My big sister, Janice, was born in 1969, and my parents commenced a typical military family life, moving from base to base, which my mother quickly realized was not the post–Puerto Rico life she had hoped for. When Jan was four, they decided to have another baby, desperately hoping for a boy. Dad was slated for an important test flight the day I was born. He would have been first in his class, but missed the test and came in second. Janice was thrilled to have a little sister, but when my mother heard “It’s a girl!” she was so mad she refused to see me.
They whisked me away, and by the time they finally brought me in to see her, I had casts on both legs. I’d been born with severely inverted legs. An orthopedic specialist, who just happened to be there that day by a stroke of luck—or perhaps by fate—explained to my parents that my crooked little limbs would have to be straightened, first with the casts and then with painful braces that I’d have to be kept in for three years, forcing the bones and joints to develop in a normal position.
My mother was fierce about those casts, as she is about pretty much everything when it comes to the people she loves. She was adamant that my legs were going to be normal and strong. The standard three-year treatment was accomplished in eighteen months because she kept the braces—little boots connected by a metal bar—firmly on me 24/7. Family members would shake their heads, take pity on me and try to remove them, but Mama prevailed and the boots stayed on. I have scars from an infection that developed when the braces became too tight, but I can’t complain about these legs of mine. They’ve served me well. This is probably the beginning of my ballerina’s dance-through-the-agony disposition. Before I learned to walk, I learned that sometimes life requires a girl to be a tough little cookie.
My mother adored the name Mayte, a Spanish conjunction of Maria and Teresa, the Basque word for “beloved.” As a teenager, she’d seen this name in a novella, torn out the page, and kept it posted on her bedroom wall for years. Janice’s middle name is Mayte, but the conventional world of the late 1960s decreed that children were better off with “American” (meaning “white”) first names, and that temporarily swayed Mama. When I came along four and a half years later, she figured if she couldn’t have the boy she hoped for, she was by God going to name this girl exactly what she wanted to: Mayte Jannell, my middle name being a combination of John and Nelly.
When Prince and I were first hanging out—not yet lovers, just friends and collaborators—he got it in his head that I should change my name to Arabia.
“Man, it’d be cool if your name was Arabia,” he kept saying.
Prince had a way of getting people to go along with ideas like that. They’d get swept up in his genius, not just for music but also for creating characters. He’d see some unique aspect of a person, and he’d highlight that. He never bullied anyone into anything, just nicely suggested that it would be really cool if a person changed her name to… oh, I don’t know—Apollonia, maybe. Or Vanity. How cool would that be?
The fourth or fifth time he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you changed your name to Arabia?” I flatly said, “No. That would not be cool. My mom would kill me.”
In my mind at the time, the wrath of Mama loomed larger than the favor of a thousand rock stars.
Mama was raised in a strict Catholic home. She dreamed of becoming a dancer, but that was not an option. She tried to enroll my sister in dance lessons, but Jan was a rough-and-tumble tomboy who would have nothing to do with our mother’s ambition to either be a ballerina or raise one. Jan was the sporty one, playing volleyball and soccer; I was the girly girl, living in tutus and “turn-around dresses.” (Gia is turning out to be comfortably in the middle, completely herself in a cute little dress with sneakers.) By the time I was three, to Mama’s delight, I was begging to dance, but you had to be five years old to take lessons at most studios. By this time, we’d moved to North Carolina, so it wasn’t hard for my mom to locate a place near the base where no one knew us.
“When they ask you how old you are,” she told me, “do this.” She held up her hand, palm flat, showing five fingers, and I did exactly as I was told after she dropped me off. Whether the ballet teacher believed me or not, she must have figured I was ready, because she took me to the barre and I never looked back. Over the years, no matter how chaotic my home life was, dance was my sanctuary. It wasn’t a task for me to concentrate. I never had to discipline myself to endure the practice. I loved every hour, even when it hurt. I loved feeling the music in my strong, straight bones.