Swing Time Characters

Narrator

The unnamed narrator is the child of a white father and a Jamaican mother. She lacks a sense of self and purpose, which she attributes partly to her biracial identity and her parents’ unhappiness. The novel shows her quest to find her identity as she sifts through memories of different periods of her life. Her only touchstone—a love of dancing, particularly that found in old black-and-white movie musicals—doesn’t equip her for any sort of meaningful career. She is instead sucked into the orbit of, first, her destructive friend Tracey and then the narcissistic performer Aimee. She becomes Aimee’s personal assistant and works for her for years until a disastrous split forces her to reckon with her own shortcomings.

Tracey

Tracey is the daughter of a Jamaican father, who is a petty criminal, and a shiftless white mother. She is described as perky, like a “darker Shirley Temple.” Her talent for dance is evident early on; her movements are sharp and precise, and she progresses through dance class to a stage school and a career as a dancer in musical theater. However, perhaps because of the influence of her parents, she has a destructive streak that sabotages her relationships with everyone, including the narrator. By the novel’s end, she is no longer dancing and has three children by different fathers, but she still has a spark of her original personality. 

Narrator’s Mother

The narrator’s beautiful Jamaican mother has had an abusive childhood and, as a result, pursues education at the expense of everything else. She cares only for bettering herself and is frustrated with the narrator’s rootlessness, judging her daughter by her own strict personal and academic standards. She has married a white man whom she gradually stops loving and divorces because he doesn’t share her aspirations. Eventually, the narrator’s mother is elected to the local council and ultimately to Parliament. Midway through the book, she takes on a lover named Miriam, who plays a secondary role in the story. The narrator’s mother dies of cancer at the novel’s close.

Aimee

Australian-born Aimee is a superstar at age 22, so famous after the release of her first single that she can’t walk down a public street without recognition. She has a white-blonde pixie cut, startlingly pale blue eyes, and an androgynous, elfin face. Youthful in body and mind and filled with energy, she works hard at her career. Aimee has two children by different fathers, neither of whom she has stayed with. At 42 she looks as if she were 26. She has a strong belief in her ability to make decisions and the role she has played in her own success. Her belief propels her decision to found a school for girls in West Africa.

Narrator’s Father

The narrator’s father is kind and more of a parent to the narrator than her mother is. However, he has no ambition, which leads to his separation and divorce from his wife. In contrast to the narrator’s mother, he is in fact downwardly mobile, deciding to give up his office job for the mail service to become a postal worker. While the narrator continues to visit him after the divorce, she finds him to be lonely and bored, totally lost without a family. His sexual escapade involving a blow-up doll is the cause of an eight-year rift between the narrator and Tracey.

Tracey’s Mother

Tracey’s mother, a white, blonde-haired Englishwoman, remains unnamed in Swing Time. She raises Tracey essentially on her own and, though unemployed for most of Tracey’s childhood, nevertheless buys her too many toys. She takes great vicarious pride in Tracey’s dancing, and the only spark in her life seems to be her ambition for her daughter. She exerts herself to get Tracey into a better school and defends Tracey when she is suspected of theft. The last time the narrator sees Tracey’s mother, she is picking up her daughter after a show with her two small grandchildren in the car.

Hawa

Hawa is the competent, ever-laughing leader of the compound where the narrator stays while she is in Africa visiting Aimee’s school. A teacher at the school, Hawa is an unusual figure in the village as the middle-class daughter of two professors. She has the job of teaching English sentences dictated by the government to the children, which she then translates back into their language, Wolof. In time, she and the narrator begin muttering, “Still no baby?” to each other as a joke. Over the course of the novel, she decides to marry a sensitive, impoverished man for whom she becomes more modest and devout.

Lamin

Lamin is a serious young Senegalese teacher with the school that Aimee builds in West Africa. He is gallant toward the narrator and respected by his “age mates,” those with whom he has grown up or studied. A devout Muslim, he is indignant when another character pretends to be holier than he is. When he has an affair with Aimee, he travels with her to the United States, where he becomes more Americanized but seems to the narrator to be very unhappy. His subsequent affair with the narrator causes Aimee to fire her. At the end of the novel, Lamin has made his way to Birmingham, where he hopes to continue his studies.

Fernando

Fernando Carrapichano, also called Fern, is the project manager who supervises the building of Aimee’s school. A Brazilian, he is both intelligent and highly moral. He and the narrator become friends over the course of building the school, and he tells her he feels his job is to make sure the school still has some usefulness after Aimee inevitably gets bored and abandons the project. He falls in love with the narrator, who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. After a rocky period, she is able to be his friend again and thinks she might be able to envision a future with him.

Mr. Booth

Mr. Booth is the kind, mild-mannered piano player at Miss Isabel’s dance school, where the narrator and Tracey take lessons as children. He is one of the few people with whom the narrator can discuss her beloved black-and-white movie musicals and the only person in her life whose friendship seems uncomplicated and lacking in motives. He is also one of the victims of Tracey’s destructive streak. Accused of stealing from the school, Tracey—with the help of her mother—manages to turn suspicion on Mr. Booth, who is fired.

Lily Bingham

Lily Bingham is the gentle and childlike white classmate and friend whose party the narrator, egged on by Tracey, helps to ruin. Lily is tall, blonde, and pink-cheeked with a happy and friendly attitude that the narrator attributes to her posh home. The videotape made by Lily at the party will play a role in the narrator’s downfall. When the girls are a bit older, Tracey plays with Lily and is surprised by Lily’s statement that while she is “color blind,” the idea of a film with an all-Black cast somehow isn’t fair.

Louie

Tracey’s father, Louie, who goes in and out of prison and his daughter’s life, is a slick petty criminal who moves like a dancer and can be violent. Tracey idolizes him and lies about his frequent absences, making up glamorous stories about his work and whereabouts. (For example, she claims her father is a backup dancer for Michael Jackson.) Louie is Jamaican, like the narrator’s mother, but the two seem to represent opposite ends of the immigrant experience. Louie is completely undependable and brings violence and instability to his household; the aspirational mother, who grew up in such a home, wants to educate and better herself.