But some vague image penetrates anyway, and lingers in memory: shantytown, gray wooden houses ramshackle on their bare lots, rusting tin roofs, roosters and chickens, old car seats and box springs, children with nothing to wear. The new money pouring in through NASA doesn’t touch this neighborhood, and no one seems to consider that we’re taking a limo through the ghetto in order for a white woman to teach us a fundamentally African American form of dance. Titusville, in 1963, is an apartheid state, though this is the year court-ordered integration comes to my school. One day a crowd of children and adults watch by the sidewalk at the far edge of the playground as a bus pulls up. Out come three small black girls. Nobody says a word, but the crowd parts, making a sort of aisle through which the heroines, in single file, march into their new world, defended by nothing but the notebooks and lunch boxes they carry before them like charms. Now we are integrated: in all my school’s wash of white faces, three quiet African American children, who keep to themselves, armored in scrubbed cotton dresses. They are in a lower grade, so I never meet them. If they were in my class, would it be possible to meet them?

At Miss Stephanie’s, Jimmy and I don our patent leather shoes with the metal cleats screwed to heel and toe. I think Jimmy looks a little ridiculous in his, especially when he wears short pants that highlight his chubby thighs. One day when he reveals that he doesn’t know how to tie his shoes by himself, I mock him, then Miss Stephanie sets me straight: Certainly there are some things that you don’t know, Mark. Obviously this is true, but what wounds is that I want to please Miss Stephanie, wish to court her favor, since she is my partner in the dizzy cha-cha, the tedious waltz.

For each tap lesson, Miss Stephanie plays records which feature a tinny piano and a nasal female voice which states commands: shuf-FLE, ball change, shuf-FLE, ball change, re-PEAT. The double long e’s of repeat pierce like little bee stings. We practice till we get it right, then we do it again.