Zadie Smith - Swing Time

At last, the vehicles parked, the miniature President alighted and walked to the podium and gave a short speech I couldn’t hear a word of due to the feedback from the speakers. No one else could hear it either but we all laughed and applauded once it was done. I had the thought that if the President himself had come the effect would not have been so very different. A show of power is a show of power. Then Aimee went up, said a few words, kissed the little man, took his cane off him and waved it in the air to great cheering. The school was declared open.

We did not move from this formal ceremony on to a separate party as much as the formal ceremony instantly dissolved and a party replaced it. All those who had not been invited to the ceremony now invaded the pitch, the neat colonial line-up of chairs broke apart, everyone took whatever seating they needed. The glamorous lady teachers ushered their classes to areas of shade and laid out their lunches, which emerged hot and sealed in big pots from those large tartan-checked shopping bags they also sell in Kilburn market, international symbol of the thrifty and far-traveled. In the northernmost corner of the grounds the promised sound system started up. Any child who could get away from an adult or had no adult in the first place was over there, dancing. It sounded Jamaican to me, a form of dancehall, and as I seemed to have lost everybody in the sudden transition, I wandered over and watched the dancing. There were two modes. The dominant dance was an ironic imitation of their mothers: bent at the knees, hunched backs, backside out, watching their own feet as they stomped the rhythm into the ground. But every now and then — especially if they spotted me watching them — the moves jumped to other times and places, more familiar to me, through hip-hop and ragga, through Atlanta and Kingston, and I saw jerking, popping, sliding, grinding. A smirking, handsome boy of no more than ten knew some especially obscene moves and would do them in little bursts so that the girls around him could be periodically scandalized, scream, run to hide behind a tree, before creeping back to watch him do some more. He had his eye on me. He kept pointing at me, shouting something over the music, I couldn’t quite make it out: “Dance? Too bad! Dance? Dance! Too bad!” I took a step closer, smiled and shook my head no, though he knew I was considering it. “Ah, there you are,” said Hawa, from behind me, linked her arm with mine and led me back to our party.

Under a tree Lamin, Granger, Judy, our teachers and some of the children were gathered, all sucking from little saran-wrapped pyramids of either orange ice or ice-cold water. I took a water from the little girl selling them and Hawa showed me how to tear a corner with my teeth to suck the liquid out. When I finished I looked at the little twisted wrapper in my hand, like a deflated condom, and realized there was nowhere to put it but the ground, and that these pyramid drinks must be the source of all those plastic twists I saw piled up in every street, in the branches of trees, littering compounds, in every bush like blossom. I put it in my pocket to delay the inevitable and went to take a seat between Granger and Judy, who were in the middle of an argument.

“I didn’t say that,” Judy hissed. “What I said was: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’” She paused to take a loud suck of her ice pop. “And I bloody haven’t!”

“Yeah, well, maybe they’ve never seen some of the crazy shit we do. St. Patrick’s Day. I mean, what the fuck is St. Patrick’s Day?”

“Granger, I’m an Aussie — and basically a Buddhist. You can’t pin St. Patrick’s Day on me.”

“My point is: we love our President—”

“Ha! Speak for yourself!”

“—why shouldn’t these people respect and love their own damn leaders? What business is it of yours? You can’t just walk up in here with no context and judge—”

“Nobody loves him,” said a sharp-eyed young woman who was sitting opposite Granger with her wrapper pulled down to her waist and a baby at her right breast, which she now shifted, applying the child to the left. She had a handsome, intelligent face and was at least a decade younger than me, but her eyes had that same look of experience I’d begun to see in certain old college friends during long, awkward afternoons visiting with their dull babies and duller husbands. Some girlish layer of illusion gone.

“All these young women,” she said, lowering her voice, taking a hand from underneath her baby’s head and waving it dismissively at the crowd. “But where are the men? Boys, yes — but young men? No. Nobody here loves him or what he has done here. Everybody who can leaves. Back way, back way, back way, back way.” As she spoke she pointed to some boys dancing near us, on the verge of adolescence, picking them out as if she had the power to disappear them herself. She sucked her teeth, exactly as my mother would. “Believe me, I’d go too if I could!”

Granger, who I’m sure, like me, had assumed this woman did not speak English — or at least could not follow his and Judy’s variations on it — nodded now to every word she said, almost before she said it. Everyone else in earshot — Lamin, Hawa, some of the young teachers from our school, others I didn’t know — murmured and whistled, but without adding anything else. The handsome young woman pulled up straight in her seat, acknowledging herself as someone suddenly invested with the power of the group.

“ If they loved him,” she said, not whispering at all now, but neither, I noticed, ever using his proper name, “wouldn’t they be here, with us, instead of throwing their life away in the water?” She looked down and readjusted her nipple and I wondered if “they,” in her case, was not an abstraction, but had a name, a voice, a relation to the hungry baby in her arms.

“Back way is craziness,” whispered Hawa.

“Every country’s got its struggle,” said Granger — I heard an inverted echo of what Hawa had told me that morning—“ Serious struggles in America. For our people, black people. That’s why it does our soul good to be here, with you.” He spoke slowly, with deliberation, and touched his soul, which turned out to be dead center between his pectorals. He looked like he might cry. It was my instinct to turn away, to give him his privacy, but Hawa stared into his face and, taking his hand, said, “See how Granger really feels us”—he squeezed her hand back—“not just with his brain, but with his heart!” A not so subtle rebuke intended for me. The fierce young lady nodded, we waited for more, it seemed only she could bring a final meaning to the episode, but her baby had finished feeding and her speech was done. She pulled up her yellow wrapper and stood to burp him.

“It is an amazing thing to have our sister Aimee here with us,” said one of Hawa’s friends, a lively young woman called Esther, who I’d noticed disliked any hint of silence. “Her name is known all over the world! But she is one of us now. We will have to give her a village name.”

“Yes,” I said. I was watching the woman in the yellow wrapper who had spoken. Now she was wandering toward the dancing, her back so straight. I wanted to follow her and talk some more.

“Is she here now? Our sister Aimee?”

“What? Oh, no… I think she had to go and do some interviews or something.”

“Oh, it is amazing. She knows Jay-Z, she knows Rihanna and Beyoncé.”

“Yes.”

“And she knows Michael Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she is Illuminati, too? Or she just is acquaintances with Illuminati?”

I could still make out the woman in yellow, distinctive among so many others, until she passed behind a tree and the toilet block and I couldn’t find her again.