Swing Time Read online

  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.

  “I wouldn’t . . . Honestly, Esther, I don’t think any of that stuff is real.”

  “Oh, well,” said Esther equably, as if she’d said she liked chocolate and I’d said I didn’t. “Here for us it is real, because there is a lot of power there for sure. We hear a lot about this.”

  “It is real,” confirmed Hawa, “but on this internet, believe me, you can’t trust everything! For example, my cousin showed me photos of this white man, in America, he was as b
ig as four men, so fat! I said, ‘Are you so foolish, this is not a real photograph, come on! It’s not possible, no one could be like this.’ These kids are crazy. They believe everything they see.”

  • • •

  By the time we made our way back to the compound it was black outside, starlit. I linked arms with Lamin and Hawa and tried teasing them a little.

  “No, no, no, even although I call her Little Wife,” protested Lamin, “and she calls me Mr. Husband, it is the truth that we are just age mates.”

  “Flirt, flirt, flirt,” said Hawa, flirting, “and that’s it!”

  “And that’s it?” I asked, kicking the door wide with my foot.

  “That is certainly it,” said Lamin.

  In the compound many of the younger children were still awake and ran to Hawa, delighted, as she was delighted to receive them. I shook hands with all four grandmothers, which always had to be done as if it were the first time, and each woman leaned in to try to tell me something important—or, more accurately, did tell me something important, which I happened not to understand—and then, when words failed, as they always did, pulled me slightly by my wrapper toward the far end of the porch.

  “Oh!” said Hawa, walking over with a nephew in her arms, “but there is my brother!”

  He was a half-brother in fact and did not look much like Hawa to me, was not beautiful like her and had none of her flair. He had a kind, serious face, which was round like hers but double-chinned with it, a smart pair of glasses and an utterly neutral way of dressing that told me, before he did, that he must have spent time in America. He was standing on the verandah, drinking a large mug of Lipton’s, his elbows resting on the lip of the concrete wall. I came round the pillar to shake hands with him. He took my hand warmly but with his head drawn back, and a half-smirk, as if bracketing the gesture in irony. It reminded me of someone—my mother.

  “And you’re staying here in the compound, I see,” he said, and nodded at the quiet industry all round us, the shrieking nephew in Hawa’s arms, whom she now released to the yard. “But how does rural village life treat you? You have to first habituate yourself to the circumstances to appreciate it fully, I think.”

  Instead of answering him I asked him where he had learned his perfect English. He smiled formally but his eyes hardened briefly behind his glasses.

  “Here. This is an English-speaking country.”

  Hawa, unsure what to do with this awkwardness, giggled into her hand.

  “I’m enjoying it very much,” I said, blushing. “Hawa has been very kind.”

  “You like the food?”

  “It’s really delicious.”

  “It’s simple.” He patted his well-rounded belly and handed his empty bowl to a passing girl. “But sometimes the simple is more flavorsome than the complicated.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “So: in conclusion, everything is good?”

  “Everything is good.”

  “It takes a while to acclimatize to this rural village life, as I say. Even for me, it takes a minute, and I was born here.”

  Somebody now passed me a bowl of food, though I had already eaten, but as I felt that everything I did in front of Hawa’s brother was being presented as a kind of test I took it.

  “But you can’t eat like that,” he fussed, and when I tried to rest the bowl on the wall, said: “Let’s sit.”

  Lamin and Hawa stayed resting against the wall, while we lowered ourselves on to a pair of slightly wonky homemade stools. No longer under the eyes of every soul in the yard, Hawa’s brother relaxed. He told me he had gone to a good school in the city, near the university his father had taught in, and from that school had applied for a place at a private Quaker college in Kansas which gave ten scholarships a year to African students, and he had been one of them. Thousands apply, but he got in, they liked his essay, though it was so long ago now he barely remembered what it was about. He did graduate work in Boston, in economics, later he lived in Minneapolis, Rochester and Boulder, all places I had visited at one time or another with Aimee, and none of which had ever meant a thing to me, yet now I found I wanted to hear about them, perhaps because a day spent in the village felt, to me, like a year—time radically slowed there—so much so that now even Hawa’s brother’s tan slacks and red golf T-shirt could apparently inspire an exile’s nostalgic fondness in me. I asked him a lot of very specific questions about his time spent in my not-quite home, while Lamin and Hawa stood next to us, frozen out of the conversational picture.

  “But why did you have to leave?” I asked him, more plaintively than I’d intended. He looked at me shrewdly.

  “Nothing compelled me at all. I could have stayed. I came back to serve my country. I wanted to return. I work for the Treasury.”

  “Oh, for the government.”

  “Yes. But to him our Treasury is like a personal money-box . . . You are a bright young woman. I’m sure you probably heard about that.” He took a strip of gum from his pocket and was a long time removing the silver foil. “You understand, when I say ‘serve my country,’ I mean all of the people, not one man. You’ll understand, too, that at the moment our hands are tied. But they won’t always be. I love my country. And when things change, at least I will be here to see it.”

  “Babu, right now you are here one day!” protested Hawa, throwing her arms around her brother’s neck. “And I want to talk to you about the drama in this yard—never mind the city!”

  Brother and sister inclined their heads affectionately toward each other.

  “Sister, I don’t doubt the situation here is more complicated—wait, I would like to finish this point for our concerned guest. You see, my last stop was New York. Am I correct in understanding that you’re from New York?”

  I said yes: it was easier.

  “Then you will know how it is, and how class works, in America. Frankly it was too much for me. I’d really had enough of it by the time I reached New York. Of course we have a system of class here, too—but not the contempt.”

  “The contempt?”

  “Now, let’s see . . . This compound you are in? This is our family you are among. Well, actually, a very, very small portion of it, but it will do in this example. Maybe to you they live very simply, they are rural village people. But we are foros, originally, nobles, through my grandmother’s line. Some people you will meet—the headmaster, for example, is a nyamalos, which means his people were artisans—they come in different varieties, blacksmiths, leather workers, etcetera . . . Or, Lamin, your family are jali, aren’t they?”

  An extremely strained look passed over Lamin’s face. He nodded in a minimal way and then looked up and away, at the huge full moon threatening to slot itself into the mango tree.

  “Musicians, storytellers, griots,” said Hawa’s brother, miming the strumming of an instrument. “While some people, on the other hand, are jongo. Many in our village are descended from jongos.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “The descendants of slaves.” He smiled as he looked me up and down. “But my point is, the people here are still able to say: ‘Of course, a jongo is different from me but I do not have contempt for him.’ Under God’s eye we have our difference but also our basic equality. In New York I saw low-class people treated in a way I never imagined was possible. With total contempt. They are serving food and people are not making even eye contact with them. Believe it or not, I was sometimes treated that way myself.”

  “There are so many different ways to be poor,” murmured Hawa, in a sudden leap of inspiration. She was in the middle of collecting a pile of fish-bones from the floor.

  “And rich,” I said, and Hawa’s brother, smiling faintly, conceded the point.

  Six

  The morning after the show the doorbell rang, too early, earlier than a postman. It was Miss Isabel, distraught. The cashboxes were go
ne, with almost three hundred pounds in them, and no sign of a break-in. Someone had let themselves in, overnight. My mother sat on the edge of the sofa in her dressing gown, rubbing her eyes against the morning light. I listened in from the doorway, my innocence presumed from the start. The discussion was what to do about Tracey. After a while I was brought in and questioned and I told the truth: we locked up at eleven-thirty, stacking all the chairs, after which Tracey went her way and I went mine. I thought she’d posted the key back through the door, but of course it’s possible she pocketed it. My mother and Miss Isabel turned to me as I spoke, but they listened without much interest, their faces blank, and the moment I had finished they turned away and returned to their discussion. The more I listened, the more alarmed I became. There was something obscenely complacent to me in their certainty, both of Tracey’s guilt and my innocence, even though I understood, rationally, that Tracey must have been involved in some way. I listened to their theories. Miss Isabel believed Louie must have stolen the key. My mother was equally sure he’d been given it. It didn’t seem unusual, at the time, that neither of them considered calling the police. “With a family like that . . .” said Miss Isabel, and accepted a tissue to dab at her eyes. “When she comes into the center,” my mother assured her, “I’ll have a talk.” It was the first I’d heard of Tracey going to the youth center, the one at which my mother volunteered, and now she looked up at me, startled. It took her a moment to regain her cool, but without looking me in the eye she began to smoothly explain that “after the incident with the drugs” she had naturally arranged for Tracey to get some free counseling, and if she hadn’t told me that was because of “confidentiality.” She hadn’t even told Tracey’s mother. Now I see that none of this was especially unreasonable, but at the time I saw maternal conspiracies everywhere, manipulations, attempts to control my life and the lives of my friends. I made a fuss and fled to my room.