Through Mahlon, Cypress discovered alternative landscapes in the middle of Manhattan. Mahlon was a collector. She took Cypress with her to artists’ studios, openings, and exhibits. Cypress lived among the bones and Sambos of Betye Saar’s altars. She wrapped herself in the gauze and twigs of Gina Hamilton’s country vistas. She made magic with the sorceress who haunted Romare Bearden’s hills; pried open the cupboards in the shacks where spirit-faces long dead led her in Carolinian nights. Cypress retreated from the shadows of skyscrapers trapping the light for the wealthy; she ignored the noises of the City in shadows: people bumping, pummeling one another because they could not see. She danced to McArthur Binion’s “Drawn Symphony,” insisting that she didn’t need to read music, she had climbed into it; over the hard edges of crayon erupting from aluminum surfaces, she’d set up camp and heard Celia Cruz in the back Mississippi woods, as colored boys denied crayons made marks on cardboard with sticks, their visions you could feel. When Cypress went out into the streets, she donned Mel Edwards’ “Five Black Face Images” to bring the colors of her ancestry to the garment district in something other than brogands and calloused hands pushing racks of the latest fashions. What dreams she found, she moved into. From David Hammons’ body prints that left her trembling, bloody, bound to walls by her shadows, following her hair wound round branches weighted down by death, to Barbara Chase-Riboud’s bronze and wool lands, offering her cliffs, ravines, quiet ponds of braid, paths to reach the other side.

Cypress reconsidered Leroy’s easiness in the world. He wasn’t in the world, not like Towbin or Mahlon who worked in it, not even like Idrina, who forced changes. Leroy’s reality was bounded by his memories of his father, the flames outside Independence. His horizons eclipsed the evening news, his version of the world left the white folks out. Exiles, she and Leroy. They didn’t need to go to Paris; that would do no good. What’s the point of being spat on in France? What could they do in Rio, where black people are a mythological presence? No, the frontiers in Leroy’s destiny were the sounds he heard and gave back as music; for Cypress the terrain of the new world was art. Her dance, like her people before her, adapted to the contours of her new land. She choreographed for the wilderness and the metropoli of the Saars, Binions, and Edwards, who let her have space, a natural element.