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Nixzmary · Jan 14, 10:43 AM

Some years ago I performed regularly at PS256 in Brooklyn, initially as part of an Ailey 2 outreach initiative, and then in residence with Sam (sorry brother, I lost your family name, please let me know), a lovely man who taught jazz dance while I worked djembe, he and I knew each other from ‘back in the day’ when we’d been regular fixtures at the Ailey school (late eighties that one brother!). Tom Sullivan, who’d danced for Martha, also taught at 256, in fact his was the activism that brought us to that school in the first place. After my time there was over, I often fantasised about going back to volunteer, but doing what, teaching djembe? Guitar? I also knew just how hard that would be, and how ill-equipped I felt in my own life to really follow-up, but still, maybe seven years later, a few months ago it came up in conversation again at home.

Seven years old, Nixzmary Brown enrolled at 256 in 2004, long after I’d left. Her story hit me hard today, right in the heart, and I’m grieving, deeply, for a girl I never met. At first I didn’t realise she’d attended that very same school, but now, after scrutinising the map, I know. And frankly, even if I was wrong, New York City,—the world—is full of such places. I’ve played many, children just mad enthused to taste what you as an artist have, children exhausting in their demand, children exhausted by the demands made on them, but so hungry for the art and the love in the art you bring them. Children may be born with inheritance’s load implacably placed within them, but untarnished by any inner or self-owned motives other than the most naive; a seven year old is beautiful and blameless. A seven year old’s ‘omission’ is just a small rendition of everybody and everything bigger that surrounds her.

Nixzmary, beautiful little daughter of that diaspora I touched on below, God bless you in your journey, Allah Ma’ak, may your soul find peace…

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