by Zadie Smith
Ten
Long before it became her career my mother had a political mind: it was in her nature to think of people collectively. Even as a child I noticed it, and felt instinctively that there was something chilly and unfeeling in her ability to analyze so precisely the people she lived among: her friends, her community, her own family. We were all, at one and the same time, people she knew and loved but also objects of study, living embodiments of all she seemed to be learning up at Middlesex Poly. She held herself apart, always. She never submitted, for example, to the neighborhood cult of “sharpness”—the passion for shiny shell-suits and sparkling fake gems, for whole days spent in the hair salon, children in fifty-quid trainers, settees paid for over several years on hire purchase—although neither would she ever entirely condemn it. People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor. But though she was serene and anthropological about these matters in her college essays—or while lecturing me and my father across the dinner table—I knew in her real life she was often exasperated. She didn’t pick me up from school any more—my father did that now—because the scene there aggravated her too much, in particular the way, each afternoon, time collapsed, and all those mothers became kids again, kids who had come to collect their kids, and all of these kids together turned from school with relief, free finally to speak with each other in their own way, and to laugh and joke and eat ice cream from the waiting ice-cream van, and to make what they considered to be a natural amount of noise. My mother didn’t fit into all of that any longer. She still cared for the group—intellectually, politically—but she was no longer one of them.
Every now and then she did get caught up in it, usually by some error of timing, and found herself trapped in a conversation with a mother, often Tracey’s, on Willesden Lane. On these occasions she could turn callous, making a point of mentioning each new academic achievement of mine—or inventing some—although she knew that all Tracey’s mother could offer in return was more of Miss Isabel’s praise, which was, to my mother, an entirely worthless commodity. My mother was proud of trying harder than Tracey’s mother, than all the mothers, of having got me into a half-decent state school instead of one of the several terrible ones. She was in a competition of caring, and yet her fellow contestants, like Tracey’s mother, were so ill-equipped when placed beside her that it was a fatally lopsided battle. I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?
• • •
One morning in early spring, my father and I ran into Tracey under our block, by the garages. She seemed agitated and though she said she was only cutting through our estate on the way to her own I felt certain she’d been waiting for me. She looked cold: I wondered whether she had been to school at all. I knew she sometimes bunked off, with the approval of her mother. (My mother had been shocked to see them both, one school-day afternoon, coming out of What She Wants on the high road, laughing, carrying a load of shopping bags.) I watched my father greet Tracey warmly. Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable—it appealed to his work ethic—and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowing a father for a few minutes was the pain of having to give him back.
“Exams coming up, aren’t they?” he asked her now. “And how’s all that going?”
Tracey stuck her nose proudly in the air: “I’m doing all six categories.”
“’Course you are.”
“For modern, though, I ain’t doing it by myself, I’m pairing. Ballet’s my strongest, then tap, then modern, then song and dance. I’m going for three golds at least, but if it was two golds and four silvers I’d be well happy with that.”
“And so you should be.”
She put her little hands on her hips. “You coming to watch us then or what?”
“Oh, I’ll be there! With bells on! Cheering my girls on.”
Tracey loved to boast to my father, she unfurled in his presence, sometimes even blushed, and the monosyllabic no and yes answers she tended to give to all other adults, including my mother, disappeared, to be replaced by this running babble, as if she thought that any pause in the flow might run the risk of losing my father’s attention altogether.
“Got some news,” she said casually, turning to me, and now I understood why we’d run into her. “My mum’s sorted it.”
“Sorted what?” I asked.
“I’m leaving my school,” she said. “I’m coming to yours.”
Later, at home, I told my mother this news, and she, too, was surprised, and, I suspected, a little displeased, at this proof of Tracey’s mother’s exertion on her daughter’s behalf more than anything else. She kissed her teeth: “I really didn’t think she had it in her.”
Eleven
It took Tracey moving to my classroom for me to understand what my classroom really was. I had thought it was a room full of children. In fact it was a social experiment. The dinner lady’s daughter shared a desk with the son of an art critic, a boy whose father was presently in prison shared a desk with the son of a policeman. The child of the postal officer shared a desk with the child of one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers. One of Tracey’s first acts as my new desk mate was to articulate these subtle differences by way of a simple, compelling analogy: Cabbage Patch Kids versus Garbage Pail Kids. Each child was categorized as one or the other and she made it clear that any friendship I had formed before her arrival was now—in as far as it may have attempted to cross this divide—null and void, worthless, for the truth was it had never truly existed in the first place. There could be no real friendship between Cabbage Patch and Garbage Pail, not right now, not in England. She emptied our desk of my beloved Cabbage Patch Kid card collection and replaced them with her Garbage Pail Kid cards, which—like almost everything Tracey did in school—at once became the new craze. Even children who were, in Tracey’s eyes, Cabbage Patch types themselves began to collect the Garbage Pail Kids, even Lily Bingham collected them, and we all competed with each other to own the most repulsive cards: the Garbage Pail Kid with snot streaming down his face, or the one pictured on the toilet. Her other striking innovation was her refusal to sit down. She would only stand at her desk, bending forward to work. Our teacher—a kind and energetic man called Mr. Sherman—battled her for a week but Tracey’s will, like my mother’s, was made of iron, and in the end she was allowed to stand as she pleased. I don’t think Tracey had any special passion for standing up, it was a point of principle. The principle could have been anything, really, but the point was she would win it. It was clear that Mr. Sherman, having lost this argument, felt he must come down hard in some other area and one morning, as we were all excitedly swapping Garbage Pail Kids instead of listening to whatever he was saying, he suddenly went completely out of his mind, screaming like a lunatic, going from desk to desk seizing the cards, sometimes from inside the desk and sometimes from our hands, until he had a huge pile of them on his desk which he then shuffled into a tower laid on its side and brushed into a drawer, locking it ostentatiously with a little key. Tracey said nothing, but her piggy nose flared and I thought: oh dear, doesn’t Mr. Sherman realize she’ll never forgive him?
• • •
That same afternoon, after school, we walked home together. She wouldn’t talk to me, she was still in her fury, but when I tried to turn into my estate she grabbed my wrist and led me across the road to hers. All the way up in the lift we were silent. It seemed to me something momentous was about to happen. I could feel her rage like an aura around her, it almost vibrated. When we got to her front door I saw that the knocker—a brass lion of Judah with its mouth open, bought o
n the high road from one of the stalls that sold Africana—had been damaged and now hung by a single nail, and I wondered if her father had been round again. I followed Tracey to her room. Once the door was closed she turned on me, glaring, as if I myself were Mr. Sherman, asking me sharply what I wanted to do, now that we were here? I had no idea: never before had I been canvassed for ideas of what to do, she was the one with all the ideas, there had never been any planning by me before today.
“Well, what’s the point of coming round if you don’t fucking know?”
She flopped down on to her bed, picked up Pac-Man and started playing. I felt my face getting hot. I meekly suggested practicing our triple time-steps but this made Tracey groan.
“Don’t need to. I’m on to wings.”
“But I can’t do wings yet!”
“Look,” she said, without raising her eyes from her screen, “you can’t get silver without doing wings, forget about gold. So what’s your dad going to come and watch you fuck it all up for? No point, is there?”
I looked at my stupid feet, that couldn’t do wings. I sat down and began quietly to cry. This changed nothing and after a minute I found myself pitiful and stopped. 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.
Twelve
We had a favorite video, it was labeled “Saturday Cartoons and Top Hat” and moved weekly from my flat to Tracey’s and back, played so often that tracking now ate the frame, from above and below. Because of this we couldn’t risk forward-winding while playing—it made the tracking worse—so we forward-wound “blind,” guessing at duration by assessing the width of the black tape as it flew from one reel to another. Tracey was an expert forward-winder, she seemed to know in her body exactly when we’d gone past the irrelevant cartoons and when to press stop to reach, for example, the song “Cheek to Cheek.” It strikes me now that if I want to watch this same clip—as I did a few minutes ago, just before writing this—it’s no effort at all, it’s the work of a moment, I type my request in the box and it’s there. Back then there was a craft to it. We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be. When Tracey was about this process she was absolutely concentrated, she would not press play until she had Fred and Ginger exactly where she wanted them, on the balcony, among the bougainvillea and the Doric columns. At which point she began to read the dance, as I never could, she saw everything, the stray ostrich feathers hitting the floor, the weak muscles in Ginger’s back, the way Fred had to jerk her up from any supine position, spoiling the flow, ruining the line. She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance. With Fred and Ginger you can always see the dance lesson. In a sense the dance lesson is the performance. He’s not looking at her with love, not even fake movie love. He’s looking at her as Miss Isabel looked at us: don’t forget x, please keep in mind y, arm up now, leg down, spin, dip, bow.
“Look at her,” Tracey said, smiling oddly, pressing a finger to Ginger’s face on the screen. “She looks fucking scared.”
It was during one of these viewings that I learned something new and important about Louie. On this occasion the flat was empty, and as it annoyed Tracey’s mother when we watched the same clip multiple times, that afternoon we indulged ourselves. The moment Fred came to a rest and leaned against the balustrade Tracey shuffled forward on all fours and pressed the button down again and off we went, back to what-once-was. We must have watched the same five-minute clip a dozen times. Until suddenly it was enough: Tracey got up and told me to follow. It was dark outside. I wondered when her mother would be home. We walked past the kitchen to the bathroom. It was exactly the same as my bathroom. Same cork floor, same avocado bathroom set. She got down on her knees and pushed the side panel of the bath: it fell in easily. Sitting in a Clarks shoebox just by the pipes was a small gun. Tracey picked up the box and showed it to me. She told me it was her father’s, that he had left it here, and when Michael came to Wembley at Christmas Louie would be his security man as well as one of his dancers, it had to be that way to confuse people, it was all top secret. You tell anyone, she told me, and you are dead. She put the panel back and went to the kitchen to start making her tea. I headed home. I remember feeling intensely envious of the glamour of Tracey’s family life compared to my own, its secretive and explosive nature, and I walked toward my own flat trying to think of some equivalent revelation I could offer to Tracey the next time I saw her, a terrible illness or a new baby, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing!
Thirteen
We stood on the balcony. Tracey held up a cigarette, stolen from my father, and I stood ready to light it for her. Before I could she spat it from her mouth, kicked it behind her and pointed down at my mother, who, as it turned out, was right below us on the communal lawn, smiling up. It was a mid-May Sunday morning, warm and bright. My mother was waving a dramatically large spade, like a Soviet farmer, and wearing a terrific outfit: denim dungarees, thin, light brown crop top, perfect against her skin, Birkenstocks and a square yellow handkerchief folded into a triangle and worn over her head. This was tied at the back of her neck in a jaunty little knot. She was taking it upon herself, she explained, to dig up the communal grass, a rectangle about eight foot by three, with the idea of establishing a vegetable garden that everybody could enjoy. Tracey and I watched her. She dug for a while, pausing regularly to rest her foot on the lip of the shovel and to shout up to us about lettuces, the various strains, the right time for planting them, none of which interested us in the least, and yet everything she said was made somehow more compelling by that outfit. We watched as several other people came out of their flats, to express concern or query her right to do what she was doing, but they were no match for her, and we noticed and admired the way she dispatched the fathers in a few minutes—essentially by looking into their eyes—while with the mothers she met with resistance, yes, with the mothers she had to make a little more effort, drowning them in language until they understood how out of their depth they were and the thin stream of their objections was completely subsumed by the quick-running currents of my mother’s talk. Everything she said sounded so convincing, so impossible to contradict. It was a wave washing over you, unstoppable. Who didn’t like roses? Who was so small-minded they would begrudge an inner-city child the chance to plant a seed? Weren’t we all Africans, originally? Weren’t we people of the land?
It started to rain. My mother, not dressed for rain, returned indoors. The next morning before school we were excited to catch up with this spectacle: my mother, looking like Pam Grier herself, digging a large, illegal hole without permission from the council. But the spade lay exactly where she had left it and the trench filled with water. The hole looked like somebody’s half-dug grave. The next day it rained again and no more digging was done. On the third day a gray sludge began to rise up and spill into the grass.
“Clay,” said my father, digging a finger into it. “She’s got a problem now.”
But he was wrong: it was his problem. Someone had told my mother that clay is only a layer of the earth, and if you dig deep enough you can get past it, and then all you have to do is go to the garden center and get some compost and pour it into your large, illegal hole . . . We peered down into the hole my father was now digging: under the clay was more clay. My mother came downstairs and peered in, too, and claimed to be “very excited” abo
ut the clay. She never again mentioned vegetables, and if anyone else tried to mention them she seamlessly adopted the new party line, which was that the hole had never been about lettuces, the hole had always been a search for clay. Which had now been found. In fact, she had two potter’s wheels, just sitting upstairs! What a wonderful resource for the children!
The wheels were small and very heavy, she had bought them because she “liked the look of them,” one freezing February when the lift doors malfunctioned: my father braced his knees, squared his arms and lugged the bloody things up three flights of stairs. They were very basic, brutal in some way, a peasant’s tool, and they had never been put to any use in our flat besides propping open the door to the living room. Now we would use them, we had to use them: if we didn’t, my mother had dug a large hole in the communal gardens for no reason at all. Tracey and I were told to collect children. We managed to convince only three kids from the estate: to make up numbers we added Lily Bingham. My father scooped clay into carrier bags and carted it up to the flat. My mother put a trestle table on the balcony and dropped a large lump of clay in front of each of us. It was a messy process, we probably would have been better off doing it in the bathroom or the kitchen, but the balcony allowed for an element of display: from up there my mother’s new concept in parenting could be seen by all. She was essentially asking the whole estate a question. What if we didn’t plonk our children in front of the telly each day, to watch the cartoons and the soap operas? What if we gave them, instead, a lump of clay, and poured water over it, and showed them how to spin it round until a shape formed between their hands? What kind of a society would that be? We watched the clay being spun between her palms. It looked like a penis—a long, brown penis—though it was only when Tracey whispered this idea into my ear that I allowed myself even to acknowledge the thought I was already having. “It’s a vase,” claimed my mother, and then added, as clarification: “For a single flower.” I was impressed. I looked around at the other children. Had their mothers ever thought to dig a vase out of the earth? Or grow a single flower to be placed inside it? But Tracey was not taking it at all seriously, she was still beside herself at the idea of a clay penis, and now she set me off, and my mother frowned at us both and, turning her attention to Lily Bingham, asked her what she would like to make, a vase or a mug. Under her breath, Tracey suggested, again, the obscene third option.