Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

It was the kind of note you might get from a spiteful seven-year-old girl with a firm idea of justice. And of course that—if you can ignore the passage of time—is exactly what it was.

If all the Saturdays of 1982 can be thought of as one day, I met Tracey at ten a.m. on that Saturday, walking through the sandy gravel of a churchyard, each holding our mother’s hand.

We almost never looked at each other. Sometimes I thought of us as two sleeper agents, mistakenly assigned to the same mark and wary of eye contact, in case the one blew the other’s cover.

my rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.

When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”

With me he would wait till I finished each sentence, and leave long gaps of silence before he replied, silences I came to think of as conversational graveyards, where anything awkward or unpleasant I might have presented to him was sent to be buried.

I had the thought that if the President himself had come the effect would not have been so very different. A show of power is a show of power.

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. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they’d placed the monument.