I brought in my biographies of dancers, thick books with soft-focus seventies portraits on the cover, of the great stars in their old age—in their silk dressing gowns and cravats, in their pink ostrich-feather capes—and on page count alone it was decided that my future should be “discussed.” My mother came in for a meeting, early, before school, where she was told that the same books she sometimes teased me for reading were evidence of my intelligence, and that there was a test such “gifted” children could take, which, if they passed, would enable them to attend the kind of good schools that give scholarships—no, no, no—no fees, don’t worry, I meant “grammars,” which are a different thing altogether, no money involved at all, no, no, please don’t worry. I glanced at my mother, whose face gave nothing away. It’s because of the reading age, explained the teacher, passing over our silence, you see her reading age is really quite advanced. The teacher looked my mother over—her bra-less vest and jeans, the kente-cloth head-wrap, a pair of huge earrings shaped like Africa—and asked if the father would be joining us. The father’s at work, said my mother. Oh, said the teacher, turning to me, and what does your father do, dear, is he the reader of the house, or . . .? The father’s a postman, said my mother. The mother’s the reader. Now, normally, said the teacher, blushing, consulting her notes, normally, we don’t suggest the entrance exam for the independent schools really. I mean, there are some scholarships available but there’s no point setting these kids up for disappointment . . . But this young Miss Bradwell we’ve had in recently thought perhaps, well, she thought that, in your daughter’s situation, it might just be the case that . . .
We walked home in silence, there was nothing more to discuss. We had already been to visit the huge and raucous comp I’d be attending in the autumn, it had been sold to me on the promise it had a “dance studio” somewhere in that warren of scuffed corridors, Portakabin classrooms and temporary toilets. Everyone that I knew—excepting Tracey—was heading there, and this was one comfort: safety in numbers. But my mother surprised me. In the grounds of the estate she stopped at the base of the stairwell and told me that I’d take that test, and work hard to pass it. No dancing at the weekend, no distractions of any kind, I was being given the kind of opportunity, she said, that she had never had herself, having been advised, at the same age I was now—and by her own teachers—to work on mastering forty words a minute, like all the other black girls.
? ? ?
It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went in adolescence, except now suddenly something was different. I’d been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he’d barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly because she’d rather walk than be told which stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go. Well, wasn’t there something noble in that? Wasn’t there some fight in it, at least—some defiance? And then there were all the outrageous historical cases I heard of at my mother’s knee, tales of the furiously talented women—and these were all women, in my mother’s telling—women who might have run faster than a speeding train, if they had been free to do so, but for whom, born in the wrong time, in the wrong place, all stops were closed, who were never even permitted to enter the station. And wasn’t I so much freer than any of them—born in England, in modern times—not to mention so much lighter, so much straighter of nose, so much less likely to be mistaken for the very essence of Blackness itself? What could possibly stop me traveling on? Yet when I sat down in my own school hall, on a stifling July day, outside of normal school hours—an unnatural time to be at school—and opened those test papers, to read through the opportunity my mother wished I would “grab with both hands,” a great, sullen fury came over me, I didn’t feel like traveling on their train, wrote a few words here and there, ignored the pages of maths and science, flagrantly failed.
Ten
A few weeks later, Tracey got into her stage school. Her mother had no choice but to ring my mother’s doorbell, enter our flat and tell us all about it. She stuck Tracey in front of her like a shield, shuffled into the hall, wouldn’t sit down or have tea. She’d never been over the threshold before. “The judges said they’d not seen anything like her original”—Tracey’s mother stopped dead and looked angrily at her daughter, who then provided the 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.