The Year My Mother Didn’t Dance for Baba

When my mother Ella Massie Marks was young, she had one great love: dance.

“I lived it, I ate it, I breathed it,” she told me. “I worked at it five hours a day and if I had a rehearsal, another five hours a day. I never thought I wanted anything else in the world.”

Raised in an old Virginia family on a farm with four brothers, when she turned twelve she was told she could no longer roam the farm with them. It wasn’t lady-like. So she turned to ballet and found her passion.

In 1947, just after she turned eighteen, my mother Ella was studying at Jacob’s Pillow, an acclaimed dance summer camp near Tanglewood in the Berkshires. For young dancers hoping to make a career of ballet, it was the place to study. It was Ella’s second year and there was a new teacher. Her name was Margaret Craske.

That was the first year Miss Craske taught in the United States after spending seven years with Baba in India. Word around the Pillow was that she had been with a guru in India, that she was a witch of some sort, and that she’d go off to be alone in the woods and keep silence. It was also known that she was one of the world’s greatest ballet teachers.

She captivated both Ella and her best friend Tex Hightower and eventually became their lifelong mentor. Like most of her students, Ella and Tex always called her Miss Craske.

At the time, Ella was a soloist at the Virginia Civic Ballet. She thought pretty highly of herself. So she marched into Miss Craske’s advanced class only to be “tossed out on my ear.”

“‘Ducks, out with you, you don’t belong here,’” she remembered Miss Craske telling her. “My ego was crushed.”

The next day she rallied her courage and ventured into Miss Craske’s intermediate class. With great relief, she remembered, she was allowed to stay. Early on during that first class, Miss Craske adjusted my mother’s arm and caught her eye. That one glance transformed her life.

“I have never seen such a depth of compassion, I couldn’t believe it. I never had a feeling like that. I just knew, it was such a gift,” she said. And while Ella didn’t know it at the time, she later said that moment was also “the beginning of learning to let go of my illusions and become practical.”

With Miss Craske’s assurances, her parents agreed to allow Ella to study in New York. Miss Craske was on tour much of the time that first year. When she returned to the city my mother and Tex would spend hours listening to her tell them stories about her life with Baba.“She fed us with an eye dropper,” she said.

Ella was completely drawn to Miss Craske and her stories, but she also didn’t quite know what to make of Baba. It was the late forties and early fifties in the United States when the idea of an Indian Master was quite alien. Still, when Miss Craske told her that Baba was coming to Myrtle Beach in 1952, she knew she had to meet Him. She also knew she couldn’t tell her parents. So in the months leading up to Baba’s visit, Ella scrimped and saved every extra cent she could and finally saved enough to fly to Myrtle Beach.

“Before I met Baba and when I was a young dancer with Miss Craske, I was a dreamy creature. I came from a very protected Virginia family, there had been servants. I didn’t even know much about how to pick up my own clothes,” Ella said. “After I met Baba, I had to grow up and realize I wasn’t going to be Margot Fonteyn [one of the greatest ballerinas of her time.] I was heartbroken because it was my desire, my love, but sometimes what gets taken away makes room for something better.”

Just over a year after that meeting, Ella married a young Episcopal priest named Peter Marks who wanted to live a “a Christ-like life.” They had an “open” parish in Spanish Harlem on 109th and 5th Avenue. My father worked with the gangs and my mother opened a dance school for the neighborhood girls. It was one of the happiest times of their lives.

When Baba came in 1956, Ella took Peter to meet Baba at the Delmonico Hotel in New York. Baba greeted them, gave my mother prasad and also flicked her belly. At the time, she was nine months pregnant with my sister Wyatt, now called Viola.

In 1958, Ella learned that Meher Baba was coming West again. She was excited, it would be another chance to see Baba and be with her dancer friends. The visit was scheduled for May. She thought she’d find a way to go, especially when she learned that Tex and some of her other dancer friends would be performing for Baba in the Barn.

But when Miss Craske learned that my mother would again be nine months pregnant at the time of Baba’s visit, she suggested that it be prudent for Ella to stay home.

“She was the soul of pragmatism,” my mother said. Miss Craske didn’t want there to be any distractions, like someone giving birth at the Center, that could take the focus away from Baba.

My mother had a profound sense of loss. For many years, I associated my birth with the fact that she missed seeing Baba that year. When I shared this with her, she would try to assuage me. “When you were born, I somehow ended up in a private room overlooking the East River,” she said. “It was one of the most peaceful times I’ve ever had at the hospital.”

When she got home, she heard how beautifully her friends had danced for Baba and felt quite low for having missed it. She put a record on and it turned out to be Marian Anderson, the great contralto, singing “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.”

“Again, it was such an experience of transcendence, and wholeness and goodness and closeness,” she said. “I was told Baba loved her singing.”

My mother always regretted not having danced for Baba. But sometime in the 1990s, she did have the opportunity to dance in Mandali Hall thanks to Cathy Riley. Here is how that happened in Cathy’s words:

“When I traveled to India sometime in the 1990s, I befriended Ella Marks. Something about her drew me to her: her wisdom, her inner calm, and Baba strength. We were easily at home with each other right away. I loved her stories about Ms. Craske, whom I had served and loved at Dilruba.

“Every Sunday, the Westerners who lived in Meherazad or Meherabad would put together programs to entertain the Mandali. What started bubbling up for me was a desire to present one of my original songs. Realizing that Ella was a retired ballet dancer, and that I’d written music to a Rumi poem called, ‘Dance, ’ I asked Ella if she would like to choreograph some movements to dance while I sang this song.

“Ella was hesitant at first, as she hadn’t danced in years and the space in Mandali Hall was not conducive to freedom of movement. There was really hardly any room at all to move about. Somehow, I persuaded her to try and we practiced a few times together before our grand performance.

“I recall being so touched by Ella’s choreographed movements, flowing so perfectly with the Rumi poem and my musical setting. While she danced, I was thrilled for her as her dance movements were so filled with grace and reverence for her Beloved. The room scintillated with this energy flowing from Ella.

“The Mandali were truly appreciative and laudatory! Ella and I enjoyed basking in their thankful praises as we faced His Chair and thanked the Lord of the Dance for this blessed opportunity to entertain Him.”

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The words of that Rumi poem, translated by Coleman Barks*:

Dance if you’re broken open
Dance if you’ve torn the bandage off
Dance in the middle of the fighting
Dance in your blood
Dance when you’re perfectly free,
Dance when you’re perfectly free.

Struck the dancers hear the tambourine inside them
Maybe you don’t hear the tambourine inside you, or the leaves clapping time.
Close the ears on your head that listen
Only to lies
There are other things to see and hear inside you
Paradise…

We are fed and refreshed by that Music
As an infant at the breast
Drink that tambourine inside you, inside your chest
Seekers, hear that tambourine inside you, it’s sparkling gold
There’s dance music and a brilliant city inside you, inside your soul

*This Longing: Poetry, Teaching, Stories and Letter of Rumi, Versions by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, p.55