Bare Feet and Concrete

Summertime, the memory of movement, and the claiming of a body

There’s something about summer that stirs a specific kind of memory in my bones.

The kind that smells like shea butter and jazz music. The kind that feels like rhythm and rebellion.The kind that begins with bare feet on concrete.

I always wanted to be a dancer. But in high school, I was too self-conscious about my body to admit it out loud. I refused to wear a leotard. The thought of my softness and thinness being seen, measured, or even acknowledged felt unbearable. My body was flat and didn’t give shape to the full leotards like the bodies of the girls who so gracefully performed modern dance with our school company. So instead, I dressed in clothes that gave the idea of a dancer. I wore a leotard top over baggy jeans, a kind of half-claiming. Not quite ready to be seen, but aching to be in motion.

When I was 18, I saw African dance performed for the first time, right there in the gymnasium of my high school. My body didn’t just watch; it remembered. I didn’t know the names of the rhythms yet, but I knew what they meant. I didn’t understand the technique, but I understood the truth in the movement.

Years later, while working at an Afrikan-centered charter school (long live Nsoroma Institute!), that memory returned in full force.

It was there that I met Fabayo Manzira, a woman who would usher me across the threshold I’d only peeked into. She was not only the kindergarten teacher, she was the school’s dance teacher, but in time, she became mine. Mama Fabayo remains one of the most beautiful dancers I have ever had the pleasure of seeing. Her movements were effortless and graceful while exuding power with every combination. Her classes weren’t just about choreography; they were about reclamation. About rhythm as resistance. About taking up space with precision and power. Mama Fabayo taught me how to own my body while pushing it to its creative and physical limits. Under her guidance, I stopped thinking of myself as a dancer and became one.

She invited me to her weekend classes at the SereNgeti Ballroom on Woodward Avenue, a storied venue graced by jazz greats. Functioning as an intimate concert venue every other day of the week, it had become a sacred site for movement, rhythm, and return. Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings turned into rituals.

Those mornings were holy. The room smelled like lavender, cocoa butter, and effort. Drums bounced off the walls and settled into our spines. Bare feet slapped the floor like declarations. And on that floor, I learned to listen to myself.

At my first dance performance at the SereNgeti circa 1999

At the SereNgeti, I met Ebrima “Pap” Jeng, a tall, slender dancer from Gambia who taught me sabar, the national dance of Senegal. Under Pap’s instruction, we drilled for what felt like hours. It was hard to contort my body into the deep, crouched stances that sabar demanded. My arms burned with each correction. My hips resisted, then surrendered. I was exhausted, but drunk with joy. For the first time, I had found a home for my long limbs and awkward gait.

My feet made jazz on the wood floors. My body flew, popped, crouched, and burst into flames. Sabar changed me. It wasn’t polite or passive. It demanded presence.

You couldn’t phone it in. You couldn’t pretend. It asked everything of you and gave you everything in return.

After I began learning from Mama Fabayo and Pap, I danced anywhere I could. My favorite place? The dance circles at the African World Festival. The drummers would gather in the center of Hart Plaza - community babas and their sons, Rastafari uncles, newly arrived Senegalese men - each with a drum slung over one shoulder and a rhythm in their hands.

They created an impromptu rhythm section to rival any national ballet.

When I heard a familiar rhythm rise from the drums, I would kick off my shoes and take to the concrete, swirling, leaping, sweating. It didn’t matter if the pavement was hot or if the circle was tight. We made space. For joy. For movement. For Blackness. For ourselves.

In my 20s and 30s, African dance shaped my life. It healed me. It made me brave. It made me unapologetic. It made me sweat, cry, and come alive.

I don’t dance in the streets the way I used to. My hips are wiser. My mornings are quieter. My body has carried life, grief, and glory.

But every summer, when the heat kisses the pavement just right, I feel her stir again.

The girl in baggy jeans with a dancer’s soul. The woman in white and gold, spinning barefoot in a ballroom on Woodward. The mother who still knows the drum’s name.

The body doesn’t forget.

It only waits.

For music.

For memory.

For permission.

Okay, your turn:

When did you first fall in love with movement, or wish you could? What would it look like to return to your body as a site of possibility, not shame?

Let me know in the comments.

I’m off to play some Balimaya Project and allow my feet to remember…