Eight
It was said later that I was a bad friend to Aimee, always had been, that I was only waiting for the right moment to hurt her, even to ruin her. Maybe she believes that. But it’s a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream. At first I thought that it wouldn’t have to be me at all, that the village itself would wake her up, because it didn’t seem possible to stay dreaming in that place or to think of yourself as in any way an exception. I was wrong about that. On the northern outskirts of the village, beside the road that led to Senegal, there stood a large pink brick house of two stories—the only one of its kind for miles around—abandoned, but basically finished except for the windows and doors. It had been built on remittances, Lamin told me, sent back by a local young man who had been doing well, driving a cab in Amsterdam, until his luck changed and the money abruptly stopped. Now the house, empty for a year, would have a new life as our “base of operations.” By the time we reached it the sun was going down, and the Minister for Tourism was pleased to show us the bare bulbs burning from the ceiling of each room. “And every time you visit,” we were told, “it will be only better and better.” The village had been waiting for light a long time—since the coup, over twenty years earlier—yet in a couple of days Aimee had managed to convince the relevant authorities to attach a generator to this shell of a house, and there were sockets to charge all our phones and a team of workmen had affixed Perspex windows and put in serviceable MDF doors, beds for everybody and even a stove. The children were thrilled—it was like camping—and for Aimee the two nights she was scheduled to spend here took the form of an ethical adventure. I heard her tell the Rolling Stone reporter how important it was to stay “in the real world, among the people,” and the next morning, alongside the formal photographed events—soil-breaking, schoolgirls dancing—many images were taken of Aimee in this real world, eating from the communal bowls, crouching down with ease alongside the women—using the muscles she had developed indoor-cycling—or showing off her agility, climbing the cashew trees with a group of young boys. After lunch, she put on her olive cargo pants and together we toured the village with the woman from DfID, whose task it was to point out “areas of particular deprivation.” We saw drop toilets crawling with hookworm, a forgotten, half-constructed clinic, many airless rooms with corrugated-iron roofs in which children slept ten to a bed. Afterward we toured the communal gardens—to witness the “limits of subsistence farming”—but as we entered the field the sun happened to be casting long, captivating shadows and the potato plants were hugely bushy and green and the trees looped with vines, the lushness of everything creating an effect of extraordinary beauty. The women, young and old, had a utopian look to them, in their colorful wrappers, pulling weeds from the ground, chatting to each other as they worked, shouting across the rows of peas or peppers, laughing at each other’s jokes. Spotting us approaching, they straightened up and wiped the sweat from their faces, with their own headscarves, if they wore them, with their hands if not.
“Good day to you. How is the day?”
“Oh, I see what’s happening here,” said Aimee to an ancient old woman who had been so bold as to put her arm around Aimee’s tiny waist. “You gals get to really talk to each other out here. No men in sight. Yeah, I can just imagine what goes on.”
The woman from DfID laughed too much. I thought of how little I could imagine of what went on. Even the simplest ideas I’d brought with me did not seem to work here when I tried to apply them. I was not, for example, standing at this moment in a field with my extended tribe, with my fellow black women. Here there was no such category. There were only the Sere women, the Wolof, and the Mandinka, the Serahuli, the Fula and the Jola, the last of whom, I was told once, grudgingly, I resembled, if only in basic facial architecture: same long nose, same cheekbones. From where I stood now I could hear the call to prayer coming from the square concrete minaret of the green mosque, rising above the trees and over this village where women covered and uncovered were sisters and cousins and friends to each other, were each other’s mothers and daughters, or were covered in the morning and uncovered in the afternoon, simply because some age mates had come visiting, boys and girls, and one of them had offered to plait their hair. Here where Christmas was celebrated with a startling fervor, and all the people of the book were considered “brothers, sisters,” while I, representing the utterly godless, was nobody’s enemy, no, just someone who should properly be pitied and protected—so one of the girls I shared a room with explained to me—as you would a calf whose mother died in the having of her.
Now I watched girls lining up at the well, filling their huge plastic tubs with water and then lifting these tubs on to their heads to begin the long walk back to the village. A few of them I recognized from the compound I had been staying in this past week. The twin cousins of my host, Hawa, as well as three of her sisters. I waved at them all, smiling. They acknowledged me with a nod.
“Yes, we’re always struck by how much the women and girls do here,” said the woman from DfID, sotto voce, following my line of sight. “They do the housework, you see, but then also all the field work, and as you’ll see it’s largely women running both the school and the market. Girl Power indeed.”
She bent down to feel the stem of a garden egg and Aimee took the opportunity to turn to me, cross her eyes and stick her tongue out. The DfID woman straightened up and glanced over at the growing queue of girls.
“Many of them should be in school, of course, but unfortunately their mothers need them here. Then you think of those young boys we just saw, lounging about in a hammock among the cashews . . .”
“Education is the answer to development for our girls and women,” Lamin piped up, with the slightly wounded and weary air, I thought, of someone who had endured a great many lectures from representatives of DfID. “Education, education, education.”
Aimee gave him a dazzling smile.
“That’s what we’re here for,” she said.
• • •
During all the activities of the day Aimee kept Lamin close, mistaking his tendency to whisper for a special intimacy between them, and after a while she began whispering back at him, flirting like a schoolgirl. Dangerous, I thought, in front of the ever-present journalist, but there was not a moment when we were alone that I could firmly tell her so. Instead I watched her struggling to restrain her impatience whenever poor Carrapichano had no choice but to draw her away from Lamin and back toward all the necessary mundane tasks of the day: signing papers, meeting ministers, discussing school fees, sustainability, curriculum, teachers’ pay. Half a dozen times he made Aimee and the rest of us stop where we were so that we might listen to yet another government functionary give yet another speech—about partnership and mutual respect, and in particular the respect the President-for-Life wanted passed on to Aimee in his absence, which itself was only the correct response owed for the respect Aimee “clearly does possess for our beloved President”—as we all stood suffering in the sun. Each speech was near-identical to the one before it, as if there were some ur-text back in the city from which all these ministers had been instructed to quote. As we approached the school, slowly, so as not to outpace the photographer—who scuttled backward before us—one of these ministers once more pressed Carrapichano’s hand, and when Carrapichano tried, quietly and out of Aimee’s sightline, to dissuade him, the minister refused to be dissuaded, standing his ground at the school gate, blocking the entrance and beginning his speech, upon which Aimee abruptly turned her back.
“Look, Fern, I don’t mean to be an asshole about it but I’m really trying to be present in this moment? And you’re making that very hard for me right now. It’s hot, we’re all hot, and I’m really mindful that we haven’t got a lot of time this time round. So I think we can put a hold on the speeches. I think we all know where we stand, we all feel welcomed, we all feel mutually respected or whatever. Right now I’m here to be present. No more spe
eches today—OK?”
Carrapichano looked down, half defeated, at his clipboard, and for a moment I thought he was about to lose his temper. Beside him the minister stood unperturbed, not having followed what Aimee had said, simply waiting for his cue to begin again.
“It is time to visit the school,” said Carrapichano, without looking up, reaching round the minister and pushing open the gate.
The nanny, Estelle, was there to meet us, with the children, and they ran through the mammoth sandy schoolyard—empty except for two bent and netless goal mouths—high-fiving any child who came near, delighted to be let loose among so many of their kind. Jay was eight at the time, and Kara six, they’d been home-tutored all their lives. As we passed through our whistle-stop tour of six large, hot, cheerily painted classrooms, their many childish questions came tumbling out, questions not unlike my own, but in their case unedited and unconsidered, and which their nanny kept trying, unsuccessfully, to hush and silence. I wished I could add to them. Why does the headmaster have two wives, why do some girls wear scarves and some not, why are all the books torn and dirty, why are they being taught in English if they don’t speak English at home, why do the teachers spell the words wrong on the board, if the new school is for girls what will happen to the boys?
Nine
Most Saturdays, as my own middle passage approached, I accompanied my mother to a protest march of one kind or another, against South Africa, against the government, against nuclear bombs, against racism, against cuts, against the deregulation of the banks or in support of the teachers’ union, the GLC or the IRA. The purpose of all this was hard for me to grasp, given the nature of our enemy. I saw her on television most days—rigid handbag, rigid hair, unturned, unturnable—and always unmoved by however many people my mother and her cronies had managed to gather to march, the previous Saturday morning, through Trafalgar Square and right up to her shiny black front door. I remember marching for the preservation of the Greater London Council, a year earlier, walking for what felt like days—half a mile behind my mother, who was up at the front, deep in conversation with Red Ken—carrying a placard above my head, and then, after that got too heavy, carrying it over my shoulder, like Jesus at the Crucifixion, lugging it down Whitehall, until finally, we got the bus home, collapsed in the lounge, switched on the TV and learned that the GLC had been abolished earlier that same day. Still I was told there was “no time for dancing” or, in a variation, that “this was not the time for dancing,” as if the historical moment itself forbade it. I had “responsibilities,” they were tied to my “intelligence,” which had been recently confirmed by a young supply teacher up at the school who had thought to ask our class to bring in “whatever we were reading at home.” It was one of those moments—there were many—when we, the students, were reminded of the fundamental innocence of our teachers. They gave us seeds in the spring to “plant in our gardens,” or asked us, after the summer break, to write a page about “where you went on holiday.” It wasn’t something that hurt me: I’d been to Brighton, many times, and once on a booze cruise to France, and was a keen window-box gardener. But what about the gypsy girl who smelled, who had weeping sores around her mouth and a weekly black eye? Or the twins, too old and dark for adoption, who bounced around the local foster homes? What about the boy with the eczema, whom Tracey and I spotted through the bars of Queen’s Park one summer night, alone, fast asleep, on a bench? Supply teachers were the most innocent of them all. I remember the surprise of this one at the not small number of children who brought in either the Radio or TV Times.
I brought in my biographies of dancers, thick books with soft-focus seventies portraits on the cover, of the great stars in their old age—in their silk dressing gowns and cravats, in their pink ostrich-feather capes—and on page count alone it was decided that my future should be “discussed.” My mother came in for a meeting, early, before school, where she was told that the same books she sometimes teased me for reading were evidence of my intelligence, and that there was a test such “gifted” children could take, which, if they passed, would enable them to attend the kind of good schools that give scholarships—no, no, no—no fees, don’t worry, I meant “grammars,” which are a different thing altogether, no money involved at all, no, no, please don’t worry. I glanced at my mother, whose face gave nothing away. It’s because of the reading age, explained the teacher, passing over our silence, you see her reading age is really quite advanced. The teacher looked my mother over—her bra-less vest and jeans, the kente-cloth head-wrap, a pair of huge earrings shaped like Africa—and asked if the father would be joining us. The father’s at work, said my mother. Oh, said the teacher, turning to me, and what does your father do, dear, is he the reader of the house, or . . .? The father’s a postman, said my mother. The mother’s the reader. Now, normally, said the teacher, blushing, consulting her notes, normally, we don’t suggest the entrance exam for the independent schools really. I mean, there are some scholarships available but there’s no point setting these kids up for disappointment . . . But this young Miss Bradwell we’ve had in recently thought perhaps, well, she thought that, in your daughter’s situation, it might just be the case that . . .
We walked home in silence, there was nothing more to discuss. We had already been to visit the huge and raucous comp I’d be attending in the autumn, it had been sold to me on the promise it had a “dance studio” somewhere in that warren of scuffed corridors, Portakabin classrooms and temporary toilets. Everyone that I knew—excepting Tracey—was heading there, and this was one comfort: safety in numbers. But my mother surprised me. In the grounds of the estate she stopped at the base of the stairwell and told me that I’d take that test, and work hard to pass it. No dancing at the weekend, no distractions of any kind, I was being given the kind of opportunity, she said, that she had never had herself, having been advised, at the same age I was now—and by her own teachers—to work on mastering forty words a minute, like all the other black girls.
• • •
It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went in adolescence, except now suddenly something was different. I’d been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he’d barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly because she’d rather walk than be told which stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go. Well, wasn’t there something noble in that? Wasn’t there some fight in it, at least—some defiance? And then there were all the outrageous historical cases I heard of at my mother’s knee, tales of the furiously talented women—and these were all women, in my mother’s telling—women who might have run faster than a speeding train, if they had been free to do so, but for whom, born in the wrong time, in the wrong place, all stops were closed, who were never even permitted to enter the station. And wasn’t I so much freer than any of them—born in England, in modern times—not to mention so much lighter, so much straighter of nose, so much less likely to be mistaken for the very essence of Blackness itself? What could possibly stop me traveling on? Yet when I sat down in my own school hall, on a stifling July day, outside of normal school hours—an unnatural time to be at school—and opened those test papers, to read through the opportunity my mother wished I would “grab with both hands,” a great, sullen fury came over me, I didn’t feel like traveling on their train, wrote a few words here and there, ignored the pages of maths and science, flagrantly failed.
Ten
A few weeks later, Tracey got into her stage school. Her mother had no choice but to ring my mother’s doorbell, enter our flat and tell us all about it. She stuck Tracey in front of her like a shield, shuffled into the hall, wouldn’t sit down or have tea. She’d never been over the threshold before. “The judges said they’d not seen anything like her original”—Tracey’s mother stopped dead and looked angrily at her daughter, who then provided the unfamil
iar word—“original choreography, not like that. That’s how new it was. Never! I always told her that she’d have to be twice as good as the next girl to get anywhere,” she said, hugging her Tracey into her mammoth bosom, “and now she is.” She had a video of the audition to give us, which my mother took graciously enough. I found it under a pile of books in her bedroom and watched it alone one night. The song was “Swing Is Here to Stay” and every movement, every blink, every nod, was Jeni LeGon’s.