When the creaky elevator at last reached the eighth floor, it opened onto another country. Somewhere in Africa, it seemed, although the building was in downtown Manhattan. The dim, narrow lobby was sultry with bodies, mostly men in dashikis and pillbox hats, kofias, talking in clumps or navigating their way through the crowd. Facing the elevator was a glass wall, and in the studio on the other side, an African dance class was in progress. Besides the sound of the drums, snatches of French bounced through the lobby, along with an English so accented it might as well have been French. The handful of Americans, black and white, looked like tourists. I felt like a tourist myself, ignorant of the customs of the country. I even felt a twinge of apprehension, as if I might at any moment have to justify my presence, maybe even present my passport.
I could readily justify my presence: I was there to learn to drum. At first I’d felt shy about joining the drum class. What would my fellow drummers make of me, a middle-aged white woman who, however musical, had never been near a drum in her life: this would be obvious right away. What was I doing in their territory? This kind of thinking was foolish, I told myself, and must be overcome. I was paying the fees like everyone else; I was entitled to my adventure.
I made sure to arrive early each week so I could watch the last few minutes of the dance class through the glass. The gray-haired male teacher, wearing loose green and gold trousers and a tunic, would lead the dancers across the floor, sweat spraying from their bodies, arms and legs flinging relentlessly to the beat of the drums. Then they would gather in a circle. A few of the bolder ones came to the center to improvise while the others cheered them on. As they filed out, one by one they thanked the drummers and shook their hands.
I watched with a kind of wistfulness. I had taken dance classes like this one a few years ago. In my old class we used to thank the drummers too, but instead of a formal handshake we each hugged our three drummers. At the beginning I felt hesitant about offering my sweaty body, but the drummers never shrank from us; they happily accepted our tributes, our wet hands and faces. I was entranced by the drums. I listened so closely that sometimes I didn’t pay enough attention to the steps and floundered. I was entranced by the drummers too, the way their faces were so somber and concentrated while their hands whirred like oversized hummingbirds’ wings.
At some point I got a flu that was hard to shake, and after I recovered I never went back to the class. The prospect of all that leaping around made me limp, as if the flu were reclaiming me. I missed the dancing, but even more, I missed the drums. I could buy CDs, sure, but even better, I could become a drummer myself. Why not? I’d never be more than a so-so dancer, but drumming was something I might have a gift for. I’d played the piano all my life, and when I danced, my timing was impeccable, even if I didn’t get the steps right because I was so absorbed by the drums.
Before each week’s class, I signed in at a small desk and paid. Fifteen dollars for the class, three dollars to rent a drum, and another dollar, optional, for a bottle of water, a good idea because the drumming was hot work. Some people brought their drums with them, in padded black cases on wheels, but I was renting one. Later, depending on how the classes went, I might buy a drum, though it would be cumbersome to lug it on the subway. The rental drums were kept in a glass cabinet in the lobby. The first few times, I stared at them, not knowing how to choose, until a passing teacher pointed out which would be best for me. I would drag the drum into a very small windowless room with black walls and eight or so ancient folding chairs arranged in a circle. More chairs were stacked against the wall. It was summer and we kept the door closed for the air-conditioning, so it was like playing in a closet filled with pounding rhythms. The closet became a world of pure sound, an isolated capsule of passion in the dark. Everything outside dropped away.
The drum we played was a West African djembe, shaped like a headless woman, a broad-shouldered woman, tapering down to a thin waist and flaring hips that were narrower than the upper torso. We held her, or rather, it, between our legs, not flat on the floor but tipped slightly outward at about a thirty-degree angle, balanced on the outer edge of its round bottom rim. You play a djembe with bare hands. After an hour and a half of slapping the cowhide surface, my hands were hot and stinging. A pleasant sting, the sting of effort.
There were about half a dozen regulars in the class. A thirtyish woman, tall and slim, who took the dance class, came in panting and shiny with sweat, still in her dancing clothes. Another woman had her long blonde hair arranged in African braids as if she were trying to become African. A stocky white man with very dark hair, an accomplished drummer, spoke only French. A young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, would sometimes wander in after the class had begun, take a seat and drum for a while with an absent-minded look, then wander out. New faces turned up occasionally, people who got wind of the place—once two Japanese tourists, once a plump American man who’d been given a djembe as a gift and wanted to learn to use it. Sometimes these people would reappear but most often not.
One by one the students came in, and then came our teacher, Etienne, glistening from drumming for the dance class. Etienne was in his early twenties, dark-skinned, stocky, of medium height, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and a cap pulled low over his eyes. He seemed very sober, almost intimidating, but when he smiled he was transformed, radiant, not intimidating. He greeted the regular students heartily, with a hug and lots of exclamations, in English or French. After I’d come three or four times he started to greet me with a hug and exclamations too, as if I were a long-lost friend he hadn’t expected to see so soon again. I liked that: I wanted to be considered one of the regulars. Already I was starting to feel superior to the drop-ins who knew nothing, while I knew something. Not much, but I did catch on quickly and could keep up with the others. I was right, I thought happily: I could get good at this if I persevered.
Etienne began each class by playing a phrase—a pattern of sound—and we would copy it. If we did it accurately he moved on to the next pattern; if not, we had to repeat it over and over until he was satisfied. He never said we were playing well; he just allowed us to continue. There was very little talking altogether. If newcomers were present Etienne might say a bit about how to hold the drum and about the three strokes of the hands: slap, tone, and bass. Slap, a sharp stroke using the heel of the hand and the fingers spread. Tone, with the fingers closed and nearer to the rim. Bass, hitting the center of the drum with the whole hand. Now and then he might come over to position our hands correctly or give instructions in his thick French accent, his manner at once stern and kindly—a stern reverence regarding the proper playing of the drum, but kindly to each individual student. But mostly we learned by listening and copying, and drumming ceaselessly for an hour and a half. Even though I loved to drum, toward the end the sting in my hands made me watch the wall clock, waiting for relief.
At some point during the class a woman from the front desk would appear in the doorway and compare the class list with our small group of drummers, tallying. She might say a word or two to Etienne, but we were so absorbed in our enchanted bubble of sound that we barely noticed her. After a moment or two she would disappear.
We played two rhythms over and over—songs, Etienne called them—for months, learning them phrase by phrase, then putting the phrases together like a collage. Or, in their irregular repetitions, like an auditory mobile. I went home with their rhythms in my hands, and for several days would move my fingers in these rhythms, hearing them in my head and feeling my hands alive and twitching with them. Like a real drummer, I thought: I was becoming a drummer. If I mentioned the class to friends, they responded with a kind of puzzled awe, as if I’d revealed an exotic facet of myself they had never suspected, and this puzzlement and awe gave me a secret delight. It was not surprising to me that I could drum, but it seemed to surprise everyone else. Indeed, telling about my new adventure was no small part of my pleasure in the drum class.
Very soon I realized that the more experienced students, the regulars, were playing more complicated patterns than the beginners, patterns that added texture to the sound the group made. And when we were going along well, Etienne would take off on his own with an even more elaborate riff. His large hands flew so fast above the drum that they became a blur, like the blades of a propeller. Sometimes he would croon along with his drumming, and once or twice he taught us the words to one of the songs and we sang the unfamiliar syllables as we drummed. From time to time another teacher would appear in the doorway and observe, poker-faced, then drift away. Or he’d come in, take a chair, and drum with us for a while. Then he and Etienne would go off on fantastic riffs together, and it was hard to concentrate on our simple patterns because theirs were so much more alluring.
I longed for the day when I would be promoted to the more complicated rhythms the advanced students played. Sometimes I even tried them, surreptitiously, I thought, though you cannot play an instrument surreptitiously; I’m sure my deviations didn’t escape Etienne. I want to do what they’re doing, I once said to him, and he nodded and smiled and said it would be very soon.
One day after class Etienne approached me and said that his regular students could pay him directly. I was surprised that he called me one of the regulars. I didn’t feel like one of them yet. I could see that drumming and the drum school were part of the weave of their lives. They huddled together, talking about drumming sessions and performances, gossip and shop talk from a world remote from the one I knew. I came just once a week and still felt like an outsider as I stepped off the elevator; I felt the excitement and shyness of venturing into another country. Then I would retreat to my ordinary life that had nothing to do with drumming. Still, if Etienne considered me one of the regulars, I was pleased: the day couldn’t be far off when I’d be playing the more complicated rhythms. Maybe I’d even start to come more often. Suddenly I was fantasizing, as I tend to do, about moving into an entirely new life: I could buy a drum, the other drummers would become my friends, I’d be part of their chatter, I’d go wherever they went after class and drum with them far into the night.
As I was taking up imaginary residence in the world of drumming, Etienne was explaining something about the class fees and seemed to be having trouble saying what he meant in English. I suggested that he speak French; this would be easier for him, but mostly I suggested it out of vanity. I wanted him to know I could understand and speak French, at least simple French if not the colloquial version the teachers spoke among themselves. In French, I gathered he was asking me to pay him for several classes in advance. An uneasy suspicion invaded my fantasies. His request was unusual, unbusinesslike. Then again, the school itself was not very businesslike. So unbusinesslike that I tended to forget it was a commercial enterprise, that Etienne was earning a living and I was purchasing his talent. If anything, I rather thought of myself as an initiate into an aesthetic discipline, at least for that weekly hour and a half—which might soon become more.
How come? I asked. Weren’t we supposed to pay at the front desk? He mumbled that Christmas was coming and also he needed money to fix the cords on his drum. Those words struck my heart: his drum was a part of him, like a vital organ. They overrode my suspicion, made it seem stodgy and petty. If I truly was in another country, maybe things were done differently here. When in Rome . . . Besides, Etienne looked embarrassed to be telling me this, and I wanted to relieve him. He was the teacher, the gifted master; I didn’t like seeing him humbled by need. It made him ordinary.
Yet even masters must have daily concerns, I thought. He was a young immigrant from Senegal making his way in a new country. He needed to fix the cords on his drum. My grandparents and my father had been immigrants and must have been in the same position, needing help. Of course I’d help him. But I had only about twenty-five dollars on me. I offered to give him a check. He said no, no check, but downstairs, in a convenience store a few doors away, was an ATM. We went together to find the ATM, I took out sixty dollars, enough for four classes, and Etienne thanked me. I asked whether I should still sign up at the desk next week and he said no, just come to class, everything would be fine.
The next week I realized that even though I’d paid for the class I still had to pay to rent the drum. When I explained this at the desk I was sharply rebuked; I shouldn’t have paid Etienne directly, the woman said—that was not how things worked. Later, when she came around with her list, she had a nasty dispute with Etienne. We were drumming so I couldn’t concentrate on all they said, but I knew I was the subject of this public dispute and I flushed, as if I’d been caught out in some shady dealing. Especially as I was still an outsider, not yet a true initiate, I felt ashamed. And then immediately irritated, both with the woman and with myself: I’d done nothing at all to be ashamed of. The woman’s intrusion in our dim room was an affront, a harsh shaft of light from the practical world.
What was the problem? I asked Etienne after class. No problem, he said, everything would be fine. Next time I shouldn’t sign in at the desk. I couldn’t summon the French to explain about renting a drum, a banal technicality compared with the glories of drumming. Etienne played with such fierce integrity. The minor integrity of my paying three dollars to rent a drum shrank in comparison.
The next week I missed class. A compelling reason or just an excuse? I can’t remember. I do remember that I anticipated—dreaded—another scene. Would I have to face disputes from now on? And why feel dread? Surely I was making too much of a trivial matter. Dread was, or should be, too strong a word for the situation. I thought of asking the regular students how they handled the fees, but I didn’t know them well enough and didn’t want to cause more trouble for Etienne. What was not trivial was that the spell of enchantment had been pierced.
The following week I didn’t sign in at the front desk; I took a drum from the cabinet without paying. I didn’t like doing that, but it seemed the simplest way. The class began and my hands quickly found the patterns. Etienne crooned. His hands flew. Another teacher ambled in with his drum and joined us. Amid the rapturous sounds of the drums, the world of commercial transactions shrank and fell away. I was a drummer, among other drummers.
But then the woman came around with her class list, tallying us up, and again there was a scene. This time I paid closer attention. Etienne was saying that these were his regular students, while the woman insisted that he must be paid through the school. I am so lacking in business sense that it hadn’t occurred to me that the school, however informal it appeared, must have taken a sizable cut of the fifteen dollars. To Etienne this must have seemed unfair; it seemed unfair to me too, even if that was how things were done in my country.
Clearly I needed to straighten this out. I tried after class, but couldn’t get my point across, in English or French. No, no, Etienne interrupted, there’s no problem, you’ve already paid. He was packing up his drum for the day and seemed to be dismissing me. Other students were crowding around to speak to him. Daunted, I moved away.
I left, tangled in anger, guilt and impotence, a deadly brew. If only he had asked me for a loan to fix his drum—I would have given that willingly. But to avoid any such awkwardness, he had put me in the awkward position. I was angry too at the noisy woman with the list—the intruder—and at myself for failing to know how to settle the matter. Settling it should have been simple, and yet it was not. Worst of all, how banal the whole predicament was, compared with the drumming that filled the dark little room.
I tried to disentangle myself. Was this really worth fretting over? Why not pay at the desk as before, pretend I’d given him a gift to fix his drum? It wasn’t the money, though; it was the injustice—and injustice is the same in any country. However helpless I felt, I wasn’t willing to put up with it. Etienne had assured me there would be no problem, yet there was a problem. That was careless. And carelessness is vitiating in an artist—that was the same in any country too. It was unraveling the spell of the dim room.
Still, I thought, what I called careless was really a survival strategy: Etienne had done what immigrants have to do. I understood that. His life was no enchanted bubble. I might be the outsider in the drum class but I was at ease in my country. He was the outsider who had to make ends meet. Fix the cords on his drum. And to do so, on his territory he had made me the one called to account.
The next week, I didn’t go to class, nor the weeks after that. It was winter now, cold and snowy; the subway trip was long. I couldn’t muster the will. And for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I didn’t feel able to resolve this trivial issue, the kind of issue that outside the drum class, on my own territory, I could have handled easily. I felt excluded from the country that appeared when the elevator doors opened, as surely as if I’d been stopped at the border, my identity papers called into question.
Months later, one night on the subway, I found myself sitting next to a large, oval-shaped man in a dashiki and kofia. He was looking at me longer than one looks at strangers on the subway—the look of a man on the verge of striking up a conversation. I was amused: for a young African I’d be an unlikely choice for a subway pickup. Then I realized he was one of the teachers I’d seen so often in the lobby. I was the one who spoke first. Aren’t you from the dance and drum school? I said. We greeted each other like old friends and he gave me news of the school. Why hadn’t he seen me around lately? he wanted to know. So I’d been noticed. Maybe I might have become one of the regulars after all. I’d been very busy, I said. And how was Etienne? He was fine. Soon it was my stop. We shook hands warmly and I got off.
That made me think of returning to the class. By now the intensity had drained out of the incident. I’d forgotten about the money, never important anyway, and the injustice . . . well, it was too long ago to matter. I’d be glad to drum again in the dim little room and hear Etienne’s fantastic riffs, watch his fingers fly till they blurred like the blades of a propeller. I could picture my return: the creaky elevator, the crowded lobby—a mini-Senegal—the sweating dancers through the wall of glass. The circle of chairs awaiting the drummers. Etienne would welcome me with a hug and exclamations and ask where I’d been for so long. I’d hug him back, but with a minuscule reservation—nothing he could detect, just a lingering grain of discomfort, like a stone in the shoe. A tiny, nagging pain, because I hadn’t managed to set things right. Out of some diffidence I harbored, I had chosen to remain a tourist, an outsider. Or, more than diffidence, it was a stubborn knot in me—an exaggerated reverence for art tied up with guilt over race and privilege. So I had excluded myself from the other country. The other country, crowded, chaotic, relentlessly practical, couldn’t afford such purity or soul-searching. It cut corners. Sometimes people got scraped in the process.
Of course you can walk even with a stone in your shoe, if you can’t remove it and you really want or need to keep going. But I didn’t keep going.
At least not then. A few years later—the whole incident nearly forgotten—I found another drum class, in a less exotic setting, where I don’t feel like an outsider but like a student among other students. The teacher is quite as dazzling a performer as Etienne and, a native English speaker, explains the technique more clearly. From him I discovered how much more I still had to learn before I could become a true drummer: Etienne, I realized, had been too tolerant of my fumbling beginners’ efforts. The new teacher is rigorous and demanding. But that is another story.
Maybe what I wanted back then was not so much the drumming, but an adventure, an adventure that, as it turned out, faltered at the first intrusion of troublesome reality, the first demand that I exert myself and claim my rights. Maybe I had gotten what I wanted, not a vocation but a vacation. A brief fantasy, a guided tour. Now I simply want to learn to play the drum.