Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  I sank back into the seat. I watched Tracey expertly maneuver her broom this way and that, giving it life, so that it seemed almost another human presence on the stage, like the trick Astaire pulls, with that hat rack, in Royal Wedding. At one point she was perfectly aligned with the image from the poster, broom in the air, arm outstretched, kinetic joy. I wanted to pause her there in that position for ever.

  The real stars arrived on stage, to begin the drama. In the background Tracey swept the front step of a general store. She was stage left from the main characters, Julie LaVerne and her devoted husband, Steve, two cabaret actors who work together on the Cotton Blossom and are in love. But Julie LaVerne is soon revealed, just before the interval, to be Julie Dozier, that is, not a white woman, as she has always pretended, but really a tragic mulatto, who “passes,” who convinces everybody, including her own husband, until the day she’s found out. At which point the couple are threatened with prison, for their marriage is illegal under the miscegenation laws. Steve cuts Julie’s palm and drinks a little of her blood: the “one drop rule”—they’re both Negroes now. In the dim light, in the middle of this ridiculous melodrama, I checked the bio of the actress playing Julie. She had a Greek last name and was no darker than Kramer.

  During the interval I drank a lot, and too quickly, and talked at Kramer relentlessly. I was leaning against the bar, blocking other people’s route to the bar staff, waving my hands around and ranting about the injustice of the casting, of how few roles there were for actors like me and even when such roles did exist you couldn’t get them, somebody always gave them to a white girl, for even a tragic mulatto apparently wasn’t quite fit to play a tragic mulatto, even in this day and—

  “Actors like you?”

  “What?”

  “You said: actors like me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “My point is: that role should be Tracey’s.”

  “You just said she can’t sing. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty much a singing role.”

  “She sings fine!”

  “Jesus, why are you shouting at me?”

  We sat through the second half as silent as we had been in the first but this time the silence had a new texture, chilled with the iciness of mutual contempt. I longed to get out of there. Long stretches of the show passed without any sign of Tracey and held no interest for me. Only toward the end did the chorus reappear, this time as the “Dahomey Dancers,” that is, as Africans, from the Kingdom of Dahomey, they were supposedly performing at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I watched Tracey in the circle of women—the men danced opposite, in their own circle—swinging her arms, crouching low and singing in a fictional African tongue, while the men stamped their feet and banged their spears in reply: gunga, hungo, bunga, gooba! I thought unavoidably of my mother, and of her line in Dahomey stories: the proud history of the kings; the shape and feel of the cowrie shells, used as money, the Amazon battalion, made up solely of women, taking prisoners of war as slaves for the kingdom, or else simply severing their enemies’ heads and holding them up in their hands. The way other children hear tell of Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks, I heard of this “Black Sparta,” the noble kingdom of Dahomey, fighting to hold off the French to the very end. But it was almost impossible to reconcile these memories with the farce presently happening, both on stage and off, for most of the people I sat among did not know what came next in the show and consequently, I realized, they felt they were watching some kind of shameful minstrel show and were willing the scene to end. On stage, too, the “audience” at the world’s fair backed away from the Dahomey Dancers, though not out of shame but their own sense of fear, that these dancers were perhaps vicious, no different from the rest of their tribe, their spears not props but weapons. I looked over at Kramer; he was squirming. I turned back and watched Tracey. What great fun she was having with the general discomfort, just as she had always enjoyed such moments as a child. She waved her spear and roared, marching with the rest, toward the fearful audience at the fair, and then laughed with the others as their audience ran off stage. Left to their own devices, the Dahomey Dancers cut loose: they sang of how glad and tired they were, glad to see the back of the white folks, and tired, so tired, of being in a “Dahomey show.”

  And now the audience—the real audience—understood. They saw that what they were watching was intended to be funny, ironic, that these were American dancers, not Africans—yes, finally they grasped that a trick had been played on them. These folks weren’t from Dahomey at all! They were just good old Negroes, after all, straight from Avenue A, in New York City itself! Kramer chuckled, the music turned to ragtime, and I felt my feet moving beneath me, trying to echo on the plush red carpet the complicated soft-shoe shuffle Tracey was performing right above me on the hard-wood stage. The steps were familiar to me—they would have been to any dancer—and I wished I was up there with her. I was stuck in London, in the year 2005, but Tracey was in Chicago in 1893, and Dahomey a hundred years before that, and anywhere and any time that people have moved their feet like that. I was so jealous I cried.

  • • •

  Show over, I came out of the long queue for the ladies and spotted Kramer before he saw me, he was standing in the lobby, bored and angry, holding my coat over his arm. Outside it had started to lash with rain.

  “So, I’m gonna go,” he said, passing me my coat, barely able to look at me. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to go say hello to your ‘friend.’”

  He turned his collar up and walked into that horrible evening, umbrella-less, still angry. Nothing offends a man so much as being ignored. But I was impressed: his dislike of me was so clearly stronger than any fear of my influence over his employer. Once he was out of sight I walked around to the side of the theater and found it was just as you always see it in the old movies: the door said “Stage Door” and there was a reasonable crowd of people waiting for the cast to emerge, despite the rain, clutching their little notepads and pens.

  With no umbrella, I pressed against the side of the wall, facing out, just covered by a narrow awning. I didn’t know what I planned to say or how I was going to approach her, but I was just beginning to think about it when a car pulled up in the alleyway, driven by Tracey’s mother. She was hardly changed: through the rain-streaked windscreen I could see the same tin hoops in her ears, the triple chin, hair scraped back tight, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. I turned at once to the wall and, as she parked, made my escape. I ran down Shaftesbury Avenue, getting soaked, thinking about what I’d seen in the back of that car: two sleeping young children, strapped in their seats. I wondered whether this, and nothing else, was the true reason the story of Tracey’s life took so little time to read.

  Two

  You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross. Lamin in that white suit in the Rainbow Room felt like an example of the opposite lesson. But in fact he didn’t have a visa, not yet. He had a new passport and a date of return. And when it was time to leave I would accompany him back to the village, along with Fern, staying on a week to complete the yearly report for the board of the foundation. After which Fern would remain, and I’d fly to London, to meet the children and supervise their quarterly visit to their fathers. So we were informed by Judy. Until then, a month together in New York.

  For the past decade, whenever we were in the city, my base had been the maid’s room, on the ground floor off the kitchen, although occasionally a half-hearted discussion would take place about the possibility of a separate space—a hotel, a rental somewhere—which never led to anything and was soon forgotten. But this time an apartment had been rented for me before I even arrived, a two-bedroom on West 10th Street, high ceilings, fireplaces, the whole second floor of a beautiful brownstone. Emma Lazarus had once lived here: a blue plaque under my window memorialized her huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. My view was o
f a pink-blush dogwood in full bloom. I mistook all this for an upgrade. Then Lamin appeared and I understood I’d been moved out so he could move in.

  • • •

  “What exactly is going on with you?” Judy asked me, the morning after Jay’s birthday party. No preliminaries, just her strident yell coming at me through my phone as I tried to tell the bodega guy on Mercer to skip the apple in my green juice. “Have you had some kind of argument with Fernando? Because we just can’t have him in the house right now—there’s no room for him at the inn. We’ve got a full inn, as you probably noticed. Our lovebirds want their privacy. The plan was meant to be he’d stay with you for a few weeks, in the apartment, it was all settled—now suddenly he’s resistant.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Because nobody told me. Judy, you didn’t even mention to me that Fern was coming to New York!”

  Judy made a sound of impatience: “Look, it was something Aimee wanted me to handle. It had to do with accompanying Lamin over here, she didn’t want it out in the world . . . It was delicate, and I handled it.”

  “Do you handle who I live with too now?”

  “Oh, love, I’m sorry—are you paying rent?”

  I managed to get her off the phone and called Fern. He was in a taxi somewhere on the West Side Highway. I could hear the foghorn of a cruise ship docking.

  “Better I find somewhere else. Yes, it’s better. This afternoon I look at a place in . . .” I heard papers being sadly shuffled. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Midtown somewhere.”

  “Fern, you don’t know this city—and you don’t want to pay rent here, believe me. Take the room. I’ll feel shitty about it if you don’t. I’ll be at Aimee’s day and night—she’s got that show in two weeks, we’ll be up to our ears. I promise you—you’ll hardly see me.”

  He closed a window, the river winds stopped rushing in. The quiet was unhelpfully intimate.

  “I like to see you.”

  “Oh, Fern . . . Please just take the room!”

  That evening the only sign of him was an empty coffee cup in the kitchen and a tall canvas rucksack—the kind a student packs for a year off—leaning in the doorframe of his empty room. As he’d climbed the steps of the ferry with this single bag on his back, Fern’s simplicity, his frugality, had seemed to have something noble in it, I’d aspired to it, but here in Greenwich Village the idea of a forty-five-year-old man with a single rucksack to his name struck me as merely sad and eccentric. I knew he’d crossed Liberia, alone and on foot, aged only twenty-four—it was some kind of homage to Graham Greene—but now all I could think was: Brother, this city will eat you alive. I wrote a pleasant and neutral note of welcome, tucked it under the straps of his bag and went to bed.

  • • •

  I was right about barely seeing him: I had to be at Aimee’s for eight each morning (she woke daily at five, to exercise for two hours in the basement followed by an hour of meditation) and Fern always slept in—or pretended that he did. In Aimee’s townhouse all was frantic planning, rehearsal, anxiety: the new show was in a mid-size venue, she’d be singing live, with a live band, things she hadn’t done in years. To keep out of the line of fire, the meltdowns, the arguments, I stayed as much as I could in the office and avoided rehearsals whenever possible. But I gathered some kind of West African theme was afoot. A set of atumpan drums were delivered to the house, and a long-necked kora, swathes of kente, and—one fine Tuesday morning—a twelve-person dance troupe, African-by-way-of-Brooklyn, who were taken to the basement studio and didn’t emerge till after dinner. They were young, mostly second-generation Senegalese, and Lamin was fascinated by them: he wanted to know their last names and the villages of their parents, chasing down any possible connection of family or location. And Aimee was glued to Lamin: you couldn’t talk to her alone any more, he was there at all times. But which Lamin was it? She thought it very provocative and funny to tell me he still prayed five times a day, in her walk-in closet, which apparently faced Mecca. Personally I wanted to believe in this continuity, in this part of him still beyond her reach, but there were days I barely recognized him. One afternoon I brought a tray of coconut waters down to the studio and found him, in his white shirt and white slacks, demonstrating a move I recognized from the kankurang, a combination of side-stamp, shuffle and dip. Aimee and the other girls watched him carefully and repeated the movements. They were sweating, dressed in crop tops and ripped unitards, and were pressed so closely to him and each other that each movement he made looked like a single wave passing through five bodies. But the truly unrecognizable gesture was the one that swept a bottle of coconut water from my tray, without a thank-you, without the vaguest acknowledgment—you’d have thought he’d been taking drinks from the wobbling trays of serving girls every day of his life. Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money. Though there were times when I saw a haunted quality in him, like he was being stalked by something. Wandering into the dining room toward the end of his visit, I found him still at the breakfast table, talking at Granger, who looked very weary, as if he’d been there a long time. I sat down with them. Lamin’s eyes were fixed somewhere between Granger’s shaved head and the opposite wall. He was whispering again, a perplexing, uninflected speech that ran on like an incantation: “. . . and right now, our women are sowing the onions in the right-hand beds and then the peas in the left-hand beds, and if the peas are not irrigated in the correct way then when they will come to rake the ground, about two weeks from now, they will have a problem, there will be an orange curl to the leaf, and if it has this curl, then it has the blight and then they will dig up what has been sown and re-sow the beds, making sure I hope to put a layer of this rich soil we get from upriver, you see, when the men go upriver, about a week from now, when we travel up there we get the rich soil . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” Granger was saying, every other sentence. “Uh-huh, Uh-huh.”

  • • •

  Fern made sporadic appearances in our lives, at board meetings or when Aimee required his presence to deal with practical problems related to the school. He looked pained at all times—physically winced whenever we made eye contact—and advertised his misery wherever he went, like a man in a comic with a black cloud above his head. In front of Aimee and the rest of the board he gave a pessimistic update, focused on recent aggressive statements of the President’s, concerning foreign presence in the country. I’d never heard him talk like that before, so fatalistically, it was not really in his character, and I knew I was the true, oblique target of his critique.

  That afternoon in the apartment, instead of hiding in my room as usual, I confronted him in the hall. He’d just come back from a run, sweating, bent over, with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, looking up at me from under thick brows. I was very reasonable. He didn’t speak but seemed to take it all in. Without his glasses his eyes looked enormous, like a cartoon baby’s. When I finished he straightened up and bent the other way, pushing the small of his back forward with both hands.

  “Well, I apologize if I embarrassed you. You are right: it was unprofessional.”

  “Fern—can’t we be friends?”

  “Of course. But you also want me to say: ‘I am happy we are friends’?”

  “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

  “But this is not one of your musicals. The truth is I am very sad. I wanted something—I wanted you—and I didn’t get at all what I wanted or hoped and now I am sad. I will get over it, I suppose, but for now I am sad. Is it OK for me to be sad? Yes? Well. Now I shower.”

  It was very difficult for me, at the time, to understand a person who spoke like that. It was alien to me, as an idea—I hadn’t been raised that way. What response could such a man—the type who gives up all power—possibly expect from a woman like me?

  • • •

  I didn’t go to the show, couldn’t
face it. I did not want to stand in the bleachers with Fern, feeling his resentment while watching funhouse versions of the dances we had both seen at their source. I told Aimee I was going and I intended to go but when eight o’clock rolled around I was still in my house sweats, lying half propped up on my bed with my laptop over my groin, and then it was nine o’clock, and then it was ten. I absolutely had to go—my mind kept repeating this fact to me and I was in agreement with it—but my body freeze-framed, felt heavy and immovable. Yes, I must go, that was clear, and just as clear was the fact I was not going anywhere. I got on YouTube, skipped from dancer to dancer: Bojangles up the stairs, Harold and Fayard on a piano, Jeni LeGon in her swishing grass skirt, Michael Jackson at Motown 25. I often ended up at this clip of Jackson, although this time as he moonwalked across the stage, the thing that really interested me was not the crowd’s ecstatic screams or even the surreal fluidity of his movements but the shortness of his trousers. And still the option of going did not seem lost or completely closed until I looked up from my aimless surfing and found eleven forty-five had happened, which signified we were now in the undeniable past tense: I hadn’t gone. Search Aimee, search venue, search Brooklyn dance troupe, image search, AP wire search, blog search. At first simply out of a sense of guilt, but soon enough with the realization that I could reconstruct—140 characters at a time, image by image, blog post by blog post—the experience of having been there, until, by one a.m., nobody could have been there more than me. I was far more there than any of the people who had actually been there, they were restricted to one location and one perspective—to one stream of time—whereas I was everywhere in that room at all moments, viewing the thing from all angles, in a mighty act of collation. I could have stopped there—I had more than enough to give a detailed account of my evening to Aimee in the morning—but I didn’t stop. I was compelled by the process. To observe, in real time, the debates as they form and coalesce, to watch the developing consensus, the highlights or embarrassments identified, their meanings and subtexts accepted or denied. The insults and the jokes, the gossip and rumor, the memes, the Photoshop, the filters, and all the many varieties of critique given free rein here, far from Aimee’s reach or control. Earlier in the week, watching a costume fitting—in which Aimee, Jay and Kara were being dressed up to resemble Asante nobles—I’d hesitantly brought up the matter of appropriation. Judy groaned, Aimee looked at me and then down at her own ghost-pale pixie frame wrapped in so much vibrantly colored cloth, and told me that she was an artist, and artists have to be allowed to love things, to touch them and to use them, because art is not appropriation, that was not the aim of art—the aim of art was love. And when I asked her whether it was possible both to love something and leave it alone, she regarded me strangely, pulled her children into her body and asked: Have you ever been in love?