowing whether or not it was possible offered up the services of Aimee’s many private doctors in Harley Street. Miriam chucked sadly.

You never liked me, you never wanted me around, you always tried to humiliate me, I was never good enough for you, you were scared of being associated with me, you always held yourself apart, you pretended you were for the community but you were only ever for yourself, you told everybody I stole that money but you had no proof and you never defended me.

That’s how it was: a surreal mix of personal vendetta, painful memory, astute political protest and a local resident’s complaints. I noticed that the letters got longer as the weeks passed, starting at a paragraph or two and expanding to thousands and thousands of words. In the most recent some of the fantasies and conspiratorial thinking I remembered from ten years earlier re-emerged, in spirit if not in letter. Lizards made no appearance: now a secret eighteenth-century

“Aimee is a very nice lady, she is helping me and I am thankful, but—” He stopped at the line, like a man fluffing a long jump, but then suddenly jumped anyway: “She is an old woman! I am a young man. And a young man wants to have children!”

“So they are saying: ‘Even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are a black!’ I say it’s true: you and Aimee, both of you—you really dance like you are blacks. It is a big compliment, I would say. I never would have guessed this about you! My, my, you even dance as well as Granger!” Aimee, overhearing, burst out laughing.

Whatever happened afterward, it wasn’t out of any lack of love for the baby. The baby was surrounded by love. It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.

She was worried about under-representation, she often was, which meant really that she was worried about what others might perceive as an under-representation, and whenever we had these conversations I had the eerie sensation of viewing myself as really being one of these things, not a person at all but a sort of object—without which a certain mathematical series of other objects is not complete—or not even an object but a kind of conceptual veil, a moral fig-leaf, protecting such-and-such a person from such-and-such a critique, and rarely thought of except when in this role. It didn’t offend me, especially: I was interested in the experience, it was like being fictional. I thought of Jeni LeGon.

I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally, here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.

all of which were as stuffed with personal invective as they would have been had Aimee written them herself. I was a whore and a traitor, a fucking this and a fucking that. Even Aimee’s personal outrage could be outsourced to a secondary party.

It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers—women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance. Fern must have sent a hundred e-mails about Lamin these past few weeks. How could he resist sending the one that would blow up my life?

All the stuff I had in New York was in boxes on the sidewalk outside the West 10th Street apartment and the locks had already been changed. My visa status was linked to my employer: I had thirty days to leave the country.

her honesty, warmth and simplicity, which nobody else in the room ever seemed able to manage, not even family. Death did not scare her. She looked directly at it, engaged with the dying person in their present situation, no matter how extreme, without nostalgia or false optimism, accepted your fear when you were afraid, and your pain if you were feeling it. How many people can do these supposedly straightforward things?

dying people, I found out, are impatient for the truth.

The power she has over me is the same as it has always been, judgment, and it goes beyond words. There is no case I can make that will change the fact that I was her only witness, the only person who knows all that she has in her, all that’s been ignored and wasted, and yet I still left her back there, in the ranks of the unwitnessed, where you have to scream to get heard.

Fern looked puzzled again: “Maybe I put it wrong, I’m not a philosopher. To me it means something simple, like to say the future is already there, waiting for you. Why not wait, see what it brings?” His face was so hopeful it made me laugh. We got some of our old friendly rhythm back, and sat talking for a long time, and I thought it was not impossible that there might be a future in which I could care for him. I was settling into the idea that I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry any longer, I would not be on the next plane. Time was on my side, as much as it is on anyone’s. Everything that afternoon

felt wide open to me, a kind of shock, I didn’t know what was happening in the next few days or even the next few hours—a new feeling. I was surprised when I looked up from my second coffee and saw the day fading and the night almost upon us. Afterward, he wanted to get on the tube, at Waterloo, it was the best stop for me, too, but instead I left him and chose the bridge. Ignoring both barriers, walking straight down the center, over the river, until I reached the other side.

“It’s clear as day,” she murmured, closing her eyes as I got up to leave. “They should be with you. The best possible place for those children is with you.”