2 / Objects

“I was a lousy pianist.”¹ - Marion Cuyjet

Had she not been from Philadelphia, not asked her friend for bus fare, not defied her mother, not been lousy at piano, I wonder if she would have danced anyway. If Essie Marie Dosey didn’t take a shine to her, didn’t pass her off as white to join the corps, didn’t arrange private lessons for her, I wonder if she would have found her way to teach dance. Had she not bore a daughter named Judy and not left her father, I wonder if she would have lovingly named her dance school “Judimar,” after their bond anyway. Had she not been a Black tenant (they called them Negroes then), I wonder if she would have been forced to rent on the second floor, taught her dancers to land the softest jumps, and moved her studio three times in five years due to noise complaints anyway.

Marion’s goal was “to make the first Black ballerina on pointe, in New York performing in a meaningful situation. It may not have been with a company. Janet Collins got there first at the age 38, dancing with the New York Metropolitan Opera. I was happy that she got there. Then I had to make as many ballerinas as possible, but they had to be brown-skinned. They had to look Negro. We were not calling ourselves Black back then. If she could pass for white, forget it. That would not give me anything. Her picture had to tell the whole story. I never worried about light-skinned girls. It was the brown-skinned girls I had to open doors for.”²

A few years ago I visited 1310 Walnut Street, one of the former sites of the Judimar School of Dance. The building was from another time. I was glad for this. Not everything was erased. I looked up at the 3-story building, bisected by the updated vinyl siding of the ground floor and the peeling paint off the bricks of the top two. The sign for “Mr. Peter” the tailor remained fastened to the building but all the tenants were long gone. It was shadowed by the sleek steel and glass of modern day City Center Philly, directly across the narrow street. I imagined what I saw on the exterior was bleak in comparison to the scholarship that happened within. I couldn’t get inside. And the weekday lunch rush clipping my shoulders signaled for me to take the goddamn picture and “move.”

When you’re brought up and everyone tells you that you’re pretty, you learn very quickly that knowing you’re pretty is not desirable. Don't be vain. Carry your beauty with humility. Or else they will resent you for it. You do not want this because after all the years of people telling you that you’re beautiful you learn it’s all you have.

I have a lot of dances and a lot of processes under my belt because I have experience. I have experience because I have been in so many rooms. I was invited to those rooms because I am fluent in my technical and performative ability. I gained those abilities through study and training and practice. And I have been studying, training, and practicing since college. Which I was able to afford because my parents helped to pay for college, even though they strongly recommended that I did not major in Dance. They helped to pay for college because their parents helped them, because they went to college too. Four generations of college-educated folks was not about to stop with me. Recognizing the importance of an education, they also knew owning property and businesses was worth more than a number. They could own things like property and businesses because their parents weren’t slaves anymore and they carried a little piece of paper saying so. At first glance they weren’t identified as Black (they called them Negroes then) because of their light skin. They had light complexion because over and over they chose spouses who also could pass as white. And before this, further down the line, there was a man named Cuyjet who left Europe and went abroad. This same skin afforded them assignments inside the houses and ships of their owners. This allowed them to see the world and understand there is life and liberty free from the plantation. And when it came time to own a business, after all of those years in kitchens, a catering company was born. With business came security and health and more equity and the aspiration of “mobility.”

This follows me into every room I enter. Other times, it precedes everything I do. A reckoning I’ve come to acknowledge, and lack the language to express. I write to name it.

Nina Simone lists the things she’s got, “my arms, I got my hands, I got my fingers, got my legs…” and so on. Lists that are an assurance that her body replaces the tangible things (like “shoes”) and conceptual things (like “class”), that she ain’t got. I look at my hands, not a scratch on them.

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With Marion comprises materials kept at my newly formed and adolescent home studio. The virtual Dance and Process sessions took place at the same location and influenced a shift in format from dancing to writing, drawing, and video. Marion Cuyjet, my great aunt, was a pioneer of dance education for students of color in the 1950s. Her portrait sits on my desk.

¹ Melanye White-Dixon, "Marion Cuyjet: Visionary in dance education in Black Philadelphia," (doctoral dissertation, Temple University, 1987).
² Ibid.