Famous dancer reunited with sister

No, it wasn't Tony, who had died of cancer 18 months earlier. And not Dale, the IBM executive in New York.

The Associated Press story he had read in The Tampa Tribune was about Arthur Bell, a 71-year-old man, once a pioneering ballet dancer, who'd been found homeless and disoriented on a Brooklyn street, his feet almost frozen.

Arthur! The missing brother, the one who had fled a stifling life in a small Southern town as the first son of a preacher who reviled dancing - the thing Arthur loved best in all the world. The brother she and her four sisters and two brothers had hunted for decades.

AP PHOTO Arthur Bell, the first African-American dancer of the New York Ballet, holds a pose from the ballet "Illuminations."

''I said, 'Oh Lord. Is he dead or is he alive?''' Coleman said. ''He has risen. My brother rose on Easter Sunday.''

''Only God could do this,'' another sister, Annie Stubblefield said yesterday, as she and her sisters worked to arrange a reunion with their brother, now in a New York City nursing home regaining strength and relearning to walk.

By midday they had arranged for Dale Bell, who had met Arthur only once, as a grade-schooler when the dancer returned briefly in the mid-1950s, to visit the nursing home this week when he returns from a business trip. The rest of the family plans to visit as soon as they can make arrangements.

Arthur Bell's reaction to hearing about his family was recounted by social worker Clare Osman: ''He said, 'Oh, my God, Dale.' He said, 'That's a great thing.' He has a chance to see all of his family again.''

The reunion was a long time coming. His sisters recall a charming teen-ager who loved to sing and could dance like no one else they knew, but who so chafed at his strict upbringing that he boarded a bus for New York City on the day he graduated from high school. World War II was not yet ended.

Patricia was in elementary school and decided the brother she was crazy about just didn't love her. Evangeline was 5 and remembers the day Arthur sat down and told her he was going to New York to dance. Sharon was an infant; she grew up hearing about the glamorous brother who had picked out her name.

''He was just determined to be a dancer,'' Stubblefield said. ''He was determined not to be a laborer, and he made it.''

They saw him only once again, the quick visit in the 1950s when their father was ill. After that, Arthur Jr. fell out of touch and they watched his career from afar, hearing from an aunt that his dancing career had led him to London and Paris.

Then he seemed to vanish entirely, and all their efforts to locate him ended in dead ends.

04-14-98