Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

I looked at my phone, it was sitting on the counter in airplane mode. 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.

he wanted more children—it was their daily argument—but on this issue, as on all things, my mother refused to budge.

My father’s concern would be some tiny domestic issue: who’d vacuumed what when, who’d gone, or should have gone, to the launderette. Whereas my mother, in answering him, would stray into quite other topics: the importance of having a revolutionary consciousness, or the relative insignificance of sexual love when placed beside the struggles of the people, or the legacy of slavery in the hearts and minds of the young, and so on.

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.

I decided to busy myself organizing Barbie’s wardrobe. All her clothes had been stuffed into Ken’s open-top automobile. It was my plan to extract them, flatten them, hang them on their little hangers and place them back in the wardrobe, the kind of game I was never permitted to play at home due to its echoes of domestic oppression. Halfway through this painstaking procedure Tracey’s heart mysteriously softened toward me: she slipped from the bed and joined me cross-legged on the floor. Together we got that tiny white woman’s life in order.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed—if digital hadn’t killed the video stars.

“Well, I’m a single mom. And I can assure you my baby doesn’t stop me doing a damn thing. He’s like my fucking inspiration right now if you really want to know. It’s a balance, for sure, but you’ve just got to want it enough.” I thought of the Jamaican nanny, Estelle, who let me into Aimee’s house each morning and then disappeared to the nursery. That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.

those old showbiz biographies that I read in the absence of sacred texts, as if they were sacred texts, taking a form of comfort from them, though they were hack work done for quick money, barely given a second thought by their authors, surely, but to me, important.

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.

Like most people in his line of work—like Granger—he had been hired for his height and his color, for the threat considered implicit in their combination.

made me think of Tracey, of the many times, as a child, she’d placed her arm next to mine, to check once again that she was still a little paler than me—as she proudly maintained that she was—just in case summer or winter had changed this state of affairs since last she’d checked. I didn’t dare tell her that I lay out on our balcony on any hot day, aiming at exactly the quality she seemed to dread: more color, darkness, for all my freckles to join and merge and leave me with the same deep dark brown of my mother.

“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.

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.”

We listened to the golden age of hip-hop, unaware at the time that we were living through a golden age.

I did try to be happy for her. I knew it was what she’d always wanted. But it’s hard, when you’re at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, and besides I felt bad for my father, and sorrier for myself.

like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.

She wants to save everybody. And that kind of person does not make the best life partner, for sure, though I will always consider her a very effective administrator.” It was impressive—and a bit sad. I wondered if some similarly chilly epigraph existed for me: She was not the best daughter, but she was a perfectly adequate dinner date.

“What about their dad?” “What about their dad what?” “Why can’t he look after them?” I was pointedly using the singular, but Tracey—always alert to euphemism or hypocrisy—was not fooled by it. “Well, as you can see, I tried vanilla, café au lait and chocolate, and you know what I figured out? On the inside, they’re all the fucking same: men.”

“Do you think she’s happy?” He smiled as if I had been caught out somehow. “Ah, yes—for Americans this is always the most important question!”

There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion.

Working on Lamin’s visa paperwork, buying Lamin’s air ticket, organizing Lamin’s departure and arrival, his pickups and his drop-offs, enduring the e-mails back and forth between him and Judy at every stage of this planning, devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence, to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. 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.