Swing Time

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7 and Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Early and Late”

Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary

When the narrator is 10 years old, 20-year-old Aimee becomes a superstar. Later, the narrator will get to know Aimee personally. But her first experience with Aimee is buying her CD for Lily Bingham’s birthday party. Tracey is on edge at this birthday party, where most of the girls are white and wealthier than her. They watch The Jungle Book; Tracey says that Mowgli looks like a boy in her class, using an offensive derogatory word for Pakistani and Indian immigrants. To entertain the other girls, Tracey and the narrator put on Lily’s mother’s lingerie and dance to Aimee’s song until Lily’s mother finds them and reprimands them. When the narrator’s mother arrives to pick them up, she defends them to Lily’s mother. But when they are alone, she lectures the girls.

Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary

Years later, while working for YTV, the narrator meets Aimee. YTV is a music channel, successful in the late 1990s, before digital music made videos on television obsolete. At YTV, the narrator is treated as too cool for trends, thanks in part to her race and cultural background.

Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary

As the narrator prepares to meet Aimee, she searches for Tracey on the internet. Tracey has performed in some shows as a dancer, but her most notable online presence is her page dedicated to a conspiracy theorist guru.

Aimee is both annoyed and impressed by the narrator’s lack of obvious admiration for her. The narrator admits that she prefers historical voices that exemplify culture to Aimee’s contemporary pop music. The narrator is hired to be Aimee’s personal assistant.

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary

The narrative flashes back to the narrator at 10 years old. Tracey has fallen in love with contemporary pop artists, while the narrator prefers dancers from the past, like the Nicholas Brothers. When the narrator insists that the modern dancers Tracey loves have all borrowed from the Nicholas Brothers, Tracey warns her not to talk about her father.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary

The narrative flashes forward to the narrator at 22 years old, now Aimee’s personal assistant. Aimee wants the narrator to share more of herself, so they travel through London to the narrator’s favorite place, Kenwood House, a former noble’s estate turned museum. Aimee has a son and is pregnant with her second child. The narrator declares she’s never wanted and will never want children. The narrator tries to tell Aimee the more sordid history of Kenwood House, featuring slavery and oppression, but Aimee embraces a sentimental view of history. Aimee and the narrator swim in the ladies’ pond.

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary

The narrative flashes back to the narrator’s childhood. She finds out from her mother that Tracey’s father is in prison. Tracey and the narrator are spending less time together, which makes the narrator

distraught, thinking it permanent, but in fact it was only a hiatus, one of many we would have, lasting a couple of months, sometimes longer, but always ending—not coincidentally—with her father getting out again, or else returning from Jamaica, where he often had to flee (115).

When Tracey’s father is in prison or in Jamaica, she is noticeably withdrawn. The narrator spends more time with Lily Bingham, who still plays with dolls. But Lily dismisses the narrator’s favorite movie Stormy Weather because she says it’s unfair that only Black people are in the movie.

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary

The narrator enjoys Saturday dance classes, where she can sing her favorite show tunes with piano accompanist Mr. Booth. Tracey and her mother make fun of the narrator, and she is struck by the fact that her parents would never smirk at another child in her presence. The narrator doesn’t seek help from her parents. Instead, when she feels upset or lost, she turns to books about show business.

Part 2 Analysis

The novel’s examination of the sexualization of little girls begins in Part 1, with the bizarre and sexually assaultive game the boys play at school. The game’s rules are highly suggestive that the boys have already internalized harmful stereotypes about Black femininity, as they specifically target Tracey, actually assault the narrator, and never go after white girls: Within white supremacist societies, Black women and girls are often over-sexualized as a way of dehumanizing them and favoring an image of white female purity. When Tracey becomes the most popular target of this game, her sexualization sets her apart from other girls her age and instills a discomfiting comfort with the objectified female body. Thus, when Tracey and the narrator are caught dancing provocatively, they unknowingly make themselves sexual beings under the white gaze. One of the many things that create a gap between the narrator and Tracey is the narrator’s clear discomfort and lack of affinity with that sexualization—when the narrator and Tracey take breaks from one another, the narrator hangs out with Lily, whose childishness is a relief compared to Tracey’s more adult games or ideas.

Another distancing dynamic is the girls’ developing understanding of race. When Tracey casually uses a racial slur for Pakistani and Indian immigrants in front of Lily’s mother and friends, the narrator’s mother is upset to see Tracey violate her necessary solidarity with other nonwhite people. By using this slur, Tracey mimics the power of being racist. Meanwhile, when the narrator shows Lily the 1943 musical Stormy Weather, Lily is offended that no white people appear in this film. Lily confuses the narrator by twisting the argument of inclusion and racism: In making herself seem like the victim, Lily takes away the narrator’s power to find representations of Black culture lacking. Even when the narrator finds images of herself in media and culture, her white friends refuse to give her the space and empathy to talk about race in constructive ways.

Britain’s racism is a part of the narrator’s adult life. At the music media channel, she is one of only two Black women in the office. She faces stereotyping from white colleagues, who expect the narrator to be involved in hip-hop culture purely because she is Black. Similarly, pop star Aimee avoids confronting the injustice of the past by sentimentalizing oppressive history: In a white supremacist society, the brutality of racism is subsumed in coating history in vague and positive terms. Thus, when the narrator brings Aimee to Kenwood House, Aimee dismisses the real history of Kenwood House as necessary trials and tribulations that have made historically marginalized people stronger. The narrator is acutely aware of how Aimee is obfuscating reality, demonstrating that the years have drawn her closer to the intellectualism of her mother.

As their rhyming names indicate, Aimee and Tracey have similar functions in the narrative: Both are women the narrator is attracted to. Like Tracey, Aimee exudes confidence and edginess. She pushes the narrator to explore new parts of herself and the world around her. Both Tracey and Aimee have emotional voids and warped interpretations of the world around them. Aimee doesn’t realize how privileged her life is, while Tracey fabricates toughness and lies to protect herself against how underprivileged her childhood is. The narrator uses both to learn about herself through the intimate observation of another woman.