O VER THE PAST FIFTY YEARS as a result of the call for diverse children’s books, there has been a steady trickling in of publications featuring protagonists of color. As a Black girlhood studies scholar, I pay close attention to pic- ture books that portray Black girls. More specifically, I intersect dance studies and children’s literary studies in order to explore the representation of Black ballerinas in autobiograph- ical and biographical children’s pic- ture books. In doing so, I demonstrate how these texts help to define what it means to be young, Black, and female in ballet as this social identity becomes characterized within African American children’s literature. In my larger body of work, I explore books published before the start of 2020, which include Debbie Allen’s Dancing in the Wings (2000), Misty Copeland’s Firebird: Ballerina Misty Copeland Shows a Young Girl How to Dance Like the Firebird (2014), Kristy Dempsey’s A Dance Like Starlight: One Ballerina’s Dream (2014), Michaela DePrince’s Ballerina Dreams: A True Story (2017), and Michelle Meadow’s Brave Ballerina: The Story of Janet Collins (2019). In this article, I focus on Copeland’s Firebird because of its notable influ- ence within the industry. Winner of the 2015 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award and the 2015 Ezra Jack Keats Book Award New Writer Honor, Copeland’s Firebird tells the story of a young dancer who desires Copeland’s balletic success. However, the protagonist does not have confidence in her abilities as a ballet dancer. She believes that there is a space between her aptitudes and that of Copeland’s that is “longer than forever” (Copeland 2014, 1). At first read, the narrative seems to allude to a young Copeland speaking to her adult self, desiring to know the outcome of her current labor. Will she fulfil her dream and become a prima ballerina?
Illustrated by Christopher Myers, the first image of Firebird features the protagonist dressed in bright-yel- low fitted clothing performing an ara- besque. Upstage of the protagonist is an enlarged image of Copeland also in arabesque. Copeland is dressed in her fiery-red firebird costume—per- haps a foreshadowing of who the girl will someday be. In the next scene, the protagonist stares into her mind’s eye, imagining Copeland in a white costume with an accompanying tiara. The scene depicts a leaping Copeland soaring over the East River against the New York City skyline at night. Here,
Copeland places her downstage arm on the girl’s downstage shoulder. Cope- land then encourages the protagonist to “let the sun shine on your face” before proceeding to tell of her story of becoming a prima ballerina (Copeland 2014, 7). As a Black ballerina in a White bal- let world, Copeland’s life narrative is also one saturated with exclusion, isolation, and marginalization. In her memoir, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina , Copeland narrates how she not only navigated poverty and hun- ger in her childhood, but moreover, continuously navigated her black-
I demonstrate how these texts help to define what it means to be young, Black, and female in ballet as this social identity becomes characterized within African American children’s literature.
the protagonist likens Copeland to the “sky and clouds and air” with feet that are as “swift as sunlight” (Cope- land 2014, 3). It is Copeland’s elon- gated leap that the protagonist imag- ines stretching “across the skyline like the daylong sun over the horizon” (Copeland 2014, 3). By the following page, the protagonist’s visualization has ended, and she returns back to reality, where she is alone and down- cast. She is seated on the floor staring at the ground with her knees pulled to her chest. She believes herself to be as “gray as rain/heavy as naptime, low as a storm pressing on rooftops” (Cope- land 2014, 4). It is because of these beliefs, the protagonist doubts that she could ever “hope to leap the space between”—that is the space between her and Copeland (Copeland 2014, 5). On the following pages, the girl’s hope is partially realized as she comes face-to-face with Copeland. Kneel- ing in order to make eye contact with the narrative’s young protagonist,
ness in a classical ballet world that is impoverished of Black dancing bod- ies, and as a result, hungry to con- sume them. Like the young protago- nist she encourages in Firebird , as a young dancer, Copeland also strug- gled to close the gap between who she was—a fatherless mixed-race Black girl without a stable home—and who she imagined herself to be—a prin- cipal ballerina performing the most prestigious classical ballet roles. Dance Scholar Brenda Gottschild acknowledges that there was a par- adigm shift in the twentieth century regarding the Black dancing body. She argues that while “the black dancer remains Other, the black body, through dance, sports, fashion, and everyday lifestyle, become the last word in white desirability” (7). She specifies that what was once seen as “‘coonish’” about the Black body is now seen as “Cool” with a capital C (7). While Gottschild goes on to complicate how the Black dancing body can, in some aspects,
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