Cypress gave her life to dancing, reducing complex actions to the curve of her wrist. Ariel Moröe took her into his troupe, The Kushites Returned, and immersed her in the ways of pre-Egyptian Nile culture, and Cypress was discovering the movements of the colored people that had been lost. Year after year Ariel’s company almost starved, but they danced nine hours a day, and moved all over the country playing audiences rallied behind the sit-in movements and Equal Opportunity for Colored Folks. The Kushites Returned played itsy-bitsy “lil ol Southern towns,” and introduced factory workers, sharecroppers, doctors, and church-women to the brazen mystical motions of black Nile dance.

Cypress took up with some of the musicians in the troupe, and she would listen and soar toward indefinite heavens when they played. Her dance took on the essence of the struggle of colored Americans to survive their enslavement. She grew scornful of her years of clamoring for ballet, and grew deep into her difference. Her ass and her legs she used like a colored girl; when she danced, she was alive; when she danced, she was free.

The Kushites Returned were just outside Chicago. In fifteen more hours they were going to hit New York City for the first time in three years. Cypress had started painting her nails aqua and mauve, while the five-car caravan of dancers waited for tire checks and gasoline. She wasn’t really there, on the road; she was still in her house in San Francisco, and everyone in the company sensed her reluctance to join them in eager anticipation of the Only City—New York. She had said no more than thirty sentences in the four days they had been on the road. Ariel Moröe had had her switched from car to car, thinking she needed more variety on the road than anyone else, but it hadn’t worked.

Cypress wasn’t with them. This decision she’d made, to stop dealing and dance for a living, was more frightening than she had any reason to believe it would be. For months she’d looked forward to the day when she could say, “No, I don’t have a thing,” and mean it. She rubbed her bosoms like she knew her grandma would have on such a hot day. Patting her chest, to remind herself that she had saved enough to stay out of business for a few months; she did have a chance to make it as a dancer; she did not have to worry. She carried traveller’s checks. No more dealing. That was a relief, for a while. When she sat still, she thought of her kitchen, and Lallah and Dulce and Maureen, the women she’d danced with . . . her friends, whom Ariel had decided not to take on tour.