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Harlem kids lived in a world of their own making. Not on the busy avenues like Broadway or Amsterdam, but on the quieter side streets, where there was more freedom. They played double Dutch and jacks and stickball. They hit the local playground, the Battlegrounds, for the monkey bars and swings, and for hoops if they could hold their own. They played street games, like the tag game Ringolevio or Hot Peas and Butter, where the leader hid a belt behind a stoop or a trash can and then yelled out to the others, “Hot Peas and Butter, come and get your supper!”
They were kids with parents who expected them back inside when the streetlights came on and neighbors who looked down from open windows with chins in hands, ready to pull them out of trouble by their ears. Kids who knew when someone’s older brother or cousin had started sniffing glue or trying heroin and would learn to avoid them when they got to acting like strangers. Kids who’d lived through six days of rioting in their neighborhoods in 1964, as people took to the streets to protest the murder of a fifteen-year-old Black boy who had been gunned down by a white police officer in front of his friends and a dozen witnesses. And kids who lived too through the awful spring of 1968, when Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered on the balcony of a second-floor Memphis motel room, just a few days before he was set to join a march on behalf of striking sanitation workers.
When news of King’s death rained down upon Harlem, Lydia Abarca was seventeen. She remembers her mother, Josephine, crying at their kitchen table. “What are we going to do now?” her mother said. “They killed this one hope.”
Folks in Harlem were used to being abandoned to deal with their grief and struggle. They certainly didn’t look to government leaders to take seriously their housing crisis or the breakdown of their public schools or the trash that collected in heaps on their street corners. Now a man who’d been fighting on their behalf was gone. So they’d go on getting by on grit and stubbornness, if not hope.
But two months after Dr. King’s murder, one of Abarca’s five sisters came home from her violin classes with ground-shifting news: “Lydia, they’ve got a Black man up there. He’s going to be teaching ballet.” Sandra, seven years Lydia’s junior, had seen a flyer at the Harlem School of the Arts, which was run out of the basement of the St. James Presbyterian Church on 141st Street and St. Nicholas. Somebody named Arthur Mitchell was starting a ballet program for kids in the neighborhood, and he wanted grown dancers too.
Lydia Abarca had let ballet go when she was fifteen, tired of giving her whole self over to something that never seemed to love her back. When she heard about Arthur Mitchell’s new school, she’d just graduated high school and was headed on a partial scholarship to Fordham University in the fall. She was going to be the first Abarca to go to college—Josephine liked to think her baby could be a doctor—and in the meantime, she needed to make a little money working a summer job as a secretary in the lobby at a bank down the street from their projects. Monday through Friday, she’d rotate through her same three outfits—twelve years in a Catholic school uniform doesn’t build an impressive wardrobe—for a paycheck doing work she hated and wasn’t especially good at. The trash can by her desk at the bank was filled with balled-up evidence of her struggle, the Wite-Out on her typos like a crime scene covered in glue. When her sister told her about this Black man looking for dancers, she couldn’t get the thought out of her head. “I’d never had a Black ballet teacher before,” she says. “Maybe he would put a little soul in the steps to make them come alive.”
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The Harlem School of the Arts was the creation of Dorothy Maynor, the international concert soprano and the first Black American to perform at a presidential inauguration (for President Truman in 1945, and then President Eisenhower in 1953). Maynor believed that all children, no matter their zip code, deserved world-class training in the arts. In 1963 she launched her arts education program out of St. James Church, where her husband was the pastor, beginning with piano classes for a dozen students. As her ideals took root, so did her courting of Arthur Mitchell. She wanted him to lend his pedigree to the start of a dance program. It would take the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for him to answer her call.
The night of the assassination, as grief hung over Harlem like a shroud, Mitchell summoned two of his dearest friends, the celebrated actors Cicely Tyson and Brock Peters, from their beds at one-thirty in the morning, inviting them to his West 78th Street apartment. He was expected in Rio de Janeiro that week, to continue with his launch of the National Company of Brazil. But this was not a time, he realized, for leaving. The three sat on the floor of Mitchell’s apartment helping him hash out his response to this national moment of helplessness and heartbreak. By sunrise, he had a plan.
Mitchell would bring ballet home to the neighborhood that had raised him or, rather, that had witnessed his raising of himself. When he was twelve years old, Mitchell’s alcoholic father went to jail after confessing to the murder of a numbers racketeer. “I called the family together and said, ‘I will take care of everybody, don’t you worry,’ ” Mitchell said in a 2016 recording with The HistoryMakers, a digital archive of filmed oral histories from prominent African Americans. He assumed responsibility for his mother, who worked coat check at the “21” Club, and his four younger siblings. He took on his father’s superintendent duties in their apartment building, got a paper route, worked for a butcher, and ran errands for the hookers who lived across the street in a bordello. After a year of studying tap and modern at the School of the Performing Arts, Mitchell’s teachers told him he would never be a dancer, not with his bad feet and tight muscles. Determined to prove them wrong, he threw himself so headlong into his training that he promptly ripped his stomach muscles apart. His work ethic was his superpower. He’d expect everyone else to match his zealousness of character for the rest of his life.
And so Mitchell accepted Maynor’s offer to lead the dance division of her arts center. He vowed to build an internationally renowned school that would once and for all prove that a person’s skin color was irrelevant to their right or relationship to classical dance. His guiding ethos was as simple as it was revolutionary: Ballet belongs to everyone. Ballet benefits everyone. The discipline it demands, and the beauty it gives back, can transform lives. As he put it more bluntly, “You’re not going to stick a needle in your arm when your instrument is your body.”
He turned to his friend and financial adviser Charles De Rose for help. A street kid like Mitchell, De Rose was an Italian boy who grew up thirty blocks north in Washington Heights before climbing the ranks to become a partner in a Wall Street investing firm. At the height of Mitchell’s City Ballet career, he had asked De Rose to put some of his money away so he wouldn’t blow it. “Now he’s calling me saying ‘I need my savings. I want to build a school. I need to buy the kids toe shoes and build a special floor,’ ” says De Rose. “I said, ‘Arthur, you’re coming to the end of your earned income life as a dancer. You can’t lift the girls anymore because your back is killing you.’ ”
But Mitchell felt divinely called to his mission and wasn’t going to let any practical concerns cloud his vision. “We were offered to be a part of Lincoln Center,” De Rose recalls, “to come under their umbrella, where they would do the fundraising for us. Arthur said ‘Why do people of color always have to go downtown? Why can’t people start coming uptown?’ He told me, ‘Charles, what I want is for the Dance Theatre of Harlem to be like a little diamond on the beach. When people are walking by, they’ll see something sparkling, and we’ll make them come over and see what it is.’ This was the burn-the-boats mentality he had. How do you not fight alongside somebody like that?”
That summer Mitchell juggled his early-morning swims at the Y, daily classes at City Ballet, and rehearsals for the Broadway musical revue Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato, in which he acted, sang, and danced, all while getting his Harlem operation off the ground. In his first month at the school, a reporter captured him instructing sixteen little Black girls at the barre. “Now I don’t want to see spaghetti,” he warned the children, who loved their boisterous new teacher but also complained to their mothers that he was mean. “I want to see straight knees. Keep that knee straight, Fatso!”
When Lydia Abarca first stepped into Mitchell’s studio, that windowless basement of St. James, she saw a couple of lamps casting a dirty yellow glow on the floor of the gym where the church’s AAU team practiced. The only source of light in the room was Mitchell himself, a man with movie star good looks, wearing flared trousers and a tight jersey shirt that appeared painted onto his lithe muscles. His style of speech was fast and clipped, every elongated vowel and sharp consonant potent with urgency.
“Kick off your shoes, let me see your feet!” Mitchell barked at Abarca by way of greeting. She slid out of her street shoes and angled her stockinged feet for him, extending and arching them into the shape of perfect cashews. A dance critic would later praise “those feet, so curved and strong one can imagine her picking up the stage with them.” Mitchell took in her willowy figure, her flute of a neck. His mind whirled with possibilities for this shy sundae of girl, standing before him in leg warmers she’d knit for herself on her living room couch. He told her to join the dancers he’d summoned to audition for the company the following day.
Abarca did as she was told. She returned to the studio the next day for the audition, looking upon the tiny group in awe. There was Walter Raines, who had trained at the School of American Ballet. He had performed with the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany before the grind of trying to convince white companies of his talent led him to quit dancing. And Llanchie Stevenson (who would change her name to Aminah Ahmad after converting to Islam and retiring from dance in the early seventies), who had graduated from the School of American Ballet only to be told that Balanchine wasn’t ready for a Black ballerina to break the color line of his corps de ballet. “When I came up, I did not blend in,” says Ahmad. “Raven Wilkinson could blend in when she was at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Janet Collins too at the Metropolitan Opera. I was darker.” But Stevenson was able to find work as the first Black female dancer in Frederic Franklin’s National Ballet of Washington. In 1968, she’d already been touring with the company throughout the United States for a year, resigned to the fact that in some Southern cities she’d be told during rehearsal that she’d have to sit out the evening’s performance for safety reasons.
Mitchell spoke to his gathered dancers with the passion of a preacher. He asked them all to consider the magnitude of his vision—a permanent Black company that would show all the institutions that had denied, tokenized, or marginalized their talents how much bigger and grander ballet could be. Mitchell had already enlisted Karel Shook, an early mentor whom he convinced to leave his post as ballet master at the Dutch National Ballet for Harlem. Under their guidance, the dancers would be groundbreakers, ambassadors, and most of all artists, whose destiny would be determined solely by their ability, their work ethic, and their commitment to excellence. “We’re going to show people that Black people can do ballet,” he told the dancers, still breathing hard from the exertion of his class. “We’re going to shock the world!”
As Abarca packed her bag at the end of the audition, her head spinning from the fervor of Mitchell’s speech, he appeared at her side, tapping his wooden counting stick on the floor. When he told her to come back the following day at the same time, she explained that she was expected at the bank in the morning. Mitchell brushed off her concerns. He offered Abarca $150 a week to quit her job and let him transform her into a ballerina. “All I heard was $150, and I said, ‘I’m here, I’m yours.’ ”
Her mother Josephine was apprehensive. Giving up a good job for another man’s dream? She worried that her beautiful daughter was naïve, ready to follow anyone down the yellow brick road. “My mother would always say of Lydia, ‘She has these big eyes,’ ” remembers Abarca’s sister Celia, the second oldest of the family. “They took up her whole face. She would always talk about how they scared her a little when Lydia was a baby because my mother had never seen eyes that big.”
But when Josephine told Lydia’s father that their daughter was quitting the bank to dance, he didn’t interfere. Francisco, or Tito as he was known in the neighborhood, worked as a custodial engineer—Josephine hated anyone ever referring to him as a janitor—at Brooklyn College and Macy’s. With a seventh-grade education, Francisco wasn’t a reader and talked even less. He relied on Josephine, a part-time telephone operator who worked two nights a week, to read him the want ads and fill out his job applications. He was a father who’d grown up without a father, so he left the emotional work of parenting to Josephine. After they retired, Francisco and Josephine would visit Lydia and her family in Georgia, and Francisco would spend most of the time sitting out on the back patio by himself, smoking his cigar in silence. One afternoon Lydia asked her father, who had a view of an auto repair shop back home, how he liked her big yard. “This is boring,” he snapped. “There’s nothing but trees back here.”
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Francisco demanded that English be spoken in his house, which perhaps explained his lack of conversation skills. The only time he ever slipped into his native tongue was to bark orders at the kids. Cállate la boca! Siéntate! No toques eso! No reading at the table. No walking around in bare feet. When he got home from work, Francisco liked to disappear into his room to watch his science fiction shows on TV. His days were long, and he wanted the house quiet at night. “Face the wall, go to sleep!” he’d shout if he heard any of his seven kids playing past their strict seven-thirty bedtime.
Lydia shared a room with her brother Julio, the only boy of the family. (When Francisco finally got his son after five girls, he banged on every door in the apartment building to share his triumph.) While Julio slept, Lydia would stay up late reading library books—Nancy Drew, Greek mythology—under the covers with a flashlight, eager for a portal into worlds free from the sour smell of government cheese and powdered milk.
The family lived in a first-floor apartment in the Grant Houses, a public housing project on 125th Street and Broadway, with bars over three layers of windowpane that had always made Lydia worry as a girl about how Santa Claus would get to them on Christmas morning. In the summertime, they roasted from the heat with only a box fan for a breeze. Lydia was the ringleader of her six younger siblings, directing them in little dance routines and games of make-believe. They’d play on the concrete playground out front, hiding in the cement barrels or hanging on the monkey bars, but whenever it rained, four of the siblings inevitably started coughing and wheezing until their faces turned blue. Josephine would pile the asthmatics into a cab, and they’d rush over to Columbia Presbyterian, where she had given birth to all seven babies. One night, triaged in a booth with an emergency room doctor, Lydia and her mother were presented with the newly invented rescue inhaler that would save her again and again, no matter the weather.
The children were a tight-knit unit; Josephine discouraged them from looking outside the family for friendship. See how the other girls in the building took offense at Lydia’s loose Puerto Rican curls, she pointed out. See how they’d look at her with curled lip. You think you’re cute ’cause you got that good hair? they’d sneer at her. “They’re jealous of you,” Josephine warned. “You can’t trust them.”
Lydia spent hours sitting cross-legged in front of their black-and-white television watching frothy RKO musicals like Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee. Watching those movies on repeat made her fall in love with dancing. “I was a shy, quiet kid,” she says. “You could say boo to me, and I’d jump. I was so skinny my knees looked at each other. But those movies lit up something in me. Dance was Hollywood and the gowns and the limousines and the big bands playing behind you. I didn’t see any of that in my neighborhood, but I saw it in all those movies with their happy endings. And I wanted that for myself.”
A family who lived on the other side of the elevator bank from their apartment had a record player. Josephine would let Lydia cross the lobby and dance along with them to the latest songs by Martha and the Vandellas and the Marvelettes. Celia would sometimes look at her sister, struck by the invisible string that seemed to keep Lydia hovering aloft from everyone else. “It was almost like Lydia was born to be a dancer,” says Celia, who took a free dance class at PS 125 as a little girl. When the teacher pointed out that her leotard was on backward, she was so embarrassed that she never danced again. “My parents would always tell me as a child, ‘Sit up straight!’ ” says Celia. “Nobody ever had to tell that to Lydia.”
Every Sunday the family went to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, two blocks from their apartment on Morningside, where their daddy would nod off during the Latin mass, making his children giggle. Josephine found a way to send four of her seven kids to St. Joseph’s Catholic School, where Lydia met her class for a half-hour mass every morning before school. It was a nun at St. Joseph’s who first saw the ballerina inside Lydia, after choreographing a brief number from The Nutcracker Suite’s “Waltz of the Flowers” for her fourth graders to perform at a school recital. The sounds of Tchaikovsky on the fuzzy speaker, and the thrill of finding both freedom and order in a simple routine, released something vital in the girl. “I was in heaven. Whatever the nun gave us, she got 150 percent of Lydia doing it. And when we did the performance, and the steps matched the music, and there was a big crescendo in the music, it was all just so fabulous. At nine years old, I was fulfilled.” Afterward the nun pulled Josephine aside and begged her to get her daughter into some formal training.
Resourceful to her core, Josephine discovered that Juilliard, at the time located just two blocks down from their projects on Broadway, was hosting auditions for dance classes. “You’re going to go, and it’s going to be a lot of white people sitting at a table,” Josephine told her daughter beforehand. “I don’t want you to be nervous, but you’re going to have to perform for them.” The little experience Lydia had of white people in Harlem—nuns, police, the dentist—had made her wary. But on the big day, she walked head held high into a room with a glittering chandelier, mirrors on the walls, and a grand piano in the corner. The row of white people holding pencils to paper vanished as the girl disappeared into melody. Lydia could sense when the pianist was wrapping up and decided to pull out her split for a grand finale, waggling her hands over her head as the judges peered down at her. She was awarded a full scholarship for Saturday ballet classes.
But oh, how that first class let her down! A stern white man told Lydia to go stand facing the wall. She grabbed hold of a barre with the rest of the girls, their feet already planted in tight V’s. Bend your knees, straighten your knees, over and over. “Ma, I thought this was going to be a dance class,” she fussed to Josephine once she was safely back in their apartment. “When do we dance?” Josephine waved her off, telling her, “Just do what they tell you to do.”
Every Saturday for four years, Lydia stood at the barre, bending, straightening, wondering when they’d finally start dancing. She kept going because she understood the cachet of being a Juilliard student. One day when she was swinging on the monkey bars at Riverside Park, a white couple walked by and noticed her pointed feet. “You have ballerina feet. You should try dancing!” the woman told her. Lydia loved calling back, “I go to Juilliard!” That meant something to the outside world, even if it didn’t mean much to her. And the white girls in class were nice enough. She got friendly with one of them, who invited her to spend the weekend with her family. “But I almost felt like a little show-and-tell in their big old house,” says Lydia. “So I just went the one time.” She had her mother in her ear when it came to girlfriends. “Don’t need ’em, don’t trust ’em.”
As the oldest, Lydia had always been tasked with the bulk of babysitting and housework. By the time she’d turned ten, though, she’d just wanted to float away into her movies and her novels. So one afternoon, resentful of her load of responsibilities, she ran away to Grandma Goldie’s apartment, twenty blocks uptown. Goldie took sympathy on the crying girl and as a treat suggested they spend the afternoon with her cousin Iris. (Iris and her husband, Dwight Raiford, would go on to form the Harlem Little League in 1989 so that their eight-year-old son and the other boys in the neighborhood would have access to America’s pastime.) The girls were told they could go either to the Coliseum or to Radio City Music Hall. Lydia voted for the Coliseum because it sounded like the one in Rome she had seen in books, and what was so great about a radio station anyway? But Iris wanted Radio City Music Hall. Their grandma cast the deciding vote. The three headed downtown for an afternoon showing of the new Jerome Robbins movie, West Side Story.
Of course, this was no radio station. First the Rockettes performed, and Lydia felt like she was watching the cast of one of her Million Dollar Movies kick free from the television. And that was just the windup to the main event. When the lights darkened, the brilliant curtain opened onto a world of operatic tension and high romance, with Puerto Ricans and their working-class white rivals dancing and singing for their lives in a neighborhood that looked just like hers. Lydia was a goner. I want to do that, I want to do that, she remembers thinking. The movie was dancing, and it told a story, and it’s in Harlem, and it’s about Spanish people! Soon she had her siblings calling themselves the 550 Jets, in honor of their address, 550 West 125th Street. When her godfather gave the family a record player, she wore out the grooves on the movie’s soundtrack.
By thirteen, Lydia was already poring over issues of Variety and Backstage, hungry for her big break. When she saw an open casting call for the musical Hair, she recruited an older friend from her building to escort her down to the theater district. After checking in at the second-floor waiting room, she noticed that all the other hopefuls were holding copies of sheet music. Panicked, she ran downstairs to Colony Records looking for any song she recognized before grabbing a copy of American Breed’s “Bend Me, Shape Me.” In her audition, the pianist asked Abarca what key she wanted him to play. Cluelessly, she blurted out “F?” Afterward her friend yelled at her on the sidewalk, “Are you crazy? What the hell was that?” as Lydia cried to him, “I thought they were going to ask me to dance!”
In high school, she was granted a scholarship to Harkness Ballet’s professional training program, which was run out of a four-story brick mansion on East 75th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. “I would get off the bus and be in another world completely,” she says. “Doormen opening doors for you, taxicabs everywhere.” After school and all day Saturdays, she diligently took her pointe classes, and adagio classes, and Russian character classes, enduring the stiffness of all that training without her teachers ever paying her proper mind, let alone giving her a reason for all her hard work. A dancer trains for the stage, yet never once in all those years was Abarca given an opportunity to perform. Sometimes she’d linger outside company rehearsals, only to find herself shooed back to class. “Move on,” they’d scold the curious Black girl. “Don’t stand in the doorway.”
Harkness soon shifted its scholarship program to the June Taylor studios on the Upper West Side. One afternoon, Abarca heard live drumming and music coming from across the hall. She sneaked out of her ballet class and discovered Jaime Rogers, the diminutive Puerto Rican actor who’d played Loco in her beloved West Side Story, leading a spirited jazz class. Now here was some dancing. Abarca started sneaking into his workshop, desperate for some of that pulse and joy. But when school officials caught wind that Rogers had a stowaway, they marched Abarca back to her ballet class. Listening to their reprimand, she realized with cold certainty that she was finished pretending she was ever going to be a ballerina. Why train and train without the promise ever of a stage? “I’d become convinced that for a girl like me, ballet was an impossible climb straight to a dead end.”
Lydia Abarca was fifteen when she quit dancing. She focused on her grades. She took a year of Latin. She joined the drum corps in her school band. She got into college and picked her first-semester courses—economics, theology, Spanish, and philosophy. She fell in love with her first boyfriend and tried to keep him a secret from her father.
But now Arthur Mitchell was telling her that ballet was meant to be shared with audiences, that he was going to give her a stage. She hadn’t realized the history of aspiring dancers being turned away from companies because of the color of their skin. Listening to Mitchell, she realized for the first time that ballet could represent something larger than a series of technical exercises to be silently endured. “Wait a minute, you’re telling me I can make a living from this?” she remembers feeling. “You’re telling me that we can shock the world and can show people that their blindness is their fault and has nothing to do with us?”
She begged her mother to understand that this wasn’t just Arthur Mitchell’s dream now but hers as well. “I got to do this, Ma. This is my one shot.”
Abarca would go on to out of Fordham after one semester. She’d fail two of her classes, after missing so many because of Mitchell’s rehearsal schedule. “To hell with you guys,” she thought to herself, after saying a final goodbye to the Bronx campus. “I’m on my way to something huge.” Her brokenhearted mother ate the cost of the tuition not covered by scholarship. Abarca vowed to herself that when Dance Theatre of Harlem really made it big, she’d repay her parents with a house, moving them out of the projects once and for all.
A month later four of Mitchell’s new dancers—Lydia Abarca, Llanchie Stevenson, Walter Raines, and Gerald Banks—made the three-hour bus ride to Rensselaerville, New York, to perform in front of a library audience. Mitchell was busy in rehearsals for his Broadway show, so Karel Shook accompanied the dancers to their first lecture-demonstration.
In their makeshift dressing room, Abarca applied some simple lipstick and mascara. When she looked over at Stevenson, who had laid a towel on top of a dresser and neatly unpacked her entire makeup kit, her stomach dropped. Rows of lipstick and eye shadow. Trays of false eyelashes, which Abarca had never even seen before. Stevenson had come up as the first Black ballerina to perform with Radio City Music Hall, where she’d been expected to wear a full face of stage makeup that would last through the day’s four shows. When she toured with the National Ballet of Washington, she’d traveled with her personal makeup case, knowing she was on her own in a white company. “Nobody else had the base that I needed,” remembers Stevenson. “My color was 11N. Nobody else had 11N. They used to kid me about that. ‘We can’t lend you this 2W because you’re 11N.’ ”
In Rensselaerville, Abarca studied Stevenson’s trays of false eyelashes on the dresser top and knew she was in trouble. (Mitchell eventually realized he’d have to spring for a company makeup class, in which a flamboyant older woman with ostrich plumes for eyelashes schooled the dancers. “There should be no line of demarcation,” she’d shout about the art of applying base. “No line!”) Raines, who was so skilled with makeup he could contour a cleft onto his chin, took pity on Abarca’s naked face. “Walter told me, ‘The audience has to be able to see your eyes and your mouth!’ I’m telling you, he beat my face. I’m looking in the mirror as he works, going, ‘Oh, my God, I look beautiful. I’ve never seen myself look this good before!’ ”
When it was time for the performance to begin, Shook introduced the small audience of cultural elites who’d gathered in the library to Arthur Mitchell’s four new dancers. The program started at the barre and then proceeded to center work, where the dancers progressed into more dynamic, full-body movements. Stevenson and Raines danced a pas de deux from Mitchell’s Holberg Suite, still a work-in-progress then. And Abarca and Banks performed the pas de deux from what later would become the first movement of Mitchell’s Tones. It was her first time ever dancing on pointe in front of an audience.
“By no stretch of the imagination could one have called this a good performance,” Raines would tell Jacqueline Moore Latham for her 1973 Ph.D. dissertation on Arthur Mitchell. “The four of us could hardly stand up, let alone dance. Llanchie and I had danced more than Lydia and Gerry, but that made little difference as we were literally falling all over the place.” But Raines quickly realized he’d underestimated the emotional power of their raw artistry. “It was the reaction of the people after we had finished that struck me. It was the look on their faces—expressing that they had just witnessed one of the most beautiful things that they had ever seen in their lives.”
Sitting among the audience that day was Abarca’s grandmother Goldie the only family member who could take the day to make the journey upstate. After the show, Goldie hugged her granddaughter tight. “You looked a little shaky up there,” she told Abarca, her voice thick with pride. “But honey, I can tell you’re going to be really good.”
Copyright © 2024 by Karen Valby. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
