Zadie Smith - Swing Time

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!

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 from 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.