Swing Time

PART FIVE Night and Day

They sat opposite each other, it felt very intimate, if you could put out of mind the millions of people looking on. Earlier they had wandered through his peculiar home together, looking at his treasures, his gaudy art, his terrible gilt furniture, talking of this and that, and at one point he sang for her and performed a few of his signature moves. But there was only one thing we wanted to know and finally she seemed to be preparing to ask it, and even my mother, who was pottering around the flat and claimed not to be interested, paused and sat down next to me in front of the television and waited to see what would happen. I reached for the remote control and turned it up. OK, Michael, she said, then let’s go to the thing that is most discussed about you, I think, is the fact that the color of your skin is obviously different than when you were younger, and so I think it has caused a great deal of speculation and controversy as to what you have done or are doing…?

He looked down, began his defense. My mother didn’t believe a word of it, and for the next few minutes I couldn’t hear a thing either of them said, there was only my mother, arguing with the television. So I’m a slave to the rhythm, he said, and smiled, though he looked bewildered, desperate to change the subject, and Oprah let him change it and the conversation moved on. My mother walked out of the room. After a while I got bored myself and switched it off.

I was eighteen. My mother and I never lived together again after that year, and already we were unsure how to relate to each other in our new incarnations: two adult women occupying, for the moment, the same space. Were we mother and daughter still? Friends? Sisters? Flatmates? We had different schedules, didn’t see much of each other, but I worried I’d outstayed my welcome, like a show that goes on too long. Most days I went to the library, tried to revise, while she worked each morning as a volunteer, at a center for troubled youth, and, in the evenings, at a Black and Asian women’s refuge. I don’t say she was not sincere in this work, and good at it too, but it’s also the case that both commitments look impressive on your CV if you happen to be standing for election as a local councilor. I’d never seen her so busy. She seemed to be all over the neighborhood at once, involved in everything, and everybody agreed that divorce suited her, she looked younger than ever: I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age. I didn’t often get down the street in her ward now without someone coming up to thank me “for all your mother is doing for us” or to ask me to ask her if she had any idea about how to start an after-school club for the newly arrived Somali children or what local space might be appropriate for a cycling-proficiency class. She hadn’t been elected to anything, not yet, but round our way the people had already crowned her.

One important aspect of her campaign was the idea to turn the old bike shed on the estate into a “community meeting space,” which brought her into conflict with Louie and his crew, who used the shed for their own activities. My mother told me later that he sent two young men round to the flat to intimidate her, but she “knew their mothers,” and was not afraid, and they left without winning the argument. I can believe it. I helped her paint the place a vivid yellow and went with her around the local businesses, looking for unwanted stackable chairs. Entry was set at a quid and covered some basic refreshments, Kilburn Books sold relevant literature from a trestle table in the corner. It opened in April. Every Friday at six o’clock speakers appeared, at my mother’s invitation, all kinds of eccentric local people: spoken-word poets, political activists, drug counselors, an unaccredited academic who wrote self-published books about suppressed historical conspiracies; a brash Nigerian businessman who lectured us about “black aspirations”; a quiet Guyanese nurse, evangelical about shea butter. Many Irish speakers were invited, too — as a mark of respect toward that original, fast-fading local population — but my mother could be tin-eared about the struggles of other tribes and did not hesitate to give lofty introductions (“Wherever we fight for freedom, the fight is the same!”) to shifty-looking gangsters who pinned tricolors to the back wall and passed round IRA collection buckets at the end of their speeches. Subjects that seemed to me historically obscure and distant from our situation — the twelve tribes of Israel, the story of Kunta Kinte, anything to do with ancient Egypt — were the most popular, and I was often sent over to the church on these occasions to beg the deacon for extra chairs. But when speakers were concerned with the more prosaic aspects of our everyday lives — local crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, academic failure — then they could count only on the few old Jamaican ladies who came whatever the subject, who came really for the tea and biscuits. But there was no way for me to get out of any of it, I had to go to it all, even the schizophrenic who walked into the room carrying foot-high piles of notes — held together with elastic bands and organized according to some system known only to him — and spoke to us with great passion about the racist fallacy of evolution that dared connect Sacred African Man to the base and earthly monkey when in fact he, Sacred African Man, was descended from pure light, that is, from the angels themselves, whose existence was somehow proved — I forget exactly how — by the pyramids. Sometimes my mother spoke: on those nights the room was packed. Her subject was pride, in all its forms. We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us.

One day she suggested that I speak. Maybe a young person could reach the young people more easily. I think she was genuinely confused that her own speeches, though popular, had not yet stopped the girls getting pregnant or the boys smoking weed or dropping out of school or going on the rob. She gave me a number of possible topics, none of which I knew anything about, and when I said as much she got exasperated with me: “The problem with you is you’ve never known struggle!” We settled into a long row. She attacked the “soft” subjects I’d chosen to study, the “inferior” colleges I’d applied to, the “lack of ambition,” as she saw it, that I had inherited from the other side of my family. I walked out. Tramped up and down the high road for a bit, smoking fags, before submitting to the inevitable and heading to my father’s. Mercy was long gone, there had been no one since, he was living alone once more and seemed to me stricken, sadder than I’d ever known him. His working hours — which still began each morning before dawn — were a new kind of problem for him: he didn’t know what to do with his afternoons. A family man by instinct, he was completely lost without one, and I wondered if his other children, his white children, ever came to see him. I didn’t ask — I was embarrassed to ask. The thing I feared was no longer my parents’ authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets. I saw enough of all this in my father already. He’d become one of those people he’d once liked to tell me about, that he met on his route and had always pitied, old boys in their house slippers watching the afternoon shows until the evening shows began, seeing hardly anyone, doing nothing. Once I came round and Lambert turned up, but after a brief flurry of cheeriness between them, they fell into the dark and paranoid moods of middle-aged men abandoned by their women, made worse by the fact that Lambert had neglected to bring any relief in the form of weed. The TV went on and they sat before it in silence for the rest of the afternoon, like two drowning men clinging to the same piece of driftwood, while I tidied up around them.

Sometimes I had the idea that complaining to my father about my mother might be a form of entertainment for us both, something we could share, but this never went well, because I severely underestimated how much he continued to love and admire her. When I told him about the meeting space, and of being forced to speak there, he said: “Ah, well, that sounds like a very interesting project. Something for the whole community.” He looked wistful. How happy it would have made him, even now, to be schlepping chairs across the road, adjusting the microphone, shushing the audience in preparation for my mother to come on stage!

A stack of posters, not photocopied but drawn, each one, by hand, announcing a talk—“The History of Dance”—were placed around the estate, where, like all public notices, they were soon defaced in creative and obscene ways, one piece of graffiti spawning a response, and then a response to the response. I was tacking one up in a walkway on Tracey’s estate when I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders — a short, hard squeeze — turned around and there she was. She looked at the poster but didn’t mention it. She reached for my new glasses, put them on her own face and laughed at her reflection in a warped piece of sheet mirror stuck up next to the noticeboard. Laughed again when she offered me a fag and I dropped it, and then again at the ratty espadrilles I was wearing, stolen from my mother’s wardrobe. I felt like some old diary she’d found in a drawer: a reminder of a more innocent and foolish time in her life. We walked together across the yard and sat on the grass verge at the back of her estate, facing St. Christopher’s. She nodded at the door and said: “That weren’t real dancing, though. I’m on a whole other level now.” I didn’t doubt it. I asked how her revision was going and learned that at her kind of school there were no exams, all of that had finished at fifteen. Where I was in chains, she was free! Now everything depended on an “end of school revue” that “most of the big agents come to,” and to which I was also grudgingly invited (“I could try and ask for you”), and this was where the best of the dancers got picked up, found representation and began auditioning for the autumn run of West End shows or the regional traveling troupes. She preened about it. I thought she had become more boastful generally, especially on the subject of her father. He was building a huge family home for her, so she claimed, in Kingston, and soon she’d move there with him, and from there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to New York, where she’d have the chance to perform on Broadway, where they really appreciated dancers, not like here. Yes, she’d work in New York but live in Jamaica, in the sun with Louie, and finally be rid of what I remember she called “this miserable fucking country”—as if it were only an accident that she had ever lived here in the first place.

But a few days later I saw Louie, in a completely different context, it was in Kentish Town. I was on a bus, on the top deck, I spotted him in the street, with his arm around a very pregnant woman, the kind we used to call a “home girl,” with big gold earrings in the shape of pyramids, wearing a lot of chains and with her hair greased and frozen in a pattern of kiss-curls and spikes. They were laughing and joking together, and kissing every now and then. She was pushing a buggy with a child in it, of about two years old, and holding the hand of a seven- or eight-year-old. My first thought was not “Who are these children?” But: “What’s Louie doing in Kentish Town? Why’s he walking down Kentish Town High Street like he lives there?” I really couldn’t think beyond a one-mile radius. Only when they were out of sight did I consider all the occasions Tracey had lied or bluffed about his absence — she stopped crying about it when she was very young — without ever guessing how close by he likely was the whole time. Not at the school concert or the birthday or the show or the sports day or even simply in the house, for dinner, because he was tending, supposedly, to an eternally sick mother in south Kilburn, or dancing with Michael Jackson, or thousands of miles away in Jamaica, building Tracey’s dream home. But that one-sided conversation on the grassy verge had confirmed for me that we could no longer speak of intimate things. Instead, when I got home, I told my mother what I’d seen. She was in the middle of trying to cook dinner, always a stressful moment of the day, and she became annoyed with me, with a speed and heat out of all proportion. I couldn’t understand it, I knew she hated Louie — so why defend him? Slamming pots about, speaking passionately of Jamaica, and not present-day Jamaica but Jamaica in the 1800s, the 1700s, and beyond — present-day Kentish Town was pushed aside as an irrelevance — telling me about breeders and bucks, of children torn from their mother’s arms, of repetition and return, through the centuries, and the many missing men in her bloodline, including her own father, all of them ghost men, never seen close up or clearly. I drew back from her as she ranted, until I was pressed up against the warmth of the oven door. I didn’t know what to do with all the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said.

A week later somebody set a fire in the old bike shed, the night before I was due to speak, reducing it to a black box of carbon. We toured it with the firemen. It smelled terribly of all the plastic chairs that had been piled up against the walls and were now melted and melded together. I was relieved, it felt like an act of God, although all signs pointed closer to home, and soon enough Louie’s boys reclaimed their space. The day after the fire, when my mother and I were out and about together, a few well-meaning people crossed the street to offer their sympathies or try to engage her on the subject, but she pursed her lips and stared at them as if they had said something coarse or personal. Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don’t think my mother would have been very useful in a real revolution, not once the talking and the meetings were over and the actual violence began. There was a sense in which she couldn’t quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew — from Lambert only — that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it “that nonsense,” or sometimes “those ridiculous people,” because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her. Louie as a sociological phenomenon or a political symptom or a historical example or simply a person raised in the same grinding rural poverty she’d known herself — a person whom she recognized, and I believe intimately understood—that Louie my mother could deal with. But the look of utter forsakenness on her face as the firemen led her to a far corner of the shed to show her the spot where the fire had been started, by someone she knew personally, had tried to reason with, but who, despite this, had chosen to violently destroy what she’d lovingly created — this look is something I’ve never forgotten. Louie did not even need to do it personally, and equally did not have to hide that he had ordered it done. On the contrary he wanted it known: it was a show of power. At first I thought this fire had destroyed something essential in my mother. But a few weeks later she regrouped, convincing the vicar to let her move her community meetings to the back room of the church. The incident even turned out to be useful, in a way, for her campaign: it was the visual, literal confirmation of the “urban nihilism” of which she had often spoken and partly built her campaign around. Not long after, she became our local councilor. And here the second act of her life, the political act — which I’m sure she considered the true act of her life — began.

The build finished with the rainy season, in October. To celebrate, an event was planned in the new yard, half a football pitch of cleared ground. We weren’t involved in the planning — the village action committee did that — and Aimee didn’t arrive till the morning of the same day. But I’d been on the ground for a fortnight, and had grown worried about the logistics, the sound system, the size of the crowd, and the conviction, shared by everybody — children and adults, the Al Kalo, Lamin, Hawa, all her friends — that the President himself was going to make an appearance. The source of this rumor was hard to determine. Everybody had heard it from someone else, it wasn’t possible to get any further information, only winks and smiles, as the assumption was that we, “the Americans,” were behind the visit anyway. “You ask me if he is coming?” said Hawa, laughing, “but don’t you know yourself?” The rumor and the scale of the event quickly fed upon each other: first three local nursery schools would participate in the parade, then five, then fifteen. First it was the President coming, then also the leaders of Senegal, Togo and Benin, and so to the mothers’ drumming circle were added half a dozen griots playing their long-necked kora and a police marching band. We started to hear that communities from several other villages were being bussed in and that a famous Senegalese DJ would play after the formal events. Running underneath all this noisy planning there was something else, a low rumble of suspicion and resentment, which I couldn’t hear at first but which Fernando recognized at once. For no one knew exactly how much money Aimee’s people had wired to the bank in Serrekunda, and so no one could be sure how much Lamin personally had received, nor was anybody able to say precisely how much of that money he had placed in the envelope which later arrived at the Al Kalo’s house, and how much he had left at that house with Fatu, our Lady Treasurer, before the remainder finally landed in the coffers of the village committee itself. No one accused anybody, not directly. But all conversations, no matter where they began, seemed to end up circling the question, usually coiled up inside proverb-like constructions such as “It is a long way from Serrekunda to here” or “This pair of hands, then this pair, then another. So many hands! Who will keep clean what so many hands have touched?” Fern — as I also called him now — was disgusted by the general ineptitude: he’d never worked with such idiots as these idiots in New York, they made only problems and had no conception of procedure or local realities. He too became a proverb-producing machine: “In a flood the water goes everywhere, you don’t have to think about it. In a drought, if you want water, you have to direct it carefully along each inch of its path.” But his obsessive worrying, what he called “detail-orientation,” didn’t annoy me any more: I made too many mistakes, every day, not to understand by now that he knew better. It was not possible any longer to ignore the real difference between us, which went far beyond his superior education, his Ph.D., or even his professional experience. It was about a quality of attention. He listened and noticed. He was more open. Whenever I spotted him in my reluctant daily walk around the village — something I did purely for exercise and to escape the claustrophobia of Hawa’s compound — Fern would be locked in intense discussion with men and women of every age and circumstance, crouching by them as they ate, jogging next to donkey-drawn carts, sitting drinking ataya with the old men by the market stalls, and always listening, learning, asking for more detail, assuming nothing until he was told it. I compared all of this to my own way of being. Keeping to my dank room as much as possible, talking to no one if I could help it, reading books about the region by the light of a headtorch, and feeling a homicidal fury, adolescent in nature, toward the IMF and the World Bank, the Dutch who’d bought the slaves, the local chiefs who’d sold them, and many other distant mental abstractions to which I could do no practical damage.

My favorite part of each day became the early evenings, when I would walk over to Fern’s and have a simple dinner with him in the pink house, cooked for us by the same ladies who fed the school. A single tin bowl, full of rice, sometimes with just a green tomato or garden egg buried in it somewhere, other times with an abundance of fresh vegetables and a very skinny but delicious fish laid on top which Fern graciously let me tear at first. “We are kin now,” he told me, the first time we ate like this, two hands in the same bowl. “They seem to have decided we’re family.” Since our last visit the generator had broken down, but as we were the only ones to use it Fern considered this a “low priority”—for the same reason I considered it a high priority — and refused to lose a day traveling to the city in search of a replacement. So now, once the sun went down, we strapped on our little head-torches, making sure to wear them at an angle so as not to blind each other, and talked late into the night. He was good company. He had a subtle, compassionate, intricate mind. Like Hawa, he didn’t get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space. A few nights before the party, while we sat considering the imminent arrival of Granger and Judy and the rest — and the end of a certain peaceful version of our life here — he began to tell me of a new problem, at the school: six children missing for two weeks from their classes. They were unrelated to each other. But their absences had all begun, the headmaster told him, on the day Fern and I arrived back in the village.

“Since we arrived?”

“Yes! And I thought: but this is odd, why is it? First, I ask around. Everybody says: ‘Oh, we don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Sometimes the children have to work at home.’ I go back to the headmaster and get the list of names. Then I go through the village to their compounds, one by one. Not easy. There’s no address, you have to follow your nose. But I find everybody. ‘Oh, she is sick,’ or, ‘Oh, he is visiting his cousin in town.’ I have the feeling no one tells me the truth. Then I am looking at the list today and I think: these names are familiar. I go back to my papers and I find this microfinance list — you remember? — this thing Granger did, independently. He is a sweet man, he reads a book on microfinance… Anyway, I look at this list and I find it is the same six families exactly! The mothers are all the same women Granger gave these thirty-dollar stakes, for their market stalls. Exactly the same. So I think: what is the connection between the thirty-dollar stake and these missing children? Now it’s obvious: their mothers, who could not repay their debt on whatever schedule Granger has arranged with them, they assume the money will be taken coin by coin, from their children’s school fees, and the children will be shamed! They see us back in the village, ‘the Americans,’ and they think: better keep these kids at home! It’s smart, it makes sense.”

“Poor Granger. He’ll be disappointed. He meant well.”

“No, no, no… it’s easily resolved. It’s just for me an interesting example of follow-through. Or of not following through. The financing is a good idea, I think, or not a bad idea. But we may have to change the repayment schedule.”

Through one of the blown-out windows I saw a bush taxi rumble down the one good road in the moonlight. Kids hung from it even at this hour, and three young men lay on their bellies on its roof, holding down a mattress with the weight of their own bodies. I felt that wave of absurdity, of pointlessness, that usually caught me in the earliest hours, laying wide awake next to a deep-sleeping Hawa as the roosters went berserk on the other side of the wall.

“I don’t know… Thirty dollars here, thirty dollars there…”

“Yes?” said Fern brightly — he often failed to pick up on tone — and when I looked up I saw in his face so much optimism and interest in this small, new problem that it irritated me. I wanted to crush it.

“No, I mean — look, you go into the city, to every other village around here, you see these Peace Corps kids, the missionaries, the NGOs, all these well-meaning white people busy worrying about a few trees — as if none of you see the forest!”

“Now you are the one speaking in proverbs.”

I stood up and began urgently burrowing through the pile of supplies in the corner, looking for the Calor gas stove and the teapot.

“You wouldn’t accept these… microscopic solutions in your homes, in your countries — why should we accept them here?”

“‘We’?” queried Fern and then began to smile. “Wait, wait.” He came over to where I was wrestling with the gas canister and bent down to help me attach it to the ring which in my bad temper I was managing badly. Our faces came very close to each other. “‘These well-meaning white people.’ You think far too much about race — did anyone ever tell you this? But wait: to you I am white?” I was so startled by the question I started to laugh. Fern drew back: “Well, it’s interesting for me. In Brazil we don’t understand ourselves as white, you understand. At least my family does not. But you’re laughing — this signifies yes, you think I am?”

“Oh, Fern…” Who did we have out here except each other? I directed my torch away from where it had lit up the sweet concern in his face, which after all was not much paler than mine. “I don’t think it matters what I think, does it?”

“Oh, no, it matters,” he said, returning to his chair, and despite the dead bulb above our heads I thought I saw him blush. I concentrated on looking for a small and exquisite pair of Moroccan glass tumblers with a green stain. He told me once that he carried them everywhere with him on his travels, and this admission was one of the few concessions I ever heard Fern make to personal pleasure, to comfort.

“But I am not offended, no, all of this it is interesting to me,” he said, sitting back in his chair and stretching out his legs like a professor in his study. “What are we doing here, what is our effect, what will be left behind as legacy, and so on. It all has to be thought about, of course. Step by step. This house is a good example.” He reached to his left and patted a patch of exposed wiring in the wall. “Maybe they paid off the owner or maybe he has no idea we are in it. Who knows? But now we are in it and all of the village sees we are in it, and so now they know that it belongs, in essence, to nobody, or to anybody the state on a whim decides to give it to. So what will happen when we leave, when the new school is up and running and we don’t visit here much any more — or at all? Maybe several families will move in, maybe it will become a community place. Maybe. My guess is it will be taken apart, brick by brick.” He took off his glasses and massaged them with the hem of his T-shirt. “Yes, first someone will take the wires, then the sheeting, then the tiles, but eventually every stone will be repurposed. This is my bet… I may be wrong, we will have to wait and see. I am not as ingenious as these people. No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”

“I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.”

Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.

“Children can be a kind of wealth,” he said.

We were silent for a while. I thought — though I really didn’t want to — of a shiny red remote-control car, bought from New York for a young boy in the compound of whom I was especially fond, but it had come with the unforeseen problem of batteries — unforeseen by me — batteries for which there was sometimes money, most of the time not, and so the car was destined for a shelf I had noticed Hawa kept in the living room, filled with decorative but fundamentally useless objects, brought by clueless visitors, to keep company with several dead radios, a Bible from a library in Wisconsin and the picture of the President in a broken frame.

“I see my job this way,” said Fern firmly, as the kettle began to whistle. “I am not of her world, that’s clear. But I am here so that if she gets bored—”

“When she gets bored—”

“My job is to make sure something of use is left here, on the ground, whatever happens, whenever she leaves.”

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.”

“Another proverb! You said you hated them, but see how you’ve caught the local habit!”

“Are we having tea or what?”

“Actually, it’s easier,” he said, pouring the dark liquid into my glass. “I respect the person who can think of the ocean. My mind no longer works that way. When I was young like you, maybe, not now.”

I couldn’t tell any more if we were talking of the whole world, of the continent in general, of the village in particular, or simply of Aimee, who, for all our good intentions, all our proverbs, neither of us seemed able to think of very clearly.

Woken at five most days by the roosters and the call to prayer, I got into the habit of going back to sleep till ten or later, getting to the school in time for the second period or the third. The morning of Aimee’s arrival, though, I felt a fresh determination to see the whole day while it was still mine to enjoy. I surprised myself — and Hawa, Lamin and Fern — by appearing at eight o’clock, outside the mosque, where I knew they met each morning without me and walked together to school. The beauty of the morning was another surprise: it reminded me of my earliest experiences of America. New York was my first introduction to the possibilities of light, crashing through gaps in curtains, transforming people and sidewalks and buildings into golden icons, or black shadows, depending on where they stood in relation to the sun. But the light in front of the mosque — the light I stood in as I was greeted like a local hero, simply for rising from my bed three hours after most of the women and children I lived with — this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination.

“What do you call those birds?” I asked Lamin. “The little white ones with the blood-red beaks? They’re beautiful.”

Lamin tipped his head back and frowned.

“Those? They are just birds, not special. You think they’re beautiful? We have much more beautiful birds than that in Senegal.”

Hawa laughed: “Lamin, you begin to sound like a Nigerian! ‘You like that river? We have a much more beautiful river in Lagos.’”

Lamin’s face creased into an irresistible, shamefaced smile—“I am only telling the truth when I say we have a similar bird but bigger. It is more impressive”—and Hawa put her hands either side of her tiny waist and gave Lamin the flirtatious side-eye: I saw how it delighted him. I should have seen it before. Of course he was in love with her. Who wouldn’t be? I liked the idea, and felt vindicated. I looked forward to telling Aimee she was barking up the wrong tree.

“Well, now you sound like an American,” announced Hawa. She looked out over her village. “I think every place has its share of beauty, thanks be to God. And right here is as beautiful as any place I know.” A beat later, though, a new emotion passed over her pretty face, and when I looked over to where she seemed to be looking I saw a young man standing by the UN fresh well-water project, washing his arms up to the elbow, and glancing over at us with an equally pensive look. It was clear that these two represented a kind of provocation to each other. As we got closer I recognized that he belonged to a type I’d seen before here and there, on the ferry, walking along the highways, often in the city but rarely in the village. He had a bushy beard and a white turban tied loosely round his head, he carried a raffia pack on his back and his trousers were oddly cut, several inches above the ankle. As Hawa ran ahead of us to greet him I asked Lamin who he was.

“It is her cousin Musa,” said Lamin, returning to his usual whisper, now laced with acid disapproval. “It is unfortunate we meet him here. You must not bother with him. He was a bumster and now he is a mashala, he is a trouble to his family, and you must not bother with him.” But when we reached Hawa and her cousin, Lamin greeted him with respect and even a little awkwardness, and I noticed Hawa, too, seemed shy of him — as if he were an elder rather than not much more than a boy — and remembering that her scarf had slipped to her neck she now lifted it back till it covered all of her hair. Hawa introduced me to Musa politely in English. We nodded at each other. He seemed to be struggling to stabilize a certain look on his face, of benign serenity, like a visiting king from a more enlightened nation. “How are you, Hawa?” he mumbled, and she, who always had a lot to say on that question, outdid herself in a nervous tumble of description: she was well, her grandmothers were well, various nephews and nieces were well, the Americans were here, and well, for the school was opening tomorrow afternoon, and there was to be a big celebration, DJ Khali was playing — did he remember that time on the beach dancing to Khali? Oh, man, that was fun! — and people were coming from upriver, from Senegal, from everywhere, because it was a wonderful thing that was happening, a new school for the girls, because education is a very important thing, especially for girls. This last part was for me and I smiled to approve it. Musa nodded, a little anxiously I thought, through all of it, but now that Hawa had at last stopped he turned a little, more toward me than his cousin, and said in English: “Unfortunately I will not be there. Music and dancing is Shaytan. Like many things done around here it is aadoo, custom, not religion. In this country we dance our lives away. Everything is an excuse for dancing. Anyway, I am leaving on khuruj today to Senegal.” He looked down at the simple leather sandals he wore on his feet as if to check they were prepared for the journey ahead. “I go there for Da’wah, to invite and to call.”

At this Lamin laughed, heavily sarcastic, and Hawa’s cousin replied sharply to Lamin in Wolof — or perhaps it was Mandinka — and Lamin back to Musa, and back again, while I stood there, smiling the awkward idiot grimace of the untranslated.

“Musa, we miss you at home!” cried Hawa suddenly in English, with real feeling, hugging her cousin’s skinny left arm as if this were as much of him as she dared hug, and he nodded many times again but did not answer. I thought he might leave us here — his and Lamin’s exchange had seemed to me of the kind where someone really should leave afterward — but instead we all walked on together toward the school. Musa put his hands behind his back and began talking, in a low, quiet, pleasant stream, it sounded to me like a lecture, to which Hawa listened respectfully but which Lamin kept interrupting, with increasing energy and volume, in a style I couldn’t recognize as his. With me he would wait till I finished each sentence, and leave long gaps of silence before he replied, silences I came to think of as conversational graveyards, where anything awkward or unpleasant I might have presented to him was sent to be buried. This angry, confrontational Lamin was so alien to me that I felt as if he, Lamin, would not want me to see him in action. I picked up my pace a little, and when I was several yards ahead of them all I turned round to see what was going on and saw that they, too, had stopped. Musa had Lamin’s wrist in his hand: he was pointing to his big broken watch and saying something very solemn. Lamin snatched his arm back, and seemed to sulk, and Musa smiled as if all this had been very pleasant, or at least necessary, shook Lamin’s hand despite their apparent dispute, accepted another hug of his arm from Hawa, nodded at me across the way, and turned back the way he had come.

“Musa, Musa, Musa…” said Hawa, shaking her head as she approached me. “Everything is nafs with Musa now — everything is a temptation—we are a temptation. It’s so strange, we were age mates, we played together always, he was like my brother. We loved him at home, and he loved us, but he couldn’t stay. We are too old-fashioned for him now. He wants to be modern. He wants to live in the city: just him, one wife, two babies and God. He is right anyway: when you are a young man, living all crazy with your family, it’s hard to be very pure. I like to live crazy — oh, I can’t help it, but maybe when I am older,” she said, looking down at her own body as her cousin had looked at his sandals, with curiosity, as if they belonged to someone else: “Maybe when I am older I will be wiser. We’ll see.”

She seemed half amused, considering the Hawa she was now and the Hawa she might become, but Lamin was worked up.

“That crazy boy is telling everyone, ‘Don’t pray like this, pray like that, cross your arms across your body, don’t put them by your sides!’ In his own family home he is calling people Sila keeba—he is criticizing his own grandmother! But what does it mean, ‘old Muslim,’ ‘new Muslim’? We are one people! He tells her: ‘No, you should not have a big naming ceremony, have a modest one, with no music, no dancing — but Musa’s grandmother is from Senegal, like me — when a baby comes, we dance!”

“Last month,” began Hawa, and I prepared myself for the long haul, “my cousin Fatu had her first baby, Mamadu, and you should have seen this place that day, we had five musicians, dancing everywhere, the food was so much — Oh! I could not eat everything, actually, I was in pain from all this food, and all the dancing, and my cousin Fatu was watching her brother dancing like—”

“And Musa is married now,” Lamin broke in. “And how did he marry? With hardly nobody there, no food — your grandmother was crying, crying for days!”

“It’s true… Our grandmothers love to cook.”

“‘Don’t wear charms, don’t go to the ‒’ we call them marabouts—and in fact I don’t go to them,” he said, showing me, for some reason, his right hand and turning it round. “I am probably in some ways different than my father, than his father, but do I tell my elders what to do? And Musa told his own grandmother she cannot go?!”

Lamin was addressing me, and though I had no idea what a marabout was or why you would go to one I feigned outrage.

“They go all the time—” confided Hawa, “our grandmothers. My grandmother got me this.” She held up her wrist and I admired a beautiful silver bracelet with a small charm hanging from it.

“Please show me where it says that to respect your elders is a sin?” demanded Lamin. “You cannot show it to me. Now he wants to take his new son to the ‘modern’ hospital instead of to the bush. That is his choice. But why can’t the boy have a coming-out ceremony? Musa will break his grandmother’s heart again with this, I promise you. But am I going to be told this and that by a ghetto boy who knows no Arabic? Aadoo, Shaytan — this is the only Arabic he knows! He went to a Catholic mission school! I can recite every hadith, every hadith. No, no.”

It was the longest, most sustained, most impassioned speech I had ever heard from Lamin, and even he seemed surprised by it, stopping for a second and wiping the sweat from his forehead with a white, folded handkerchief he kept for the purpose in his back pocket.

“I say people will always have their differences—” began Hawa, but Lamin interrupted her again: “And then he says to me”—Lamin pointed to his broken watch—“‘This life is nothing compared to eternity — this life you are in is only the half-second before midnight. I am not living for this half-second but for what comes after.’ But he thinks because he prays with his arms folded across his chest he is better than me? No. I said to him: ‘I read Arabic, Musa, do you?’ Believe me, Musa is a man in confusion.”

“Lamin…” said Hawa, “I think you are a bit unfair, Musa only wants to perform jihad, and there is nothing wrong with—”

My face must have done something startling: Hawa pointed at my nose and burst out laughing.

“Look at her! Oh, man! She thinks my cousin wants to go shoot up people — oh no, that’s funny — a mashala doesn’t even have a toothbrush, forget a gun — ha ha ha!”

Lamin, less amused, pointed to his own chest, and returned to whispers: “No more reggae, no more hanging out in the ghetto, no more smoking of marijuana. She means this. Musa used to have dreadlocks — you know what are these? OK, so dreadlocks down to here! But now he is in this spiritual jihad, inside. She means this.”

“I wish I was so pure!” announced Hawa, sighing sweetly. “Oh, oh… it’s good to be pure — probably!”

“Well, of course it is,” said Lamin, frowning. “We all try to perform jihad, every day in our own way, as much as we are able. But you don’t need to cut your trousers and insult your grandmother. Musa dresses like an Indian. We don’t need this foreign imam here — we have our own!”

We had come to the school gate. Hawa twisted her long skirt, dislodged by the walk, until it sat straight again on her hips.

“Why are his trousers like that?”

“Oh, you mean short?” said Hawa dully, with that gift she had for always making me feel I’d asked the most obvious question of all. “So his feet don’t burn in hell!”

That night, under an exquisitely clear sky, I helped Fern and a team of local volunteers lay out three hundred chairs and erect white canopies to go over them, to send flags up poles and paint “WELCOME, AIMEE” on a wall. Aimee herself, Judy, Granger and the PR girl were all asleep in the hotel in Banjul, exhausted from their journey, or at the thought of the pink house, who knew. All around us the talk was of the President. We endured the same jokes over and over: how much we knew, or were claiming not to know, or who between the two of us knew more. No one mentioned Aimee. What I couldn’t work out among all this frenetic rumor and counter-rumor was whether a visit from the President was longed for or dreaded. It’s the same when you hear of a storm that’s coming to town, explained Fern, as we drove the tin legs of the folding chairs into the sand. Even if you fear it you’re curious to see it.

I was at King’s Cross station with my father in the early morning, on one of our last-minute trips to view a university. We’d just missed our train, not because we were late but because the price of a ticket was twice what I’d warned my father it might be, and during the argument about what to do next — one of us go now, the other later, or both not go or both go another afternoon, outside the peak-fare period — the train had pulled away from the platform without us. We were still snapping testily at each other in front of the announcement board when we spotted Tracey coming up the escalator from the tube. What a vision! Spotless white jeans and little high-heeled ankle boots and a black leather jacket cut close to her body and zipped up right to her chin: it looked like a kind of body armor. My father’s mood transformed. He lifted both his arms like an air-traffic controller signaling in a plane. I watched Tracey walk toward us in a weirdly formal way, a formality my father missed altogether, hugging her as he had done in the old days, without noting the rigidity of her body next to his or the ram-rod stillness of her arms. He pulled back and asked after her parents, how her summer was going. Tracey gave a series of bloodless replies that contained, to my ear, no real information. I saw his face cloud over. Not at what she was saying, exactly, but at the manner in which it was being said, a brand-new style of hers that seemed to have nothing to do with the wild, funny, courageous girl he thought he had known. It belonged to a different girl altogether, from a different neighborhood, a different world. “What they giving you in that crazy place,” he asked, “elocution lessons?” “Yes,” said Tracey primly and stuck her nose in the air, and it was clear she wanted to end the subject here, but my father, never very good at hints, wouldn’t let it go. He kept teasing her, and to defend herself against his ridicule Tracey now began listing the many skills she was developing in her summer singing and fencing lessons, her ballroom dancing and drama lessons, skills not necessary in the neighborhood but which a person needed to perform on what she was now calling the “West End stage.” I wondered, but did not ask, how she was paying for it all. As she rambled on to me, my father stood staring at her and then suddenly interrupted. “But you’re not serious, are you, Trace? Stop it with all that — it’s just us here! No need to talk fancy with us. We know you, we’ve known you since you were this high, you don’t have to pretend to be Lady Muck with us!” But Tracey became agitated, she spoke faster and faster, in this funny new voice of hers that perhaps she had thought would impress my father instead of repel him, and which did not quite have control over itself and veered unnaturally every other sentence back to our shared past and jaggedly forward into her mysterious present, until my father lost control of himself entirely and giggled at her, in the middle of King’s Cross station, in front of all those rush-hour commuters. He meant no harm — he was only bemused — but I saw how it hurt her. To her credit, though, Tracey didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use. She excused herself politely and said she had to get to a class.

In July, Miss Isabel called my mother to ask if Tracey and I would be volunteers at her end-of-summer show. I was flattered: when we were kids ex-students had seemed like gods to us, long-legged and independent, giggling with each other and speaking their whispered adolescent currency as they took our tickets, ran the tombola, served snacks, handed out prizes. But that painful morning in King’s Cross was still fresh in my mind. I knew that Miss Isabel’s vision of our friendship was stuck in time, but I couldn’t stand to break her image of it. I said yes via my mother and waited to hear about Tracey. The next day Miss Isabel called again: Tracey had agreed. But neither of us phoned the other or made any attempt at contact. I didn’t see her till the morning of the concert itself, when I decided I’d be the bigger person and go over to her place. I pressed the doorbell twice. After a strangely long pause Louie answered. I was surprised: we seemed to have surprised each other. He wiped some sweat from above his mustache and asked me gruffly what I wanted. Before I could answer I heard Tracey, in a funny sort of voice — I almost didn’t recognize it — shouting at her father to let me in, and Louie nodded and let me pass, but walked the other way, straight out of the door and along the corridor. I watched him hurry down the stairs, across the lawn and away. I turned back into the flat, but Tracey was not in the hall, and then not in the living room and then not in the kitchen: I had the feeling she was leaving each room a moment before I reached it. I found her in the bathroom. I would have said she had been recently crying, but I can’t be sure. I said hello. At the same moment she looked quickly down at herself, at the same spot I was looking at, straightening her crop top until it once again fully covered her bra.

We walked back out and down the stairs. I couldn’t speak but Tracey was never tongue-tied, not even in extreme situations, and chatted now in a bright, comical style, about all the “skinny bitches” she was up against in her auditions, the new moves she had to learn, the problem of projecting your voice beyond the footlights. She spoke quickly and constantly, to ensure no gap or pause in which I might ask a question, and in this way she got us both safely out of the estate and to the church door, where we met Miss Isabel. We were given matching keys, shown how to lock the cashbox and where to store it, how to close and open up the church before and after, and other small, practical things. As we walked around the space Miss Isabel asked a lot of questions about Tracey’s new life, about the small roles she was already getting within her school and the big roles outside of it she hoped one day to get. There was something beautiful and innocent in these questions. I could see Tracey wanted to be the girl Miss Isabel had in her mind, the kind whose life is uncluttered and straightforward, who has nothing but goals in front of her, bright and clear and nothing standing in her way. Taking on the role of this girl, she walked through this familiar space of our girlhood, reminiscing, remembering to shorten her vowels, her hands behind her back, like a tourist wandering through a museum, looking over the exhibits of a painful history, the kind of tourist who has no personal attachment to what she sees. When we came to the back of a church, where the children were queuing up for their juice and biscuits, they all looked up at Tracey with a wild admiration. She had her hair in a dancer’s bun and a Pineapple Studios bag slung over her shoulder, she turned her feet out as she walked, she was the dream we’d both had, a decade before, when we’d queued up for juice here, little girls ourselves. No one paid much attention to me — even the children could see I wasn’t a dancer any longer — and Tracey seemed happy to be surrounded by all these little admirers. To them she was beautiful and grown-up, enviably talented, free. And by looking at her this way, too, it was easy to tell myself I’d been imagining things.

I made my way across the room, and back in time, until I got to Mr. Booth. He was still sitting on his battered piano seat, a little older, but to me unchanged, and playing an unseasonable tune: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” And here that seamless thing happened, which, in its very unreality, makes people hate musicals, or so people tell me when I say I like them: we began making music together, without discussion or rehearsal. He knew the music, I knew the words. I sang about faithful friends. Tracey turned my way, and smiled, a melancholy but affectionate smile, or maybe it only carried the memory of affection. I saw the seven-, eight-, nine- and ten-year-old in her, the teenager, the little woman. All of these versions of Tracey were reaching across the years of the church hall to ask me a question: What are you going to do? To which we both already knew the answer. Nothing.

It looked less like the opening of a school than the announcement of the end of an old regime. A troop of young soldiers dressed in dark blue uniforms stood in the middle, holding their brass instruments, brutally sweating. There was no shade out there and they’d been in position for an hour already. I was sitting a hundred yards from them, under the canopy, with the great and good of the whole upper-river region, some local and international press, Granger and Judy, but not the President, and not Aimee, not yet. Fern was to bring her over, when everything was set and all were in place: a long process. Lamin and Hawa, who were neither great nor good, had been relegated to some far-off spot, distant from us, for the hierarchy of the seating was absolute. Every fifteen minutes or so Judy, or sometimes Granger, or sometimes me, would suggest that someone should really get those poor musical soldiers some water, but none of us did, and no one else did either. Meanwhile the nursery schools trooped in, each school in its distinctive uniform, pinafores, shirts and shorts in striking combinations of colors — orange and gray, or purple and yellow — led by small groups of women, their teachers, who had pulled out all the stops in terms of glamour. The teachers of Kunkujang Keitaya Nursery School wore tight red T-shirts and black jeans with rhinestone pockets and their hair in elaborate braids. The teachers of Tujereng Nursery School wore wrappers and headscarves of matching red-and-orange design and identical white platform sandals. Each team took a different approach from the next but like the Supremes maintained a perfect uniformity within their group. They entered through the main gate, sashayed across the yard, trailing children, poker-faced — as if they didn’t hear us all cheering — and when they reached their assigned spot two of the women would then unsmilingly unfurl a homemade banner with the name of the school upon it and stand holding it, shifting their weight from hip to hip as the wait continued. I don’t think I ever saw so many outrageously beautiful women in one place. I’d been dressed up too — Hawa told me firmly that my usual khakis and crumpled linen would not do — borrowing a white-and-yellow wrapper and top from my host, which, being far too narrow for me, I could not close at the back and so had to disguise the open seam with a wide red scarf casually thrown over my shoulders, although it was at least 102 degrees.

Finally, almost two hours after we’d sat down, all who were to be in the yard were in the yard, and Aimee, surrounded by a jostling crowd of well-wishers, was led by Fern to her central seat. Camera bulbs flared. And the first thing she turned to ask me was: “Where’s Lamin?” I didn’t have a chance to tell her: horns blew, the main event was upon us, and sitting back in my chair, I wondered if I might in fact have misunderstood everything I’d been so sure I’d understood in the previous two weeks. For now a parade of children walked into the square in costume, all of about seven or eight years old, dressed as the leaders of African nations. They came in kente-cloth and dashikis and Nehru collars and safari suits, and each had their own entourage, made up of other children who’d been done up as security guards: dark suits and dark glasses, speaking into fake walkie-talkies. Many of the little leaders had little wives by their side, dangling little handbags, though Lady Liberia walked alone, and South Africa came with three wives, who linked arms with each other as they walked behind him. To look at the crowd you would think nothing funnier had been seen by anyone in their lives, and Aimee, who also found it hilarious, wiped tears from her eyes as she reached out to hug the President of Senegal or squeeze the cheek of the President of Côte d’Ivoire. The leaders paraded past the desperate, sweating soldiers, and then in front of our seats, where they waved and posed for pictures but would not smile or speak. Then the band stopped blaring welcome horns and began a very loud brass rendition of the national anthem. Our chairs vibrated. I turned and saw two massive vehicles rumbling into the yard over the sandy ground: the first an SUV like the one in which we’d traveled four months before, and the second a real police jeep, so heavily armored it looked like a tank. Maybe a hundred children and teenagers from the village ran alongside these vehicles, behind, sometimes in front, but always dangerously close to the wheels, cheering and whooping. In the first car, standing up through the sun-roof, was an eight-year-old version of the President himself, in his white grand boubou and white kufi cap, holding his cane. A real stab at verisimilitude had been attempted: he was as dark as the President and had the same frog face. Next to him stood an eight-year-old glamour-girl, of about my shade, in a wig and a slinky red dress, throwing handfuls of Monopoly money into the crowd. Clinging to the sides of the car were more of these little security guards, with little sunglasses and little guns, which they pointed at the children, some of whom opened their arms in delight to expose their little chests to the aim of their peers. Two adult versions of these security types, in the same outfit, but with no gun, or not as far as I could see, ran beside the car, filming all this on the latest video cameras. In the police jeep bringing up the rear the little policemen with their toy guns shared space with real policemen with real Kalashnikovs. Both the little and big policemen held their guns in the air, to the delight of the children, who ran behind and tried to clamber into the back of the jeep themselves, to get to where the power was. The adults I sat among seemed torn between smiling cheers — whenever the cameras swung round to catch them — and crying out in terror as the vehicles threatened every moment to collide with their running children. “Move on over,” I heard a real policeman shout, to a persistent boy at his right axel, who was pleading for sweets. “Or we’ll move on over you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My point is: we love our President—”

“Ha! Speak for yourself!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Back way is craziness,” whispered Hawa.

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

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

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

“Is she here now? Our sister Aimee?”

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

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

“Yes.”

“And she knows Michael Jackson?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is certainly it,” said Lamin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You like the food?”

“It’s really delicious.”

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

“Yes, exactly.”

“So: in conclusion, everything is good?”

“Everything is good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, for the government.”

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

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

Brother and sister inclined their heads affectionately toward each other.

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

I said yes: it was easier.

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

“The contempt?”

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

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

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

“I don’t know what that is.”

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

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

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

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

Everything happened quickly after that. Miss Isabel, in her innocence, went to talk to Tracey’s mother and was more or less chased out of their flat, returning to ours looking shaken, her face pinker than ever. My mother sat her down again and went to make tea, but a moment later we heard the sound of the open front door banging in its frame: Tracey’s mother, propelled by her own unfinished fury across the road, up the stairs and into our lounge, where she stayed long enough to make a counter-accusation, a terrible one, about Mr. Booth. It was loud enough that I heard it through the ceiling. I ran down the stairs and right into her, she was filling the doorway, defiant, full of contempt — for me. “You and your fucking mother,” she said. “You’ve always thought you were better than us, always thought you were some kind of bloody golden child, but turns out it ain’t you at all, is it? It’s my Tracey, and all of you are just fucking jealous, and I’ll be dead before I let you people get in her way, she’s got her whole life in front of her and you can’t stop her with lies, none of you can.”

No adult had ever spoken to me like that before, as if they despised me. According to her, I was trying to ruin Tracey’s life, and so was my mother, and so were Miss Isabel and Mr. Booth, and miscellaneous others on the estate, and all the jealous mothers from dance class. I ran, crying, back up the stairs, and she screamed: “You can cry as much as you bloody want, love!” Upstairs I heard the front door slam and for several hours everything went quiet. Just before supper my mother came up to my room and asked a series of delicate questions — the only time the subject of sex ever came up explicitly between us — and I made it as clear as I could that Mr. Booth had never laid a hand on me or on Tracey, nor anyone else, as far as I knew.

It didn’t help: by the end of the week, he was forced to give up playing the piano in Miss Isabel’s dance class. I don’t know what happened to him after that, whether he carried on living in the neighborhood, or moved away, or died, or was simply broken by the rumors. I thought of my mother’s intuition—“Something serious happened to that girl!”—and I felt now that she was right as usual, and that if we had only asked Tracey the proper questions at the right moment and in a more delicate way we might have got the truth. Instead our timing was bad, we backed her and her mother into a corner, to which they both reacted predictably, with wildfire, tearing through whatever was in its path — in this case poor old Mr. Booth. And so we got something like the truth, quite like it, but not exactly.