by Zadie Smith
Lamin got back on his knees and quietly restarted his first prayer of the day—I had interrupted that, too. Listening to his whispered Arabic, I wondered exactly what form his prayer took. I waited. I looked around me at the poverty Aimee hoped to “reduce.” It was all I could see, and the kinds of questions children ask were the only kind that came to me. What is this? What’s happening? The same mindset had led me, on the very first day I’d arrived, to the headmaster’s office, where I sat sweating under his molten tin roof, frantically trying to get online, although I could, of course, have googled what I wanted to know in New York, far more quickly, with infinitely more ease, at any time in the previous six months. Here it was a laborious process. A page would half load, then crash, the energy from the solar rose and fell and sometimes cut off completely. It took more than an hour. And when the two sums of money I was looking for finally appeared in their adjacent windows all I did was sit and stare at them for a long time. In the comparison, as it turned out, Aimee came out a little ahead. And just like that the GDP of an entire country could fit into a single person, like one Russian doll into another.
Four
That last June of primary school Tracey’s father got out and we met for the first time. He stood on the communal grass, looking up at us, smiling. Suave, modern, full of a kind of kinetic joy, but also somehow classic, elegant, Bojangles himself. He stood in fifth position, legs apart, in an electric-blue bomber jacket with a Chinese dragon on the back and tight white jeans. A thick, rakish mustache, and an Afro in the old style, with no fades or lines cut into it and no high-top. Tracey’s happiness was intense, she reached over the balcony, as if to pull her father up to her, yelling at him to come, come up here, Dad, come up, but he winked at us and said: “I’ve got a better idea, let’s go down the high road.” We ran down and each took a hand.
The first thing I noticed was that he had the body of a dancer, and moved like a dancer, rhythmically, with force but also with lightness, so that we three didn’t just walk along the high road, we promenaded. Everybody looked at us, we strutted in the sunshine, and several people stopped what they were doing and came to hail us—to hail Louie—from across the street, from a grotty window above a hairdresser’s, from the doorways of the pubs. As we approached the betting shop, an old Caribbean gentleman, in a flat cap and thick woolen vest, despite the heat, stepped in front of us, blocking our way, and asked: “Dem your daughters?” Louie held up our hands like we were two prizefighters. “No,” he said, letting my hand drop, “just this one.” Tracey lit up with the glory of it all. “I hear dem say tirteen months all you do,” said the old man, chuckling. “Lucky, lucky Louie.” He nudged Louie in his neat waist, it was cinched by a thin gold belt, like a superhero. But Louie was insulted, he stepped back from the old man—a deep sliding plié—and loudly sucked his teeth. He corrected the record: didn’t even do seven.
The old man drew out a newspaper he’d had tucked into his armpit, unrolled it and showed Louie a certain page, which he studied before bending down to show it to us. We were told to close our eyes and stick our fingers wherever the mood took us, and when we opened our eyes we each had a horse under a finger, I can still remember the name of mine, Theory Test, because five minutes later Louie ran back out through the bookie’s doors, scooped me up off the floor and threw me into the air. A hundred and fifty quid won on a five-pound stake. We were diverted to Woolworths, and each told to choose whatever we wanted. I left Tracey at the videos intended for kids like us—the suburban comedies, action films, space sagas—walking on and bending over the big wire bin, the “bargain bin,” set aside for those who had little money or choice. There were always a lot of musicals in there, nobody wanted them, not even the old ladies, and I was scavenging through, happily enough, when I heard Tracey, who had not moved on from the modern section, asking Louie: “So how many can we have?” The answer was four, though we were to hurry up about it, he was hungry. I snatched four musicals in a blissful panic:
Ali Baba Goes to Town
Broadway Melody of 1936
Swing Time
It’s Always Fair Weather
The only one of Tracey’s purchases I remember is Back to the Future, more expensive than all mine put together. She pressed it to her chest, giving it up only for a moment so that it might be passed to the cashier, and snatching it back again afterward, like an animal snapping at its food.
When we got to the restaurant we sat at the best table, just by the window. Louie showed us a funny way to eat a Big Mac, dismantling its layers and placing fries above and below each burger and then putting it all together again.
“You coming to live with us, then?” Tracey asked.
“Hmmm. Don’t know about that. What she say?”
Tracey stuck her piggy nose in the air: “Don’t care what she says.”
Both her little hands were screwed into tight fists.
“Don’t disrespect your mum. Your mum’s got her own problems.”
He went back up to the counter to get milkshakes. When he returned he looked burdened, and without introducing the topic in any formal way, he began to talk to us about the inside, about how you found, when you were inside, that it wasn’t like the neighborhood, no, not at all, it was very different, because when you were inside everybody understood that people had better keep to their own kind, and that’s how it was, “like stayed with like,” there was hardly any mixing, not like up at the flats, and it wasn’t the guards or anyone telling you to do it, that’s just the way it was, tribes stick together, and it even goes by shade, he explained, pulling up his sleeve and pointing at his arm, so all of us that was dark like me, well, we’re over here, tight with each other, always—he drew a line on the Formica tabletop—and brown like you two is somewhere over here, and Paki is somewhere else, and Indian is somewhere else. White is split, too: Irish, Scottish, English. And in the English some of them are BNP and some are all right. Everybody goes with their own is the point, and it’s natural. Makes you think.
We sat slurping our milkshakes, thinking.
And you learn all kinds of things, he continued, you learn who the real God of the black man is! Not this blue-eyed, long-haired Jesus individual—no! And let me arks you: how comes I never even really heard of him or his name before I get up in there? Look it up. You learn a lot that you can’t learn in school, because these people won’t tell you nothing, nothing about African kings, nothing about Egyptian queens, nothing about Mohammed, they hide it all, they hide the whole of our history so we feel like we’re nothing, we feel like we’re at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s the whole plan, but the truth is we built the fucking Pyramids! Oh, there’s a devilishness in them, but one day, one day, God willing, this white day will be done. Louie lifted Tracey on to his lap and jiggled her as if she were a much younger child, and then worked her arms from below, like a puppet, so she seemed to be dancing to the music that was playing through the speakers that nestled between the security camera. You still dancing? It was a casual question, I could tell he wasn’t particularly interested in the answer, but Tracey always took her opportunities, no matter how small, and now she told her father, in a great, happy rush of detail, about all her dance medals from that year, and from the previous year, and of what Miss Isabel had said about her pointe work, of what all kinds of people said about her talent, and about her upcoming audition for stage school, on which subject I had already heard about as much as I could stand. My own mother would not allow stage school, not even if I won a full scholarship, of the kind Tracey was betting on. We had been battling over it, my mother and I, ever since I heard that Tracey would be allowed to audition. The thought of having to go to a normal school while Tracey spent her days dancing!
Now see, with me, said Louie, tiring suddenly of his daughter’s talk, with me I didn’t need dance school, matter of fact I used to rule the dance floor! This girl got it all from her daddy. Believe me: I can do all the mo
ves! Arks your mum! Used to even make some money off it, back in the day. You look doubtful!
To prove it, to allay our doubts, he slipped off his stool and kicked his leg up, jerked his head, shifted the line of his shoulders, spun, stopped on a dime and ended on the points of his toes. A group of girls who sat across from us in a booth whistled and cheered, and watching him I felt I understood now what Tracey had meant by placing her father and Michael Jackson in one reality, and I didn’t find that she was a liar, exactly, or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. They were touched by the same inheritance. And if Louie’s dancing happened not to be famous like Michael’s, well, this was, to Tracey, only a kind of technicality—an accident of time and place—and now, thinking back on his dancing, writing it all down, I think she was exactly right.
Afterward we decided to walk with our huge milkshakes back up the high road, stopping again to speak to a few friends of Louie’s—or perhaps they were simply people who knew enough about him to fear him—including a young Irish builder hanging one-handed off the scaffolding outside the Tricycle Theater, his face burned red from too much work in the sun. He reached down to shake Louie’s hand: “Now, if it isn’t the Playboy of the West Indies!” He was rebuilding the Tricycle’s roof, and Louie was very struck by this, it was the first time he’d heard about the terrible fire of a few months before. He asked the boy how much it would cost to rebuild, how much he and the rest of Moran’s men were getting paid an hour, what cement they were using and who were the wholesalers, and I looked over at Tracey as she filled up with pride at this glimpse of another possible Louie: respectable young entrepreneur, quick with numbers, good with his staff, taking his daughter round his place of work, holding her hand so tightly. I wished it could be like that for her every day.
• • •
It didn’t occur to me that there would be any consequences to our little outing but even before I’d got back on to Willesden Lane somebody had told my mother where I’d been and with whom. She caught hold of me as I walked through the door and slapped the milkshake out of my hand, it struck the opposite wall, very pink and thick—unexpectedly dramatic—and for the rest of the time we lived in that place we coexisted with a faint strawberry stain. She started in yelling. What did I think I was doing? Who did I think I was with? I ignored all her rhetorical questions and asked her again why I couldn’t audition like Tracey. “Only a fool gives up an education,” said my mother, and I said, “Well, then, maybe I’m a fool.” I tried to get by her, into my room, my haul of videos behind my back, but she blocked my way and so I told her bluntly that I was not her and did not ever want to be her, that I didn’t care about her books or her clothes or her ideas or any of it, I wanted to dance and live my own life. My father emerged from wherever he’d been hiding. Gesturing at him, I tried to make the point that if it were up to my father I’d be allowed to audition, because my father was a man who believed in me, as Tracey’s father believed in her. My mother sighed. “Of course he’d let you do it,” she said. “He’s not worried—he knows you’ll never get in.”
“For God’s sake,” muttered my father, but he couldn’t look at me and I understood with a stab of pain that what my mother was saying must be true.
“All that matters in this world,” she explained, “is what’s written down. But what happens with this”—she gestured at my body—“that will never matter, not in this culture, not for these people, so all you’re doing is playing their game by their rules, and if you play that game, I promise you, you’ll end up a shade of yourself. Catch a load of babies, never leave these streets, and be another one of these sisters who might as well not exist.”
“You don’t exist,” I said.
I grabbed at this line as a child grabs at the first thing to hand. The effect on my mother was beyond anything I could have hoped for. Her mouth turned slack and all her self-possession and beauty drained from her. She began to cry. We stood at the threshold to my room, my mother with her head bowed. My father had retreated, it was just we two. It took a minute before she found her voice again. She told me—in a fierce whisper—not to take another step. But as soon as she’d said it she saw her own mistake: it was an admission, this was exactly the time of my life when I could finally take a step away from her, many steps, I was almost twelve, I was already as tall as her—I could dance right out of her life—and so a shift in her authority was inevitable, was happening precisely as we stood there. I said nothing, stepped around her, went into my room and slammed the door.
Five
Ali Baba Goes to Town is a strange film. It’s a variation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which Eddie Cantor plays Al Babson, an everyday schmuck who finds himself working as an extra on an Arabian Nights–type picture, out in Hollywood. On set he falls asleep and dreams he’s back in ninth-century Arabia. One scene made a very strong impression on me, I wanted to show it to Tracey, but she’d become hard to pin down, she didn’t call, and when I tried to call her flat there was always a pause on the line before her mother told me she was out. I knew she had her legitimate reasons, she was busy preparing for her stage-school audition—which Mr. Booth had kindly agreed to assist her with—she rehearsed most weekday afternoons in the church hall. But I wasn’t ready to release her into her new life. I made many attempts to ambush her: the doors to the church would be open, sun streaming through the stained glass, Mr. Booth accompanying her on the piano, and if she spotted me spying on her, she’d wave—the adult, distracted greeting of a busy woman—but never once did she come out to talk to me. By some obscure pre-teen logic, I decided my body was to blame. I was still a lanky, flat-chested child, lurking in the doorway, while Tracey, dancing in the light, was already a little woman. How could she have any interest in the things that still interested me?
• • •
“Nah, don’t know it. What’s it called again?”
“I just told you. Ali Baba Goes to Town.”