Black Girl, Blue Leotard: How My Ticket to Belonging Broke My Heart
Lisa’s dance uniform was everything. She cherished it, wore it everywhere. Until, that is, she took a new dance class where she felt inferior and started to see things in a different light.
As you can probably tell, we’re really in the thick of it with the 2025 Narratively Memoir Prize right now. If you’re thinking about submitting to this year’s prize and could use some inspiration, or you just missed it the first time around, check out Lisa Williamson Rosenberg’s 2024 Narratively Memoir Prize–winning piece — which was included in The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025 — below. And as a bonus to get you started, some excellent advice Lisa shared on our most recent episode of Narratively Academy’s Open Book video series: “If you can tap into an emotion of yours that is visceral and deep and somebody else can feel it — even if their experience is totally different from yours — just go with that.”
I loved my royal blue, capped-sleeve leotard more than you can imagine. Or maybe you can imagine it. Maybe you, too, were an only child of older parents, neither of whom you resembled because your father was Black and your mother was white and Jewish. Maybe, while you looked a bit like your father’s mother and, in some lighting, a tiny bit like your mother’s father, you looked nothing like anyone living. I had never heard of royal blue before then, but it was the most beautiful color I had ever seen: rich, bright and a tiny bit bluer than blue.
The leotard was my very first uniform, my first ticket to belonging. I got it when I was 6 years old and the brand was Danskin, which meant that the material was very thick and kind of itchy, but it was the leotard we were all required to wear for our modern dance class, to be held weekly in the basement of the 92nd Street Y.
I remember the very first class. And the dressing room — buzzing, bustling with other little girls and their mothers, a few of whom were also wrangling toddlers and bouncing infants — as jackets and street clothes were removed to reveal the brilliant shade of blue we all shared.
I remember a procession — of girls in leotards, our mothers, the several small siblings — to the place where we would meet our teacher and ostensibly dance. It was a vast space where most things were a classical 1970s brown: hardwood floors in need of revarnishing, smooth wood-paneled walls disrupted only by broad, stout windows with panes of the same brown, a stage that rose above it all with sepia-toned curtains pushed to the sides. There were folding chairs lined up against the walls where the mothers could sit and watch the class if their younger charges allowed it.
Our teacher — tall, fair and striking in a black leotard and beige footless tights — introduced herself as Kellyann. As we girls followed her to the stage, I admired the way Kellyann’s neat blonde ponytail bobbed and bounced against her neck. My mother, whose hair was straight and fine, dependent upon a nightly pin-curl ritual for “body,” was ill-equipped to manage my own mass of wild, coily tresses. I yearned for hair that my mother could do, or alternately, for my mother’s fingers to master the hair I had. I’d have been just as pleased with the multitude of braids I saw on the heads of Black girls with Black mothers.
Kellyann called us “girls” rather than “ladies,” as my subsequent dance teachers would. Her voice was soft yet commanding as she invited us to sit in a circle, feet together, knees bent and flopping sideways like frogs, which everyone could do and did proudly. Kellyann placed a record on the phonograph and joined us on the floor. With a warm smile and encouraging nods for all, our new teacher made it easy to follow her instructions and movements. We bounced our knees, we stretched our legs, we pointed and flexed our feet. Next, we rose like blooming sunflowers. We reached for the sky, stomped around like elephants, zoomed like dragonflies, arms like buzzing wings. We stole glances at one another throughout, studying each other — not with judgment but with rapt curiosity at our differences. We came in all the various colors, sizes and shapes of 6-year-old girls.
What a thrill it was! Belonging to and with these other girls: to and with the dark-skinned Black girl with pink airplanes on the end of her braids, to and with the redheaded white girl who had one big front tooth on its way in, to and with the girls who were twins with jet-black pigtails on the sides of their heads, to and with all the other girls in the class. We. That’s right. We wore royal blue, capped-sleeve leotards that were thick and kind of itchy. We. And that included me.