by Zadie Smith
He looked down, began his defense. My mother didn’t believe a word of it, and for the next few minutes I couldn’t hear a thing either of them said, there was only my mother, arguing with the television. So I’m a slave to the rhythm, he said, and smiled, though he looked bewildered, desperate to change the subject, and Oprah let him change it and the conversation moved on. My mother walked out of the room. After a while I got bored myself and switched it off.
• • •
I was eighteen. My mother and I never lived together again after that year, and already we were unsure how to relate to each other in our new incarnations: two adult women occupying, for the moment, the same space. Were we mother and daughter still? Friends? Sisters? Flatmates? We had different schedules, didn’t see much of each other, but I worried I’d outstayed my welcome, like a show that goes on too long. Most days I went to the library, tried to revise, while she worked each morning as a volunteer, at a center for troubled youth, and, in the evenings, at a Black and Asian women’s refuge. I don’t say she was not sincere in this work, and good at it too, but it’s also the case that both commitments look impressive on your CV if you happen to be standing for election as a local councilor. I’d never seen her so busy. She seemed to be all over the neighborhood at once, involved in everything, and everybody agreed that divorce suited her, she looked younger than ever: I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age. I didn’t often get down the street in her ward now without someone coming up to thank me “for all your mother is doing for us” or to ask me to ask her if she had any idea about how to start an after-school club for the newly arrived Somali children or what local space might be appropriate for a cycling-proficiency class. She hadn’t been elected to anything, not yet, but round our way the people had already crowned her.
One important aspect of her campaign was the idea to turn the old bike shed on the estate into a “community meeting space,” which brought her into conflict with Louie and his crew, who used the shed for their own activities. My mother told me later that he sent two young men round to the flat to intimidate her, but she “knew their mothers,” and was not afraid, and they left without winning the argument. I can believe it. I helped her paint the place a vivid yellow and went with her around the local businesses, looking for unwanted stackable chairs. Entry was set at a quid and covered some basic refreshments, Kilburn Books sold relevant literature from a trestle table in the corner. It opened in April. Every Friday at six o’clock speakers appeared, at my mother’s invitation, all kinds of eccentric local people: spoken-word poets, political activists, drug counselors, an unaccredited academic who wrote self-published books about suppressed historical conspiracies; a brash Nigerian businessman who lectured us about “black aspirations”; a quiet Guyanese nurse, evangelical about shea butter. Many Irish speakers were invited, too—as a mark of respect toward that original, fast-fading local population—but my mother could be tin-eared about the struggles of other tribes and did not hesitate to give lofty introductions (“Wherever we fight for freedom, the fight is the same!”) to shifty-looking gangsters who pinned tricolors to the back wall and passed round IRA collection buckets at the end of their speeches. Subjects that seemed to me historically obscure and distant from our situation—the twelve tribes of Israel, the story of Kunta Kinte, anything to do with ancient Egypt—were the most popular, and I was often sent over to the church on these occasions to beg the deacon for extra chairs. But when speakers were concerned with the more prosaic aspects of our everyday lives—local crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, academic failure—then they could count only on the few old Jamaican ladies who came whatever the subject, who came really for the tea and biscuits. But there was no way for me to get out of any of it, I had to go to it all, even the schizophrenic who walked into the room carrying foot-high piles of notes—held together with elastic bands and organized according to some system known only to him—and spoke to us with great passion about the racist fallacy of evolution that dared connect Sacred African Man to the base and earthly monkey when in fact he, Sacred African Man, was descended from pure light, that is, from the angels themselves, whose existence was somehow proved—I forget exactly how—by the pyramids. Sometimes my mother spoke: on those nights the room was packed. Her subject was pride, in all its forms. We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us.
One day she suggested that I speak. Maybe a young person could reach the young people more easily. I think she was genuinely confused that her own speeches, though popular, had not yet stopped the girls getting pregnant or the boys smoking weed or dropping out of school or going on the rob. She gave me a number of possible topics, none of which I knew anything about, and when I said as much she got exasperated with me: “The problem with you is you’ve never known struggle!” We settled into a long row. She attacked the “soft” subjects I’d chosen to study, the “inferior” colleges I’d applied to, the “lack of ambition,” as she saw it, that I had inherited from the other side of my family. I walked out. Tramped up and down the high road for a bit, smoking fags, before submitting to the inevitable and heading to my father’s. Mercy was long gone, there had been no one since, he was living alone once more and seemed to me stricken, sadder than I’d ever known him. His working hours—which still began each morning before dawn—were a new kind of problem for him: he didn’t know what to do with his afternoons. A family man by instinct, he was completely lost without one, and I wondered if his other children, his white children, ever came to see him. I didn’t ask—I was embarrassed to ask. The thing I feared was no longer my parents’ authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets. I saw enough of all this in my father already. He’d become one of those people he’d once liked to tell me about, that he met on his route and had always pitied, old boys in their house slippers watching the afternoon shows until the evening shows began, seeing hardly anyone, doing nothing. Once I came round and Lambert turned up, but after a brief flurry of cheeriness between them, they fell into the dark and paranoid moods of middle-aged men abandoned by their women, made worse by the fact that Lambert had neglected to bring any relief in the form of weed. The TV went on and they sat before it in silence for the rest of the afternoon, like two drowning men clinging to the same piece of driftwood, while I tidied up around them.
Sometimes I had the idea that complaining to my father about my mother might be a form of entertainment for us both, something we could share, but this never went well, because I severely underestimated how much he continued to love and admire her. When I told him about the meeting space, and of being forced to speak there, he said: “Ah, well, that sounds like a very interesting project. Something for the whole community.” He looked wistful. How happy it would have made him, even now, to be schlepping chairs across the road, adjusting the microphone, shushing the audience in preparation for my mother to come on stage!
Two
A stack of posters, not photocopied but drawn, each one, by hand, announcing a talk—“The History of Dance”—were placed around the estate, where, like all public notices, they were soon defaced in creative and obscene ways, one piece of graffiti spawning a response, and then a response to the response. I was tacking one up in a walkway on Tracey’s estate when I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders—a short, hard squeeze—turned around and there she was. She looked at the poster but didn’t mention it. She reached for my new glasses, put them on her own face and laughed at her reflection in a warped piece of sheet mirror stuck up next to the noticeboard. Laughed again when she offered me a fag and I dropped it, and then again at the ratty espadrilles I was wearing, stolen f
rom my mother’s wardrobe. I felt like some old diary she’d found in a drawer: a reminder of a more innocent and foolish time in her life. We walked together across the yard and sat on the grass verge at the back of her estate, facing St. Christopher’s. She nodded at the door and said: “That weren’t real dancing, though. I’m on a whole other level now.” I didn’t doubt it. I asked how her revision was going and learned that at her kind of school there were no exams, all of that had finished at fifteen. Where I was in chains, she was free! Now everything depended on an “end of school revue” that “most of the big agents come to,” and to which I was also grudgingly invited (“I could try and ask for you”), and this was where the best of the dancers got picked up, found representation and began auditioning for the autumn run of West End shows or the regional traveling troupes. She preened about it. I thought she had become more boastful generally, especially on the subject of her father. He was building a huge family home for her, so she claimed, in Kingston, and soon she’d move there with him, and from there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to New York, where she’d have the chance to perform on Broadway, where they really appreciated dancers, not like here. Yes, she’d work in New York but live in Jamaica, in the sun with Louie, and finally be rid of what I remember she called “this miserable fucking country”—as if it were only an accident that she had ever lived here in the first place.
But a few days later I saw Louie, in a completely different context, it was in Kentish Town. I was on a bus, on the top deck, I spotted him in the street, with his arm around a very pregnant woman, the kind we used to call a “home girl,” with big gold earrings in the shape of pyramids, wearing a lot of chains and with her hair greased and frozen in a pattern of kiss-curls and spikes. They were laughing and joking together, and kissing every now and then. She was pushing a buggy with a child in it, of about two years old, and holding the hand of a seven- or eight-year-old. My first thought was not “Who are these children?” But: “What’s Louie doing in Kentish Town? Why’s he walking down Kentish Town High Street like he lives there?” I really couldn’t think beyond a one-mile radius. Only when they were out of sight did I consider all the occasions Tracey had lied or bluffed about his absence—she stopped crying about it when she was very young—without ever guessing how close by he likely was the whole time. Not at the school concert or the birthday or the show or the sports day or even simply in the house, for dinner, because he was tending, supposedly, to an eternally sick mother in south Kilburn, or dancing with Michael Jackson, or thousands of miles away in Jamaica, building Tracey’s dream home. But that one-sided conversation on the grassy verge had confirmed for me that we could no longer speak of intimate things. Instead, when I got home, I told my mother what I’d seen. She was in the middle of trying to cook dinner, always a stressful moment of the day, and she became annoyed with me, with a speed and heat out of all proportion. I couldn’t understand it, I knew she hated Louie—so why defend him? Slamming pots about, speaking passionately of Jamaica, and not present-day Jamaica but Jamaica in the 1800s, the 1700s, and beyond—present-day Kentish Town was pushed aside as an irrelevance—telling me about breeders and bucks, of children torn from their mother’s arms, of repetition and return, through the centuries, and the many missing men in her bloodline, including her own father, all of them ghost men, never seen close up or clearly. I drew back from her as she ranted, until I was pressed up against the warmth of the oven door. I didn’t know what to do with all the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said.
• • •
A week later somebody set a fire in the old bike shed, the night before I was due to speak, reducing it to a black box of carbon. We toured it with the firemen. It smelled terribly of all the plastic chairs that had been piled up against the walls and were now melted and melded together. I was relieved, it felt like an act of God, although all signs pointed closer to home, and soon enough Louie’s boys reclaimed their space. The day after the fire, when my mother and I were out and about together, a few well-meaning people crossed the street to offer their sympathies or try to engage her on the subject, but she pursed her lips and stared at them as if they had said something coarse or personal. Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don’t think my mother would have been very useful in a real revolution, not once the talking and the meetings were over and the actual violence began. There was a sense in which she couldn’t quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew—from Lambert only—that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it “that nonsense,” or sometimes “those ridiculous people,” because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her. Louie as a sociological phenomenon or a political symptom or a historical example or simply a person raised in the same grinding rural poverty she’d known herself—a person whom she recognized, and I believe intimately understood—that Louie my mother could deal with. But the look of utter forsakenness on her face as the firemen led her to a far corner of the shed to show her the spot where the fire had been started, by someone she knew personally, had tried to reason with, but who, despite this, had chosen to violently destroy what she’d lovingly created—this look is something I’ve never forgotten. Louie did not even need to do it personally, and equally did not have to hide that he had ordered it done. On the contrary he wanted it known: it was a show of power. At first I thought this fire had destroyed something essential in my mother. But a few weeks later she regrouped, convincing the vicar to let her move her community meetings to the back room of the church. The incident even turned out to be useful, in a way, for her campaign: it was the visual, literal confirmation of the “urban nihilism” of which she had often spoken and partly built her campaign around. Not long after, she became our local councilor. And here the second act of her life, the political act—which I’m sure she considered the true act of her life—began.
Three
The build finished with the rainy season, in October. To celebrate, an event was planned in the new yard, half a football pitch of cleared ground. We weren’t involved in the planning—the village action committee did that—and Aimee didn’t arrive till the morning of the same day. But I’d been on the ground for a fortnight, and had grown worried about the logistics, the sound system, the size of the crowd, and the conviction, shared by everybody—children and adults, the Al Kalo, Lamin, Hawa, all her friends—that the President himself was going to make an appearance. The source of this rumor was hard to determine. Everybody had heard it from someone else, it wasn’t possible to get any further information, only winks and smiles, as the assumption was that we, “the Americans,” were behind the visit anyway. “You ask me if he is coming?” said Hawa, laughing, “but don’t you know yourself?” The rumor and the scale of the event quickly fed upon each other: first three local nursery schools would participate in the parade, then five, then fifteen. First it was the President coming, then also the leaders of Senegal, Togo and Benin, and so to the mothers’ drumming circle were added half a dozen griots playing their long-necked kora and a police marching band. We started to hear that communities from several other villages were being bussed in and that a famous Senegalese DJ would play after the formal events. Running underneath all this noisy planning there was something else, a low rumble of suspicion and resentment, which I couldn’t hear at first but which Fernando recognized at once. For no one knew exactly how much money Aimee’s people had wired to the bank in Serrekunda, and so no one could be sure how much Lamin personally had received, nor was anybody able to say precisely how much of that money he had placed in the en
velope which later arrived at the Al Kalo’s house, and how much he had left at that house with Fatu, our Lady Treasurer, before the remainder finally landed in the coffers of the village committee itself. No one accused anybody, not directly. But all conversations, no matter where they began, seemed to end up circling the question, usually coiled up inside proverb-like constructions such as “It is a long way from Serrekunda to here” or “This pair of hands, then this pair, then another. So many hands! Who will keep clean what so many hands have touched?” Fern—as I also called him now—was disgusted by the general ineptitude: he’d never worked with such idiots as these idiots in New York, they made only problems and had no conception of procedure or local realities. He too became a proverb-producing machine: “In a flood the water goes everywhere, you don’t have to think about it. In a drought, if you want water, you have to direct it carefully along each inch of its path.” But his obsessive worrying, what he called “detail-orientation,” didn’t annoy me any more: I made too many mistakes, every day, not to understand by now that he knew better. It was not possible any longer to ignore the real difference between us, which went far beyond his superior education, his Ph.D., or even his professional experience. It was about a quality of attention. He listened and noticed. He was more open. Whenever I spotted him in my reluctant daily walk around the village—something I did purely for exercise and to escape the claustrophobia of Hawa’s compound—Fern would be locked in intense discussion with men and women of every age and circumstance, crouching by them as they ate, jogging next to donkey-drawn carts, sitting drinking ataya with the old men by the market stalls, and always listening, learning, asking for more detail, assuming nothing until he was told it. I compared all of this to my own way of being. Keeping to my dank room as much as possible, talking to no one if I could help it, reading books about the region by the light of a headtorch, and feeling a homicidal fury, adolescent in nature, toward the IMF and the World Bank, the Dutch who’d bought the slaves, the local chiefs who’d sold them, and many other distant mental abstractions to which I could do no practical damage.
