Part 4, Middle Passage: Chapters 1–12 Summary

In Part 4, Chapter 1, the narrator recollects seeing a kankurang, the dancer who symbolizes and leads traditional initiation rites for young Mandinka males in parts of West Africa. She is in a taxi with Lamin and a group of strangers to visit the school that Aimee has built in an unnamed West African country. Lamin will be one of the teachers. The dance party stops the cab and invites the travelers to dance with them; Lamin does. As they resume their journey, the narrator wonders: if not the kankurang, “Who comes for the girls?” Perhaps it is their mothers, grandmothers, or a friend, she thinks.

Part 4, Chapter 2 returns to the past as the narrator remembers how Tracey experienced early puberty with little help from her mother, who is now employed cleaning offices. She wears “sexy” clothes, and the other girls ignore her because she supposedly lets boys touch her. Returning to the scene in Africa in Chapter 3, the narrator stays in a family compound led by cheerful, confident Hawa, a teacher at the school. The narrator wants to see the shore from which ships left with enslaved Africans to journey to Jamaica and then on to the Americas and Britain with the goods for which they had sold the Africans. This triangular journey, she reflects, has led to her own existence. She considers how hard the women in the compound work just to keep her fed and free from any toil.

Part 4, Chapter 4 returns to the past as the 12-year-old narrator randomly picks a winning horse for Tracey’s father, Louie, to bet on. With the money he subsequently gives her, she buys several videos of movie musicals, including Swing Time. Tracey tells him she is auditioning for a stage school, and Louie responds with some slick dance moves. The narrator’s mother later learns with whom her daughter has been, and she is furious. The narrator in turn tells her mother that she doesn’t care about her mother’s interests; she only wants to dance and live her own life. The mother belittles her dancing ability and says all that matters is “what’s written down.” The narrator realizes that an inevitable shift in her mother’s authority is taking place.

In Chapter 5, the narrator wants to share the videos she has purchased with Tracey, especially Ali Baba Goes to Town, where a blackface Al Cantor sings to African musicians “a verse that seemed to swing time itself” and transports the musicians from ancient Arabia to Harlem. She shows Tracey a girl dancer, Jeni LeGon, who looks like Tracey and does a move similar to one of Michael Jackson’s.

Part 4, Chapter 6 returns to Africa, where Aimee arrives in the village with her children, their nanny, three other assistants, a journalist and photographer, a Brazilian project manager named Fernando, and others. Aimee revels in the attention of the people they pass.

Chapter 7 again revisits the past and the girls’ obsession with Jeni LeGon and her dance, which Tracey teaches herself. The narrator’s mother and father have broken up, although they still live together so the father can care for his daughter. The parents stop talking eventually, but the narrator cares only for Tracey’s attention.

Chapter 8 is set in Africa as Aimee participates in opening ceremonies for the school. The narrator considers how unlike the women of the village they are. In Chapter 9, the narrator’s teacher recommends her for a scholarship to an independent school. Dismayed at the thought of her mother directing her future, the narrator deliberately fails the entrance exams.

In Chapter 10, Tracey gets into the stage school by executing Jeni LeGon’s dance. The narrator is lonely and lost at her new school without Tracey, feeling she has no place in the groups that form around skin tone, social class, wealth, and other factors. She survives day to day during her “middle passage” years, 13 to 15. She decides to join a Goth group and skips school with them, returning to her father’s new apartment. 

In Part 4, Chapter 11, the narrator returns to Africa with Fernando and stays in Hawa’s family compound again. She reflects on the fact that the women in the village do most of the work, raising both children and crops. She visits the school, looking for the brightest students. Many of them are “Traceys,” bored and free-spoken. It is no wonder, as the students are taught to read and write English but are barely learning a few words.

Chapter 12 returns to the past and the end of the narrator’s middle passage. She goes dancing on Friday nights with her Goth friends; her mother always picks her up afterward and drives her home. She meets a boy at one of these outings and briefly has sex with him. Afterward she goes outside and sees Tracey, who is high and very ill, having a fight with a man. The narrator’s mother takes Tracey to a hospital to have her stomach pumped. Glimpsing herself in a mirror there, the narrator sees “the face of a woman” and gives up being a Goth. 

Part 4, Middle Passage: Chapters 1–12 Analysis

Part 4 takes its title from the horrific voyage of enslaved Africans to the Americas. It was the “middle” part of a triangular trade route that went from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back. The narrator describes her own middle passage, as she names her years from ages 13 to 15. Missing Tracey, she becomes a truant, disaffected Goth. This dark time in her childhood takes place after she has repudiated her mother by telling her she doesn’t exist.

Interspersed with the narrator’s recollections of the past are accounts of her trips to Africa on behalf of Aimee’s school. Here gender and identity are inseparable: the village women do all the work simply because they are women. For the narrator’s mother, education is the key to success, but for the young women in Aimee’s school it is a meaningless exercise because of the vast mismatch between what is taught and the students’ understanding. Education by itself, Smith seems to say, is not the sole answer to poverty and deprivation. Emphasizing the passive role of the village women, the narrator wonders why only the men have a spiritual guide for their transition to adulthood. 

The book’s title takes on a double meaning as the narrator describes the scene in Ali Baba Goes to Town that fascinates both her and Tracey. As Al Cantor sings to a group of African musicians in ancient Arabia, he “swing[s] time itself,” pulling them centuries into the future. Up to this point, readers know “Swing Time” only as the title of a Fred Astaire movie. Now it doesn’t just refer to a time to swing, or move rhythmically, but to the ability of song and dance to connect the past and the future.