Initially Lenjen imagined her feeling of kinship arose on account of the genesis of their names—both from West African dances—and the similar sounds of Lenjen and Lamban. That made them two of a kind. But she also thrilled that Lamban wore African pants and didn’t hold back from trying the men’s steps.
As the bus hulked toward their stop, Lenjen hoped Lamban would start coming to Tanya’s class on Fridays and prayed the woman would be in Sulaiman’s class this evening. Her thoughts stirred with rising excitement: maybe Lamban would be in the sabar class next Tuesday. She’d have to start coming to the Armory on Saturdays. That was the class of the week where all the African queens showed up in force.
But maybe, Lenjen reasoned against her quickening thoughts, the woman went to Newark on Sundays. Clearly an accomplished dancer, with movements articulate and strong, she always put her own vibe into the steps. She had to be taking class somewhere regularly, Lenjen argued with herself. It took a long time to learn West African dance. Good Haitian and Brazilian dancers came across awkward and stupid-looking when they entered the West African tradition. Even though some of the Haitian and Brazilian dance steps were similar, a whole different energy would spin the West African movements in motion. You had to learn the entire alphabet of each particular people’s dance language before your body could say its words and form sentences.
Lenjen felt strange and giddy as she pondered where this unusual woman had been taking class. I could ask her, she hesitantly proposed to herself. Grown-ups think teenagers are children anyway, so I could ask as if I really were younger. I can make like I do to get people in class to show me steps so
that I can catch their phrasing. Then I can ask where she takes class, and I can ask her to show me what she knows about lamban!
I like that she’s so strong and handsome, not pretty and silly about it. That stupid drummer, Ralph—always with something to say about a woman’s body after she passed out of earshot—has a point: She is juicy delicious, and I think she’s dreamy.
The bus jolted and then sunk to a halt. “Lenjen, wake up, little sister. Here’s our stop!”
During the warm-up calisthenics that Sulaiman directed, Lamban, twice Lenjen’s age, sensed someone watching her. She turned her head and saw Lenjen look down, the girl’s face an Etch-A-Sketch from expression to blankness. It was more than a sixth sense that told her she had drawn Lenjen’s eye.
She moved with caution when it came to revealing her interest for anyone in class, but she liked this teenager who was all limbs and as quick to frown someone off as grin them in. Something familiar about the girl tickled Lamban. In class the previous week Lamban had asked her line partner, a Bajan woman called Merle, “Whose daughter is that beanpole?”
“Lenjen? She’s Cayenne’s girl. She’s gotten big all of a sudden,” and Merle frowned at her recognition that the girl was now a teen.
Lamban tried to cover her curiosity by hastily adding, “That babyface on stilts is so open and alive when she dances. She has a sweet feeling to her.” Merle had nodded, and Lamban marveled how Lenjen could remain quietly self-contained among so many boisterous people. Maybe she’s given up on being taken seriously around all these adults, Lamban thought, turning away from the dancers to hitch her lapa for a more comfortable fit. Lenjen was the rare bird who didn’t wrangle for attention and demand to be noticed. The girl had a quality to her that Lamban found dear.
It pained Lamban to imagine that Lenjen probably kept herself quiet because otherwise the men in class would never leave her alone. She sipped from her water bottle and in her peripheral vision, Lenjen looked like some imagined African royalty—delectable as she blossomed into a young woman’s beauty.
She coughed and spilled some water. A patch of envy spread across her chest for how Lenjen had grown up with African dance and didn’t
have to start in Senegambian folklore as an adult. Not all people took to the demands of West African dance, but those who did held tight to this ground and made it a home.
As Sulaiman guided the 30 dancers through a series of hip rolls, Lamban savored the curiosity she felt emanating from Lenjen. Probably doesn’t know the half of her beauty, Lamban thought. Young women could look so unearthly at times.
She once again praised the powers that had brought her back to the African dance scene. She’d taken herself away, needing a break from the clutch of frustration, an involuntary muscle that kicked in against her will. It held her at breath when she cared so strongly for women in a community that valued only male–female couplings as important. She couldn’t understand how women who had the pride enough not to straighten their hair still left themselves by the wayside. Why did those sisters pump up boys’ already-overblown on a sense of themselves? These were the very men who didn’t allow room for the women rooting for them to have space on stage.
Lamban wondered if she could see this pattern of the heterosexual social dance because she entered the world as a lesbian. But she was also a dancer and West African folklore gave her heart its rhythm. She’d stayed away from these dance classes for months, and a few people let her know they’d noticed and were glad to see her return.
That first evening back, the woman who became her line partner for the night said, “Hello, stranger. Haven’t see you in a dog’s age. You been busy, huh?”
Lamban heartened that she’d not been forgotten, surprised she’d even been missed. As much as she chafed against the ultra-heterosexuality of the African dance community, she did love the people. They’d all been taking classes and sharing high energy for years now. She knew individual spirits, had watched their children grow, and her soul had mingled in the communion of rhythms for dance.
Still, the boys could be real pains in the ass when they paraded their notions of manhood. “Hold back, girl. You’re making me look bad. I’m supposed to be the strong one. You chill out.”
Lamban felt she couldn’t be as freely loving to the sisters as she wanted—she didn’t want anyone calling her “queer” in that tone of contempt she knew so well. She cringed at the disdain straight women could put forth for lesbians only. She never heard them voice anger for
the men who deserted families. Or condemn pimps, rapists, molesters, and murderers.
She’d felt confounded yet again by attitudes she’d overheard that evening in the dressing room. “That sister should know better; men can’t help themselves.” Is that how they felt about men who wouldn’t step up to the plate for the children they helped create?
But the African dancer in her could be fed only within this sphere. And not all the women were “Black-maled” into keeping themselves back so that some men could hold on to an illusion of superiority. Sisters weren’t stupid. It was just those misguided and loud-about-it few who let themselves be quelled and then energetically tried to send other women astray.
“Jumping jacks,” Sulaiman ordered. He simply smiled at the groans that issued from around the room.
Lamban knew as well as Sulaiman did that these women welcomed the good feeling that came with pushing their muscles. She felt so good to be back in this class, she wondered why she’d ever left. No, she knew the reasons; they just weren’t tormenting her like a headache fevered by the devil’s hammer.
She’d been through the fire, sorted through her ashes and determined she wouldn’t hurt herself again by denying her lesbian self. She’d tried hiding this truth from anyone who got friendly with her. When she couldn’t pretend anymore, instead of going to class, she stayed home and cried night after night for a week.
She switched to Haitian and Brazilian classes downtown. Those rhythms fed another part of her soul, but her spirit longed for the dances of Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. She ached to do djola, mandgiani, wolofso-don, goumbe, lenjen, sabar, and her beloved lamban. A cramped tendon in her spirit throbbed for release, just as her muscles would want more stretch when she didn’t extend her body to the full range of its ability.
Lamban still grieved that being a lesbian could ma
ke her an outlaw to a group of people who did the most spiritually sustaining thing she knew in life. She’d needed all those months away to love herself again. The time in seclusion let her grow a perspective, like new skin. That’s how lobsters did it—when the old shell became too small for the mature body, they’d go to a protected place where they could shed the old covering safely. In that haven, they could curl naked and vulnerable until a new covering grew in.
“Are you getting warm?” Sulaiman asked the group who responded with “Yeah!” and “Give us a break.”
It had taken time for Lamban to understand what had bent her so far out of shape. She’d ignored the many off-notes she felt as she smiled eagerly to people who gave her suspicious looks. She’d remained fervent in pursuit of dance and felt she couldn’t afford to challenge a woman who, when Lamban had come into the bathroom, had self-righteously declared to another, “There’s no funny women in Africa you know.”
Were they talking about her? Lamban’s underarms grew moist. She wasn’t sure and had been afraid to eye the speaker with a frown intended to challenge the woman. Wasn’t this the one who’d once bragged, “I changed that AC/DC into a real man, and he’s my husband now.” That man had left her not so long ago, Lamban remembered as she’d hurriedly gotten dressed. Still, she hadn’t opened her mouth to wrestle with the woman’s viewpoint.
Lamban couldn’t admit then, that as much as she loved her lesbian self—a favorite part which she would swear before anyone that the African powers had made her—she sought her image in mirrors that didn’t reflect her. How many times had she heard, “Friends are OK and all that, but every woman needs a man”? The distortion occurred as if by osmosis, and she had no tools to correct the vision. Not seeing other lesbians and gay men stand in her corner made it all too easy for her truth to be clipped of wings.
For a long time it had been all right with Lamban not to ask for anything, to give the listening ear to the sisters when they talked about their men and babies. But after a while, she too needed to be heard, needed simple recognition that she, a lesbian woman, was one on a scale of dissonant notes that Black Americans could always harmonize. She needed these individuals to ask about her girlfriend or give a touch of sympathy if she mentioned having trouble on the home front.
But fear kept her opinions unspoken. It didn’t take long for that poverty of speech to make Lamban feel closed out from the people among whom she mingled. When her well ran dry, that’s when she’d cried all those nights, aching because it hurt to be left-out and maligned.
The time in exile gave her to realize how strongly she loved West African folklore and that this culture gathered the people with whom she wanted to dance. Maybe most wouldn’t welcome her as a lesbian, and she’d have to resign herself to getting a family embrace elsewhere.
But, by the same token, she didn’t have to till the land for their heterosexuality either.
When a woman in a Brazilian dance class had complimented Lamban on her samba step—“Work them hips girl. That’s the action that brings the brothers around”—Lamban shook her head and said, “It’s not about that for me.” Her cheeks filled with heat, but she didn’t rush to assure the woman that men mattered. Lamban decided right then and there that she needed her own encouragement more than she wanted to give it away to women who pledged themselves first to men and abandoned sisters to sink at sea. Let the ones who’d shrink from her do so, but she wouldn’t stay away from her rightful place in this world, and resolved to get back to West African dance. She was one of the multitude of rhythms that African people the world over could work through their bodies all at the same time.
Having a stronghold on hard-won knowledge, Lamban had earlier this evening packed her dance gear: leotards, leg warmers, tights cut off above her knees, and a piece of fabric to fasten around her hips in a wrap she liked. She’d taken care to drape the fabric almost like a baby’s diaper, giving herself room to move freely and feel all her strength.
“Let’s do some last stretches. You’re almost done,” Sulaiman coaxed.
“You’re killing us before we even started, Sulai,” a voice in the back of the room warned.
“This is it, I promise,” and he put a hand on his hip in a classic Black woman’s body posture, queening it up, making everyone grin.
Lamban returned to her old stomping grounds with a mind set to make herself at home. Shackles fell away when she no longer cared to follow in the manner of an American-style traditional African woman. No one would give her any medals for pretending to be something she wasn’t. She stopped wearing lapa or dress outfits; instead she wore the dabbas, the shokotos, the African pants the men and a few women wore.
In her new ease, she marveled that she’d kept her affection for the community in class. She still recoiled from the just plain jive of some—and they weren’t the majority—but she could exult in the dance, the beauty of her classmates, the drummers, and the unseen forces that brought them all together.
“OK, you’re done,” Sulaiman told the group who grumbled at him good-naturedly for making them break a sweat during the warm-up.
As women adjusted lapas and the drums blasted ceremonial calls, Lamban felt a trespass of eyes against her skin. She paused to examine the ravelled edge of her African fabric, looked up abruptly, and saw Lenjen quickly fold her face toward her neck, then become engrossed in re-tying her own lapa. A surge of triumph curved Lamban’s lips. Lenjen was drawn to her, and she knew the reason why. She vowed to the sprit of a young girl she carried inside herself that she would lead by example if this teenager was walking the same road.
Lamban shook her head in wonder at the paradox that her period of exile granted her freedom to take root with herself. She could now say, This is who I am, and I am a branch on this family tree.
The bellowing drums grew thunderous in the Cathedral of the Church of St. John the Divine. Her eyes landed with affection on Sulaiman who had been teaching this Wednesday class for the past few months. He’s gay, she thought with defensiveness to a disapproving audience. Lots of us are queer and you know it, so don’t try to act like we don’t exist or that we’re too weird to even conceive of, she wanted to shout to everyone. Scanning the room to see who else was here tonight, Lamban felt at ease. She knew the routine of changing clothes, warming up, learning the steps to the dances. The familiarity gave her confidence as she skipped downstairs to the bathroom. Before the evening ended, she’d rise to the tide of rhythm the drums called forth as dancers unfurled in a wave of prayer.
When she returned, African fabric wrapped around her hips, Lamban heard Sulaiman saying, “Pat Rollins is our guest teacher tonight, so I’ll let her speak on what she’s teaching us. Pat.”
A woman who’d been kneeling over a djimbe drum, her back to the group, straightened and stepped forth. Lamban looked at a face planed in bronze: it might have been sculpted in Benin. She’d taken class with that Brooklyn-born, spirit-of-Guinea girl. Pat Rollins embodied a Guinea folkloric dancer to her core: strong, with faster movement than the neighboring Senegalese style, and so much more exciting.
Pat’s father was a master drummer in New York. Papa Rollins had trail-bazed African folkloric arts for American Blacks years before the current generation of percussionists. But Pat owned a reputation in her own right as a dancer, independent of her father’s Nigerian focus. The woman could move from liquid lightning to fiery steel, Lamban thought. If she weren’t beautiful, she’d be ugly. The French had a word for her: belle laide.
Lamban admired the hearty and outspoken woman, but some drummers wished Pat would disappear. “She’s the kind who puts fear into Black men’s hearts—always speaking her mind,” a songbe player said to the drum circle only half-joking. Lamban surprised herself by turning to a woman standing nearby, “Well, Pat knows what she’s talking about when she calls drummers on not playing the rhythms she wants.”
The woman, her stance as sturdy as a market vendor’s, had nodded and whispered to her nervous-looking c
ompanion, “Sometimes these drummers don’t understand what the dance teacher is asking for. You get a lot of brothers acting like women don’t know anything about the drum. They think they can get away with playing any old beat they want—probably because they don’t know how to do what the teacher asks.” The woman was almost getting into a huff.
Lamban continued the whispered conversation as the group waited for Pat to finish instructing the lead drummer. “Pat’s father taught a lot of these whelps when they couldn’t keep a beat,” she informed the women nearby, whose eyes regarded Pat approvingly.
Lamban liked how Pat didn’t hesitate to pick up a djimbe and replace a drummer without apology to show up anyone who wasn’t playing what she asked. Pat even made the men keep quiet when she explained a cultural note to her dancers. Lamban noticed she wasn’t the only dancer appreciating Pat for that.
The woman Lamban spoke to, dressed in a lapa and matching-top outfit, said to her friend, who was timid about being a tenderfoot in class, “There’s another thing about Pat—she’s really into her dancers and refuses to treat the drummers as if they were the high and holy be-all and end-all. She wants the music exact and will make those men play their butts off until they get it right.”
Lamban knew that some men resented this leadership, but they’d play harder and afterward be glad they had to work their best energy to meet Pat’s demands.
“Ms. Mister,” Ralph, a djimbe player, called behind her back as Pat moved like a lioness from the drummers to ask Sulaiman a question. Lamban figured Ralph had heard the thrilling rumor that Pat was creating her own company to perform traditional dance. Even he couldn’t deny that this group would be no less than a thundering herd, despite the drama that would follow a woman artistic director.
Sulaiman was rounding up dancers. “Pat is so knowledgeable about the folklore and such a blazing rock of a dancer that…” He didn’t finish. Pat took his arm and walked him past the circle of drummers for her question.
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