Swing Time Summary and Analysis

Prologue and Part 1, Early Days: Chapters 1–14 Summary

In the prologue, the unnamed narrator describes the “first day of her humiliation” as she returns to England in disgrace from her former employer, Aimee. On a whim, she goes to hear a film director discuss his work and sees a clip from a favorite childhood movie, Swing Time. A scene of Fred Astaire dancing makes her realize that she has “always tried to attach [herself] to the light of other people.” Later she shows the clip to her Senegalese ex-lover, Lamin, and is shocked to discover Astaire is in blackface in the scene.

As Part 1, Chapter 1 begins, the narrator recalls first meeting her friend Tracey in 1982 on the way to Miss Isabel’s dance class. The narrator notices she and Tracey, both mixed-race children, are exactly the same “shade of brown,” though readers later learn the narrator has a Jamaican mother and white father while Tracey’s mother is white and her father Jamaican. They are from adjacent public housing estates in London but attend different schools. The narrator describes herself as serious while Tracey is perky, like a dark-skinned Shirley Temple. The narrator’s mother is a feminist and student of sociology and politics who dresses her daughter plainly while Tracey’s white, overweight mother loves to dress up her daughter. 

In Chapter 2, Tracey turns out to be a far better dancer than the flat-footed narrator, but the girls are drawn to each other by mutual fascination. The narrator reveals that she is an only child who constantly battles her mother. The mother in turn is “outgrowing” the narrator’s father as she pursues her studies.

In Chapter 4, the narrator discusses her love of dancers in movies, who seem to her to have no nationality or family ties, a quality she loves. She doesn’t care about the plots, only the dancing. The music in these movies is, she feels, far superior to the “white” classical music in dance class and reminds her that there “must be a world somewhere” where Black and white music combine. She is herself a talented singer, but Tracey remains the superior dancer.

The narrator’s mother openly disapproves of Tracey. In Chapter 6 she describes the Sankofa, an African bird that can only look at the past, to her daughter, and the narrator understands this metaphor to apply to both her father and Tracey. At the narrator’s house, the girls write stories that Tracey dictates. The stories promise happiness for a young ballerina, but Tracey always finds a new way to destroy the happy endings.

Tracey is loyal to her absent father, whom she claims is a backup dancer for Michael Jackson. In Chapter 8 the father, Louie, finally shows up, swearing and overturning the furniture. In Chapter 9, the narrator gets her own unpleasant surprise with the one-time visit of her father’s two teenaged children, who are white. John, the boy, plays with her but calls her mother a racial epithet. 

Tracey moves to the narrator’s school in Chapter 11 after her mother arranges it and immediately becomes popular and influential. The girls now share an interest in clips of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing.

Prologue and Part 1, Early Days: Chapters 1–14 Analysis

The prologue and Part 1 of Swing Time introduce the novel’s major characters and conflicts. The prologue contains the narrator’s revelation that she “always tried to attach [herself] to the light of other people,” explaining her attraction to the magnetic yet less-principled Tracey and to her monstrous former employer, Aimee. The mention of Tracey’s tendency to destroy the happiness of her fictional characters foreshadows the fact that she too will have a role in the narrator’s downfall.

Part 1 sets up the structural pattern for all but the last part of the novel: chapters will shift between a particular time in the narrator’s past and in her adult life. This section also introduces some of the novel’s major themes. For a child who is only 9 as Part 1 ends, the narrator is acutely aware of the link between identity and race. She is constantly weighing Black and white versions of everything from Fred Astaire in blackface to her comparison of Tracey to Shirley Temple to the whiteness of her half-siblings. She dislikes classical music, which she dismisses as “white,” but loves the music in dance movies because she, a Black child, can sing along to the songs. Her question about whether there is “a world somewhere” where Black and white music combine foreshadows her need to find her own place in the world.

Neither the narrator nor Tracey can appreciate their mothers, even though the mothers influence everything from what the girls eat to how they dress. Tracey speaks lightly of her mother’s accomplishment in getting her into a better school and idolizes her violent, mostly absent father while the narrator doesn’t seem to take any pride in her own mother’s desire to better herself and her daughter through education.