Manifesting Beauty: Jeannine Osayande Seeks Joy and Change Through Dance and Stories
Jeannine Osayande is the fifth generation of her family to live in Swarthmore. Photo: Satya Nelms
Jeannine Osayande likes to tell the story of how African dance found her on a street corner in Harvard Square. “The drums were playing, and a dancer suddenly pushed me into the circle,” she recalls. “And I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”
Osayande — then called Rachel Jeannine Lee — was 18 years old when she moved from Swarthmore to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her plan was to attend Lesley College and become a teacher like her mother. Also, she was following a boy, Juan Daley, now Chenoa Osayande, who had come to Swarthmore for high school as part of the A Better Chance program. The two would later marry.
Cambridge in 1979 was full of music and life. It seemed as if every street corner was a stage for a musician, dancer, or storyteller. Osayande spent many evenings walking around and taking it all in. Tracy Chapman might be singing, or storyteller Brother Blue might be spinning tales. For a Black girl from a quiet Quaker town, Cambridge was a revelation.
Then one night, as she was leaving her apartment, she heard drums. The rhythm drew her. “I just kept walking and walking,” she recalls. “I got into Harvard Square and saw this big circle of drums, and people drumming and dancing. And it grabbed me.”
After that, she started going to hear and see the drummers and dancers every weekend, following the sound down Massachusetts Avenue, to be part of the circle. “At some point, the folks there gave me the basket,” she recalls. “I would walk around and be the money collector.” Before long, someone handed her a set of maracas to play.
Finally, one evening, Osayande felt a push on her back. Godis Shani Asantewaa Strothers, a dancer and a student at MIT, had picked her out. And suddenly, there she was in the circle, dancing.
That was the night that changed her life.
The 1970s were a good time for an American to learn African diasporic dance traditions. National companies from recently indepen- dent countries like Ghana, Senegal, and Guinea were touring the world, performing and teaching.
Osayande began studying with a group called the Art of Black Dance and Music. She took eight to 10 classes a week — sometimes two a night — even while pregnant, and when her children were young. In the winter, she recalls, “They’d plow the road and you’d have snow up to your waist. And we would have our backpack, and a baby here, and a baby in the stroller, and our hiking boots. And we would just walk to get to those classes! We’d do anything it would take to get there.”
Growing Up in Swarthmore
Osayande was born in Swarthmore in 1960 to Betty Ann (née Coleman) and Donald Lee. Her mother taught at Nether Providence Elementary School, and her father was Swarthmore’s first Black policeman. In time, he would become the town’s chief of police. Little Jeannine and her two older sisters, Annette and Donna, lived with their parents in the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore, in the same house Osayande lives in now. Growing up, she was surrounded by family, and by neighbors who were family, too. Many of the children she played with were descended from her parents’ and grandparents’ playmates. “I always sat under the elders and listened to the stories,” Osayande recalls. “What we call ear hustling.”
One story was about Osayande’s great-grandmother, Martha Tillman. Tillman had worked for and lived with the Ladds, a white family, on Lafayette Avenue in Swarthmore, at the dawn of the twentieth century. As an adult, Osayande searched the historical records, and found her listed on the 1910 census rolls: “Martha Tillman, servant, age 32.” The Ladds were 31 and 32. Martha cared for their small children.
But Martha had a child of her own. Because of segregation, her son, John, had to live on the other side of town, in the segregated Black neighborhood, cared for by a great-aunt. “Here’s my great- grandmother,” Osayande observes, “making sure this family is well and has what they need, and taking care of them and their children. And she only gets to see her son once or twice a week. I can’t imagine that! But that is America.”
A Storytelling Education
Like the elders in her neighbor- hood, Osayande became a teller of stories. She told them to her children, so they would know their people’s history. Later, she told them to her grandchildren.
In 2009, she had the opportunity to delve deeper into the craft of collecting and disseminating stories. She was invited to participate in a yearlong Community Folklife Documentation Workshop training, through the Philadelphia Folklore Project, learning about ethnography, transcription, and interview techniques. Bringing her skills back to Swarthmore, she put them to work interviewing her neighbors and recording them on DVDs under the title “Making a Homeplace.” Like her own, many of the Black families in the neighborhood had lived there, going back generations, since the beginning of the twentieth century. She wanted to make sure their stories weren’t lost.
This project seems still more pressing now, as the neighborhood is rapidly changing. Today, Blacks are a minority in the Historically Black Neighborhood, Osayande says, with housing prices rising fast. Some members of the old-time families can afford them, but many cannot. Houses where multiple generations of a family once lived are now inhabited by new people. It’s hard not to feel it as a loss.
Some newcomers seem to move to the neighborhood precisely because of its history, Osayande says, valuing the community and its spirit. Others don’t seem interested in learning the customs of a place where, for decades, people shared celebrations, glasses of lemonade on front porches, and one another’s griefs.
“For us, it’s the first time in the history of the neighborhood you have children not acknowledge you,” Osayande explains. “That’s one of those rules in the community: that you see your elders and you speak. And the elders speak to the children.”
But while she doesn’t want to lose the past, she’s also thinking about the future. She’s asking, “How do we get to a new way of being in community?”
The Birthday Party Story
One of Osayande’s favorite stories is one she calls “The Birthday Party Story.” (She credits F. Nii-Yartey of the Noyam African Dance Institute for helping her make it ready for performance.)
In the story, Jeannine is 12 years old and waiting for an invitation to her best friend’s birthday party.
Her friend is white.
The invitation never comes.
“Everybody has a story of being left out,” Osayande says. ”Especially when you’re one of a very small number of Black people in a larger white community.”
This one really gets going when young Jeannine, surprising herself, gets dressed up and determines to go to the party anyway. “I was embarrassed about it,” she says. “But I also knew that I should be there. I should not be kept out because I’m Black.”
Her mother, having no idea Jeannine wasn’t invited, drops her off. Jeannine gets herself up the steps with her gift, her knees trembling, and knocks.
The friend’s mother answers the door. There’s a long pause.
“She’s looking at me,” Osayande recalls. “And I’m looking at her. And we both know what just happened.”
The mother lets her in.
At this point, the story seems as though it might be just about over. Some girls question Jeannine about coming without an invitation, but mostly the day goes fine. There is softball and singing and cake.
Then the story jumps ahead in time and takes an unexpected turn. Osayande describes how — 40 years later — she runs into the friend’s mother on a visit to a nursing home where the mother turns out to be living. What they say to each other — the complicated reckoning between them — is the real point here, as the story makes room for a complicated forgiveness.
“As you get older, you figure out that forgiveness is always ongoing,” Osayande reflects. “It’s a relief to let go.”
In Osayande’s community, too, there is a question about what can be forgiven, and how. Osayande is taken aback by the number of people she talks to who believe the HBNS was created by choice rather than by segregation.
Other questions and grievances date back decades. Were real estate taxes fairly assessed in the Black neighborhood? Did the town permit commercial ventures there they wouldn’t have stood for elsewhere in town? In the 1990s, when the decades-old grocery at the corner of Yale and Kenyon became a restaurant, the neighborhood tried to stop it. They complained to borough council but got no support. “They said the taxes would be good for the town,” Osayande recalls. “They said that a restaurant would be good for the town.”
Contending that borough’s Zoning Hearing Board had illegally permitted the business to change use from a store to restaurant, some of the neighbors went to court to appeal the board’s decision. But by then, too many months had elapsed. Legally, they had missed their window of opportunity.
As a result, “We had years of 18-wheelers pulling up at 5 a.m., honking their horns for the owner to open the door,” Osayande remembers. “We would be overrun with cars and trash and cigarettes. Everybody stopped sitting in their backyards.”
She concludes: “It would never have happened in any other neighborhood.”
Jeannine Osayande (left) with her mother, Betty Ann Wilson, in 2017. Photo: Andy Shelter
Social Change Through Dance
Osayande moved back to Pennsylvania from Massachusetts in 1989. After a decade of learning, she was ready to start her own dance company. And with Dunya Performing Arts Company she did eventually become a teacher, though not in the way she had once imagined. Her company offers performances, workshops, teacher training, and residencies in various forms of African dancing and drumming to many area schools. Osayande has been teaching it to third-graders at Swarthmore-Rutledge School for 29 years.
But dancing and drumming aren’t all that’s being taught. Osayande and her colleagues use that material as a springboard for lessons about the broader culture and achievements of various regions of Africa. She’ll call out, “Name one thing you know about Africa!” After touching on (perhaps) coffee, complex surgeries, and the calendar, she introduces the class to some examples of African philosophy.
She especially likes to describe the Sankofa, an Adinkra symbol that looks like a bird, with its feet facing forward and its head facing backward, carrying a precious egg in its mouth. As Osayande explains to her students, the Sankofa embodies the importance of remembering the past as you move into the future.
Through learning about African culture, children start to reflect on their own cultures, Osayande explains. “In that way, it’s not like ‘Ooh, it’s this exotic African thing that’s over here.’” She wants to help American children learn to see connections between their own traditions, celebrations, and values, and those of people from around the world.
Then, she hopes, students ask themselves, “What else can I know?” Having learned about Africa’s contributions, maybe they’ll be inspired to learn about other places and people.
She also hopes non-Black children will begin to look at their Black classmates — their neighbors and fellow-citizens — differently. “For them to really see us as people,” she says. “Not what the news says. Or even what has been put in the history books.”
Her ideas about what art can do are shaped in part by a summer she spent in India, performing in a touring dance, music, and spoken-word piece called “Colors of Her Heart.” The project was developed by Indian performing artist and activist Mallika Sarabhai of the Darpana Academy, the mother of one of Osayande’s dance students at University of the Arts.
“With Mallika, I saw a whole other level,” Osayande recalls. She saw how the performance, combining storytelling with dance, song and music, shifted the way some in the audience thought about community in service of art for social change.
Looking Forward
There are things Osayande misses about the past, but she welcomes the many things that have changed for the better. She notes the new vibrancy of Swarthmore’s town center — what Osayande calls “Uptown” — the introduction of live music and the farmers market. “Before,” she recalls, “things shut down at six. Nothing was open on Sunday.”
Something else is changing, too. She sees people — white people — ready to talk about the realities of race in new ways.
“People I’ve known for years in Swarthmore have reached out,” she says. “I’ve been able to have conversations with folks about things we wouldn’t have talked about before. So I see growth.” She smiles.
“Growth in people,” Osayande says. “It’s there.”
In summer 2020, Jeannine Osayande was one of several Philadelphia-area artists commissioned by the People’s Light and Theatre Company to produce art “that speaks to this historic moment of activism and reckoning.” You can see her work, including a rendition of “The Birthday Party Story,” here.
