“You were so calm, Jesse. It’ll be a long time till I can take another train,” she said.

That’s when I knew I could leave her.

PART FOUR

PART FOUR

Ruella

Ruella

There was smoke everywhere on me. There was smoke all in my clothes and all in my hair, like I had a head full of burning wires. I tasted smoke on my tongue and teeth. My whole body felt smelly and thick.

We were lucky, though. Some people had to spend the night in the hospital. No one was killed, thank God. Truth is, I felt like it was the end of something I couldn’t quite name. It took me two whole days to get my nerves back. When I had to go out, I took the bus. No subway was going to wreck my nerves. And not my last nerve, for sure.

Later, Jesse and I practiced without music. Then he bought the Nina Simone album and we practiced again. He kept humming the tune over to himself as we stretched together on the floor. I started to sing. He joined in. We halted at the pronouns. “He doesn’t know his beauty. He thinks his brown body has no glory. If he could dance…”

“That song’s about me, too,” he said.

“And me.”

We laughed.

The next day everyone was watching us during auditions. The call required two parts. First, an original dance with a partner, something like an improvisation, but which showed how you worked with another dancer. The second part was an individual execution of combinations given by the dance captain. If you passed the first you could present the second. Anna Louise thought we had a good chance with the Simone-Cuney piece.

“She doesn’t know her beauty,” I remembered. “She thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance…If she could dance. “I said this over and over to myself and imagined all the graceful movements that could come to someone like me who had to practice, to work at it, like Mama would say and Aunt Lois, too, before I left home. I was not a pretty woman. I didn’t mind it, not really. You got to work for anything you want in this life. You got to dance.