by Zadie Smith
I’d been bold and walked into the church at the end of one of her rehearsals. She was sitting in a plastic chair taking off her tap shoes, while Mr. Booth was still in his corner, messing around with the piece—“Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine”—speeding it up and slowing it down, playing it now as jazz, now as ragtime.
“I’m busy.”
“You could come now.”
“I’m busy now.”
Mr. Booth packed his music into his bag and wandered over. Tracey’s nose shot in the air, sniffing out praise.
“Well, that was smashing,” he said.
“Was it good, really?”
“Smashing. You dance like a dream.”
He smiled and patted her on the shoulder, and a flush of happiness passed over her face. It was the kind of praise I got from my own father daily, no matter what I did, but for Tracey it must have been very rare, for hearing it seemed to change everything, including how she felt about me, in that moment. As Mr. Booth made his way slowly out of the church, she smiled, slung her dance bag over her shoulder and said: “Let’s go.”
• • •
The scene comes early in the film. A group of men sits on the sandy ground, they seem apathetic, depressed. These, the sultan tells Al, are the musicians, the Africans, whom nobody can understand, for they speak an unknown language. But Al wants to talk to them and he tries everything: English, French, Spanish, Italian, even Yiddish. Nothing doing. Then a brainwave. Hi dee hi dee hi dee hi! The call of Cab Calloway, and the Africans, recognizing it, leap to their feet and cry out the response: Ho dee ho dee ho dee ho! Excited, Cantor starts blacking up, right then and there, painting his face with a burned piece of cork, leaving only those rolling eyes, the elastic mouth.
“What is this? I don’t want to watch this!”
“Not this bit. Just wait, Trace, please. Wait.”
I took the remote control from her and asked that she sit back on the settee. Now Al was singing to the Africans, a verse that seemed to swing time itself, flashing far ahead, to a moment when these Africans would no longer be as they were presently, a time a thousand years in the future when they would set the tempo the world wants to dance to, in a place called Harlem. Hearing this news, the delighted musicians stood up and started dancing and singing, on a raised platform, in the town square. The sultana and her advisers look down from a balcony, the Arabians look up from the street. The Arabs are Hollywood Arabs, white, in Aladdin costumes. The Africans are black Americans dressed up—loincloths and feathers, outlandish headdresses—and they play primitive musical instruments, in a parody of their future Cotton Club incarnations: trombones made of actual bone, clarinets formed from hollowed-out sticks, that sort of thing. And Cantor, true to the origins of his name, is the bandleader, with a whistle round his neck, which he blows to end a solo or usher a performer off stage. The song reached its chorus, he told them that swing was here to stay, that there was no avoiding it, and so they must choose their partner—and dance. Then Cantor blew his whistle and the wonderful thing happened. It was a girl—a girl arrived. I made Tracey sit as close to the screen as she could, I didn’t want there to be any doubt about it. I looked across: I saw her lips part in surprise, as mine had done the first time I watched it, and then I knew that she could see what I saw. Oh, the nose was different—this girl’s nose was normal and flat—and there was, in her eyes, no hint of Tracey’s brand of cruelty. But the heart-shaped face, the adorable puffy cheeks, the compact body and yet the long limbs, these were all Tracey. The physical resemblance was so strong and yet she didn’t dance like Tracey. Her arms wheelbarrowed as she moved, her legs flew back and forth, she was a hoofer, not an obsessed technician. And she was funny: walking on her toes or freeze-framing for a second in an absurd comic attitude, on one leg, arms in the air, like the hood ornament of an expensive car. Dressed like the rest—grass skirt, feathers—but nothing could diminish her.
For the big finish the girl came back out on stage and joined all those Americans dressed like Africans, and Cantor himself, and they all stood still in a line and leaned forward at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. It was a move back from the future: a year later we were all trying it ourselves in the playground, having just seen Michael Jackson in a music video doing the exact same thing. And for weeks after that video first aired Tracey and me and many other kids in the playground tried our best to imitate the move, but it was impossible, no one could do it, we all fell flat on our faces. At the time I didn’t know how it was done. Now I know. In the video, Michael used wires and, a few years later—when he wanted to achieve the effect live on stage—he wore a pair of “anti-gravity” shoes, they had a slot in the heel that engaged with a peg in the stage, and he was their co-inventor, the patent is in his name.
The Africans of Ali Baba nailed their own shoes to the floor.
Six
At Aimee’s hotel we got into a series of SUVs. It was the full circus on that first trip: her children were with us, and their nanny, Estelle, and Judy of course, plus the three other PAs, a PR girl, Granger, a French architect I’d never seen before in my life, a star-struck woman from the Department for International Development, a journalist and photographer from Rolling Stone, and a man called Fernando Carrapichano, our project manager. I watched the sweating bellboys in their white linen uniforms heaving bags into trunks, helping everyone to their seats, and wondered what village they came from. I’d expected to ride with Aimee, in her car, to debrief her—for what it was worth—on my week’s reconnaissance, but when Aimee saw Lamin her eyes widened and the first thing she said to him after “Hello” was “You should ride with me.” I was directed to the second car, with Carrapichano. He and I were to pass the time together, so we were told, “ironing out the details.”
The drive back to the village was uncanny. All the difficulties I had come to expect from that journey were now absent, as when in a dream the dreamer is lucid and able to manipulate everything around her. No checkpoints, not any longer, and no pot-holed roads bringing us to a standstill, and instead of the enervating, stifling heat, a perfectly air-conditioned twenty-one-degree environment and an ice-cold bottle of water in my hand. Our convoy, which included a pair of jeeps filled with government officials and a police motorcade, moved swiftly along streets that seemed at times to have been artificially cleared, at others artificially populated—lined with flag-waving children, like a stage set—and we took an odd, elongated route, weaving through the electrified tourist strip and then on through a series of suburban enclaves I had not realized existed, where huge, unfinished houses, blighted with rebar, struggled to rise up from behind their fortress walls. Under the influence of this state of unreality, I kept seeing versions of my mother’s face everywhere, in young girls running down the street, in old women selling fish in the markets, and once in a young man hanging off the side of a minibus. When we got to the ferry it was empty but for us and our cars. I wondered what Lamin made of it all.
• • •
Carrapichano I didn’t know very well and the only time we’d spoken before I’d made a fool of myself. It was on the plane to Togo, six months earlier, back when Togo was still on the shortlist, before Aimee had offended that tiny nation by suggesting, in an interview, that its government did “nothing for their people.” “What’s it like?” I’d asked, leaning over him, looking out of the porthole window, and meaning, I must admit, “Africa.”
“I have not been,” he said coldly, without turning round.
“But you practically live here—I read your résumé.”
“No. Senegal, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, Ethiopia, yes—Togo, never.”
“Oh, well, you know what I mean.”
He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: “If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?”
Now I tried to make amends, small talk, but he was busy wit
h a huge sheaf of papers, on which I spotted graphs I couldn’t follow, sets of statistics from the IMF. I felt a little sorry for him, stuck with us and our ignorance, he was so far outside his natural milieu. I knew he was forty-six, had a Ph.D., was an economist by training, with a background in international development, and that like Miriam he’d worked at Oxfam for many years: she was the one who’d recommended him to us in the first place. He’d spent most of the nineties managing aid projects in East and West Africa, in remote villages without television, and one interesting consequence of this—for me, anyway—was that he really did not have a very clear idea who Aimee was, beyond having registered her name, vaguely, as a phenomenon of his youth. Now he was having to spend all of his time with her, and therefore with people like Mary-Beth, Aimee’s ditzy second assistant, whose job consisted entirely of sending e-mails, dictated by Aimee, to other people, and then reading out the replies. Or grim Laura, assistant number three, who reigned over Aimee’s muscle aches, toiletries and nutrition, and happened to believe that the moon landings were staged. He had to listen to Judy read the star signs out each morning and plan her day accordingly. Amid the insanity of Aimee’s world, I should have been the closest thing he had to an ally, but every conversation we attempted went awry somehow, the way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn’t doubt was the real one, but which I couldn’t “speak to,” to use a favorite phrase of his. Aimee, equally helpless before a graph, liked him because he was Brazilian and handsome, with rich, curly, black hair and lovely gold glasses that made him look like an actor playing an economist in a movie. But it was obvious from the start there would be trouble for them ahead. Aimee’s way of communicating her ideas relied on a shared understanding—of Aimee herself, of her “legend”—and “Fern,” as she called him, had no context for any of that. He was excellent at ironing out the details: architectural plans, government negotiations, land contracts—all the various practical considerations. But when it came to speaking directly with Aimee about the project itself—which for her was primarily a personal and emotional undertaking—he was out of his depth.
“But what does it mean when she is saying to me: ‘Let’s make it kind of an illuminated ethos’?”
He pushed his glasses up his handsome nose and examined his many notes, the result, I presumed, of having dutifully transcribed every little piece of nonsense that had fallen from Aimee’s mouth during their eight-hour flight together. He held the paper up as if it might resolve itself into sense if only he stared at it long enough.
“Maybe I misunderstand? In what way can a school be ‘illuminated’?”
“No, no, it’s a reference to an album of hers: Illuminated. From ’97? She thinks of it as her most “positive” album, so the lyrics are, well, they’re sort of like: Hey, girls, go get your dreams, blah blah, you’re strong, blah blah, never give up. That sort of thing? So she’s basically saying: I want this to be an empowering school for girls.”
He looked bewildered.
“But why not just say this?”
I patted him gently on his shoulder: “Fernando, don’t worry—it’s going to be fine.”
“I should listen to this album?”
“Honestly, I don’t think that would help.”
• • •
Up ahead, in the next car, I could see Aimee leaning out of the passenger seat with her arm over the door, happily engaged with every wave or whistle or scream of delight from the street, which were, I felt pretty certain, not responses to Aimee herself but to this shiny cavalcade of SUVs rolling through rural areas in which not one in two hundred owned a car. In the village, out of curiosity, I often commandeered the phones of the young teachers, put my earphones in and listened to the thirty or so songs they tended to play on rotation, some of which came free with their minutes, others—especially beloved—they had spent precious credit to download. Hip-hop, R&B, soca, reggae, ragga, grime, dub-step, hi-life—ringtone scraps of the whole glorious musical diaspora could be heard, but rarely any white artists, and never Aimee. Now I watched her smile and wink at the many soldiers, who, relieved of their usual activity, stood aimlessly at the sides of the road, guns by their side, watching us pass. And wherever there was music, wherever kids were dancing, Aimee would clap her hands to get their attention and imitate their moves as best she could while still sitting down. This element of roadside rolling chaos that so affected and disturbed me, like a zoetrope unfurled and filled with every form of human drama—women feeding children, carrying them, talking to them, kissing them, hitting them, men talking, fighting, eating, working, praying, animals living and dying, wandering down the street bleeding from their necks, boys running, walking, dancing, pissing, shitting, girls whispering, laughing, frowning, sitting, sleeping—all of this delighted Aimee, she leaned so far out of that window I thought she might fall right through her beloved matrix and into it. But then she was always happiest in ungovernable crowds. Until her insurance company stopped her doing it she often crowd-surfed, and it never frightened her, as it did me, to be suddenly swarmed by people in an airport or the lobby of a hotel. Meanwhile the only thing I could see through my tinted window did not appear to surprise or alarm her, and when I made some reference to it in the few minutes we were together, standing on the gangway, watching our cars roll on to the spookily empty ferry and her children run delightedly up the cast-iron steps, to the upper deck, she turned to me and snapped: “Jesus Christ, if you’re gonna be shocked by every fucking sign of poverty you see here, this is going to be a mighty long trip. You’re in Africa!”
Just as if I’d asked why it was light outside and been told: “It’s daytime!”
Seven
All we had was her name, we found it in the credits. Jeni LeGon. We had no idea where she’d come from, if she was alive or dead, if she’d made any other films, we had only these four minutes from Ali Baba—well, I had them. If Tracey wanted to watch them she had to come round, which she began to do, every now and then, like Narcissus bending over a pool of water. I understood it wouldn’t take her long to learn the whole routine—excepting the impossible lean—but I wasn’t going to give her the video to take home, I knew better than that, I knew when I had collateral. And I had begun to spot LeGon here and there, bit parts in movies I’d seen many times. There she was as a maid to Ann Miller, wrestling with a baby pug, and as a tragic mulatto, dying in the arms of Cab Calloway, and once more a maid, helping Betty Hutton get dressed. These discoveries, widely spaced, sometimes many months apart, became a reason to call Tracey, and even if her mother answered Tracey would come round right away, with no hesitation or excuses. She sat inches from the television screen, ready to point out this or that moment of action or expression, an emotion passing over Jeni’s face, a variation in one step or another, and interpreting everything she saw with that sharpness of insight I felt I lacked, that I considered, at this point, Tracey’s possession alone. A gift for seeing that seemed to have its only outlet and expression here, in my living room, in front of my television, and which no teacher ever saw, and no exam ever managed to successfully register or even note, and of which, perhaps, these memories are the only true witness and record.
• • •
One thing she failed to notice, and I didn’t want to tell her: my parents had broken up. I only knew it myself because my mother told me it was so. They still lived in the same flat and slept in the same room. Where else could they go? Real divorces were for people who had lawyers and new places to live. There was also the question of my mother’s capabilities. We all three knew that in divorces the father left, but my father could not leave, there was no question of that. Who, in his absence, would tape up my knee when I fell, or remember when my medicine was to be taken, or calmly comb the nits out of my hair? Who would come to me when I had my night terrors? Who would wash my stinking, yellow sheets the next morning? I don’t mean that my mother
didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time left for anything else, there’s no time to go to the park or get ice cream, no time to put a child to bed, no time to listen to the teary recounting of a nightmare. No, my father could not leave.
One morning when I was brushing my teeth my mother walked into the bathroom, sat on the rim of our avocado bathtub and euphemistically outlined the new arrangement. At first I could hardly understand her, she seemed be taking a very long time to get to the point of whatever she really wanted to say, speaking of child-psychology theories, and “places in Africa” where children were raised not by their parents but “by a village,” and other matters I either didn’t understand or didn’t care about, but finally she pulled me to her, hugged me very tightly and said, “Your dad and me—we’re going to live as brother and sister.” I can remember thinking this was the most perverse thing I’d ever heard: I was to be left an only child, while my parents became siblings to each other. My father’s initial reaction must have been similar, because for several days after that it was warfare in the flat, all-out warfare, and I had to sleep with two pillows pressed to my ears. But when he at last understood that she was not joking, that she would not change her mind, he fell into a depression. He began to spend whole weekends on the sofa, watching television, while my mother kept to the kitchen and to her high stool, busy with the homework for her degree. I went to dance class alone. I ate my tea with one or the other of them, no longer with both.
A little while after my mother’s announcement my father made a baffling decision: he went back to delivering the post. It had taken him ten years to become a Delivery Office Manager but in his sadness he read Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and this novel had convinced him that he’d be better off doing “honest labor,” as he put it—and have the rest of his days free to “get the education he never had”—than work at a soulless desk job that used up all his time. It was the kind of impractical, high-principled action that my mother usually appreciated, and the timing of the announcement did not seem, to me, accidental. But if winning her back was his plan it didn’t work: he rose once again each morning at three and returned at one in the afternoon, often ostentatiously reading some sociological textbook nicked from my mother’s shelves, but although my mother respectfully asked after his morning’s work and occasionally after his reading, she did not fall back in love with him. After a while they stopped talking to each other altogether. The weather in the flat changed. In the past I had always had to wait for one of the rare gaps in my parents’ decade-long argument, into which I would then try to insert myself. Now I could speak without interruption, if I wanted, to either of them, but it was already too late. In the fast-forward style of city childhoods, they were no longer the most important people in my life. No, I really didn’t care what my parents thought of me any longer. Only my friend’s judgment counted, now more than ever, and sensing this, I suspect, more and more she chose to withhold it.
