I sat down and Googled the man, thinking, I’ll sue him. I’ll post his name online and call him out for molesting my sister and me. Now I would be the one with the power and he’d be the one with the shame. I could get revenge. If I wanted to. But as I sat there with my hands on the keyboard, thinking about what that act of revenge would mean for me and Gia, how it would affect the quiet, joyful life I was making for her, the need for it faded. I believe in karma. God will take care of this guy when his time in this world is over, and he’s old now. His time is running out. Hopefully, his kids know what he is, but I know I’m not responsible for anything he did in his life—including what he did to my sister. The burden of thinking it was my fault is one more thing he had no right to inflict on me.
Seeing Gia now, I realize how very small and helpless Jan and I were amid the chaos of our parents’ failing marriage, even though we thought then that we were so tough. When Mama moved out of the house, leaving us with Dad, it was a relief in some ways. The man who’d molested Jan and me stopped coming around. The constant battles cooled to an uneasy truce, and even though she was living in her own apartment, Mama was in our kitchen waiting for Jan and me every morning when we got up, and she was there every evening to make supper and tuck us in for the night. I never felt abandoned by her—quite the opposite. She was on top of things, my most loyal ally, and still is today.
In 1980, while Prince was touring with Rick James, processing his own dysfunctional childhood into a project that would become Purple Rain and building on the momentum from his first platinum album, Mama and I were keeping up a busy schedule of dance performances and seminars. Throughout that terrible year, I danced, and when I danced, I was untouchable. Dance was my secret power, my doorway to another dimension where there was only beauty, only music, only love.
The world of belly dancing had a hierarchy of stars, and among them, Ibrahim “Bobby” Farrah reigned supreme. He was tall and moved with a strong yet delicate danger that I liked. Sometimes, he’d start spinning, twirling faster and faster, a mad blur, and then slowly, always teasing the audience with his brown eyes. The women loved him because he was passionate, loud, and funny.
Then there was Amir, a classically trained master who’d been a principal dancer in the Russian ballet and innovated a sort of tango-belly-ballet fusion, which he performed in a bolero and tight pants that showed off his insane shimmy. Amir was everything. Every. Thing. The name itself means “Prince.” He had a jet-black mustache and eyebrows, and wore a tasteful dash of black eyeliner around his soulful eyes. He had the training and strength to do things women belly dancers couldn’t safely attempt, and he was the only male dancer who could keep his masculinity and not come off as cheesy. It kept me genuinely entertained. He was way ahead of his time with his amazing sense of humor and off-the-chain stomach movements and muscle isolations no woman I knew could do. He’d shimmy this impressive isolated shimmy, then pulsate his stomach muscles to the beat of the drums—and then he’d do this exaggerated stagger and gasp, as if he were out of breath, and we’d go from awe to laughter. Every movement was done with surgical precision; each eyelash told a love story.
Mama was not about to miss an opportunity for us to take classes from these two legends, so our whole family drove to Atlanta and got a hotel room for the weekend. I arrived with a terrible cold, but I wasn’t about to let that slow me down. All day Saturday, we took classes. I gave it my all and fell asleep exhausted and happy. On Sunday, it was our turn to perform in the student showcases, and the whole place was buzzing because I was going to be dancing with a sword on my head. Some of the older, more established dancers objected furiously to that. I totally get it now. Who wants to have their thunder stolen by an eight-year-old? I would have probably let the adults win and skipped the sword, but with someone like Mama behind me? Oh, you better believe I danced with that sword.
“You’re dancing with your sword,” she told me. I didn’t hear what she told them, but they were suddenly being much nicer to me.
The sword I danced with was a gift from a vendor at a previous seminar. I’d been working with it for a while, dancing for hours to the music of George Abdo and his Flames of Araby Orchestra. Most ladies dancing with a sword used a wadded rag or scarf to keep it from slipping off their heads when they did a backbend or turn. I didn’t want to do that, so Dad scored the edge of the blade just enough to give it some traction against my hair. The finale involved spinning the sword forward and gracefully swooping it off. I practiced till I had a bald spot on the crown of my head.