by Zadie Smith
I let out a sort of ugly laugh as I said it, but I knew that nothing I could do in the present could ameliorate or change this fictional fact; no, all I could do was remember it, and tell myself I was remembering it—so that it wasn’t forgotten, although with the mental proviso that suffering has no purpose in reality. To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.
There’s a key scene, after my stoic maid has tidied lunch away, when Taylor and George and a load of other happy, young, rich people jump into a flashy speedboat that is leaving from the dock. Off they fly, whooping and smiling with their perfect American teeth. Meanwhile, we, the anxious folk at Film Forum, stay on the dock, in the foreground, where a lone radio sits, and we listen to this radio as the happy young people frolic in the distance. We hear that Shelley Winters has died in a lake, that the police think it’s murder, and they’re closing in on the perpetrator. Which means that everyone on that boat, including Elizabeth Taylor, will soon know that George Eastman, aka Montgomery Clift, is guilty as sin, or is guilty to some, perhaps ultimately unknowable, degree. I found myself clutching Scout’s hand, quietly weeping.
Later, on the way out of the cinema, Scout asked me if I instinctively sympathized with the rich and the happy. I said I didn’t understand the question. She said, I’ll put it another way: You instinctively sympathize with perpetrators instead of victims. Since that was less a question than a statement, all I could do was add a statement to her statement. I said, In our philosophy department at the university, we feel that, just as there are degrees of sin or error, there are degrees of sympathy. It’s not a zero-sum game, or it used not to be, in the past. Well, there’s your problem, Scout said. You’re two-faced, you’re looking the wrong way, and if you don’t watch out you’re going to find yourself beyond the pale.
She went off to catch the 1 train while I trudged back to my tower alone, making note of the fact that I’d be seeing no more films at the Forum for a spell, because it was closing for the summer so that a fourth screen could be built. That’s what I need, I thought as I walked. A fourth screen. If I had a fourth screen, no reality could get through the cracks at all, I would be able to live only in symbol, and then surely everything would be easier. I was at LaGuardia Place before I noticed that almost everyone on the sixth floor was angling their arrows upward, directly at my apartment, though I wasn’t even there. Montgomery Clift isn’t rich or happy. He’s guilty. I instinctively sympathize with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret.
In the current climate, a high-school student wrote to me:
Dear Professor,
I am a high-school English student in South Bend, Indiana. I am quite intrigued by your use of metaphor in your recent piece in Philosophy Today. But why did you choose to make the metaphor so obvious? And why would you not really take a stand (for or against) by specifically saying his name? And why would you choose to omit his name if you are taking a stand?
Thanks,
A High-School Student
I wrote back:
Dear High-School Student,
Have you seen that video? It’s a little like that. Some things are so obvious that subtle metaphor is impossible. In that video, for example, there was no point in being subtle about the state-funded violence inflicted on black people in this country: the only way was to show it explicitly. And when we saw all those people dancing in the foreground that was again the most obvious metaphor possible—i.e., while you’re watching these black people dance and entertain you, other black people are dying.
As to your other question, I guess it seems to me that some things are so low or evil or contemptible that they barely deserve a name. Giving them a name would be to honor them more than they deserve. See also “he-who-shall-not-be-named.”
Yours,
Professor
This did not particularly satisfy the high-school student, and I can see why. Apart from anything else, I was the ten million two hundred and sixth person to watch that video, so my opinions on it were easily discounted. And even the Lord himself called the Devil a variety of euphemistic names. Besides, teenagers can sniff out the truth. (The truth is, I didn’t want to be deported.) The next week, making no reference whatsoever to our previous exchange, the high-school student struck again:
Hey, Professor, it’s me, back to bother ya. My English teacher is having us write a prompt comparing certain eras of literature and what their authors would say in response to Hamlet’s Quintessence of Dust monologue. 99.9% of the authors are dead but you are very much alive. I have pasted the monologue below just in case you are not familiar with it. Thank you so much for your time!
I have of late,—but wherefore I know not,—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Thanks!
A High Schooler
I replied:
Dear High Schooler,
I’d say he’s having a quarter-life crisis.
Best,
Professor
PS I know it’s not much, but, on the other hand, as you say, almost everybody else is dead and I am very much alive.
I bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically, babbling like a couple of maniacs about a whole load of things: shame, ruin, public humiliation, the destruction of reputation—that immortal part of oneself—the contempt of one’s wife, one’s children, one’s colleagues, personal pathology, exposure, suicidal ideation, and all that jazz. I thought, Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things. “It’s like prison,” he said, not uncheerfully. “You don’t see anybody and you get a lot of writing done.”
If you’re wondering where he would be placed on a badness scale of one to ten, as I understand it he is, by general admission, hovering between a two and a three. He did not have “victims” so much as “annoyed parties.” What if he had had victims? Would I have talked to him then? But surely in that case, in an ideal world—after a trial in court—he would have been sent to a prison, or, if you have more enlightened ideas about both crime and punishment, to a therapeutic facility that helps people not to make victims of their fellow humans. Would I have visited him in prison? Probably not. I can’t drive, and besides I have never volunteered for one of those programs in which sentimental people, under the influence of the Gospels, consider all humans to be essentially victims of one another and of themselves and so go to visit even the worst offenders, bringing them copies of the Gospels and also sweaters they’ve knitted. But that wasn’t the case here. He was beyond the pale, I wasn’t. We said our good-byes and I returned to my tower, keeping away from the window for the afternoon, not being in the mood for either signs or arrows. I didn’t know where I was on the scale back then (last week). I was soon to find out. Boy, was I soon to find out. But right now, in the present I’m telling you about, I saw through a glass, darkly. Like you, probably.
Like a lot of people.
Then I made a mistake. This was yesterday. If you’re anything like Scout, you probably heard about it already. (Scout e-mailed me fifteen minutes after it happened to commiserate and also to alert me to the fact that she would not be e-mailing me anymore.) How it happened was: one of our poets said something beyond the pale. He is one of the newer poets—the musical kind—and so his words tend to go everywhere, floating between our towers, rising above the city. People were appalled, furious. All arrows pointed to him. And I said, Look, politically you’re absolutely within your rights to be angry, but existentially you’re wrong—existentially this particular poet just wants us all to be free. As a matter of fact, he’s not even a poet at all, he’s a philosopher. Yes, I said it: He’s one of us. But then the poet himself said that philosophy makes nothing happen and also that he happened to quite like the Devil—whom we sometimes call “the adversary” and sometimes nothing at all—and then he said that he was glad that he-who-shall-not-be-named had come to power, because he admired his energy, his inability to distinguish between past, present, and future, and soon after that the poet got canceled and, soon after that, me, too.
GRAND UNION
Having screamed at my six-year-old to the point that she threw herself down on her bed and wept, I felt the need to get out of the house and see my mother. She was dead, and in heaven, but for convenience’s sake we met outside the chicken spot at the top of Ladbroke Grove. It was, in the moment, the blackest place I could think of. We sat together on the steps of the Golden Dragon. Mandem and Galdem passed us by, heading inside for their stir-fry and their Szechuan. Mother and I regarded each other. For being dead, she looked pretty fantastic. Death could not wither her. It was merely one of a long line of things that could not wither her. She wore her dreds wrapped just right, high and impressive. Never ashy, her darkness shone. She looked the spit of Queen Nanny on the five-hundred-dollar bill.
That is not a coincidence, she said, when I mentioned the resemblance. In death, I have become Nanny of the Maroons. That is, I have always been she, but now it is revealed. Figures, I said, and she admonished me for using an Americanism and asked if I was still living in those devilish parts. I had to confess I was, but had come all this way, across an ocean, just to converse with her spirit. Well, you’re Asante now, she said, and I was glad to hear it, having always suspected as much. Still, I kissed my teeth, to make clear that, like all warrior daughters, I wanted more from my warrior mother, much more, and would never get enough. My mother kissed her teeth in turn, signifying that she understood.
Together, we surveyed the scene. All around us was carnival detritus: Red Stripe cans and abandoned yellow crusts of lamb patty and broken whistles and glittering press-on face jewelry and filthy feathers and friendly cards from the police, describing proper stop-and-search procedure, informing us of the limits of their powers. Oh, carnival! While we dance in the August sun it’s wonderful, it’s sticky with joy, it’s the sweet flypaper of life, but then night arrives, the police hurry us home, we survey the devastated streets, we think surely we’re not going to put ourselves through all this shit again next year? (Nanny has gone to carnival every year since 1972.) Or maybe only I think that. (The borders between me and everybody else have never been clear to me.) Maybe all cycles must be respected.
The women in our family, announced my mother, do not recognize the women in our family. Well, that seemed cheap and tautological to me so I went inside to get some chicken. Though it’s a Chinese place, it empathizes with its clientele, and that day they were offering inauthentic jerk with rice and pea and two plastic forks. I watched the daughter of the establishment sigh as the mother of the establishment critiqued her Styrofoam-box-closing technique in rapid Cantonese. And I once knew a girl called Hermione whose mother would never sit down to eat. She went straight from cooking to cleaning and if anyone tried to get her to the table she said oh, no, no, no, I’m fine with my little plate here, and then she’d clean up after everybody and pick at that plate like a bird, one bite every half-hour or so, till it was stone cold and a skin had grown over it, at which point she’d scrape whatever was left into the bin and wash up the little plate, too. It was her way of showing love and it was so exotic to me—I was in awe of it. I went to her funeral. Seven hundred people stood up as one to chant: “She always thought of others, never of herself!” But you can only really know the blood you’re swimming in.
When I got back outside, my mother had assumed the position of an old Obeah woman: legs wide apart, skirts falling in between, toes splayed like a duck. She still looked fantastic. Many had been the time she’d eaten the food straight off my plate before I’d even raised my plastic fork—but I could see why the Arawaks once flocked to her. If you’re on the edge of extinction nothing less than Nanny will do. Yet you can’t sing a note, I said to my mother—I was finally getting to the point—and the weird thing is my daughter sings with soul, truly with soul, and I suppose I’m worried about what it all means. Here my mother and all the other Obeah women in the neighborhood paused to laugh long and loud at the way worries will sprout on wet, fertile ground yet rarely care to flower in the kind of drought conditions they themselves had known.
Now, if you asked Billie Holiday, my mother said, with her eyes closed, she would tell you: No one sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love.” That’s not a defense of anything, clarified my mother, that’s just a true fact. Although I’m not a Billie fan myself, daughter, as you know. Rodigan is my musical love, then, now and forever!
I stood up. I told her I loved her. I wandered over to the Grand Union Canal which may well be that river of milk which all the daughters of the world are looking for whenever they go to the hardware store for milk, even though they know full well there’s no milk at the hardware store. Hardware! Americanisms everywhere. But also love, and recognition of history, and the inconceivably broad shadow cast by the Blue Mountains, on top of which you’ll find my Maroon grandfather, never dying, undead, totally undead, living eternally among his chickens and goats, his parcels of contested land, his dozens and dozens and dozens of out-the-house children, among whom a few bold girls now make their way down the shady side of the mountain, following the tread of my mudder, and her mudder, and her mudder, moving with necessary speed, not always holding each other’s hands.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tash, Devorah, Chris, Dave, Georgia, Jonathan, Ann, Dev, Cressida, Ben, Darryl and Simon all made these stories better, in one way or another. Thank you.
Thank you to Nick for reading the original “Grand Union” and sending me on a different course, upriver.
And thanks to my mother, Yvonne, for reminding me of Kelso Cochrane at the right moment.
PERMISSIONS
The publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce the following extracts:
This page: Frank O’Hara, excerpt from “Yesterday Down at the Canal” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 2014 by Maureen O’Hara, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com.
This page: “Something’s Gotta Give,” words and music by Johnny Mercer, 1954.
This page: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1903).
This page: “It Is No Gift I Tender” by A. E. Housman, from A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman (Penguin Classics, 2010).
This page: Extract—“I Dreamed a Dream” from Boublil and Schönberg’s Les Misérables. Music and lyrics by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer and Jean-Marc Natel. Publisher: Alain Boublil Music Limited/Editions Musicales Alain Boublil. Copyright © 1980, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 2012. Lyrics printed with permission.
This page: “Ash Wednesday” by T. S. Eliot, from Collected Poems
1909–1962 (Faber & Faber Ltd, 1963).
This page: “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” by Toni Cade Bambara, in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg (W. W. Norton & Company, 1980).
This page: “A Humanist View” by Toni Morrison, delivered at Portland State University’s Oregon Public Speakers Collection, “Black Studies Center public dialogue, Part II,” 30 May 1975.
This page: Patrick Digby quoted in the Daily Express, 21 May 1959 (Headline: YOUTHS GO HOME AFTER 50 HOURS).
This page: Francis Ponge, La Table, © Éditions Gallimard.
This page: Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Routledge, UK, 2004) and Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).
Acknowledgment is also due to the following publications, in which some of these stories first appeared:
“The Lazy River” was first published in The New Yorker, 18 December 2017.
“Just Right” was first published in Granta magazine, 6 April 2013.
“Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” was first published in The Paris Review, Spring 2014.
“Escape from New York” was first published in The New Yorker, 8 June 2015.
“Big Week” was first published in The Paris Review, Summer 2014.
“Meet the President!” was first published in The New Yorker, 12 August 2013.
