Excerpt from The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But by the time her granddaughter came home asking about that history, all that was left were a few dusty plastic bins in the basement full of yellowing photographs, stacks of old programs, and an invitation for Abarca to perform for the Queen Majesty. There were old profiles from People and The Washington Post that delighted in the star power of Mitchell's young ballerina. Her face beamed from magazine covers, reviews marveled over her beauty and talent, her exquisite profile and flower stem neck had been etched into a Revlon perfume box. Whatever remained of her spotlight years now lived in a couple of click-top bins and a shaky eleven-minute VHS recording of her breathtaking pas de deux in Balanchine's "Bugaku."

Daniella knew the bones of her mother's past. But what she experienced in the day-to-day was a modest woman who took her administrative work in a doctor's office seriously, who'd taught ballet classes in Daniella's elementary school cafeteria, and later helped her high school step team on their routines. She knew that her mother kept her figure to a strict size eight and that she booked extra work on local movie productions to make some cash on the side. And she also knew that in the evenings her mother drank too much rum, to the point that Daniella kept Hannah away from her, to spare her child from seeing her beloved grandmother slur or stumble. She'd found the empty bottles hidden in her mother's trunk, behind her hair products under the bathroom sink. Daniella, a pastor and single mother, understood that Abarca was lost or unhappy in ways she didn't yet have the language to express.

The gaslighting of one's own history will mess with a person's head. Abarca was losing grip of herself. The past and present had to converge if she was going to find any real way forward. She'd need the women who were with her at the beginning of it all alongside her again. And they, it turned out, needed her too.



At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, divorced from the normal rhythms and routines of their lives, five founding and first-generation Dance Theatre of Harlem ballerinas formed the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, named for the street they helped make famous. Lydia Abarca-Mitchell (no relation to Arthur), Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin had held each other up half a century earlier and they would do so again through the terrifying trudge of Covid. They all had been knocked off balance by the anointing of Misty Copeland, by what felt like the deliberate scrubbing of their groundbreaking history. They would make peace with quarantine by gathering online every Tuesday afternoon, to throw out an anchor to one other from their scattered perches across the country. They would take advantage of the time to try and right a grievous wrong—they would take control of their own history. However daunting that task may have seemed, no matter. They had accomplished the impossible before.

These five intrepid girls had come together and made one of the most iconic childhood fantasies come true. Originally strangers, in so many ways, they couldn't have been more different from one another. Contrary to early in-house fundraising press releases that described Dance Theatre of Harlem's dancers as "black slum youngsters" and "high school drop-outs," they were each unique human beings who came from specifically loving homes. Lydia Abarca was raised by working-class parents and had been bound for Fordham University on a partial academic scholarship when she first met Arthur Mitchell. Gayle McKinney-Griffith's father was a draftsman at a submarine engineer firm, and she was raised in a two-story colonial house on acres of land in Connecticut. Sheila Rohan's father died when she was a baby and her immigrant West Indian mother cleaned houses in Staten Island to put food on the table for her eight daughters. Marcia Sells grew up on a Cincinnati cul-de-sac with a father who had his PhD and a mother who went back to school for her Master's in her forties. And Karlya Shelton grew up in Denver in a working-class family that belonged to the local AME church and took elaborately planned road trips every summer to national landmarks in their Chevrolet station wagon.

Excerpted from The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby. Copyright © 2024 by Karen Valby. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.