Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

I 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.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

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

She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although entrapment in this case was only another word for love.

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.

Maybe I never got out of this habit of elaboration. Twenty years later over a difficult lunch I revisited the story of my ghostly siblings with my mother, who sighed, lit a cigarette and said: “Trust you to add snow.”

“That’s enough, now,” Lily’s mother kept mumbling, but she couldn’t establish any authority, her own sense of embarrassment seemed to stop her. She did not want us to make noise, but at the same time she couldn’t bear to make the necessary noise it would take to stop us making noise,

she was an ardent Thatcherite, the kind who feels that having pulled herself up by her own bootstraps everybody else better follow her example and do the same.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I heard her tell a dachshund, and then, straightening up and facing me again: “If my dad hadn’t died young? No way I’d be here. It’s the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That’s our secret fucking strength.”

I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn’s famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals?

if you followed its logic all the way to the end of the revolving belt, then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness—or potential for goodness—a person possessed.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my

Now we had “boyfriends,” chosen for us by other girls, in notes passed from desk to desk, or in long, tortuous phone calls (“Want to know who fancies you and told everyone he fancies you?”), and once these boyfriends had been formally assigned we stood solemnly with them in the playground in the thin winter sun, hand in hand—more often than not a head taller than them—until the inevitable moment came for us to break up (the timing of this, too, was decided by our friends) and the round of notes and calls would begin again.

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”

I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. 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.

“Look, I don’t want to have an argument with you on the phone,” said my mother, sounding very much like she wanted to have an argument on the phone.

“And the thing you have to understand,” said Chalky (after a certain number of whiskies there were always these things we had to understand),