Dancing Naked for Men Restored My Faith

The opening train whistle rings out, high pitched and lonely. Conjuring a desolate frontier town at high noon. Tumbleweeds roll down the dirt road under their own power.

All sound ceases in the wake of that lonely whistle. Expectation hangs in the waning strain. A breathless pause. Then the R&B thumping beat of Cameo's Word Up. Your heart pumps in sync with the music. It's the 90's and I'm in some unnamed dusty rural Ontario, about to take the stage in a darkly lit strip club. 

"Yoh pretty ladies around the world" 

The DJ calls my stage name (I don't recall it) and my stomach drops. That's my cue. I should be strutting my shit to Cameo's highest-charting song. A gymnast and a modern dancer, I should be eager to show off my moves. To show up the girls who only dance to Guns N' Roses "Sweet Child of Mine." 

That had been the plan.

Instead, I'm cowering at the back of the stage, tears ruining my carefully applied kohl liner. Wondering how I became a fallen woman. Earlier I'd excitedly put on my costume, tiny blue shorts and a white buttoned cropped top, with a blue bra and thong panties underneath.

But now, reality settled heavily. I couldn't do it. Could not force my legs to carry me forward.

Here I was, a baptized Seventh-day Adventist churchy Black girl. Crying on a dirty stage in the middle of the whitest of Ontario towns. Too scared to do my job and doff my clothes for a bunch of staring white guys. Lost in a dimly lit club on a late July morning. This was about as out of my depth as I could be. 

The DJ calls my name. Again.

Where are all the good holes to swallow you up when you need them?

"Got a weird thing to show you" 

I was nineteen. I'd just finished my first year of university. And I needed money. I'd hoped to return to my job from the year before sorting comic books in an old warehouse. I spent most of my day sorting X-Men, Spiderman, Batman and every title comic into their shared bags. Two by two, I put them in their clear plastic protectors, the covers facing out, the flaps carefully folded over and taped. It was a great gig for a collector like me. I did more reading than sorting and the time passed quickly. But this year, the warehouse was closed. 

I needed to work and had zero prospects. 

At school I'd been speaking with a new friend. She shared her plans to spend the summer on the dance circuit, visiting a new club every week. I could join her if I wanted. There's a hole in my memory where her face should be. 

Maybe it's strange that I don't remember a thing about her. Whether or not she returned to school, if we ever spoke again. It's all blank. But her offer was exciting and I wanted to know what the story would be if I danced on the strip circuit.

"So tell all the boys and girls"

I'd been a church going girl because that's how my moms raised us. Church gave us community, a place and people to belong to. Moms had immigrated to Canada with our dad when I was three and half, set to turn four later that same year. My youngest brother was only a few months old when we arrived in February and my middle brother was a year younger than me. 

Mom was a Registered Nurse by training, but as Black woman from the Islands her credentials weren't recognized and she'd been relegated to a nurse's assistant. 

It would take a few years and cost a lot of money and stress, but she retrained in Canada and became an RN. Again.

In the meantime, our father's career took off. He ran a successful insurance practice in Toronto despite the many extra-marital affairs he engaged in. Until he was asked by the Trinidadian government to return home and become a senator, a position he couldn't pass up. It was the start of his steady political climb up. He was set to become Prime Minister before cancer took his life a few years ago. 

He left mom to manage alone. And true to the image of the strong Black woman, she took care of her business. Before she died, we would talk. She told me how much it cost her to work through our father's abandonment. Because that's what it was. He left us alone in a hostile country and returned to the warm welcome of home.

Mom called her mother, our grandmother, who became our caregiver. With grandmother helping mind three unruly kids, well, maybe one particularly willful female child, mom secretly went back to school. 

I wasn't a handful. I was the earth, stars and moon of trouble. Or, so the story goes. I led a walk-out of kids from my pre-school class, apparently unhappy with the teaching quality and some unremembered injustices. 

There was the time the police turned up at our house because someone had determined a naked walk through the streets of Hamilton, Ontario was in order after bathing. The cops caught up with my brothers and me trooping the main road and brought us home. As if my Black mother didn't have enough to contend with, she also had to open her door to the police holding her children.

As for my mother, in later life she told me she didn't want grams to know she had gone back to school because it would've hurt her to know the racism mom had to face. Isolated and alone, we started going to the Seventh-Day Adventist church. 

It was white.

"Tell your brother, your sister"

Even as a kid I could feel the racism. Despite attending that church for years, we were rarely invited to anyone's home for dinner after church. Dinner was the special meal after the Saturday church service, prepared the day before the Sabbath. Because on Sabbath, you didn't do any work according to our beliefs. God gave the seventh day to rest and that was serious business. 

When the new Italian family started church I saw how they were immediately welcomed. Each Saturday they packed up their car and kids and shared the Sabbath meal with the white families we'd known for years. Homes where we'd never been invited.

I must have made some silent, unknown vow to myself, because despite the obvious racism, I worked to become the most devout and respected Christian. I sang solos and duets. I was in the choir. I played piano. I played flute and guitar. I played for the church when the regular pianist was away. I took Jesus as my saviour.

I was baptized, white robes and all in a big warm pool of water. Pastor J, a man I'd known by then, nearly my whole short life and who's home I never visited - but the Italian family had on their first day of church- supported my back and dunked me completely under the water. And just like that I was officially part of God's family. The Black sheep part.

"…cause they're about to go down"

A few years later, I'd attend the private Christian school and be kicked out. A clash between racism and the strict rules of the Sabbath. I thought the rules should accomodate how long it took a Black girl to get her hair did and my (white) house mother didn't. 

A "fuck you" later and the good girl was the scandal of the church.

The schism between what the church said and the racism the church allowed was getting too hard for me to keep suppressing. But, I did. I pushed down feeling unworthy. I pushed down the feeling that there was something wrong with the church. Everybody loved the church. The problem was me. 

By the time Uni rolled my way, I'd left the church behind, but the teachings were still part of my body. The wrongness of me, was still inside me. So, when I stared down that stage as Word Up throbbed I was at a crossroad of racism and christianity. 

The men in front of me were all white and I was the only Black girl dancer. Cos' back then, there could only always be one. Whether it was the school play, the musical, gymnastics, track, it was always, only me.

On that stage with the pole shaming me in the middle of the stage, and my feel unwilling to move, my mind told me I was betraying God. I was letting the Black race down.

I was the embodiment of the stereotype. A Black girl with the loose morals that all white people ascribed to Black girls. I was a disgrace. A cliche. I was all the wrongness of a pitiful Black girl come to life. 

The tears flowed. The DJ called my name. If I didn't move I would also be even poorer. I wasn't going to earn money cowering like the loser I was.

"And you'll know just what to do"

I walked out into the lights and the men stared at me. Was I the first Black girl they'd seen? Was I gross? I was in deep. Lost. Humiliation burned through me. I cried harder as the music beat. "What's the word? The Word Up."

"You're beautiful." "It's okay." "You're going to be fine." "Look at you beautiful." 

Then they clapped and clapped. They hooted and cheered. They supported me. They cared for me. Those men carried me that night. They bought drinks from me. They clamored for lap dances. These strangers, these not godly men, at least to my churchy eyes. They lifted me up and made me feel like a human being. I remain grateful to them today. They showed me a humanity I didn't expect to find in a strip club. 

I stood straight. I danced. I played with the audience. I felt the music flow through me and lift me. I twirled on the pole and hung upside down spinning. I had fun! I laughed. I became brighter.

We always danced to three songs. The first one fast, where we removed our first outfit by the end. Tops came off with the second song. And the third song got us naked. 

I've no memory of second song. But the third one I'll never forget.

"Singing my life with his words"

For my final, I danced to "Killing Me Softly" not the Fugees version, the original by Roberta Flack. I soared on the pole. Hanging upside down, legs split in the air. I used my gymnastic skills to make the pole sing, to show off what I could do. By the end, yes, the scales were clearing from my eyes with the removal of my clothes. I wasn't the scared, sad, miserable little girl who'd frozen backstage. 

I was getting free. Killing my old suppressed self. 

Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly - from YouTubeI wasn't the teary-eyed waif stumbling down a stage. I was in control.

That summer wasn't the culmination of who I would become. For all the gaps in my memory it was the least traumatizing time of my life, a blur of busyness and business. I earned money for school and returned able to pay my bills and support myself. 

But that summer was my renewal. Another baptism. The start of me accepting me. The start of me seeing the world as it was. As it is. Of looking behind the curtain and giving it an authentic appraisal. I looked into the scary places and didn't flinch when they looked back. 

"Everybody say when you hear the call/You got to get it underway"

If church had interrupted my journey into questioning everything, dancing naked on stage for a group of white men showed me I wasn't a fallen woman. Just a woman. 

When you're naked on stage, there's no hiding. It's you in the spotlight, with all eyes watching. I was never happy with the fake. The fake church love and the ripe racism. After that summer, I shed it all. 

Word.

Credits:

• Lyrics from Cameo's Word Up.
• Lyrics from Roberta Flack's, Killing Me Softly.
• Ennio Morricone's theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - the train whistle at the beginning inspired Cameo's opening for Word Up.