Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (26 page)

ABT filmed my two performances, and I gave them everything I had. We then sent the videotape to the Princess Grace Foundation for judging.

I didn’t win. But I still felt victorious. I had achieved another milestone by competing, and I’d reinforced Kevin’s faith in me.

BALLET WAS NEVER SOMETHING
that was outside myself. As Misty the woman evolved and matured, so did my dancing.

Maybe it was because of the confidence I gained knowing I could heal from being hurt. Perhaps it was the realization that the timid girl from San Pedro could thrive on her own, in the urban melee of New York City. Or maybe it was knowing that I could be bent low by the occasional spectator deriding my caramel-colored presence, but rise again, undeterred, and stand my ground.

Whatever the motivations, all I know is that one day I woke up and made one of the most important emotional decisions of my life. I wanted to meet my father.

I had never ached for him. I had had Harold from the time I could remember, and he had been a loving, wonderful daddy to me in every way that he could possibly be, despite the flaws that had separated him from my mother. I had even had a relationship with Robert, though the way he treated my mother, my brothers, and especially my beloved baby sister, Lindsey, soured my memories of him. But a curiosity about the man who had actually been my dad had recently begun to grow, and now I was ready to take action.

Growing up, we had only the vaguest notions of why Mommy had picked up one day—Doug Jr., Chris, Erica, and me in tow—and hopped a Greyhound for California. We knew Mommy said she’d been unhappy, and since picking up and leaving is what she constantly did, there was little reason to ponder what had propelled her the first time, or whether the reasons were any different from those behind all her other departures.

So Mommy never spoke about our father, and we never asked. I never even saw his picture.

Somehow I understood that it wasn’t his choice not to be a part of our lives. Rather, we kids felt, perhaps intuitively, that Mommy did not want us to reach out to him. So we didn’t. After all, we Copelands were a tribe, with Mommy at the center. We knew from the crumbs of stories that she would drop along the way that she’d had a rough childhood, a tough life. And we wanted to protect her.

But after Doug Jr. graduated from high school, he decided that he wanted to find the man for whom he was named.

Doug had always been independent. He’d also been someone deeply interested in his roots, both cultural and familial. The little boy who’d tracked down a tuft of natural cotton to try to experience what it might have been like for our ancestors to pick it wanted to meet the man without whom he wouldn’t exist.

I was about sixteen then, enjoying being back home, in a comfortable apartment with Mommy. I loved my studies at the Lauridsen Ballet Centre—hanging out with new friends and giddy from my summers away, first in San Francisco and then New York. I had ballet on my mind.

“Misty,” Doug Jr. told me one afternoon as we sat together in the kitchen, when he was home from college. “I found our father.”

“Our father?” I asked him, confused. Harold was only a few miles away. What was he talking about?

“Yeah!” Doug continued excitedly. “He’s living in Wisconsin. I tracked him down, and we’ve been talking on the phone. I’m going to get some money together and go see him.”

It all clicked. “Oh,” I said. “That’s great!” I was happy that Doug was so elated. But I wasn’t really that interested.

Of course, Mommy hadn’t known about Doug’s search. But now that he’d found our dad, Doug Jr. didn’t keep it a secret. He was grown, after all, so I guess she accepted it begrudgingly. Eventually, Doug Jr. did go see our dad, and he returned with a stack of photos detailing all the years that we had missed.

Senior and Junior looked just alike, copper-skinned and sinewy. Our father had apparently been a great athlete when he was young, and we figured that’s where Chris and Doug Jr. had gotten their talents on the basketball court and football field from. I also concluded that was where I’d inherited my body structure, so much more muscular than Mommy’s lithe frame.

It was fun hearing my father’s stories from Doug Jr. But the rest of us were too busy with our present lives to reclaim the one we’d lost with a man we’d hardly known. Erica was living with her high school sweetheart, and together they were raising my beautiful niece, Mariah. Chris was focused on his studies, preparing to go to law school. And I was living my dream of performing with ABT.

But after being in the corps for a couple of years, I began to wonder more about my dad. What did he sound like when he spoke? Had he missed us? What might he think of his daughter, the ballerina? Those questions crowded my journal, began to haunt me in dance classes and through the streets of the Upper West Side.

One day I picked up the phone and called Doug Jr.

“I want to meet our dad,” I told him.

“Okay,” Doug said. “Let’s book the tickets.”

And on August 20, 2004, I met my father.

Doug Jr. and I flew to Wisconsin one weekend while I was on a break from ABT, and we stayed for a week. While I was there, I also met my great-aunt and a few of my cousins.

We Copeland kids had enjoyed wonderful, raucous gatherings with Harold’s family, and I had a host of surrogate relatives, from the Cantines, my godparents; to Bubby; and even Robert’s mother, Grandma Marie.

But I realized, when I breathed in the fragrance of my paternal grandfather’s sister for the first time, that there was nothing like actually knowing an elder who shared the same blood. Mommy had been adopted and largely raised herself. So this was the closest I would ever get to an actual grandparent, to relatives whose ancestry was the same as mine.

My father was sweet. He was almost shy when he first greeted me, and then he wrapped me in his arms.

He was full of stories about his childhood in Kansas City, about being the son of a German mother and African American father. He told me how pretty Mommy had been when they met, how much he had cared for her, and how proud he had been of his four beautiful children.

It was crazy to me that he had been a phone call or plane ride away all this time and I had never seen him. Crazy—and also sad. But I was elated that I had made the effort to follow my curiosity where it led me, into my father’s embrace.

“I have his lips,” I jotted excitedly in my diary. “I wish I had his pretty hazel eyes. That would look fresh on me.”

“It’s like a part of me has been fulfilled. I’m really happy.”

Of all the emotions I felt after meeting my father, anger at Mommy wasn’t one of them. I think becoming a woman,
and having to face and make my own difficult decisions, has helped me to understand her better. I knew that Mommy often handled difficulty by choosing not to deal with it.

I also understood that I was different from her, as was Doug, perhaps more so than our other siblings. We were reflective. We didn’t want to flee. We wanted to take the situation and turn it over in our hands, to gaze at it and try to figure out how to make it better.

I thought of the trips I had taken: to China as an apprentice with ABT, to Mexico and Jamaica on my first cruise with Leyla, to Cape Cod with the Studio Company. And I thought that I would have given up every one of them to be here in Wisconsin, spending time with my father.

It was a joyful time, but Dad also spoke about more painful things. He had a long-time girlfriend, Debbie, whom he’d dated pretty much from the time my mother left him. But he never had any more children. He told my brother that he already had two sons and two daughters far away, and he never wanted any more. I know that he always loved us and wanted us to have a relationship. Our mother’s leaving and our disappearing had taken a toll on him.

I had actually been startled when I first saw him. Compared to his pictures, he seemed shrunken, and his hair was turning gray. His hazel eyes sparkled, but he barely resembled the youthful man I’d seen in those photographs. Doug Jr. was a reflection of what our father had once been physically, but was no longer.

Though our growing happened without him, I think he is as proud as I am at how we all turned out. I marvel that I not only came through my chaotic childhood and somehow
emerged as a professional ballerina, but that all my brothers and sisters have also done well.

To this day, I don’t really understand how we did it, given the situations that we were put in. We’d been taken from our natural father, in the case of myself and my older siblings, and then from Harold, the only dad we’d ever truly known, to live with a man who spewed epithets. Next we lived with family friends in a gang-infested neighborhood, moved in with strangers, and then, finally, settled down in a shabby motel. It is still a wonder to me that not one of us has ended up in jail or on drugs.

Instead, we thrived. Chris eventually joined me in New York, and not long ago he passed the New York bar. Doug married his high school sweetheart, Raven, a beautiful woman whom I love like a sister. She is a physician, and Doug works in the insurance industry. They still live in California, where they are raising my adorable nephew, Orion.

I think Erica in many ways had it rougher than the rest of us, being the oldest and, in many ways, our surrogate mother. But she also has a great life. She’s still strong, confident, and independent, and she and Mariah’s father, Jeff, have been a couple for more than twenty years, ever since they were teenagers and he would give me rides to Cindy’s school way across town.

Then there’s Lindsey, who was a track star and attended Chico State University on a scholarship. She married a wonderful young man, and I was maid of honor at her wedding. Cameron, our youngest brother, is the most like me artistically. He was never much of an athlete, like Chris and Doug; instead, he’s a prodigy at the piano. He still plays, and he also acts, sings, and writes music.

I rarely get angry when I think about my childhood, wishing for what we could have been if we’d had more of a nurturing home environment. It made us all strong fighters, primed to push through the toughest of struggles. But I do get frustrated with people who experienced relatively ideal lives and yet don’t appreciate what they’ve had. Performing with ABT, I have sometimes overheard my dance mates complaining about going to the same vacation spot with their families, going on and on about how they’d rather be sunbathing than rehearsing, or how bad we have it at ABT versus City Ballet, or some other inconsequential thing.

I would think about all that I had been through, what I had to navigate and overcome to stand on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera.
What are these people fussing about?
I’d chuckle to myself. I do what I love for a living; I have my art, spend most of my time devoted to it, and travel the world while most can only dream of this opportunity. When our idyllic life at ABT is gone and we can no longer perform, I can guarantee that every one of those dancers will regret not appreciating every second of it while it was theirs.

Knowing what I’d survived, what all my siblings had made it through, makes me all the more grateful.

A DECADE LATER, I
feel as if I’m still struggling to get to know my dad, to do the impossible and recover all that lost time. But we are not giving up. Since Dad and Debbie live in Wisconsin, they often make the trek to Chicago whenever ABT performs there.

And every single Sunday when the phone rings at ten in the morning, it’s my father on the line.