by Zadie Smith
Sandra Bland
Trayvon Martin
Eric Garner
Alton Sterling
Philando Castile
Michael Brown
We did not stop there but I am practicing an economy of form. And the minister took us all in his embrace, in a human chain, and he did say: Now we shall come together in prayer for this young child who was shot because she was black. And God help me but I broke the chain. I said, See what you’ve done there is you’ve transformed an act of the perpetrator into a characteristic of the target. You’ve turned one person’s action into another person’s being. I said, You don’t say to a witch: the reason they’re dunking you is because you’re a witch. You say, the reason they’re dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft! Their whole society is based on it! Nobody put a spell on them! They produce witchcraft every day, collectively, together! Their whole reality is constructed on a belief in witchcraft!
Well, Black Church got what I was saying but it wasn’t anything they hadn’t heard before and plus they didn’t feel it was particularly helpful in the present moment what with witches getting dunked right, left and center, every fucking place you looked. The minister took me aside and said: Now, you’re not American, are you? So you’re kind of talking out your ass, if you’ll excuse my technical religious language. And I said, Minister, you’re absolutely right, I am from the Caribbean side of things, and, like the pesky Africans, we haven’t yet learned the catechism fully. It takes years and years of training to fully concede you are a witch. But I’m amenable! I can be taught!
* * *
• • •
Two of my aunts came to town, just in time for Brett to make his case. Being Jamaican ladies of a certain dimension, we took up a lot of the sidewalk and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We started walking in Harlem and headed downtown, but my aunts still have the habit of making a little note in a calfskin notebook every time they see a glorious individual from the diaspora and by the time we got to Greene Street they’d seen seven hundred painters, three hundred and seventy-nine video and conceptual artists, about eight hundred writers, an infinity amount of musicians, forty-seven sculptors in various materials, a whole load of doctors and entertainment lawyers, plenty yoga teachers and so on and whatnot, plus a former president, Lyle Ashton Harris, John Legend, Hilton Als and Spike Lee himself. I said, Ladies, you’re gonna wear out those notebooks, you might as well try and take it all in your stride. We haven’t even got to Brooklyn! (Of course, I could have taken them elsewhere but they come from elsewhere and I wanted to show them the sparkling lights like any good niece on the tourist trail.) My aunts gave me the side eye. They folded their arms under their mighty bosoms. They said, Dear yellowbone niece, don’t be hurrying us on our holidays—let us take our sweet time. Maybe we were made witches, but this beautiful, globe-stretching coven you’re a part of is what we did with what was done to us, it is our own blessed creation, and a mighty glorious business it is too! Therefore: hush up. Let us enjoy it while we’re here. Now do you know where Lorraine Hansberry’s plaque is or do you not?
Anyway, by the time we got to the tip of the island they were in high racial spirits and didn’t mind too much settling into a corner booth and watching the proceedings from Washington on a massive TV hung above the bar. Now, rape is as common in the history of our family as whatever is common in your family is common in yours, so what my aunts said next I take to have a certain authority. They said, This might look like a war between men and women, but what this really is is the last siege of a ruling class. See Brett up there making that little bitch-baby face? See that? That’s the face a baby makes when you try and take his rattle away. We’ve had many, many babies so we’re familiar. America being the rattle in this analogy. He thinks he deserves to do whatever he wants with that rattle, and women are simply a subclause in that arrangement. Remember when we pressed the button on that crazy yellow megaphone? When we heard blessed LeRoi Jones cry out THE NATION IS LIKE OURSELVES? But, dear yellowbone niece, as we have explained we are on holiday and we are here to have a good time. Can’t we go dancing now?
We danced for four days, which turned out to be the exact length of the investigation, and by the time my aunts’ taxi pulled in at JFK, Brett had proved once again that whenever a young Brett is born in these United States, born with a dream, that dream can truly come true. Yes, sir, if your baby Brett really puts his mind to it—if he believes, if he has faith, if he is a he, and if he is called Brett—he can do whatever it is he puts his mind to, and that goes double for all you Troys, Kips, Tripps, Bucks and Chads.
* * *
• • •
Well, we were reeling. And I’m not the conspiratorial type but it did seem a bit suspicious that just as Brett was getting sworn in, everybody beneath 14th Street got an e-mail informing them that Café Loup was reopening. I think even a true artist living in an Hungarian forest can imagine that in the circumstances this felt like the best news any of us had heard in the longest time. I tried on four different outfits and then just went ahead and wore them all. I ran through the doors. It was packed to the rafters. But once you got over the incredible crush of human bodies it was impossible not to notice that not a thing had changed. The wallpaper was the same, the waiters were the same, the food was still not especially good, the tables were as usual flung randomly around the place, and everyone still thought the Austrian painter had either opened the door to a new possibility in painting or destroyed the possibility of painting altogether. The only difference was that instead of drinking our usual martinis while discussing this infinite subject, everybody was drinking beer, and clinking beers, and telling their waiters as they served more beer: “Sometimes I drank too much. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer.” I suppose that kind of thing is why real artists live in Hungarian forests, but I live downtown so I took my seat at a series of different tables (the whole point of Café Loup is it’s a movable feast) and told everyone I met that the next time they saw me in this godforsaken joint or Black Church or anywhere else for that matter I’d have shed my green card and become a citizen because really what the fuck and the great thing about Café Loup is nobody rolled their eyes or pointed out the delicate matter of a new citizen’s eligibility for certain national art prizes until I was way down Sixth Avenue and couldn’t hear a thing.
MISS ADELE AMIDST THE CORSETS
“Well, that’s that,” Miss Dee Pendency said, and Miss Adele, looking back over her shoulder, saw that it was. The strip of hooks had separated entirely from the rest of the corset. Dee held up the two halves, her big red slash mouth pulling in opposite directions.
“Least you can say it died in battle. Doing its duty.”
“Bitch, I’m on in ten minutes.”
“When an irresistible force like your ass . . .”
“Don’t sing.”
“Meets an old immovable object, like this shitty old corset . . . You can bet as sure as you liiiiiive!”
“It’s your fault. You pulled too hard.”
“Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give, SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE.”
“You pulled too hard.”
“Pulling’s not your problem.” Dee lifted her bony white midwestern leg up onto the counter, in preparation to put on a thigh-high. With a heel she indicated Miss Adele’s mountainous box of chicken and rice: “Real talk, baby.”
Miss Adele sat down on a grubby velvet stool and greeted her reflection. She was thickening and sagging, in all the same ways, in all the same places, as her father. Plus it was midwinter, her skin was ashy. She felt like some once-valuable piece of mahogany furniture, lightly dusted with cocaine. This final battle with her corset had set her wig askew. She was forty-six years old.
“Lend me yours.”
“Good idea. You can wear it on your arm.”
And tired to death, as the Italians say—tire
d to death. Especially sick of these kids, these “Millennials,” or whatever they were calling themselves. Always “on.” No backstage to any of them—only front of house. Wouldn’t know a sincere, sisterly friendship if it kicked down the dressing-room door and sat on their faces.
Miss Adele stood up, un-taped, put a furry deerstalker on her head and switched to her comfortable shoes. She removed her cape. Maybe stop with the cape? She had only to catch herself in the mirror at a bad angle, and there was Daddy, in his robes.
“The thing about undergarments,” Dee said, “is they can only do so much with the cards they’ve been dealt? Like Obama.”
“Stop talking.”
Miss Adele zipped herself into a cumbersome floor-length padded coat, tested—so the label claimed—by climate scientists in the Arctic.
“Looking swell, Miss Adele.”
“Am I trying to impress somebody? Only thing waiting for me at the stage door is mono. Tell Jake I went home.”
“He’s out front—tell him yourself!”
“I’m heading this way.”
“You know what they say about choosing between your ass and your face?”
Miss Adele put her shoulder to the fire door and heaved it open. She caught the punch line in the ice-cold stairwell.
“You should definitely choose one of those at some point.”
* * *
• • •
Aside from having to work there, Miss Adele tried not to mess much with the East Side. She’d had the same sunny rent-controlled studio apartment on Tenth Avenue and 23rd since ’93, and loved the way the West Side communicated with the water and the light, loved the fancy galleries and the big anonymous condos, the High Line funded by bankers and celebrities, the sensation of clarity and wealth.
But down here? Depressing. Even worse in the daylight. Crappy old buildings higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, ugly students, shitty pizza joints, delis, tattoo parlors. Nothing bored Miss Adele more than ancient queens waxing lyrical about the good old bad old days. At least the bankers never tried to rape you at knifepoint or sold you bad acid. And then once you got past the Village, everything stopped making sense. Fuck these little streets with their dumbass names! And then the logistics of googling one’s location—remove gloves, put on glasses, find the damn phone—were too much to contemplate in the current wind chill. Instead Miss Adele stalked violently up and down Rivington, cutting her eyes at any soul who dared look up. At the curb she stepped over a frigid pool of yellow fluid, three cardboard plates frozen within it. What a dump! Let the city pull down everything under East 6th, rebuild, number it, make it logical, pack in the fancy hotels—not just one or two but a whole bunch of them. Don’t half-gentrify—follow through. Stop preserving all this old shit. Miss Adele had a right to her opinions. Thirty years in a city gives you the right. And now that she was, at long last, no longer beautiful, her opinions were all she had. They were all she had left to give to people.
Whenever her disappointing twin brother, Devin, deigned to call her from his three-kids-and-a-labradoodle, don’t-panic-it’s-organic, liberal-negro-wet-dream-of-a-Marin-County fantasy existence, Miss Adele made a point of gathering up all her hard-won opinions and giving them to him good. “I wish he could’ve been mayor for ever. FOR-EVAH. I wish he was my boyfriend. I wish he was my daddy.” Or: “They should frack the hell out of this whole state. We’ll get rich, secede from the rest of you dope-smoking, debt-ridden assholes. You the ones dragging us all down.” Her brother accused Miss Adele of turning rightwards in old age. It would be more accurate to say that she was done with all forms of drama—politics included. That’s what she liked about gentrification, in fact: gets rid of all the drama.
And who was left, anyway, to get dramatic about? Every pretty boy she’d ever cared about had already moved to Brooklyn, Jersey, Fire Island, Provincetown, San Francisco or the grave. This simplified matters. Work, paycheck, apartment, the various lifestyle sections of The Times, Turner Classic Movies, Nancy Grace, bed. Boom. Maybe an old Golden Girls re-run. A little Downton. That was her routine and disruptions to it—like having to haul ass across town during a polar vortex to buy a new corset—were rare. Sweet Jesus, this cold! Unable to feel her toes, she stopped a shivering young couple in the street. British tourists, as it turned out; clueless, nudging each other and beaming up at her Adam’s apple with delight, like she was in their guidebook, right next to the Magnolia Bakery and the Naked Cowboy. They had a map, but without her glasses it was useless. They had no idea where they were. “Sorry! Stay warm!” they cried, and hurried off, giggling into their North Face jackets. Miss Adele tried to remember that her new thing was that she positively liked all the tourists and missed Bloomberg and loved Midtown and the Central Park nags and all the Prada stores and The Lion King and lining up for cupcakes wherever they happened to be located. Sure, why not, she was crazy about all that shit. So give those British kids your most winning smile. Sashay round the corner in your fur-cuffed Chelsea boots with the discreet heel. Once out of sight, though, it all fell apart; the smile, the straightness of her spine, everything. Even if you don’t mess with it—even when it’s not seven below—it’s a tough city. Takes a certain willfulness to keep your shit in a straight line. When did the effort start outweighing the pleasure? Part of the pleasure used to be precisely this: the buying of things. She used to love buying things! Lived for it! Now if she never bought another damn thing again she wouldn’t even—
Clinton Corset Emporium. No awning, just a piece of cardboard stuck in the window. As Miss Adele entered, a bell tinkled overhead—an actual bell, on a catch wire—and she found herself in a long, narrow room—a hallway, really—with a counter down the left-hand side and a curtained-off cubicle at the far end, for privacy. Clearly it lacked many of the things a girl expects from an emporium—background music, hangers, shelves, mirrors, lights, price tags, et cetera. Bras and corsets were everywhere, piled on top of each other in anonymous white cardboard boxes, towering up to the ceiling. They seemed to form the very walls of the place.
“Good afternoon,” said Miss Adele, daintily removing her gloves, finger by finger. “ I am looking for a corset. Could somebody help me?”
A radio was on; talk radio—incredibly loud. Some AM channel bringing the latest from a distant land, where the people talk from the back of their throats. One of those Easterny, Russiany places? Miss Adele was no linguist, and no geographer. She unzipped her coat, made a noise in the back of her own throat, and looked pointedly at the presumed owner of the place. He sat slumped behind the counter, listening to this radio with a tragic twist to his face, like one of those sad-sack cab drivers you see hunched over the wheel, permanently tuned in to the bad news from back home. And what the point of that was, Miss Adele would never understand. Turn that shit down! Keep your eyes on the road! Leave the place you left where you left it! Lord knows, the day Miss Adele stepped out of the godforsaken state of Florida was pretty much the last day that shithole ever crossed her mind.
Could he even see her? He was angled away, his head resting in one hand. Looked to be about Miss Adele’s age, but further gone: bloated face, about sixty pounds overweight, bearded, religious type, wholly absorbed by the radio. Meanwhile, somewhere back there, behind the curtain, Miss Adele could make out two women talking:
“She just turned fourteen. Why you don’t speak to the nice lady? She’s trying to help you. She just turned fourteen.”
“So she’s still growing. We gotta consider that. Wendy—can you grab me a Brava 32B?”
A scrap of an Asian girl appeared from behind the curtain, proceeded straight to the counter and vanished below it. Miss Adele turned back to the owner. He had his fists stacked like hot potatoes—upon which he rested his chin—and his head tilted in apparent appreciation of what Miss Adele would later describe as “the ranting,” for did it not penetrate every corner of that space? And was it not quite impossibl
e to ignore? She felt she had not so much entered a shop as some stranger’s spittle-filled mouth. RAGE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS, cried this radio—in whatever words it used—RIGHTEOUSNESS AND RAGE. Miss Adele crossed her arms in front of her chest, like a shield. Not this voice—not today. Not any day—not for Miss Adele. By the time she’d hit New York, thirty years earlier, she already knew how to avoid being turned into a pillar of salt, and was not in the least bit surprised to find herself spending forty days—or four years—in the wilderness (of Avenue A). And though she had learned, over two decades, that there was nowhere on earth entirely safe from the voices of rage and righteousness—not even the new New York—still Miss Adele had taken great care to organize her life in such a way that her encounters with them were as few as possible. (On Sundays, she did her groceries in a cut-off T-shirt that read THOU SHALT.) She may have been fully immersed, dunked in the local water, with her daddy’s hand on the back of her head and his blessing in her ear, but she’d leaped out of that shallow channel of water the first moment she was able. Was she to be ambushed, now, in a corset emporium?
“A corset,” she repeated, and raised her spectacular eyebrows. “Could do with a little help here?”
“WENDY,” yelled the voice behind the curtain, “could you see to our customer?”
The shopgirl sprung puppet-like, up from below, clutching a stepladder to her chest.
“Looking for Brava!” shouted the girl, turned her back on Miss Adele, opened the stepladder and began to climb it. Meanwhile, the owner shouted something at the woman behind the curtain, and the woman, adopting his tongue, shouted something back. The radio voice worked itself up into what sounded like apoplexy.
“It is customary, in retail—” Miss Adele began.
“Sorry—one minute,” said the girl, came down with a box under her arm, dashed right past Miss Adele and disappeared once more behind the curtain.
