Come a Stranger

  Mina’s eyes flew open. They were making her act as if she was white, or as if she wished she was.

  “Who’s making you do that, Missy?” she asked herself. She asked it out loud, but answered it silently: I am, or I’m letting them, which is about the same thing. And she was ashamed of herself. Angry too.

  No more, she promised herself. She was going to be herself, Mina Smiths, t-rou-ble. She felt the devilment rising up in her.

  Mina went right to the big seat that ran across the rear of the school bus. That way, there was room for anybody who wanted to sit with her, but nobody who didn’t want to would have to. Tansy and Isadora and Natalie came back to join her. They watched people get into the bus. The oldest girls were dressed up pretty fine, Mina noticed, with as much eyeshadow as they thought they could get away with. “Because of the sailors over there,” Isadora explained.

  Isadora had mascara on, Mina saw, and lipstick. “You’re doing it too—don’t try and kid me.”

  “Don’t be—” Isadora started to say, then she saw something on Mina’s face that made her giggle instead. “They’re awfully cute in those uniforms. You’re just jealous.”

  “Don’t you wish,” Mina said, and the girls around them said, “That’s telling her.” But Mina looked around her, at the heads of hair that shone silky clean in so many colors, and at the slender necks that looked delicate even though they were, she knew, strong. She looked strong, she knew that, big and strong. And she was too.

  “We’ll have to get you introduced to one of them,” she said to Isadora. “Maybe, you should fall into the river.”

  “I can swim.”

  “You can pretend, can’t you? Splash around and yell for help. Then he comes to rescue you.”

  Many faces were turned around to watch this conversation.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Isadora said.

  “Okay, then I’ll push you.”

  Miss Maddinton told them to be quiet, to behave with some dignity, please, and the bus started up.

  As the sun went down, they watched the flag being lowered, while a bugle blew taps. Everybody stood quiet to watch, listening to the sad, lonely notes of the bugle. Four marines stood at attention, while two others lowered the flag and folded it. Mina looked around at the crowd: officers and their families, lots of children standing quiet, sailors in bright white uniforms, and civilian groups. Except for a couple of the marines, she was the only black person there. She felt as if everybody must be noticing her, standing there among the girls from the camp.

  She wasn’t going to let that get her down. When they sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to music from the loudspeaker, Mina just went ahead and sang out. All around her, quiet white voices sang in a reined-in way, fading away on the high notes. Not Mina; Mina sang strong and true, letting her voice dominate. Let people notice her, if they wanted to.

  “You have a nice voice,” Tansy whispered as they sat down, getting ready to watch the fireworks.

  “You bet,” Mina said. She heard people chuckling at her reply, because what they would have said was something modest, like, “Oh, do you think so?” or “Not really, I just like singing the anthem.”

  While they waited, the last light faded out of the sky, and a little breeze came up along the river. They were sitting fairly far back from the river’s edge, all of the dance camp girls together, supervised by the teachers. Mina wanted to sit closer to the water, because that would be a better view. She whispered to Isadora, asking if she wanted to move up.

  “We have to stay here.”

  “Nobody’ll know, nobody’ll see us, because it’s dark.”

  Isadora’s shadowed face looked around. She got up, while Mina told Tansy, who didn’t want to come with them. Mina and Isadora moved along the edge of their group, like shadows, Mina thought.

  But not enough like shadows to escape Miss Maddinton. “Isadora?” she called. “Where do you think you’re off to?”

  She said it as if it was Isadora’s idea, as if Mina was just following Isadora. It was as if she wasn’t going to call out at Mina because then she would be picking on Mina because she was black. As if Mina was a mouse like Tansy and couldn’t get herself into her own trouble. As if she got special treatment. All of this rushed through Mina’s mind in a second and fed the devilment.

  “We’s gwine down to de lebee,” Mina called out. “To pick us some wateymelon.” She barely got the words out before she doubled over laughing. Everyone around started laughing too, and she and Isadora returned to their places. “Honestly, Mina,” they said. “How could you?” they giggled.

  A light exploded in the sky, a huge white light that plumed out like a chrysanthemum, and then two more exploded behind it. It knocked the breath out of Mina. When the three crackers went off, like cannon across the skies, she wanted to jump up and cry out something. Whoo-ee, that was what was in her mouth. The audience clapped, instead.

  Mina just shook her head. If this was what a super big fireworks display was like, she guessed she could see why they thought it was such a big thing. She couldn’t figure out why they just applauded, like it was a theater. She went along with them, patting her palms together, but that wasn’t the way to do justice to what was going on in the sky overhead.

  The sky filled, over and again, with explosions of white and red and orange, with whirligigs that spun upward and then showered down like falling stars. Mina watched with big eyes. The fireworks shone out against the sky. When they faded, the black sky waited there, pricked with stars, silent, until the next explosion of light and sound.

  Finally, Mina couldn’t hold it in, because she didn’t want to. “Whoo-eee,” she called out, like a trumpet, to the falling fires. All around, voices shushed her.

  CHAPTER 8

  On Monday of the third week, Mr. Tattodine came to their dance class with a video camera to record them. Miss Maddinton told them to ignore it, and after a few minutes they could. Mina found it easy to forget the white head with its eye fixed into the viewer of the black box. Mina was working hard, as usual. She wondered—while she concentrated on getting her legs right and her arms right, to keep her body in the balance Miss Maddinton showed them—if she was in some kind of transition stage in her dancing. She didn’t remember that it used to be this much trouble. It used to be as natural as breathing. The class, warmed up now by the barre exercises, moved to the center of the room. Mina continued to wonder.

  If it was like—like being a seed in your seed case; there would come a time when you had to break out of the case and force your roots through. Or like being pregnant, and then the labor of having your baby; it was easy to get pregnant, and her mother always talked about how good her body felt when she was carrying her children, close inside her. But before the baby could have its own life, it and the mother had to work it out. The class did the port de bras movements, while the piano played a theme from Swan Lake. And Mina wondered, feeling how her muscles seemed to pull at her shoulder bones, feeling big and clumsy among the swaying torsos.

  Belle and she had once watched a crab go through the final stages of shedding its old shell. They had found it hidden among the grass at the edge of a creek. Crabs shed their old shells when they got too big for them, Mina had always known that. At the season of every full moon, people went looking among the shallow waters for the soft-shelled crabs, which could be fried up whole and eaten. Mina didn’t much care for soft shells, except for the crunchy thin legs. But after they had watched the crab pulling itself out of its outgrown undersized shell—after she had seen the contractions of muscles under the flesh as it patiently pulled each leg free, working backward out of the old shell . . . it looked like someone with no fingers trying to take off his socks. It hurt Mina and made her impatient, watching it. She wanted the process to be over, even though she knew that the crab would be helpless for the next day or so while it grew its new shell. She knew that other crabs, who weren’t shedding, would come through the shallow waters, looking for dinner, as would
the herons and egrets. The process of shedding was so painful to watch—as the crab gathered its dwindling strength to pull its legs free and force itself backward through a narrow crack in the hard old shell, achieving another quarter-inch of freedom—Mina ran away, that long ago summer day. This day, however, she wasn’t going to run away. She thought something like shedding was happening to her.

  Miss Maddinton called out for the class to do batterie en demi-pointe and Mina pulled her muscles together to try it. It was not too successful, but she kept trying and kept smiling, kept pulling up into the air and beating with her foot. It almost always missed one beat, and she grinned, thinking of how it must look.

  Miss Maddinton had a private conference with everyone in her class. She met with them in the dormitory living room. First they watched the tape, then they talked about technique and poise and what needed improvement. Mina was one of the first, although not the very first. Sitting in the big armchair, watching the square screen, Mina saw more clearly than anytime before exactly how much she stood out. She tried to watch the whole class, or the whole performing group, but she kept seeing the one black person there. Miss Maddinton didn’t say anything while they watched, except to hurry on past parts where Mina didn’t appear. She didn’t stop the tape to discuss any special problem.

  Mina watched the big black girl on the screen. The girl looked clumsy. Not clumsy by ordinary standards, but clumsy in comparison to everyone else there dancing.

  Then Miss Maddinton put in another tape: It was Mina’s audition tape, a little black girl who wasn’t too skillful, but danced easily, naturally, and with a pleasure that made you smile to see her.

  After both tapes were finished, Miss Maddinton sat back in her chair, her legs stretched out in front of her. Miss Maddinton always wore dancing slippers for shoes. “What do you think?” she asked Mina. “You see what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Do you think I’m more disciplined?” Mina asked. “I think I am.” She was a little frightened, and she was afraid she knew why.

  Miss Maddinton stood up. She went over to one of the long windows that looked out on the trees and grass. She turned around to face Mina.

  “I don’t know what to do about you,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the right thing to do.”

  “What’s the matter?” Mina asked.

  “You saw it. I know you did. I guess I can’t expect you to make it easy for me, after you’ve fought so hard to come this far. You’ve grown uncoordinated, Mina,” she said. “You’re too far behind the rest of the class, and falling farther behind every day. I think you know that.”

  No, Mina hadn’t known that. She couldn’t kid herself about not seeing it, when she watched the tape. But she hadn’t thought that it was happening because she wasn’t good enough. “It’s not that bad,” she said.

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault. There’s nothing you can do about it. This just happens, with singers as well as dancers, at puberty. Nobody can really predict how a body will develop over the years of change. Your people develop earlier, which is why it’s happened to you this year.”

  “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it,” Mina asked. Maybe the girls could avoid talking about it, but they were children and Miss Maddinton was a grown-up.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Miss Maddinton sounded like she had known Mina was going to ask that.

  “No,” Mina said. “No, I don’t think it is. You just said it was, in fact.”

  “What I just said, Mina, is that you’re awkward and ungainly. That’s what I meant and that’s what I said. Although, you don’t see many black ballerinas—”

  “And what about the Harlem Dance Theater?” Mina demanded. If she’d talked like that at home, her mother would have stopped her mouth. But she wasn’t at home.

  “Not in the classical ballet,” Miss Maddinton went on, as if she was thinking out loud. “I don’t know . . . Next time I’m going to insist on at least two of you, you’d have felt better with someone like you here, wouldn’t you? Or four, if we must have any, if we must have the federal funding. The trouble is, you’re so mature. Not only physically, so it’s hard to know—Georges Tattodine says you do well in theory, he says you’ve an excellent memory and a perfect ear and—but it’s not fair to you, nor to our executive committee. It costs money, for room and board if nothing else.”

  “I could try harder,” Mina said. She sat very still in her chair.

  “You know as well as I do how hard you’re trying right now. You have, as you rightly said, learned discipline.”

  “Then why don’t you give me a chance?” Mina demanded. Miss Maddinton’s eyes grew cold.

  “Why do you think I’ve delayed making this decision? I thought this would happen, and I saw it right away, but I thought, maybe—Oh, I wanted to avoid trouble too.”

  “I’m not any trouble,” Mina insisted. “I try. I practice. I’m more serious than a lot of them. You know that’s true.”

  “But it’s not getting any better, and it’s certainly not getting any easier. It can’t be a happy time for you,” Miss Maddinton insisted.

  “I’m not unhappy,” Mina said.

  “Because,” Miss Maddinton went on, thinking correctly that Mina was trying to avoid the main point, “you’re starting to clown around, to turn errors and clumsiness and slowness to learn into a joke. Mina?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mina said, collapsing inside herself, like a tree finally felled. Miss Maddinton was right. But she didn’t want to say so out loud. That was all Mina wanted, now, just not to have to say out loud, herself, that she was no longer good enough.

  “What do you think, Mina?” Miss Maddinton kept after her. For these conferences, she wore white slacks and a silvery pink, pale shirt. She stood in front of the window, not moving, and Mina knew that until she’d said what Miss Maddinton wanted to hear, the conversation wouldn’t be over.

  “I’m the worst in the class,” Mina admitted.

  Miss Maddinton waited. Mina felt helpless. She was helpless against Miss Maddinton’s cold discipline, and she was about not to be able to control her tears any longer, so she was helpless against herself too.

  “What do you want me to do?” Mina asked, almost pleading with Miss Maddinton, just to say something, make some decision and then make Mina obey, just to have this finished with.

  “Mr. Tattodine notwithstanding, you’re going to have to go home.”

  “Go home? Why do I have to do that?”

  Miss Maddinton sighed and shook her head at Mina’s stupidity.

  “I could drop the ballet class. I don’t have to take that if you think I’m so bad. But I could still take theory and do the evening things. I don’t want to go home.”

  “Pull yourself together, Mina. Faites attention. Oh, you get along well with the girls, I’ll admit that; I’ve been surprised at how successful that’s been. You handle yourself with real maturity. But it won’t do to have a girl here who isn’t taking dance. You know that as well as I. We have neither staff nor courses to take that responsibility. It’s always hard to admit that you’ve failed—”

  At that, Mina was so angry that she did burst into tears. She was so angry she just wept. She was weeping so hard she couldn’t speak. Just growing wasn’t failure, you couldn’t say someone had failed just because her body grew bosoms and hips and the muscles worked differently.

  “But, Mina, what do you want me to say? What can I do? What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go home,” Mina wailed, miserable, angry, and ashamed.

  “Good,” Miss Maddinton said, ushering Mina out of the room now that Mina had said what she wanted to hear.

  It was all settled by the next day. Most of the girls avoided Mina, as if she had some horrible contagious disease. “That’s tough,” Isadora said. “I’m glad I’ve still got a dancer’s body. I’ll keep it, my parents are both slight.”

  Tansy had been kinder. “I’ll miss you, you make things more fun,” Tansy said, her big brow
n mouse eyes showing that she meant it. For all the difference that made.

  Mina didn’t know what to say to anybody, so she didn’t say anything. When Mr. Tattodine put her on the morning train to go south, he told her to keep on studying music. “You’ve got real ability,” he said, his face looking worried.

  Mina just nodded. She shook the hand he held out for her to shake.

  She sat by herself on the train, with her suitcase on the rack above her. There were several other people on the train and Mina just kept looking out the window so that she wouldn’t see them looking at her. Everything was quiet except for the train noises. The train went on south, stopping at places, New Haven and Bridgeport, Stamford, and then it went underground to get into New York. Mina sat still and waited. They’d given her some money for lunch, but she wasn’t hungry. They’d told her that her family knew when she was getting into Wilmington and would meet her, but she didn’t wonder about that, even though she remembered that her father had the car.

  At New York, there were a lot more people who got on the train, and the car started to fill up with music from radios, and with voices talking, and with little children. Mina stared out the window, seeing no difference between the dark tunnel of New York and the industrial towns of New Jersey and the rolling countryside past Philadelphia.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do, she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do. She knew the camp hadn’t turned her out, not exactly, but she felt like they had. She knew that they had turned her out because of the dancing, but she felt like they had done it because she was black. She was afraid they’d only let her come in the first place just because she was black.

  CHAPTER 9