Swing Time

PART FOUR: Middle Passage

The greatest dancer I ever saw was the kankurang. But in the moment I didn’t know who or what it was: a wildly swaying orange shape, of a man’s height but without a man’s face, covered in many swishing, overlapping leaves. Like a tree in the blaze of a New York fall that uproots itself and now dances down the street. A large gang of boys trailed behind it in the red dust, and a phalanx of women, with palm leaves in their hands — their mothers, I assumed. The women sang and stepped heavily, beating the air with the palms, walking and dancing both. I was squeezed into a taxi, a beat-up yellow Mercedes with a green stripe running down its middle. Lamin was next to me, in the backseat, alongside somebody’s grandfather, a woman feeding a squalling baby, two teenage girls in their uniforms, and one of the Koranic teachers from the school. It was a scene of chaos that Lamin met calmly, ever conscious of his status, as a trainee teacher, his hands folded priest-like on his lap, looking as always — with his long, flat nose and broad nostrils, and sad, slightly yellowed eyes — like a big cat in repose. The car stereo played reggae from my mother’s island, turned up to a crazy volume. But whatever was coming toward us was dancing to rhythms reggae never approaches. Beats so fast, so complex, that you had to think about them — or see them expressed through the body of a dancer — to understand what you were hearing. Otherwise you might mistake it for one rumbling bass note. You might think it was the sound of thunder overhead.

Who was drumming? I looked out of my window and spotted three men, their instruments gripped between their knees, walking like crabs, and when they scuttled in front of our car the whole traveling dance party paused in its forward momentum, took root in the middle of the road, forcing us to stop. It made a change from the checkpoints, the sullen, baby-faced soldiers, their machine guns held loosely at the hip. When we stopped for soldiers — often a dozen times in a single day — we would fall silent. But now the cab exploded in talk and whistles and laughter and the schoolgirls reached out of the window and jimmied the broken handle until the passenger door opened and everyone except the breastfeeding woman tumbled out.

“What is it? What’s happening?”

I was asking Lamin, he was supposed to be my guide, but he seemed barely to remember I existed, much less that we were meant to be heading for the ferry, to cross the river into the city, and on to the airport, to greet Aimee. None of that mattered now. There was only the present moment, only the dance. And Lamin, as it turned out, was a dancer. I spotted it in him that day, before Aimee had even met him, long before she saw the dancer in him. I saw it in every hip swivel, each nod of his head. But I couldn’t see the orange apparition any more, there was such a crowd between me and it that I could only hear it: what must have been its feet pounding the ground, and the raw clang of metal on metal, and a piercing shriek, otherworldly, to which the women replied in song, as they, too, danced. I was dancing involuntarily myself, pressed up close to so many moving bodies. I kept asking my questions—“What is it? What’s happening?”—but English, the “official language,” that heavy formal coat people only put on in my presence, and even then with obvious boredom and difficulty, had been thrown to the ground, everyone was dancing on it, and I thought, not for the first time in that first week, of the adjustment Aimee would have to make when she finally arrived and discovered, as I already had, the chasm between a “viability study” and life as it appears before you on the road and the ferry, in the village and the city, within the people and in a half-dozen languages, in the food and the faces and the sea and the moon and the stars.

People were clambering on to the car for a better view. I looked for Lamin and found him, too, scrambling up, on to the front bonnet. The crowd was dispersing — laughing, screaming, running — and I thought at first that a firecracker must have gone off. A group of the women fled leftwards, and now I saw why: the kankurang wielded two machetes, long as arms. “Come!” cried Lamin, reaching a hand down for me, and I pulled myself up to him, clinging to his white shirt as he danced, trying to keep my balance. I looked down at the frenzy below. I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life.

Directly above me an old woman sat decorously on the roof of our car, eating a bag of peanuts, looking like a Jamaican lady at Lord’s, following a day’s cricket. She spotted me and waved: “Good morning, how is your morning?” The same courteous, automatic greeting that followed me round the village — no matter what I wore, no matter who I was with — and which by now I understood as a nod to my foreignness, which was obvious to everyone everywhere. She smiled mildly at the machetes as they spun, at the boys who kept daring each other to approach the dancing tree and match its frenetic moves — while steering clear of its circling knives — imitating in their own narrow bodies the convulsive stamps and twists and crouches and high kicks and general rhythmic euphoria that radiated from the figure to all points on the horizon, through the women, through Lamin, through me, through everyone I could see, as beneath us the car shook and rolled. She pointed at the kankurang. “It is a dancer,” she explained.

A dancer who comes for the boys. Taking them to the bush, where they are circumcised, initiated into their culture, told the rules and the limits, the sacred traditions of the world in which they will live, the names of the plants to help with this or that illness and how to use them. Who acts as threshold, between youth and maturity, wards off evil spirits and is the guarantor of order and justice and continuity between and within his people. He is a guide who leads the young through their difficult middle passage, from childhood to adolescence, and he is also, simply, a young man himself, anonymous, chosen in great secrecy by the elders, covered in the leaves of the fara tree and stained with vegetable dyes. But I learned all this on my phone, back in New York. I did try to ask my guide about it, at the time, what it all meant, how it fitted into or diverged from local Islamic practice, but he couldn’t hear me over the music. Or did not want to hear me. I tried again, a little later, after the kankurang had moved on elsewhere, and we were all squeezed back into the cab, along with two of the young dancing boys, they lay across our laps, sticky with the sweat of their efforts. But I could see my questions were annoying to everybody and by then the euphoria was over. Lamin’s depressing formality, which he brought to all his dealings with me, had returned. “A Mandinka tradition,” he said and then turned back to the driver and the rest of the passengers to laugh and argue and discuss things I couldn’t guess in a language I didn’t know. We drove on. I wondered about the girls. Who comes for the girls? If not the kankurang, who? Their mothers? Their grandmothers? A friend?

When Tracey’s time came there was no one to guide her over the threshold, to advise her or even tell her that this was a threshold she was crossing. But her body was developing quicker than anybody else’s and so she had to improvise, to make her own arrangements. Her first idea was to dress wildly. Her mother was blamed — mothers usually are — but I’m sure her mother barely saw or knew the half of it. She was still asleep when Tracey left for school and not home when she got back. She’d found some work finally, I think she was cleaning an office block somewhere, but my mother and the other mothers disapproved of her employment almost as much as they had disapproved of her unemployment. Before she had been a “bad influence,” now she was “never home.” Both her presence and her lack of presence were no good somehow, and the way they began to speak of Tracey took on a tragic dimension, for isn’t it only tragic heroes who have no choices before them, no alternative routes, only unavoidable fates? In a few years Tracey would be pregnant, according to my mother, and so would drop out of school, and the “cycle of poverty” would complete itself, ending, most probably, in prison. Prison ran in the family. Of course, prison ran in my family, too, but somehow I was linked to a different star: I would be and do none of these things. My mother’s certainty about all this worried me. If she was right it meant her dominion over other people’s lives extended far beyond anything I had up till now imagined. And yet if anyone might defy fate — as presented in the form of my mother — surely Tracey could manage it?

But the signs were bad. Now when Tracey was asked to take her coat off in class she no longer refused, instead performing the action with terrible relish, unzipping slowly and in such a way that her breasts were presented to the rest of us with as much impact as possible, barely contained by an unsuitable top that showed off her abundance where the rest of us still had only nipples and bone. Everybody “knew” it cost 50p to “touch Tracey’s tits.” I had no idea whether this was true or not, but all the girls united in shunning her, black, white and brown. We were nice girls. We did not let people touch our non-existent tits, we were no longer the crazed things we’d been back in Year Three. Now we had “boyfriends,” chosen for us by other girls, in notes passed from desk to desk, or in long, tortuous phone calls (“Want to know who fancies you and told everyone he fancies you?”), and once these boyfriends had been formally assigned we stood solemnly with them in the playground in the thin winter sun, hand in hand — more often than not a head taller than them — until the inevitable moment came for us to break up (the timing of this, too, was decided by our friends) and the round of notes and calls would begin again. You could not take part in this process without belonging to a clique of willing females and Tracey had no girlfriends left, only me, and only then when she chose to be friendly. She took to spending her break-times in the boys’ football cage, sometimes cursing them, even picking up the ball and stopping play, but more often than not acting as their accomplice, laughing with them as they teased us, never attached to any boy in particular and yet, in the school’s imagination, freely handled by all. If she saw me through the bars, playing with Lily or doing Double Dutch with the other black and brown girls, she would make a show of turning and talking with her male circle, whispering with them, laughing, as if she, too, had an opinion on whether or not we wore bras or had started our periods. Once when I was walking past the football cage in a very dignified way, hand in hand with my new “boyfriend”—Paul Barron, the policeman’s son — she stopped what she was doing, gripped the bars of the cage and smiled out at me. Not a nice smile, a deeply sarcastic smile, as if to say: Oh, is that who you’re pretending to be now?

By the time we’d escaped the kankurang, and passed through all intervening checkpoints, and after our taxi had made it through the clogged, pot-holed streets of the market town and on to the ferry port, by then it was too late, we were out of time, we ran down the gangway but found ourselves stranded with at least a hundred others, watching the rusty, hulking prow push forward into the water. The river split this finger of land in half throughout its length, and the airport was on the other side. I looked up at the ferry’s chaotic three-story cargo: mothers and their babies, schoolchildren, farmers and workers, animals, cars, trucks, bags of grain, tourist tat, oil drums, suitcases, furniture. The children waved at us. Nobody seemed sure if it was the last ferry. We waited. Time passed, the sky turned pink. I thought of Aimee, at the airport, having to make small talk with the Minister of Education — and of Judy in a rage, hunched over her phone, calling me over and over and getting nowhere — but these thoughts did not have their expected effect. I felt quite calm as I waited, resigned, alongside all these other people who seemed likewise to betray no impatience, or at least did not express impatience in any form I recognized. I had no network, there was nothing I could do. I was completely unreachable, for the first time in years. It gave me an unexpected but not unpleasant sense of stillness, of being outside of time: it reminded me somehow of childhood. I waited, leaning on the bonnet of the taxi. Others sat on their own luggage, or hitched themselves up on to the lids of oil drums. An old man rested on half of a giant bedstead. Two little girls straddled a cage of chickens. Periodically, articulated lorries inched their way along the gangway, shunting black diesel smoke down all our throats, honking to alert whoever might be sitting or sleeping in their path, but finding nowhere to go and nothing to do soon joined us in this wait that seemed to have no beginning and no end: we had always been looking out across the water for the ferry and always would be. At sunset our driver threw in the towel. Turned his taxi round, inched back through the crowd, and was away. To avoid a woman determined to sell me a watch I moved, too, toward the edge of the water, and sat down. But Lamin was concerned for me, he was always concerned for me, a person like me should be in the waiting room, which cost two of the filthy, crumpled notes I had balled up in my pocket, and for that reason naturally he would not go with me, but still he was insistent that I must go there, yes, the waiting room was certainly the place for a person like me.

“But why can’t we just wait where we are?”

He gave me his agonized smile, the only kind he had.

“For me it’s OK… but for you?”

It was still forty degrees outside: the idea of being in a room was nauseating. Instead I made him sit with me, our feet dangling over the water, kicking our heels against the heaps of dead oysters cemented to the struts of the pier. All the other young men in the village had dance music on their phones, precisely to listen to at times like these, but Lamin, a serious young man, preferred the World Service, and so taking one earbud each we listened to a story about the cost of university tuition in Ghana. Below us, at the shoreline, topless, broad-backed boys carried determined travelers on their shoulders, through the choppy shallows, to some brightly painted, perilous-looking narrowboats. I pointed to a very fat woman with a baby strapped to her back being hoisted on to the shoulders of one of them. Her thighs crushed his sweating head.

“Why can’t we do that? We’d be across in twenty minutes!”

“For me it’s OK,” Lamin whispered — it was as if every conversation we had were somehow shameful to him and must not be overheard—“not for you. You should go to the waiting room. It will be a long time.”

I watched the beach boy, soaking wet now up to his thighs, lower his passenger on to her seat. He looked less pained, shifting this cargo, than Lamin looked simply talking to me.

As it began to get dark, Lamin entered the crowd to ask questions, becoming another Lamin altogether, not the monosyllabic whisperer he was with me but what must have been the real Lamin, serious and respected by everyone, funny and loquacious, seeming to know everybody, greeted with warm, fraternal affection by beautiful young people wherever we went. His “age mates,” he called them, and this could mean either that he had grown up in the village with them, or that they had been in the same class in school, or else in his year at the teachers’ college. It was a tiny country: age mates were everywhere. The girl who sold us cashews in the market was his age mate, also a security guard in the airport. Sometimes age mates turned out to be one of the young police or army cadets who stopped us at the checkpoints, and that always felt like a piece of luck, the tension dissipated, they took their hands off their guns, leaned in through the passenger window and happily indulged in nostalgia. Age mates gave you a better price, issued tickets more quickly, waved you through. And now here was another one, a bosomy girl in the ferry office, wearing a confounding combination of items I had seen on many local girls and looked forward to showing Aimee, with the superior knowledge of the traveler who has arrived a whole week earlier. Skin-tight, low-riding, studded jeans, the skimpiest of vests — revealing the neon edges of a lacy bra — and a scarlet-red hijab, wrapped modestly round the face and secured with a glittering pink pin. I watched Lamin and this girl talk for a long time, in one of the several local languages Lamin spoke, and I tried to imagine how the simple answers we were seeking to the questions “Is there another ferry? When will it come?” could possibly be turned into as involved a debate as the two of them seemed to be having. Across the bay I heard a honking sound and saw a great shadowy shape moving toward us in the water. I ran over to Lamin and gripped his elbow.

“Is that it? Lamin, is that it?”

The girl stopped her chattering and turned to look at me. She could tell I was no age mate. She examined the drab, utilitarian clothes I had bought especially for wearing in her country: olive cargo pants, long-sleeved wrinkled linen shirt, an ex-boyfriend’s battered old pair of Converse and a black scarf I’d felt silly and self-conscious wearing and so had slipped off my head and now wore round my neck.

“That is a container ship,” she said, with undisguised pity. “You miss the last ferry.”

We paid what Lamin considered an exorbitant amount for our narrowboat passage, despite fierce negotiations, and the moment my giant boy lowered me on to my seat a dozen young men appeared from nowhere and joined us, sitting on every viable piece of the boat’s frame and transforming us from private water taxi into public boat. But on the other side of the water, my network reappeared and we learned that Aimee had decided to stay in one of the beach hotels and set out for the village tomorrow. The giant boy was delighted: we paid him again and thus subsidized another trip for some local kids, sailing back the way we’d come. Once on shore, we made our way finally to the village, in a beat-up minibus. The idea of two boats and two cabs in a single day was excruciating to Lamin, even if I paid for the second ride, even if the price quoted — which made him wince — would not buy me a bottle of water on Broadway. He sat on the roof of the vehicle, with another boy who could not be squeezed in, and as my fellow passengers talked and slept and prayed and ate and fed babies and shouted at the driver to let them off at what appeared to me to be completely deserted intersections, I could hear Lamin beating out a rhythm on the roof, over my head, and for two hours it was the only language I understood. We reached the village after ten. I was staying with a local family, and had never been outside their compound at that hour, or realized the total darkness that surrounded us, through which Lamin walked now with complete confidence, as if it were floodlit. I scurried behind him through the many narrow, sandy, trash-strewn paths I could not see, past the corrugated-iron sheets that marked each breeze-block single-story compound from the next, until we reached the Al Kalo’s compound, no grander or taller than the rest, but with a large open wasteground in front of it, in which at least a hundred children, in the uniform of their school — the school we were here ultimately to replace — huddled under the canopy of a single mango tree. They’d waited six hours to do their dance for a woman called Aimee: now it fell to Lamin to explain why this lady would not be arriving today. But when Lamin had finished speaking the chief appeared to want it explained to him all over again. I waited as the two men discussed the matter, their hands moving in an animated way, while the children grew ever more bored and agitated, until the women lay aside the drums they would not now play and told the children finally to stand, and in dribs and drabs sent them running back to their homes. I held up my phone. It cast its artificial light over the Al Kalo. He was not, I thought, the great African chief Aimee had in her mind. Small, ashy, wrinkled and toothless, in a threadbare Man U T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and plastic Nike house slippers held together with gaffer tape. And how surprised the Al Kalo would be, in turn, to hear what a figure he had become for us all, in New York! It had started with an e-mail from Miriam — subject heading: Protocol—which outlined, in Miriam’s view, what any visitor to the village must present to its Al Kalo upon arrival, as a mark of respect. Scrolling through it, Judy released her seal-bark and put her phone in my face: “This a joke?”

I read the list:

“Don’t think so… Miriam doesn’t make jokes.”

Judy smiled fondly at her screen: “Well, I think we can swing that.”

Not many things charmed Judy, but that list did. It charmed Aimee even more, and for a few weeks afterward, whenever any good people of means visited us, in the Hudson Valley house, or in Washington Square, Aimee would repeat this list with mock-solemnity and then ask everybody present if they could even imagine, and everybody would confess they could hardly even imagine and seemed very moved and comforted by this failure to imagine, it was taken as a sign of purity, both in the Al Kalo and in themselves.

“But it’s just so challenging to make that translation,” commented a young man from Silicon Valley, on one of these nights — he was leaning over the dining table into a candle centerpiece and his face seemed lit from below with his own insight—“I mean, between one reality and the other. Like passing through the matrix.” Everybody at the table nodded and agreed that it was, and later I caught Aimee seamlessly adding this dinner-party line to her recitations of the Al Kalo’s now famous list, as if it were her own.

“What’s he saying?” I whispered to Lamin. I was tired of waiting. I lowered my phone.

Lamin put a hand gently on the chief’s shoulder, but the old man continued to make his endless, agitated address to the darkness.

“The Al Kalo is saying,” Lamin whispered, “that things are very difficult here.”

The next morning I went with Lamin to the school and charged my phone in the headmaster’s office, through the sole outlet in the village, run on a solar-powered generator and paid for by an Italian charity years earlier. Around midday network mysteriously reappeared. I read through my fifty texts and established I had two more days alone here before I would have to go back to the ferry and collect Aimee: she was “resting” in a city hotel. At first I was excited by this unexpected solitude, and surprised myself with all kinds of plans. I told Lamin I wished to go to the famous compound of the rebel slave, two hours away, and that I wanted to see at last, with my own eyes, the shore from which the ships had left, carrying their cargo of humans, destined for my mother’s island, and then on to the Americas and Britain, bearing the sugar and the cotton, before turning back again, a triangle that had produced — among its numberless consequences — my own existence. Yet two weeks earlier, in front of my mother and Miriam, I had called all of this, contemptuously, “diaspora tourism.” Now I told Lamin I would ride a minibus unaccompanied to the old slave forts that once held my ancestors. Lamin smiled and seemed to agree but in practice stepped between all such plans and me. Between me and all attempted interactions, personal or economic, between me and the incomprehensible village, between me and the elders and me and the children, meeting any questions or requests with his anxious smile and his favored — whispered — explanation: “Things are difficult here.” I was not allowed to walk into the bush, pick my own cashews, help cook any meals or wash my own clothes. It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees. Then I realized everyone in the village thought of me that same way. Where grandmothers crouched to eat from the communal bowl, resting on their powerful haunches, gathering up rice and scraps of ladyfish or garden egg in their fingers, I was brought a plastic chair and a knife and fork, because it was assumed, correctly, that I would be too weak to assume the position. As I poured a full liter of water down the drop toilet, to flush out a cockroach that disturbed me, not one of the dozen young girls I lived with ever let me know exactly how far she’d walked that day for that liter. When I snuck off by myself, to the market, to buy a red-and-purple wrapper for my mother, Lamin smiled his anxious smile but spared me the knowledge of what proportion of his yearly teacher’s salary I’d just spent on a single piece of cloth.

Toward the end of that first week I worked out that the preparations for my dinner began moments after my breakfast had been served. But when I tried to approach the corner of the yard where all those women and girls were hunkering in the dust to peel and cut and pound and salt, they laughed at me and sent me back to my leisure, to sit on a plastic chair in my dark room and read the American newspapers I’d brought with me — now crumpled and comically irrelevant — so that I never did discover how, exactly, with no oven and no electricity, they made the oven fries I did not want, or the great bowls of more appetizing rice they cooked for themselves. Food preparation was not for me, nor was washing, or fetching water or pulling up onions or even feeding the goats and chickens. I was, in the strictest sense of the term, good-for-nothing. Even babies were handed to me ironically, and people laughed when they saw me holding one. Yes, great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.

The night before we were to pick up Aimee I was woken very early, by the call to prayer and the hysterical roosters, and finding that it was not yet insanely hot I got dressed in the darkness and left my compound, alone, without any of the small army of women and children I lived with — as Lamin had insisted I must never do — and went looking for Lamin. I wanted to tell him I was going to the old slave fort today, whether he liked it or not, I was going. As morning broke I found myself followed by many barefoot, curious children—“Good morning, how is your morning?”—like so many shadows, as here and there I paused to say Lamin’s name to the dozens of women I passed, already heading off to work on the communal farm. They nodded and pointed me on, through the scrub, down this path and that, round the bright green concrete mosque half eaten on each side by twelve-foot orange termite hills, past all those dusty front yards that were swept, at this hour, by sullen, half-dressed teenage girls, who rested on their brooms to watch me pass. Everywhere I looked women were working: mothering, digging, carrying, feeding, cleaning, dragging, scrubbing, building, fixing. I didn’t see a man until I found Lamin’s compound, finally, at the outskirts of the village, before the farmland. It was very dark and dank, even by local standards: no front door, only a bed sheet, no huge wooden couch, only a single plastic chair, no floor covering, only earth, and a tin bucket of water with which he must have only recently finished washing himself, for he was on his knees beside it, soaking wet in a pair of football shorts. On the breeze-block wall behind him I could make out the crudely drawn logo of Man United, daubed in red paint. Topless, slender, made only of muscle, skin incandescent with its own youth — flawless. How pale, practically colorless, I looked beside him! It made me think of Tracey, of the many times, as a child, she’d placed her arm next to mine, to check once again that she was still a little paler than me — as she proudly maintained that she was — just in case summer or winter had changed this state of affairs since last she’d checked. I didn’t dare tell her that I lay out on our balcony on any hot day, aiming at exactly the quality she seemed to dread: more color, darkness, for all my freckles to join and merge and leave me with the same deep dark brown of my mother. But Lamin, like most people in the village, was as many times dark as my mother was to me, and looking at him now I found the contrast between his beauty and these surroundings to be — among many other things — surreal. He turned and saw me standing over him. His face was full of hurt — I had broken some unspoken contract. He excused himself. Stood the other side of a rag-curtain that notionally separated one part of the dismal space from the other. But I could still see him, pulling on his pristine white Calvin Klein shirt with the monogram, and his white chinos and white sandals, all of it kept white by a means I couldn’t imagine, covered as I was every day in red dust. His fathers and uncles mostly wore jellabas, his many young cousins and siblings ran around in the ubiquitous threadbare soccer shirts and crumbling denim, barefoot, but Lamin wore his Western whites, almost every time I saw him, and a big silver wristwatch, studded with zirconia, whose hands were perpetually stuck at 10:04. On Sunday, when the whole village gathered for a meeting, he wore a tan, bishop-collared suit, and sat close to me, whispering in my ear like a UN delegate, translating only whatever he chose to translate of whatever was being discussed. All the young male teachers in the village dressed in this way, in traditional bishop-collars or sharp chinos and shirts, with big watches and thin black bags, their flip-phones and huge-screened androids always in hand, even if they didn’t work. It was an attitude I remembered from the old neighborhood, a way of representing, which in the village meant dressing for a certain part: I am one of the serious, modern young men. I am the future of my country. I always felt absurd next to them. Compared to their sense of personal destiny, I looked like I was in the world by mere accident, having given no thought at all to what I represented, dressed in my wrinkled olive cargo pants and my filthy Converse, dragging a battered rucksack around.

Lamin got back on his knees and quietly restarted his first prayer of the day — I had interrupted that, too. Listening to his whispered Arabic, I wondered exactly what form his prayer took. I waited. I looked around me at the poverty Aimee hoped to “reduce.” It was all I could see, and the kinds of questions children ask were the only kind that came to me. What is this? What’s happening? The same mindset had led me, on the very first day I’d arrived, to the headmaster’s office, where I sat sweating under his molten tin roof, frantically trying to get online, although I could, of course, have googled what I wanted to know in New York, far more quickly, with infinitely more ease, at any time in the previous six months. Here it was a laborious process. A page would half load, then crash, the energy from the solar rose and fell and sometimes cut off completely. It took more than an hour. And when the two sums of money I was looking for finally appeared in their adjacent windows all I did was sit and stare at them for a long time. In the comparison, as it turned out, Aimee came out a little ahead. And just like that the GDP of an entire country could fit into a single person, like one Russian doll into another.

That last June of primary school Tracey’s father got out and we met for the first time. He stood on the communal grass, looking up at us, smiling. Suave, modern, full of a kind of kinetic joy, but also somehow classic, elegant, Bojangles himself. He stood in fifth position, legs apart, in an electric-blue bomber jacket with a Chinese dragon on the back and tight white jeans. A thick, rakish mustache, and an Afro in the old style, with no fades or lines cut into it and no high-top. Tracey’s happiness was intense, she reached over the balcony, as if to pull her father up to her, yelling at him to come, come up here, Dad, come up, but he winked at us and said: “I’ve got a better idea, let’s go down the high road.” We ran down and each took a hand.

The first thing I noticed was that he had the body of a dancer, and moved like a dancer, rhythmically, with force but also with lightness, so that we three didn’t just walk along the high road, we promenaded. Everybody looked at us, we strutted in the sunshine, and several people stopped what they were doing and came to hail us — to hail Louie — from across the street, from a grotty window above a hairdresser’s, from the doorways of the pubs. As we approached the betting shop, an old Caribbean gentleman, in a flat cap and thick woolen vest, despite the heat, stepped in front of us, blocking our way, and asked: “Dem your daughters?” Louie held up our hands like we were two prizefighters. “No,” he said, letting my hand drop, “just this one.” Tracey lit up with the glory of it all. “I hear dem say tirteen months all you do,” said the old man, chuckling. “Lucky, lucky Louie.” He nudged Louie in his neat waist, it was cinched by a thin gold belt, like a superhero. But Louie was insulted, he stepped back from the old man — a deep sliding plié—and loudly sucked his teeth. He corrected the record: didn’t even do seven.

The old man drew out a newspaper he’d had tucked into his armpit, unrolled it and showed Louie a certain page, which he studied before bending down to show it to us. We were told to close our eyes and stick our fingers wherever the mood took us, and when we opened our eyes we each had a horse under a finger, I can still remember the name of mine, Theory Test, because five minutes later Louie ran back out through the bookie’s doors, scooped me up off the floor and threw me into the air. A hundred and fifty quid won on a five-pound stake. We were diverted to Woolworths, and each told to choose whatever we wanted. I left Tracey at the videos intended for kids like us — the suburban comedies, action films, space sagas — walking on and bending over the big wire bin, the “bargain bin,” set aside for those who had little money or choice. There were always a lot of musicals in there, nobody wanted them, not even the old ladies, and I was scavenging through, happily enough, when I heard Tracey, who had not moved on from the modern section, asking Louie: “So how many can we have?” The answer was four, though we were to hurry up about it, he was hungry. I snatched four musicals in a blissful panic:

The only one of Tracey’s purchases I remember is Back to the Future, more expensive than all mine put together. She pressed it to her chest, giving it up only for a moment so that it might be passed to the cashier, and snatching it back again afterward, like an animal snapping at its food.

When we got to the restaurant we sat at the best table, just by the window. Louie showed us a funny way to eat a Big Mac, dismantling its layers and placing fries above and below each burger and then putting it all together again.

“You coming to live with us, then?” Tracey asked.

“Hmmm. Don’t know about that. What she say?”

Tracey stuck her piggy nose in the air: “Don’t care what she says.”

Both her little hands were screwed into tight fists.

“Don’t disrespect your mum. Your mum’s got her own problems.”

He went back up to the counter to get milkshakes. When he returned he looked burdened, and without introducing the topic in any formal way, he began to talk to us about the inside, about how you found, when you were inside, that it wasn’t like the neighborhood, no, not at all, it was very different, because when you were inside everybody understood that people had better keep to their own kind, and that’s how it was, “like stayed with like,” there was hardly any mixing, not like up at the flats, and it wasn’t the guards or anyone telling you to do it, that’s just the way it was, tribes stick together, and it even goes by shade, he explained, pulling up his sleeve and pointing at his arm, so all of us that was dark like me, well, we’re over here, tight with each other, always — he drew a line on the Formica tabletop — and brown like you two is somewhere over here, and Paki is somewhere else, and Indian is somewhere else. White is split, too: Irish, Scottish, English. And in the English some of them are BNP and some are all right. Everybody goes with their own is the point, and it’s natural. Makes you think.

We sat slurping our milkshakes, thinking.

And you learn all kinds of things, he continued, you learn who the real God of the black man is! Not this blue-eyed, long-haired Jesus individual — no! And let me arks you: how comes I never even really heard of him or his name before I get up in there? Look it up. You learn a lot that you can’t learn in school, because these people won’t tell you nothing, nothing about African kings, nothing about Egyptian queens, nothing about Mohammed, they hide it all, they hide the whole of our history so we feel like we’re nothing, we feel like we’re at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s the whole plan, but the truth is we built the fucking Pyramids! Oh, there’s a devilishness in them, but one day, one day, God willing, this white day will be done. Louie lifted Tracey on to his lap and jiggled her as if she were a much younger child, and then worked her arms from below, like a puppet, so she seemed to be dancing to the music that was playing through the speakers that nestled between the security camera. You still dancing? It was a casual question, I could tell he wasn’t particularly interested in the answer, but Tracey always took her opportunities, no matter how small, and now she told her father, in a great, happy rush of detail, about all her dance medals from that year, and from the previous year, and of what Miss Isabel had said about her pointe work, of what all kinds of people said about her talent, and about her upcoming audition for stage school, on which subject I had already heard about as much as I could stand. My own mother would not allow stage school, not even if I won a full scholarship, of the kind Tracey was betting on. We had been battling over it, my mother and I, ever since I heard that Tracey would be allowed to audition. The thought of having to go to a normal school while Tracey spent her days dancing!

Now see, with me, said Louie, tiring suddenly of his daughter’s talk, with me I didn’t need dance school, matter of fact I used to rule the dance floor! This girl got it all from her daddy. Believe me: I can do all the moves! Arks your mum! Used to even make some money off it, back in the day. You look doubtful!

To prove it, to allay our doubts, he slipped off his stool and kicked his leg up, jerked his head, shifted the line of his shoulders, spun, stopped on a dime and ended on the points of his toes. A group of girls who sat across from us in a booth whistled and cheered, and watching him I felt I understood now what Tracey had meant by placing her father and Michael Jackson in one reality, and I didn’t find that she was a liar, exactly, or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. They were touched by the same inheritance. And if Louie’s dancing happened not to be famous like Michael’s, well, this was, to Tracey, only a kind of technicality — an accident of time and place — and now, thinking back on his dancing, writing it all down, I think she was exactly right.

Afterward we decided to walk with our huge milkshakes back up the high road, stopping again to speak to a few friends of Louie’s — or perhaps they were simply people who knew enough about him to fear him — including a young Irish builder hanging one-handed off the scaffolding outside the Tricycle Theater, his face burned red from too much work in the sun. He reached down to shake Louie’s hand: “Now, if it isn’t the Playboy of the West Indies!” He was rebuilding the Tricycle’s roof, and Louie was very struck by this, it was the first time he’d heard about the terrible fire of a few months before. He asked the boy how much it would cost to rebuild, how much he and the rest of Moran’s men were getting paid an hour, what cement they were using and who were the wholesalers, and I looked over at Tracey as she filled up with pride at this glimpse of another possible Louie: respectable young entrepreneur, quick with numbers, good with his staff, taking his daughter round his place of work, holding her hand so tightly. I wished it could be like that for her every day.

It didn’t occur to me that there would be any consequences to our little outing but even before I’d got back on to Willesden Lane somebody had told my mother where I’d been and with whom. She caught hold of me as I walked through the door and slapped the milkshake out of my hand, it struck the opposite wall, very pink and thick — unexpectedly dramatic — and for the rest of the time we lived in that place we coexisted with a faint strawberry stain. She started in yelling. What did I think I was doing? Who did I think I was with? I ignored all her rhetorical questions and asked her again why I couldn’t audition like Tracey. “Only a fool gives up an education,” said my mother, and I said, “Well, then, maybe I’m a fool.” I tried to get by her, into my room, my haul of videos behind my back, but she blocked my way and so I told her bluntly that I was not her and did not ever want to be her, that I didn’t care about her books or her clothes or her ideas or any of it, I wanted to dance and live my own life. My father emerged from wherever he’d been hiding. Gesturing at him, I tried to make the point that if it were up to my father I’d be allowed to audition, because my father was a man who believed in me, as Tracey’s father believed in her. My mother sighed. “Of course he’d let you do it,” she said. “He’s not worried — he knows you’ll never get in.”

“For God’s sake,” muttered my father, but he couldn’t look at me and I understood with a stab of pain that what my mother was saying must be true.

“All that matters in this world,” she explained, “is what’s written down. But what happens with this”—she gestured at my body—“that will never matter, not in this culture, not for these people, so all you’re doing is playing their game by their rules, and if you play that game, I promise you, you’ll end up a shade of yourself. Catch a load of babies, never leave these streets, and be another one of these sisters who might as well not exist.”

“You don’t exist,” I said.

I grabbed at this line as a child grabs at the first thing to hand. The effect on my mother was beyond anything I could have hoped for. Her mouth turned slack and all her self-possession and beauty drained from her. She began to cry. We stood at the threshold to my room, my mother with her head bowed. My father had retreated, it was just we two. It took a minute before she found her voice again. She told me — in a fierce whisper — not to take another step. But as soon as she’d said it she saw her own mistake: it was an admission, this was exactly the time of my life when I could finally take a step away from her, many steps, I was almost twelve, I was already as tall as her — I could dance right out of her life — and so a shift in her authority was inevitable, was happening precisely as we stood there. I said nothing, stepped around her, went into my room and slammed the door.

Ali Baba Goes to Town is a strange film. It’s a variation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which Eddie Cantor plays Al Babson, an everyday schmuck who finds himself working as an extra on an Arabian Nights—type picture, out in Hollywood. On set he falls asleep and dreams he’s back in ninth-century Arabia. One scene made a very strong impression on me, I wanted to show it to Tracey, but she’d become hard to pin down, she didn’t call, and when I tried to call her flat there was always a pause on the line before her mother told me she was out. I knew she had her legitimate reasons, she was busy preparing for her stage-school audition — which Mr. Booth had kindly agreed to assist her with — she rehearsed most weekday afternoons in the church hall. But I wasn’t ready to release her into her new life. I made many attempts to ambush her: the doors to the church would be open, sun streaming through the stained glass, Mr. Booth accompanying her on the piano, and if she spotted me spying on her, she’d wave — the adult, distracted greeting of a busy woman — but never once did she come out to talk to me. By some obscure pre-teen logic, I decided my body was to blame. I was still a lanky, flat-chested child, lurking in the doorway, while Tracey, dancing in the light, was already a little woman. How could she have any interest in the things that still interested me?

“Nah, don’t know it. What’s it called again?”

“I just told you. Ali Baba Goes to Town.”

I’d been bold and walked into the church at the end of one of her rehearsals. She was sitting in a plastic chair taking off her tap shoes, while Mr. Booth was still in his corner, messing around with the piece—“Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine”—speeding it up and slowing it down, playing it now as jazz, now as ragtime.

“I’m busy.”

“You could come now.”

“I’m busy now.”

Mr. Booth packed his music into his bag and wandered over. Tracey’s nose shot in the air, sniffing out praise.

“Well, that was smashing,” he said.

“Was it good, really?”

“Smashing. You dance like a dream.”

He smiled and patted her on the shoulder, and a flush of happiness passed over her face. It was the kind of praise I got from my own father daily, no matter what I did, but for Tracey it must have been very rare, for hearing it seemed to change everything, including how she felt about me, in that moment. As Mr. Booth made his way slowly out of the church, she smiled, slung her dance bag over her shoulder and said: “Let’s go.”

The scene comes early in the film. A group of men sits on the sandy ground, they seem apathetic, depressed. These, the sultan tells Al, are the musicians, the Africans, whom nobody can understand, for they speak an unknown language. But Al wants to talk to them and he tries everything: English, French, Spanish, Italian, even Yiddish. Nothing doing. Then a brainwave. Hi dee hi dee hi dee hi! The call of Cab Calloway, and the Africans, recognizing it, leap to their feet and cry out the response: Ho dee ho dee ho dee ho! Excited, Cantor starts blacking up, right then and there, painting his face with a burned piece of cork, leaving only those rolling eyes, the elastic mouth.

“What is this? I don’t want to watch this!”

“Not this bit. Just wait, Trace, please. Wait.”

I took the remote control from her and asked that she sit back on the settee. Now Al was singing to the Africans, a verse that seemed to swing time itself, flashing far ahead, to a moment when these Africans would no longer be as they were presently, a time a thousand years in the future when they would set the tempo the world wants to dance to, in a place called Harlem. Hearing this news, the delighted musicians stood up and started dancing and singing, on a raised platform, in the town square. The sultana and her advisers look down from a balcony, the Arabians look up from the street. The Arabs are Hollywood Arabs, white, in Aladdin costumes. The Africans are black Americans dressed up — loincloths and feathers, outlandish headdresses — and they play primitive musical instruments, in a parody of their future Cotton Club incarnations: trombones made of actual bone, clarinets formed from hollowed-out sticks, that sort of thing. And Cantor, true to the origins of his name, is the bandleader, with a whistle round his neck, which he blows to end a solo or usher a performer off stage. The song reached its chorus, he told them that swing was here to stay, that there was no avoiding it, and so they must choose their partner — and dance. Then Cantor blew his whistle and the wonderful thing happened. It was a girl — a girl arrived. I made Tracey sit as close to the screen as she could, I didn’t want there to be any doubt about it. I looked across: I saw her lips part in surprise, as mine had done the first time I watched it, and then I knew that she could see what I saw. Oh, the nose was different — this girl’s nose was normal and flat — and there was, in her eyes, no hint of Tracey’s brand of cruelty. But the heart-shaped face, the adorable puffy cheeks, the compact body and yet the long limbs, these were all Tracey. The physical resemblance was so strong and yet she didn’t dance like Tracey. Her arms wheelbarrowed as she moved, her legs flew back and forth, she was a hoofer, not an obsessed technician. And she was funny: walking on her toes or freeze-framing for a second in an absurd comic attitude, on one leg, arms in the air, like the hood ornament of an expensive car. Dressed like the rest — grass skirt, feathers — but nothing could diminish her.

For the big finish the girl came back out on stage and joined all those Americans dressed like Africans, and Cantor himself, and they all stood still in a line and leaned forward at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. It was a move back from the future: a year later we were all trying it ourselves in the playground, having just seen Michael Jackson in a music video doing the exact same thing. And for weeks after that video first aired Tracey and me and many other kids in the playground tried our best to imitate the move, but it was impossible, no one could do it, we all fell flat on our faces. At the time I didn’t know how it was done. Now I know. In the video, Michael used wires and, a few years later — when he wanted to achieve the effect live on stage — he wore a pair of “anti-gravity” shoes, they had a slot in the heel that engaged with a peg in the stage, and he was their co-inventor, the patent is in his name.

The Africans of Ali Baba nailed their own shoes to the floor.

At Aimee’s hotel we got into a series of SUVs. It was the full circus on that first trip: her children were with us, and their nanny, Estelle, and Judy of course, plus the three other PAs, a PR girl, Granger, a French architect I’d never seen before in my life, a star-struck woman from the Department for International Development, a journalist and photographer from Rolling Stone, and a man called Fernando Carrapichano, our project manager. I watched the sweating bellboys in their white linen uniforms heaving bags into trunks, helping everyone to their seats, and wondered what village they came from. I’d expected to ride with Aimee, in her car, to debrief her — for what it was worth — on my week’s reconnaissance, but when Aimee saw Lamin her eyes widened and the first thing she said to him after “Hello” was “You should ride with me.” I was directed to the second car, with Carrapichano. He and I were to pass the time together, so we were told, “ironing out the details.”

The drive back to the village was uncanny. All the difficulties I had come to expect from that journey were now absent, as when in a dream the dreamer is lucid and able to manipulate everything around her. No checkpoints, not any longer, and no pot-holed roads bringing us to a standstill, and instead of the enervating, stifling heat, a perfectly air-conditioned twenty-one-degree environment and an ice-cold bottle of water in my hand. Our convoy, which included a pair of jeeps filled with government officials and a police motorcade, moved swiftly along streets that seemed at times to have been artificially cleared, at others artificially populated — lined with flag-waving children, like a stage set — and we took an odd, elongated route, weaving through the electrified tourist strip and then on through a series of suburban enclaves I had not realized existed, where huge, unfinished houses, blighted with rebar, struggled to rise up from behind their fortress walls. Under the influence of this state of unreality, I kept seeing versions of my mother’s face everywhere, in young girls running down the street, in old women selling fish in the markets, and once in a young man hanging off the side of a minibus. When we got to the ferry it was empty but for us and our cars. I wondered what Lamin made of it all.

Carrapichano I didn’t know very well and the only time we’d spoken before I’d made a fool of myself. It was on the plane to Togo, six months earlier, back when Togo was still on the shortlist, before Aimee had offended that tiny nation by suggesting, in an interview, that its government did “nothing for their people.” “What’s it like?” I’d asked, leaning over him, looking out of the porthole window, and meaning, I must admit, “Africa.”

“I have not been,” he said coldly, without turning round.

“But you practically live here — I read your résumé.”

“No. Senegal, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, Ethiopia, yes — Togo, never.”

“Oh, well, you know what I mean.”

He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: “If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?”

Now I tried to make amends, small talk, but he was busy with a huge sheaf of papers, on which I spotted graphs I couldn’t follow, sets of statistics from the IMF. I felt a little sorry for him, stuck with us and our ignorance, he was so far outside his natural milieu. I knew he was forty-six, had a Ph.D., was an economist by training, with a background in international development, and that like Miriam he’d worked at Oxfam for many years: she was the one who’d recommended him to us in the first place. He’d spent most of the nineties managing aid projects in East and West Africa, in remote villages without television, and one interesting consequence of this — for me, anyway — was that he really did not have a very clear idea who Aimee was, beyond having registered her name, vaguely, as a phenomenon of his youth. Now he was having to spend all of his time with her, and therefore with people like Mary-Beth, Aimee’s ditzy second assistant, whose job consisted entirely of sending e-mails, dictated by Aimee, to other people, and then reading out the replies. Or grim Laura, assistant number three, who reigned over Aimee’s muscle aches, toiletries and nutrition, and happened to believe that the moon landings were staged. He had to listen to Judy read the star signs out each morning and plan her day accordingly. Amid the insanity of Aimee’s world, I should have been the closest thing he had to an ally, but every conversation we attempted went awry somehow, the way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn’t doubt was the real one, but which I couldn’t “speak to,” to use a favorite phrase of his. Aimee, equally helpless before a graph, liked him because he was Brazilian and handsome, with rich, curly, black hair and lovely gold glasses that made him look like an actor playing an economist in a movie. But it was obvious from the start there would be trouble for them ahead. Aimee’s way of communicating her ideas relied on a shared understanding — of Aimee herself, of her “legend”—and “Fern,” as she called him, had no context for any of that. He was excellent at ironing out the details: architectural plans, government negotiations, land contracts — all the various practical considerations. But when it came to speaking directly with Aimee about the project itself — which for her was primarily a personal and emotional undertaking — he was out of his depth.

“But what does it mean when she is saying to me: ‘Let’s make it kind of an illuminated ethos’?”

He pushed his glasses up his handsome nose and examined his many notes, the result, I presumed, of having dutifully transcribed every little piece of nonsense that had fallen from Aimee’s mouth during their eight-hour flight together. He held the paper up as if it might resolve itself into sense if only he stared at it long enough.

“Maybe I misunderstand? In what way can a school be ‘illuminated’?”

“No, no, it’s a reference to an album of hers: Illuminated. From ’97? She thinks of it as her most “positive” album, so the lyrics are, well, they’re sort of like: Hey, girls, go get your dreams, blah blah, you’re strong, blah blah, never give up. That sort of thing? So she’s basically saying: I want this to be an empowering school for girls.”

He looked bewildered.

“But why not just say this?”

I patted him gently on his shoulder: “Fernando, don’t worry — it’s going to be fine.”

“I should listen to this album?”

“Honestly, I don’t think that would help.”

Up ahead, in the next car, I could see Aimee leaning out of the passenger seat with her arm over the door, happily engaged with every wave or whistle or scream of delight from the street, which were, I felt pretty certain, not responses to Aimee herself but to this shiny cavalcade of SUVs rolling through rural areas in which not one in two hundred owned a car. In the village, out of curiosity, I often commandeered the phones of the young teachers, put my earphones in and listened to the thirty or so songs they tended to play on rotation, some of which came free with their minutes, others — especially beloved — they had spent precious credit to download. Hip-hop, R&B, soca, reggae, ragga, grime, dub-step, hi-life — ringtone scraps of the whole glorious musical diaspora could be heard, but rarely any white artists, and never Aimee. Now I watched her smile and wink at the many soldiers, who, relieved of their usual activity, stood aimlessly at the sides of the road, guns by their side, watching us pass. And wherever there was music, wherever kids were dancing, Aimee would clap her hands to get their attention and imitate their moves as best she could while still sitting down. This element of roadside rolling chaos that so affected and disturbed me, like a zoetrope unfurled and filled with every form of human drama — women feeding children, carrying them, talking to them, kissing them, hitting them, men talking, fighting, eating, working, praying, animals living and dying, wandering down the street bleeding from their necks, boys running, walking, dancing, pissing, shitting, girls whispering, laughing, frowning, sitting, sleeping — all of this delighted Aimee, she leaned so far out of that window I thought she might fall right through her beloved matrix and into it. But then she was always happiest in ungovernable crowds. Until her insurance company stopped her doing it she often crowd-surfed, and it never frightened her, as it did me, to be suddenly swarmed by people in an airport or the lobby of a hotel. Meanwhile the only thing I could see through my tinted window did not appear to surprise or alarm her, and when I made some reference to it in the few minutes we were together, standing on the gangway, watching our cars roll on to the spookily empty ferry and her children run delightedly up the cast-iron steps, to the upper deck, she turned to me and snapped: “Jesus Christ, if you’re gonna be shocked by every fucking sign of poverty you see here, this is going to be a mighty long trip. You’re in Africa!”

Just as if I’d asked why it was light outside and been told: “It’s daytime!”

All we had was her name, we found it in the credits. Jeni LeGon. We had no idea where she’d come from, if she was alive or dead, if she’d made any other films, we had only these four minutes from Ali Baba—well, I had them. If Tracey wanted to watch them she had to come round, which she began to do, every now and then, like Narcissus bending over a pool of water. I understood it wouldn’t take her long to learn the whole routine — excepting the impossible lean — but I wasn’t going to give her the video to take home, I knew better than that, I knew when I had collateral. And I had begun to spot LeGon here and there, bit parts in movies I’d seen many times. There she was as a maid to Ann Miller, wrestling with a baby pug, and as a tragic mulatto, dying in the arms of Cab Calloway, and once more a maid, helping Betty Hutton get dressed. These discoveries, widely spaced, sometimes many months apart, became a reason to call Tracey, and even if her mother answered Tracey would come round right away, with no hesitation or excuses. She sat inches from the television screen, ready to point out this or that moment of action or expression, an emotion passing over Jeni’s face, a variation in one step or another, and interpreting everything she saw with that sharpness of insight I felt I lacked, that I considered, at this point, Tracey’s possession alone. A gift for seeing that seemed to have its only outlet and expression here, in my living room, in front of my television, and which no teacher ever saw, and no exam ever managed to successfully register or even note, and of which, perhaps, these memories are the only true witness and record.

One thing she failed to notice, and I didn’t want to tell her: my parents had broken up. I only knew it myself because my mother told me it was so. They still lived in the same flat and slept in the same room. Where else could they go? Real divorces were for people who had lawyers and new places to live. There was also the question of my mother’s capabilities. We all three knew that in divorces the father left, but my father could not leave, there was no question of that. Who, in his absence, would tape up my knee when I fell, or remember when my medicine was to be taken, or calmly comb the nits out of my hair? Who would come to me when I had my night terrors? Who would wash my stinking, yellow sheets the next morning? I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers — the management of time — was beyond her. She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time left for anything else, there’s no time to go to the park or get ice cream, no time to put a child to bed, no time to listen to the teary recounting of a nightmare. No, my father could not leave.

One morning when I was brushing my teeth my mother walked into the bathroom, sat on the rim of our avocado bathtub and euphemistically outlined the new arrangement. At first I could hardly understand her, she seemed be taking a very long time to get to the point of whatever she really wanted to say, speaking of child-psychology theories, and “places in Africa” where children were raised not by their parents but “by a village,” and other matters I either didn’t understand or didn’t care about, but finally she pulled me to her, hugged me very tightly and said, “Your dad and me — we’re going to live as brother and sister.” I can remember thinking this was the most perverse thing I’d ever heard: I was to be left an only child, while my parents became siblings to each other. My father’s initial reaction must have been similar, because for several days after that it was warfare in the flat, all-out warfare, and I had to sleep with two pillows pressed to my ears. But when he at last understood that she was not joking, that she would not change her mind, he fell into a depression. He began to spend whole weekends on the sofa, watching television, while my mother kept to the kitchen and to her high stool, busy with the homework for her degree. I went to dance class alone. I ate my tea with one or the other of them, no longer with both.

A little while after my mother’s announcement my father made a baffling decision: he went back to delivering the post. It had taken him ten years to become a Delivery Office Manager but in his sadness he read Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and this novel had convinced him that he’d be better off doing “honest labor,” as he put it — and have the rest of his days free to “get the education he never had”—than work at a soulless desk job that used up all his time. It was the kind of impractical, high-principled action that my mother usually appreciated, and the timing of the announcement did not seem, to me, accidental. But if winning her back was his plan it didn’t work: he rose once again each morning at three and returned at one in the afternoon, often ostentatiously reading some sociological textbook nicked from my mother’s shelves, but although my mother respectfully asked after his morning’s work and occasionally after his reading, she did not fall back in love with him. After a while they stopped talking to each other altogether. The weather in the flat changed. In the past I had always had to wait for one of the rare gaps in my parents’ decade-long argument, into which I would then try to insert myself. Now I could speak without interruption, if I wanted, to either of them, but it was already too late. In the fast-forward style of city childhoods, they were no longer the most important people in my life. No, I really didn’t care what my parents thought of me any longer. Only my friend’s judgment counted, now more than ever, and sensing this, I suspect, more and more she chose to withhold it.

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 speeches 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?

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.

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 unfamiliar 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.

That autumn, in my first term at my new school, I found out what I was without my friend: a body without a distinct outline. The kind of girl who moved from group to group, neither welcomed nor despised, tolerated, and always eager to avoid confrontation. I felt I made no impression. There were, for a while, a couple of girls in the year above who believed I prided myself on my high color, on my long nose, on my freckles, and they bullied me, stole money from me, harassed me on the bus, but bullies need resistance of some kind, even if it’s only tears, and I gave them none and they soon got bored and left me alone. Most of my years in that school I don’t remember. Even as I was living them a stubborn part of me never accepted it as anything more than a place I had to survive each day until I was free again. I was more engaged with what I imagined of Tracey’s schooling than with the reality of my own. I remember her telling me, for example, not long after she arrived in the place, that when Fred Astaire died, her school held a memorial assembly, and some of the students were asked to dance in tribute. Tracey, dressed as Bojangles, in a white top hat and tails, brought the house down. I know I never saw her do this but even now I feel I have a memory of it.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the difficult middle passage — in those years I really didn’t see much of her. Her new life swallowed her up. She was not there when my father finally moved out or when I got my period. I don’t know when she lost her virginity or if and by whom she first got her heart broken. Whenever I saw her in the streets it seemed to me that she was doing well. She would be wrapped around a very handsome, mature-looking young man, often tall and with a sharp fade cut into his hair, and I think of her on these occasions as not so much walking as bouncing by — fresh-faced, hair pulled up tight in a dancer’s bun, wearing neon leggings and a crop top — but also red-eyed, clearly stoned. Electric, charismatic, outrageously sexual, filled with the summer’s energy at all times, even in freezing February. And to come across her like this, as she really was — that is, outside of my own envious ideas about her — was always a form of existential shock, like seeing someone from a storybook in real life, and I would do everything I could to make the encounter as brief as possible, sometimes crossing the street before she reached me, or jumping on a bus, or claiming to be heading for somewhere urgently. Even when I heard, a little later on, from my mother and others in the neighborhood, that she was having difficulties, more and more frequently in trouble, I couldn’t imagine why that would be, her life was perfect as far as I was concerned, and this is one side-effect of envy, maybe, this failure of imagination. In my mind, her struggles were over. She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by color, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities… In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth — it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up. Goths were already a minority, and I joined the oddest chapter, a small group of only five kids. One was from Romania and had a club foot, another was Japanese. Black Goths were rare but not unprecedented: I’d seen a few of them hanging around Camden and now copied them as best I could, dusting my face ghost-white and painting my lips blood red, letting my hair half-dread and spraying some parts of it purple. I bought a pair of Dr. Martens and covered them in Tipp-Exed anarchy symbols. I was fourteen: the world was pain. I was in love with my Japanese friend, he was in love with the fragile blonde in our circle who had scars all up her arms and looked like a broken cat left out in the rain — she couldn’t love anybody. For almost two years we spent all our time together. I hated the music, and there was no dancing allowed — just pogoing up and down, or else swaying drunkenly into each other — but I liked that the political apathy disgusted my mother and that the brutality of my new look brought out the keenly maternal side of my father, who now worried about me endlessly and tried to feed me up as I gothically lost weight. I bunked off for the greater part of each week: the bus that went to school also went to Camden Lock. We sat on the towpaths, drinking cider and smoking, DMs hanging over the canal, discussing the phoniness of everyone we knew, free-form conversations that could eat up whole days. Violently I denounced my mother, the old neighborhood, everything from my childhood, above all Tracey. My new friends were made to listen to every detail of our mutual history, all of it retold in a bitter spirit, stretching back to the very first day we met, walking across a churchyard. After an afternoon of that I’d get back on the bus, pass by the grammar school I’d failed to get into and get off at a stop outside — but precisely outside — my father’s new bachelor flat, where I could happily go back in time, eat his comfort food, indulge in the old secret pleasures. Judy Garland pretending to be a Zulu, dancing the cakewalk, in Meet Me in St. Louis.

Our second visit came four months later, in the rainy season. We arrived in darkness, after a delayed flight, and when we reached the pink house, I couldn’t get over the oddness of that place, the sadness and emptiness of it, the feeling I had of moving into somebody else’s broken ambition. Rain pelted the cab roof. I asked Fernando if he wouldn’t mind if I went back to Hawa’s compound.

“For me it’s very fine. I have a lot of work to do.”

“You’ll be all right? I mean, by yourself?”

He laughed: “I have been alone in much worse places.”

We parted at the huge, peeling billboard that marked the beginning of the village. I got soaked walking twenty yards, pushed open the aluminum door of Hawa’s family compound, weighted by an oil-can half filled with sand but unlocked as always. Inside was almost unrecognizable to me. In the yard, where there had been, four months earlier, neatly raked red earth, and grandmothers, cousins, nephews, nieces, sisters and many babies, sitting all around, late into the night, now there was nobody, only a churned mud-pit into which I immediately sank and lost a shoe. When I reached down for it I heard laughter. I looked up and realized I was being watched from the concrete verandah. Hawa and a few of her girlfriends, carrying the tin plates from dinner back to wherever they were kept.

“Oh-oh,” cried Hawa, laughing at the sight of me, bedraggled, and now carrying in my arms a large suitcase that refused to roll through the sludge. “Look what the rain brings!”

I had not expected to stay with Hawa again, hadn’t warned her, but neither she nor anybody else in the compound seemed very surprised by my arrival, and though I hadn’t been a particularly successful or well-loved house guest the first time round, I was welcomed like family. I shook hands with the various grandmothers, and we hugged, Hawa and I, and said how much we’d missed each other. I explained that on this trip there was only Fernando and me — Aimee was recording in New York — and that we were here to observe in further detail what was being done in the old school and what might be improved in the new one. I was invited to join Hawa and her visitors in the small living room, dimly lit with white solar, more keenly illuminated by the screens of each girl’s phone. We smiled at each other, the girls, Hawa, me. My mother’s and father’s health were politely asked after — it was again considered astonishing that I had no siblings — and then Aimee’s and her children’s health were asked after, and Carrapichano’s and Judy’s, but none more solicitously than Granger’s. Granger’s health was what they were really interested in, for Granger had been the real hit of the first visit, far more than Aimee or any of the rest of us. We were curiosities — he was loved. Granger knew all the cheesy R&B tracks that Hawa adored, Aimee disdained and I’d never heard of, he wore the kinds of sneakers she most admired, and during a celebratory drum circle, put on by the mothers at the school, without hesitation had entered the ring, brushed his shoulders, body-popped, vogued and performed the moonwalk, while I cringed in my seat and busied myself taking pictures. “That Granger!” said Hawa now, shaking her head happily at the thrilling memory of Granger, compared to the dull reality of me. “Such a crazy dancer! All the boys were saying: ‘Are these the new moves?’ And remember, your Aimee said to us: ‘No, these are the old ones!’ You remember? But he’s not with you this time? It’s a shame. Oh, Granger is such a fun guy!” The young women in the room laughed and shook their heads and sighed, and then a silence fell again, and it began to dawn on me that I had interrupted a get-together, a gossipy good time, which now, after a minute of awkward silence, resumed in Wolof. Not wanting to go to the complete darkness of the bedroom, I sat back in the sofa, let the talk wash over me and my clothes air-dry on my body. Next to me Hawa held court, two hours’ worth of stories which — from what I could tell — ranged from the hilarious to the mournful to the righteously offended but never stretched as far as anger. Laughter and sighs were my guide, and the photos from her phone which she flashed in the middle of certain anecdotes and cursorily explained in English if I made a point of asking. I gathered she had a love problem — a young policeman in Banjul whom she rarely saw — and a big plan, already anticipated, to go to the beach when the rains ended, for a family gathering, to which the policeman would be invited. She showed me the picture from this event the previous year: a panoramic shot that took in at least a hundred people. I spotted her in the front row and noticed the absence of scarf, instead she had a silky weave on her head, parted in the center and falling to her shoulders.

“Different hair,” I said, and Hawa laughed, put her hands to her hijab and removed it, revealing four inches of her own hair twisted into little dreads.

“But it grows so slow, oh!”

It took me a while to figure out that Hawa was that relative rarity in the village, a middle-class girl. The daughter of two university teachers, neither of whom I ever met, her father was working in Milan now, as a traffic warden, and her mother lived in the city and still worked at the university. Her father had taken what people in the village called “the back way,” along with Hawa’s elder brother, traveling through the Sahara to Libya and then finally making the dangerous crossing to Lampedusa. Two years later, by then married to an Italian, he sent for the other brother, but that was six years ago, and if Hawa was still waiting for her call she was far too proud to tell me. The money the father sent home had brought certain luxuries to the compound, rare in the village: a tractor, a large lot of private land, a toilet, though it was not connected to anything, and a television, though it did not work. The compound itself housed the four wives of Hawa’s dead grandfather and many of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren his unions had produced, in ever-changing combinations. It was never possible to locate all the parents to these children: only the grandmothers remained constant, passing babies and toddlers back and forth between themselves and to Hawa, who, despite her youth, often seemed to me to be the head of the household, or at least the heart of it. She was one of those people who attract everybody. Emphatically cute, with a perfectly circular, blue-black face, Disney-bright features, very pretty long eyelashes and something adorably duck-like in her full and forward upper lip. Anybody seeking lightness, silliness, or simply to be playfully teased for an hour or two knew to come to Hawa, and she took an equal interest in everybody, wanted to hear all news, no matter how apparently quotidian or banal (“You were just in the market? Oh, so tell me! Who was there? And was the fish man there?”). She would have been the jewel in the crown of any small village anywhere. She had, unlike me, no contempt whatsoever for village life: she loved the smallness, the gossip, the repetition and the closeness of family. She liked that everybody’s business was her business and vice versa. A neighbor of Hawa’s, with a more difficult love problem than her own, came by to visit us daily — she’d fallen for a boy her parents wouldn’t let her marry — and held Hawa’s hands as she spoke and wept, often not leaving till one in the morning, and yet, I noticed, she always left smiling. I tried to think of ever performing a similar service for a friend. I wanted to know more about this love problem, but translation bored Hawa, and in her impatient version two hours of talk was easily boiled down to a couple of sentences (“Well, she is saying he is very beautiful and kind and they will never marry. I’m so sad! I tell you I won’t sleep tonight! But come on: haven’t you learned even a little bit of Wolof yet?”). Sometimes, when Hawa’s guests arrived and found me sitting in my dark corner they would look wary and turn back, for just as Hawa was known everywhere as the bearer of lightness, someone whose very presence brought relief from woe, it was very soon clear to everyone that the visitor from England had brought with her only weight and sorrow. All the morbid questions I felt I must ask with a pen in my hand, concerning poverty reduction, or the lack of supplies at the school, or the apparent hardships of Hawa’s own life — to which were now added the difficulties of the rainy season, the mosquitoes, the threat of untreated malaria — all of this repelled our guests and severely tested Hawa’s patience. Political talk didn’t interest her — unless it was conspiratorial, intensely local and directly concerned people she knew — and she also disliked any too strenuous conversation on the topics of religion or culture. Like everybody, she prayed and went to the mosque, but as far as I could see she had no serious religious interest. She was the kind of girl who wants only one thing from this life: to have fun. I remembered the type very well from my own school days, girls like that have always mystified me — they still do — and I felt I mystified Hawa equally. I lay on the floor next to her each night, on our neighboring mattresses, grateful for the blue aura that came off her Samsung as she scrolled through her messages and photographs, sometimes well into the wee hours, laughing or sighing at pictures that amused her, breaking up the dark and relieving the need for conversation. But nothing ever seemed to outrage or seriously depress her, and perhaps because I saw so many things that elicited exactly these emotions in me, every day, I found myself consumed by a perverse desire to rouse the same feelings in her. One night as we lay side by side, as she again reflected on how much fun Granger had been, how cool and fun, I asked her what she made of the President’s promise to personally decapitate any homosexual he found in the country. She sucked her teeth and continued scrolling: “That man is always talking up some nonsense. Anyway, we have none of those people here.” She did not connect my question with Granger but I went to sleep that night burning with shame, that I should be so willing to casually destroy the possibility of Granger ever returning here, and for the sake of — what? Principle? I knew how much Granger had loved it here, even more than Paris — and much more than London — and that he felt this way despite the existential threat the visit had surely represented for him. We’d spoken about it often, it broke up the boredom of recording sessions — sitting in the booth together, smiling at Aimee through the glass, never listening to her sing — and these were the most substantial conversations I’d ever had with Granger, as if the village had unlocked in us a relation we did not know we had. Not that we agreed or made the same connections. Where I saw deprivation, injustice, poverty, Granger saw simplicity, a lack of materialism, communal beauty — the opposite of the America in which he’d been raised. Where I saw polygamy, misogyny, motherless children (my mother’s island childhood, only writ large, enshrined in custom), he remembered a sixth-floor walk-up, a tiny studio apartment shared with a depressed single mother, the loneliness, the food stamps, the lack of meaning, the threat of the streets right outside his front door, and spoke to me with genuine tears in his eyes of how happier he might have been raised by not one woman but fifteen.

Once, when it happened to be just Hawa and me in the yard, and she was plaiting my hair, I tried again to speak of difficult things, exploiting the intimacy of the moment to ask her about a rumor I’d heard, about a vanished village woman, apparently seized by the police, the mother of a young man who’d participated in a recent attempted coup. No one knew where she was, or what had happened to her. “There was a girl who came here last year, her name was Lindsay,” said Hawa, as if I had not spoken at all. “It was before Aimee and you all came, she was from the Peace Corps — she was American and she was really fun! We played Twenty-one and we played Blackjack. You play cards? I tell you, she was really fun, man!” She sighed, laughed and pulled my hair tight. I gave up. Hawa’s own preferred topic was the R&B star Chris Brown, but I had almost nothing to say about Chris Brown and only one song of his on my phone (“That is a very, very, very old song,” she informed me) whereas she knew everything there was to know about the man, including all his moves. One morning, just before she left for school, I spotted her in the yard, dancing with her earphones in. She was dressed in her technically modest yet intensely form-hugging trainee-schoolteacher outfit: a white blouse, long black Lycra skirt, yellow hijab, yellow sandals, yellow watch, and a snug pinstripe waistcoat, which she made sure was pulled especially tight at the back to make a feature of a tiny waist and spectacular bosom. She looked up from where she was admiring the quick steps of her own feet, saw me and laughed: “Don’t you tell my students!”

Each day of that visit, Carrapichano and I went into the school, visiting Hawa’s and Lamin’s classrooms, making notes. Carrapichano focused on every aspect of the school’s functioning, while my remit was narrower: I went first to Lamin’s class and then Hawa’s, looking for the “best and the brightest,” as I had been instructed by Aimee to do. In Lamin’s class, a maths class, this was easy: I only had to put down the names of the girls who got the right answers. And that’s what I did, waiting each time for Lamin to confirm, on the board, that the answers of the children were correct. For anything beyond basic addition and subtraction was, in truth, beyond my ability, and I watched Lamin’s ten-year-olds multiply more quickly than me and reach long-division answers I could not even stumble toward. I would grip my pen and feel my hands sweating. It was like time travel. I was right back in my own maths classes, I had the same old, familiar feelings of shame, and still retained, as it turned out, my childhood habit of self-deception, covering my workings with my hand as Lamin passed by and always managing to half convince myself, once the answer was up on the board, that I had been very close to getting it all along, but for this or that small error, the terrible heat in the room, my own irrational anxiety in the face of numbers…

I was relieved to leave Lamin and head to Hawa’s session, a general class. There I had decided to look for the Traceys, that is, for the brightest, the quickest, the most willful, the lethally bored, the troublesome, the girls whose eyes burned like lasers straight through the government-issued English sentences — dead sentences, sentences devoid of content or meaning — that were being laboriously transcribed in chalk up on to the board by Hawa before being equally laboriously translated back into Wolof and thus explained. I had expected to find only a few Traceys in each class, but it soon became clear that there were more of Tracey’s tribe in those hot rooms than anyone else. Some of these girls’ uniforms were so worn they were now little more than rags, others had open sores on their feet or eyes weeping pus, and when I watched the school fees being paid into the teachers’ hands each morning in coins, many did not have their coin to give. And yet they had not given up, these many Traceys. They were not satisfied with singing their lines back to Hawa, who herself, only a few years earlier, must have sat in these seats, singing these same lines, clinging to her textbook then as she did now. Watching all that fire with so little kindling, it was of course easy to despair. But each time the conversation was freed from its pointless English shackles and allowed to fall back into the local tongues I would see it again, the clear sparks of intelligence — like flames licking through a grille meant to smother them — and taking the same form natural intelligence takes in classrooms around the world: backchat, humor, argument. It was Hawa’s unfortunate duty to silence all of this, all natural inquiry and curiosity, and drag the class back to the government textbook in hand, to write The pot is on the fire or The spoon is in the bowl with a piece of broken chalk on the board, and have them repeat it, and then to have them write this down, copying it exactly, including Hawa’s own frequent errors. After watching this painful process for a few days I realized that she never once tested them on these written lines without the answer being already front of them, or having just been repeated, and one especially hot afternoon I felt I had to resolve the question for myself. I asked Hawa to sit where I sat, on a broken stool, so I could stand up before the class and ask them to write in their books: The pot is on the fire. They looked up at the empty board, and then expectantly at Hawa, awaiting the translation. I wouldn’t let her speak. Two long minutes followed, as children stared blankly at their half-ruined exercise books, re-covered many times over in old wrapping paper. Then I went around the room, collecting the books to show to Hawa. Some part of me enjoyed doing this. Three girls in forty had written the sentence correctly in English. The rest had one word or two, almost all of the boys had no written letters at all, just vague markings reminiscent of English vowels and consonants, the shadows of letters but not letters themselves. Hawa nodded at each book, betraying no emotion, and then, when I had finished, stood up and continued her class.

When the bell rang for lunch I ran across the yard to find Carrapichano, who was sitting under the mango tree, making notes in a pad, and told him in an excitable hurry all the events of the morning, and the implications as I saw them, imagining how slow my own progress might have been if my teachers had taught our curriculum in, say, Mandarin, though I spoke Mandarin nowhere else, heard no Mandarin, had parents who spoke no Mandarin…

Carrapichano put his pen down and stared at me.

“I see. And what is it you think you just achieved?”

At first I thought he hadn’t understood me, so restated my case from the top, but he cut me off, stamping a foot in the sand.

“All you did was humiliate a teacher. In front of her class.”

His voice was quiet but his face very red. He took off his glasses and glared at me, and looked so gravely handsome it lent a certain weight to his position, as if those who are right are always more beautiful.

“But — it’s — I mean, I’m not saying it’s a question of ability, it’s a ‘structural issue’—you always say that yourself — and I’m just saying maybe we could have an English lesson, OK, of course, but let’s teach them in their own languages in their own country, and then they can — they could, I mean, you know, take English tests home, as homework or something.”

Fernando laughed bitterly and swore in Portuguese.

“Homework! Have you been to their homes? Do you see books on their shelves? Or shelves? Desks?” He stood up and started shouting: “What do you think these children do when they get home? Study? Do you think they have time to study?”

He had not moved toward me but I found myself backing away from him, until I was up against the trunk of the mango tree.

“What are you doing here? What experience do you have in this work? This is adult work! You behave like a teenager. But you’re not a teenager any more, are you? Isn’t it time you grew up?”

I burst into tears. Somewhere a bell rang. I heard Fernando sigh with what sounded like sympathy, and I had a wild hope, for a moment, that he was about to put his arm around me. With my head in my hands I heard hundreds of kids burst from their classrooms and run through the yard, laughing and shouting, on their way to their next lessons, or out of the gates to help their mothers on the farm, and then Carrapichano kicking the leg of his chair, toppling it and walking back across the yard to class.

The end of my own middle passage came in midwinter, the perfect time to be a Goth: you’re in tune with the misery all around you, like that clock that’s right twice a day. I was on the way to my father’s, the bus doors wouldn’t open for the height of snow already in front of them, I had to force them apart with my black leather gloves and step down into a drift, protected from the intense cold by steel-capped black DMs and layerings of black jersey and black denim, by the heat of bird’s-nest Afro hair, the fug of hardly ever washing. I had become an animal perfectly adapted to its environment. I rang my father’s doorbell: a young girl answered the door. Perhaps she was twenty. Her hair was in very basic twists, she had a sweet teardrop of a face and flawless skin that shone like the peel of an aubergine. She looked fearful, smiled nervously, turned around, and called my father’s name, but with such a thick accent it was hardly his name at all. She disappeared and was replaced by my father and after that she didn’t come out of his bedroom for the rest of my visit. As we walked through the dilapidated communal hallway, past the curling wallpaper, rusted mail boxes, filthy carpet, he quietly explained to me, as if he were a missionary and a little bashful to reveal the true extent of his charity, that he had found this girl in King’s Cross station. “She was barefoot! She’d nowhere to go, nowhere at all. You see, she’s from Senegal. Her name is Mercy. You should have rung to say you were coming.”

I ate dinner as usual, watched an old movie—The Green Pastures—and when it came time to go, and still nothing more about Mercy had been said by either of us, I saw him look back over his shoulder at his bedroom door, but Mercy did not reappear, and after a while I left. I didn’t tell my mother or anyone at school. The only person I felt would understand was Tracey, and I hadn’t seen her in months.

I’d noticed that other people had this adolescent gift for “spiraling out of control,” of “going off the rails,” but whatever catch inside of themselves they managed to release in times of sadness or trauma I wasn’t able to find in myself. Instead, self-consciously, like an athlete deciding on a new training regime, I decided to go off the rails. But no one took me very seriously, least of all my mother, for she considered me a fundamentally reliable teenager. When other local mothers stopped her in the street, as they often did, to ask advice about their wayward sons and daughters, she would listen to them sympathetically but without any concern on her part, sometimes bringing the conversation to a close by putting a hand to my shoulder and saying something like: “Well, we’re very lucky, we don’t have those sorts of problems, not yet.” This narrative was so cemented in her mind that any attempt I made to stray from it she simply couldn’t see: she was attached to a shadow-me and followed this instead. And wasn’t she right? I was not really like my new friends, not especially self-destructive or reckless. I hoarded (unnecessary) condoms, was terrified of needles, too afraid of blood generally to contemplate cutting myself, always stopped drinking before truly incapacitated, had a very healthy appetite, and when I went clubbing would sneak away from my crew — or conspire to lose them — at around a quarter past midnight, so that I could meet my mother, whose rule it was to pick me up at exactly half past the hour every Friday night, outside the stage door of the Camden Palace. I’d get into her car and bitch spectacularly about this arrangement while always, secretly, feeling grateful it existed. The night we rescued Tracey was like that, a Camden Palace night. Normally, my circle went to an indie night there, which I could just about tolerate, but this time we had gone for some reason to a hardcore show, shredded guitars distorting the huge speakers, a raging noise, and at a certain point I realized I wasn’t going to make it till midnight — even though I’d battled with my mother for exactly this dispensation. Around eleven thirty I said I was heading to the bathroom and stumbled through that old theater, once a vaudeville place, found a spot in one of the empty booths on the first floor and set about getting drunk on the little bottle of cheap vodka I carried around in a pocket of my black trench coat. I knelt on the threadbare velvet where the chairs had been ripped out and looked down into the mosh pit. I got a sad sort of satisfaction from the thought that I was very likely the only soul in the place at that moment who knew that Chaplin had played here, and Gracie Fields, not to mention all the long-forgotten dog acts, family acts, lady hoofers, acrobats, minstrels. I looked down at all those disaffected suburban white kids dressed in black, hurling themselves at each other, and imagined in their place G. H. Elliott, “The Chocolate-Colored Coon,” dressed head to toe in white, singing of the silvery moon. Behind me I heard the curtain swish: a boy walked into my booth. He was a white boy, very skinny, no older than me, and clearly high on something, with deep-pitted acne and a lot of dyed black hair falling over his cratered forehead. But his eyes were a beautiful blue. And we were of the same ersatz tribe: we wore the same uniform, the black denim, black cotton, black jersey, black leather. I don’t think we even spoke to each other. He just came forward and I faced him, already on my knees, and reached up for his fly. We undressed as minimally as possible, lay back on that ashtray of a carpet and became attached at the groin for a minute or so, while the rest of our bodies remained apart, each swaddled in its layers of black. It was the only time in my life that sex occurred without its shadow, without the shadow of ideas about sex or fantasies regarding it of the kind that can only accumulate over time. On that balcony all was still exploratory, experimental, and technical in the sense of figuring out exactly what went where. I’d never seen any pornography. That was still possible then.

It seemed wrong for Goths to kiss so we bit gently at each other’s necks like little vampires. Afterward he sat up and said in a much posher voice than I’d expected: “But we didn’t use anything.” Was it his first time, too? I told him it didn’t matter, in a voice which probably surprised him just as much, and then asked him for a cigarette, which he gave me in the form of a pinch of tobacco, a Rizla and a square of cardboard. We agreed to go down to the bar and get a snakebite together, but on the staircase I lost him in a crowd surging upward, and suddenly desperate for air and space I made my way instead to the exit and out into Camden at the witching hour. Everyone was barrelling around half-lit, falling out of the pubs, in their torn denim and check or black-on-black, some sitting on the floor in circles, singing, playing guitars, others being told by a man to see another man, further down the road, who had the drugs that the first man was meant to have. I felt at once brutally sober, lonely, and wished my mother would appear. I joined a ring of strangers on the ground, who looked to be from my tribe, and rolled that fag.

From where I sat I could see up the side street to the Jazz Café and was struck by what a different crowd was gathered at its doors, not on their way out but on the way in, and not at all drunk, as these were people who loved dancing, who did not need to be drunk to convince their bodies to move. Nothing they wore was torn, or shredded or defaced with Tipp-Ex, everything was flash as flash could be, the women shone and dazzled, and no one sat on the ground, on the contrary all effort had been made to separate the clientele from the ground: the men’s trainers had two inches of air built into them, and the women’s shoes had double that in heel. I wondered what they were queuing for. Maybe a brown girl with a flower in her hair was going to sing for them. I thought of walking up there and seeing for myself but just then I became aware of a commotion, outside the entrance to the Mornington Crescent tube stop, some sort of problem between a man and a woman, they were yelling at each other, and the man had the woman up against the wall, he was shouting at her and had his hand around her throat. The boys I was sitting with did not move, or seem very concerned, they kept playing the guitar or else rolling up their joints. It was two girls who took action — a tough-looking bald girl and perhaps her girlfriend — and I stood up with them both, not shouting like them but following quickly behind. As we got closer, though, the situation became confused, it became less clear whether the “victim” was being hurt or helped — we saw her legs had gone floppy beneath her and that the man was in some sense holding her up — and we all slowed down a little in our approach. The bald girl became less aggressive, more solicitous, and in the same moment I realized the woman was not a woman but a girl and that I knew her: Tracey. I ran up to her. She recognized me but couldn’t speak, she only reached out and smiled sadly. Her nose was bleeding, both nostrils. I smelled something awful and looked down and saw vomit, all over her front and in a pool at the floor. The man let go of her and stepped back. I stepped in, held her and said her name — Tracey, Tracey, Tracey — but her eyes rolled back in her head and I felt her full weight in my arms. This being Camden, every passing pisshead and stoner had a theory: bad E, dehydration, alcohol poisoning, probably done a speedball. You had to keep her standing, or lie her down, or give her some water, or move back and give her some air, and I was beginning to panic when, cutting through this noise, from across the road, came a much louder voice, one with real authority, calling Tracey’s name and mine together. My mother, pulling up in front of the Palace as previously agreed, at twelve thirty a.m, in her little 2CV. I waved at her and she lurched forward again and parked beside us. Confronted with such a fierce-looking and capable adult, everyone else dispersed, and my mother did not even pause to ask what seemed to me to be necessary questions. She separated the two of us, lay Tracey out on the backseat, elevated her head with a couple of the serious books she had with her at all times, even in the middle of the night, and drove us straight to St. Mary’s. I wanted so much to tell Tracey of my balcony adventure, of how, for once, I had been truly reckless. We emerged onto the Edgware Road: she snapped out of it and sat up. But when my mother tried gently to explain what was happening and where we were going, Tracey accused us both of kidnapping her, of trying to control her, we who had always been trying to control her, ever since she was a child, who always thought we knew what was best for her, what was best for everybody, we had even tried to steal her from her own mother, her own father! Her anger grew in proportion to my mother’s icy calm, until, when we pulled into the A&E car park, she was leaning right forward in her seat, spitting on the back of our necks in her fury. My mother would not be baited or diverted. She told me to take the left side of my friend as she took the right and we half dragged, half compelled Tracey into the waiting room, where she became, to our surprise, utterly compliant, whispering “speedball” to the nurse, and then waiting with a handful of tissues pressed to her nostrils until she was seen. My mother went in with her. About fifteen minutes later she came out — I mean, my mother did — and said Tracey would be staying overnight, that her stomach would have to be pumped, and that she’d said — Tracey had — a number of sexually explicit things, in her delirium, to a stressed Indian doctor on his night shift. She was still only fifteen years old. “Something serious happened to that girl!” my mother murmured, kissed her teeth and bent over a desk to sign some papers in loco parentis.

In this context my own mild drunkenness wasn’t worth troubling over. Spotting the vodka bottle in my coat, my mother removed it, without discussion, and dropped it into a hospital bin meant for medical waste. On the way out I caught a reflection of myself in the long mirror on the wall of a disabled toilet that happened to have, at that moment, its door flung wide open. I saw my drab black uniform and absurd dusted face — of course, I’d seen it all before, but not under that stark hospital lighting, and now it was no longer the face of a girl, now a woman stared back. The effect was very different from anything I had seen before by the light of the dim purple bulb in my black-walled room. I was over the threshold: I gave up the gothic life.