Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  The road ended finally at the river. We got out and walked up to a thirty-foot concrete statue of a stick man who stood facing the river. He had the whole of planet Earth for a head and was yanking his stick arms free from slavery’s chains. A lone nineteenth-century cannon, the red-brick shell of an original trading post, a small “slavery museum built in 1992” and a desolate café completed what a desperate guide with few teeth described as “the Welcome Center.” Behind us a village of broken-down shacks, poorer by many orders of magnitude than the one we had come from, stubbornly faced the old trading post, as if hoping it might reopen. A crowd of children sat watching our arrival but when I waved to them our guide told me off: “They are not allowed to come any closer. They beg for money. They bother you tourists. The government has chosen us as official guides so that you are not bothered by them.” About a mile across the river I could see the island itself, a small, rocky outcrop with the picturesque ruins of barracks upon it. All I wanted was a minute’s quiet to contemplate where I was and what, if anything, it meant. Here and there, between the triangle of café, slave statue and watching children, I could see and hear groups of tourists—a solemn Black-British family, some enthusiastic African-American teenagers, a couple of white Dutch women, both already freely weeping—who were all trying to do the same, and likewise enduring a recited lecture from one of the official government guides in their ragged blue T-shirts, or having menus thrust into their hands from the café, or haggling with boatmen eager to take them across to see the prison cells of their ancestors. I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity—intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once—I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astride it and look out over the water. I tried to put myself in a meditative frame of mind. To picture the ships in the water, the human property walking up the gangplanks, the brave few who took their chances and leaped into the water, in a doomed attempt to swim to shore. But every image had a cartoon thinness to it, and felt no closer to reality than the mural on the side of the museum that showed a strapping, naked Mandinka family in neck chains being chased out of the bush by an evil Dutchman, as if they’d been trapped like prey by a hunter rather than sold like grain by their chief. All paths lead back there, my mother had always told me, but now that I was here, in this storied corner of the continent, I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they’d placed the monument. I gave up and went in search of Lamin. He was leaning against the statue, on his new phone, a fancy-looking BlackBerry, with a dozy look on his face, a big, foolish smile, and when he saw me coming he shut it off without saying good-bye.

  “Who was that?”

  “And so if you are ready,” whispered Lamin, wedging the huge thing into his back pocket, “this man will now take us across.”

  We shared a narrowboat with the Black-British family. They tried to strike up a conversation with the guide concerning how far it was from the island to the mainland and whether any man, never mind one in chains, could conceivably swim through these fast-moving currents. The guide listened to them talk but looked so tired, the whites of his eyes obscured by the sheer number of broken blood vessels, and did not seem overly interested in hypotheticals. He repeated his mantra: “If a man reached the shore, he was given his freedom.” On the island we shuffled around the ruin and then queued to enter the “last resort,” a small underground room, ten by four, where “the most rebellious men, like Kunta, were held.” Imagine! Everybody kept saying this to each other, and I did try to imagine being brought down here but knew instinctively I was not the rebellious type, not likely to be one of Kunta’s tribe. Few people are. My mother I could certainly imagine down here, and Tracey, too. And Aimee—she was in her way another of the breed. But not me. Unsure what to do with myself I reached out to grasp an iron hoop in the wall to which these “most rebellious” had been chained at the neck. “Makes you want to cry, dunnit?” said the mother of the British family, and I felt it really should, but when I looked away from her in preparation, upward to the tiny window, I found the government guide laid out on his belly, his three-toothed mouth blocking almost all of the available light.

  “You will now feel the pain,” he explained through the bars, “and you will need a minute alone. I will meet you outside after you have felt the pain.”

  • • •

  On the boat back I asked Lamin what it was he and Aimee had to talk about so often. He was sitting on the thwart of the boat and straightened his back, lifted his chin.

  “She thinks I am a good dancer.”

  “Does she?”

  “I have taught her many moves she didn’t know. On the computer. I demonstrate our local steps. She says she will use them in her performances.”

  “I see. And does she ever talk about you coming to America? Or England?”

  “It is all in the hands of God,” he said, casting an anxious eye over the other passengers.

  “Yes. And the Foreign Office.”

  • • •

  Lolu, who had been waiting patiently in his cab, drove up to the shoreline as we approached, and opened the car door, apparently intending to take me straight from the water to the car, another two-hour ride, without lunch.

  “But Lamin, I have to eat!”

  I noticed he’d been clutching the café’s laminated menu throughout our visit to the island and now he showed it to me, the vital, clinching piece of evidence in a courtroom drama.

  “This is too much money for lunch! Hawa will make us lunch back home.”

  “I’ll pay for lunch. It’s, like, three pounds a head. I promise you, Lamin, it’s not too much for me.”

  An argument ensued between Lamin and Lolu which, I was pleased to see, Lamin appeared to lose. Lolu put his hands on his buckle like a triumphant cowboy, closed the door of his car and rolled it back up the hill.

  “It’s too much,” said Lamin again, sighing hugely, but I followed Lolu and Lamin followed me.

  We sat at one of the picnic tables and ate fish in foil with rice. I listened to the talk at the neighboring tables, strange, uneven conversations that could not decide what they were: the heavy reflections of visitors to a historical trauma or the light cocktail chatter of people on their beach holiday. A tall, sun-ravaged white woman, in her seventies at least, sat alone at a table at the back, surrounded by piles of folded printed cloth, drums and statues, T-shirts that said NEVER AGAIN, other local merchandise. No one came near her stall or looked likely to buy anything, and after a while she stood up and began passing from table to table, welcoming guests, asking them where they were staying, where they were from. I was hoping we would have finished eating before she reached our table, but Lamin was a painfully slow eater and she caught us, and when she heard that I was not from any hotel, and not an aid worker and not a missionary, she took a special interest and sat down with us, too close to Lolu, who hunched over his fish and wouldn’t look at her.

  “Which village did you say?” she asked, although I hadn’t, but now Lamin told her before I had an opportunity to be vague. The penny dropped.

  “Oh, but you’re involved with the school! Of course. Well, I know people say the most awful things about that woman but I really love her, I admire her, honestly. I’m actually an American, too, originally,” she said, and I wondered how she thought anyone could be uncertain on this point. “Normally I don’
t care for Americans, in general, but she’s the kind with a passport, if you know what I mean. I really find her so curious and passionate, and it’s a great thing for the country, all the publicity she brings. Oh, Australian? Well, either way she’s a woman after my own heart! An adventuress! Although of course I came here for love, not charity. The charity came afterward, in my case.”

  She touched her heart, which was half exposed, in a multicolored spaghetti-strap dress with a frighteningly deep décolletage. Her breasts were long, red and crêpy. I was absolutely determined not to ask her whose love she had come here for, nor to what good deeds this act had ultimately led, but sensing my resistance, she decided, with an old woman’s prerogative, to tell me anyway.

  “I was just like these people, just here on holiday. I didn’t mean to fall in love! With a boy half my age.” She winked at me. “And that was twenty years ago! But it was much, much more than a holiday romance, you see: together we built all this.” She looked around proudly at this great monument to love: a tin-roofed café with four tables and three items on the menu. “I’m not a rich woman, I was really just a humble yoga teacher. But these people in Berkeley, you only have to say to them: ‘Look, this is the situation, these people are in desperate need,’ and I can tell you, you’d be surprised, these people really just go for it, they really do. Just about everybody wanted to pitch in. When you explain what a dollar does here? When you explain how far that dollar’s gonna go? Oh, people can’t believe it! Now, sadly, my own children, from my first marriage? They have not been so supportive. Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you. But I always say to the people here, “Don’t believe everything you hear, please! Because not all Americans are bad news, not at all.” There’s a big difference between the folks in Berkeley and the folks in Fort Worth, if you catch my meaning. I was born in Texas, to Christian folks, and when I was young America was a pretty hard place for me, because I was a free spirit and I just couldn’t find my place. But I guess it suits me a little more now.”

  “But you live here, with your husband?” asked Lamin.

  She smiled but did not seem overly enthralled by the question.

  “In the summers. The winters I spend in Berkeley.”

  “And he goes then with you?” asked Lamin. I had the sense he was conducting subtle research.

  “No, no. He stays here. He has a lot to do here, all year round. He’s the big man round here and I guess you could say I’m the big woman back there! So it works very well. For us.”

  I thought of that layer of girlish illusion Aimee’s new-mother friends all appeared to have lost, a kind of light in their eyes that had gone out, notwithstanding even their own celebrity and wealth, and then I looked into the wide, blue, half-crazed eyes of this woman and saw a total excavation. It hardly seemed possible someone could have had so many layers stripped from her and still be able to play her part.

  Five

  After graduation, from the base of my father’s flat, I applied for every entry-level media job I could think of, leaving my begging letters on the kitchen counter each night for him to post in the morning, but a month passed, and nothing. I knew my father’s relationship to these letters was complicated—good news for me meant bad news for him, meant me moving out—and sometimes I had paranoid fantasies that he never posted them at all, just deposited them in the bin at the end of our street. I considered what my mother had always said about his lack of ambition—against which accusation I had always angrily defended him—and was forced to admit that I could see now what she was getting at. Nothing made him jollier than my Uncle Lambert’s occasional Sunday visits, when we would all three plant ourselves in deckchairs on the ivy-covered flat roof of my father’s downstairs neighbors and smoke weed, eat the homemade fish dumplings that were Lambert’s excuse for being two to three hours late, listen to the World Service and watch the Jubilee Line trains rise up, every eight to ten minutes, from the bowels of the earth.

  “Now this is the life, love, wouldn’t you say? No more: do this, don’t do that. Just us all friends together—equals. Eh, Lambert? When you get to be friends with your own kid? This is the life, isn’t it?”

  Was it? I didn’t remember him ever taking on the parental power dynamic he claimed now to be sloughing off, he’d never said, “Do this, don’t do that.” Love and latitude—that was all he’d ever offered me. And where did it lead? Was I going to enter early stoned retirement with Lambert? Not knowing what else to do, I went back to a terrible job, one I’d had the first summer of college, in a pizza place in Kensal Rise. It was run by a ridiculous Iranian called Bahram, very tall and thin, who considered himself, despite his surroundings, to be a man of quality. He liked to wear a long, chic, camel-colored coat, no matter the weather, often hanging it from his shoulders like an Italian baron, and he called his dump a “restaurant,” though the premises were the size of a small family bathroom, occupying a corner plot of scrubland wedged between the bus terminal and the railway. No one ever came in to eat, they ordered delivery or took their food home. I used to stand at the counter and watch the mice dart across the linoleum. There was a single table at which theoretically a customer was free to dine, but in reality Bahram occupied this table all day long and half the night: he had troubles at home, a wife and three difficult, unmarried daughters, and we suspected he preferred our company to this family, or at least preferred shouting at us to arguing with them. At work his day was not strenuous. He passed it commenting on whatever was on the TV in the top-left corner of the place, or else verbally abusing us, his staff, from this sitting position. He was in a rage all the time about everything. A flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating. Anyway it was the only entertainment on offer. But the first time I walked in there, aged nineteen, I was not abused, no, I was greeted in what I later understood to be Farsi, and so effusively that I really felt I got a sense of what he was saying. How young I was, and lovely, and clearly smart—was it true I was in college? But how proud my mother must be! He stood up and held me by the chin, turning my face one way and then the other, smiling. But when I replied in English he frowned and looked closely, critically, at the red bandanna covering my hair—I’d thought it would be welcome in a place of food production—and a few moments later, after we had established that despite my Persian nose I was not Persian, not even a little bit, nor Egyptian, nor Moroccan, nor an Arab of any kind, I made the mistake of speaking the name of my mother’s island, and all friendliness vanished: I was directed to the counter, where my job was to answer the phone, take orders to the kitchen and organize the delivery boys. My most important task was attending to a beloved project of his: the Banned Customers List. He had taken the trouble to write this list out on a long roll of paper and stuck it up on the wall behind my counter, sometimes with Polaroids attached. “Mostly your people,” he pointed out to me casually, on my second day.

  “They don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!” I couldn’t afford to be offended. I was determined to last those three summer months, long enough to put something toward a deposit so I could start renting the moment I graduated. But the tennis was on, and this made everything impossible. A Somali delivery boy and I were following it avidly, and Bahram, who would normally also follow the tennis—he considered sport the purest manifestation of his sociological theories—was this year in a fury about it, and in a fury with us for enjoying it, and each time he caught us watching it he became more enraged, his sense of order having been deeply disturbed by the failure of Bryan Shelton to drop out in the first round.

  “Why you follow him? Huh? Huh? ’Cos he’s one of you?”

  He was jabbing his finger into the narrow c
hest of the Somali delivery boy, Anwar, who had a great luminosity of spirit, a notable capacity for joy—despite nothing in his life seeming to provide just cause for it—and whose response now was to clap his hands and grin from ear to ear.

  “Yeah, man! We for Bryan!”

  “You are idiot, this we know,” said Bahram, and then turned to me, behind the counter: “But you are smart, and this makes you more idiot.” When I said nothing he came right up to me and slammed his fists on the counter: “This man Shelton—he won’t win. He can’t.”

  “He win! He win!” cried Anwar.

  Bahram picked up the remote and turned down the TV so he could get himself heard all the way to the back, even as far as the Congolese woman scrubbing the sides of the pizza oven.

  “Tennis not black game. You must understand: every people have their game.”

  “What’s your game?” I asked, genuinely curious, and Bahram pulled himself up very tall and proud in his seat: “Polo.” The kitchen exploded in laughter.