Swing Time

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.

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?

I spent more time with Lily Bingham, for example, taking pleasure in her good humor and gentle way of being: she still played with dolls, knew nothing of sex, loved drawing and making things out of cardboard and glue. In other words she was still a child, as I sometimes wished I could be. In her games nobody died or was afraid or took revenge or feared being uncovered as a fraud, and there was absolutely no black and no white, for, as she solemnly explained to me one day as we played, she herself was “color blind” and saw only what was in a person’s heart. She had a little cardboard theater of the Russian Ballet, bought in Covent Garden, and for her a perfect afternoon involved maneuvering the cardboard prince around the stage, letting him meet a cardboard princess and fall in love with her, while a scratchy copy of Swan Lake, her father’s, played in the background. She loved ballet, though she was a poor dancer herself, too bandy-legged to have any real hopes, and she knew all the French words for everything, and the tragic life stories of Diaghilev and Pavlova. Tap dancing didn’t interest her. When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn’t fair. Maybe in America you could do that,
but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to “go on about it.” And we wouldn’t like it, she said, if someone said to us that only black people could come to Isabel’s dance class, that wouldn’t be nice or fair to us, would it? We’d be sad about that. Or that only black people could come into our school. We wouldn’t like that, would we? I said nothing. I put Stormy Weather back in my rucksack and went home, walking beneath a Willesden sunset of petroleum colors and quick-shunting clouds, going over and over this curious lecture in my mind, wondering what she could have meant by the word “we”?