Just as I Am: A Memoir Read online

  Frontispiece

  My wedding day in December 1942, just after my eighteenth birthday. Seated: Me with my first husband, Kenneth. Back row, left to right: My mother, Fredericka; Kenneth’s cousin, the best man; Reverend Jones, Kenneth’s father, who married us; my sister, Emily, the maid of honor; my godfather; and my cousin, Sylvia Tyson, a bridesmaid.

  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  Dedication

  “Can a woman’s tender care cease toward the child she bare? Yes, she may forgetful be, yet I will remember thee.”

  —FROM THE HYMN “HARK, MY SOUL, IT IS THE LORD,” BASED ON ISAIAH 49:15

  To the one who has paid the greatest price for this gift to all—Just as I Am is dedicated to Joan.

  Courtesy of Cicely Tyson

  Love, Mom

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Foreword: A Mighty Seed by Viola Davis

  Introduction: This Life

  Part One: Planted

  1: The Vow

  2: String Bean

  3: Church Girl

  4: Transitions

  5: The Other America

  6: Unspoken

  7: Ground Shifts

  8: Divinely Guided

  9: Shoulder Taps

  10: Center Stage

  Part Two: Rooted

  11: Riverside Park

  12: Going Natural

  13: 1968

  14: Rebecca

  15: Jane Pittman

  16: Endings and Beginnings

  17: The Ladder

  18: Roots

  19: Thanksgiving Day

  20: Threadbare

  21: Lesson Before Dying

  Part Three: Bountiful

  22: A Strong Harvest

  23: Trip to Bountiful

  24: When Great Trees Fall

  25: Just as I Am

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  A Mighty Seed

  by Viola Davis

  I WAS introduced to Ms. Tyson on a television set in my family’s dilapidated apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Oddly, it was a television that rested upon another broken one, a set with aluminum foil on its antennae for better reception. My sisters Deloris and Dianne sat beside me, cross-legged in front of the screen, and together we witnessed magic—an image that changed my life at the tender age of seven. There was Ms. Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a made-for-TV movie based on the novel by Ernest J. Gaines. In the 1974 film, 110-year-old Jane Pittman reflects on her life, from her enslavement in her early twenties to the day nearly a century later when she defies Jim Crow by sipping from a whites-only water fountain.

  I couldn’t believe the same actress had played both the young woman and the elder one, but Deloris insisted she had. I stared at my sister, and then back at the screen, marveling at Ms. Tyson’s mastery of her craft, the brilliance with which she had transformed herself. It planted in me a seed that immediately took root. She was the manifestation of excellence and artistry, a dark-skinned, thick-lipped woman who truly mirrored me. I can pinpoint the exact moment when my life opened up, and it was there, in front of that set, that mine did. With one mesmerizing performance, with one gorgeously poignant rendering of her character, Ms. Tyson gave me permission to dream.

  I was no stranger to the wonder of dreams. For most of my life, dreams were all my siblings and I had. I was born in 1965, in a one-room sharecropper’s shack on a plantation in South Carolina. My father was illiterate, and my mother had only an eighth-grade education. Desperate to support my siblings and me, my parents moved us north. My father was an equestrian who groomed horses and prepared them for racing, and in Rhode Island he found work. We settled in Central Falls, a mill town a single square mile in size. Though my father did all he could to piece together a living for us, we still lived in abject poverty, on society’s lowest rung. Our deprivation far exceeded the financial. We were the only Black family in a town of white Irish Catholics, a family with no sense of ourselves, other than as invisible. There was no foundation of self-love or worth for us, no pathway to any kind of achievement.

  We settled for a time at 128 Washington Street—or 128, as my sisters and I referred to it. That condemned building represented exactly how the world felt about us. It was the demon that sat on my chest during those years, the devil that still hangs over me as a painful memory of the trauma. Our third-floor, rat-infested apartment lacked heat, plumbing, and hot water because the pipes froze during the harsh New England winters. There was a single room with electricity, and from that room, a long cord stretched to connect us to the outside world through that foiled-antennae television. It was on that screen, in 128, that Ms. Tyson flickered into my world.

  In Ms. Tyson I saw a dark-skinned woman with the same ’fro as my mother, an artist who carried herself with pride and poise. I was more than entertained by the story of Jane Pittman’s life. I was mesmerized by Ms. Tyson’s ability to transport me from my world to hers, to a place where I didn’t have to wade through garbage bins in search of food covered in maggots, a place where the demon on my chest disappeared for a time. Even as a child, I knew I wanted more than 128, wanted more than the rat-infested existence we endured. Watching Jane Pittman, I saw my ticket out of poverty and shame.

  Ms. Tyson, the daughter of immigrants, had herself risen out of poverty and onto the global stage. In her journey, I glimpsed possibilities for my own. For hours in our bedroom, my sisters and I would try to imitate everything about Ms. Tyson: her piercing gaze, those eyes brimming with memory and emotion, the way she held her jaw, how she so fully embodied her characters. By the time I was fourteen, I was so intent on following in her path that I took a bus to an acting class two hours away, since my family didn’t have a car. There I was, a complete geek in my gaucho pants and my purple mascara, doing all I could to imbue my characters with the empathy Ms. Tyson brought to her portrayals. I wanted to be exceptional at my craft. And more than anything, I wanted to be like her.

  Before I knew of her, Ms. Tyson had already made a name for herself as an accomplished actor, engraving our narratives into the storybook of the world. For six decades, Ms. Tyson has shown us who we are: vulnerable, magnificent, pain-ridden, and beautifully human. Time and time again, she has put our humanity on display, never compromising her dignity while creating a new chapter in Black history. In 1963 during the filming of the series East Side/West Side, she arrived on set rocking her ’fro, becoming the first Black woman to wear her natural hair on TV. Yet terms like “trailblazer” and “pioneer” don’t fully capture what she means to so many of us who looked up to her as the epitome of Black strength. Ms. Tyson is the Master Truth Teller—a warrior with fierce courage and supreme artistry, her instrument precisely tuned to tell stories that capture our being.

  Over the years, I’ve held close Ms. Tyson’s brave spirit as I’ve admired her work from afar. Then, in 2011 on the set of The Help, I finally met my muse. There before me on a muggy afternoon in Mississippi stood the divine giver of gifts, the legend who had inspired me to act. I embraced her, tears spilling from my eyes as I stammered through a flurry of thank-yous, none of them conveying the depth of my gratitude. We had no scenes together in the movie, and I wasn’t on set when Ms. Tyson filmed her segments as Constantine. But the director, Tate Taylor, recalled the dedication she brought to her work. She showed up on set in character and remained that way, insisting that she be called Constantine at all times. That’s just who Ms. Tyson is: excellence personified.

  Tow
ard the end of 2014, I asked my role model to play Ophelia, the mother of my character, Annalise, on the ABC series How to Get Away with Murder. In life, Ms. Tyson had nurtured and mentored me. On the set, she would do the same, though in a way that initially caught me off guard. She’d just turned ninety years old then, and she strode in already steeped in the tense history between mother and daughter. As she entered, I stood there with an enormous smile on my face and my arms outstretched to hug her. She marched right past me, reprimanding me with her stern expression, a mother putting a child in her place. She knew that if she’d broken the moment by stepping out of character, her portrayal wouldn’t be the same. Faced with that wall, I laughed and thought, Well maybe I need to get working. During our scenes in Murder, I experienced her ingenuity up close. With just her demeanor—with those lucid and revealing eyes, with traces of pain on her brow—Ms. Tyson often took viewers someplace you can go only if you’ve been there. That is because she does not simply act. She bares every corner of her soul. And in so doing, she accomplishes what all great art does: she makes us feel less alone.

  A few years later when Ms. Tyson heard I’d been nominated for an Academy Award for Fences, she called to congratulate me. I clutched the phone, giddy like the seven-year-old I’d been watching her play Jane Pittman all those winters ago. “I know the road you’re on,” she told me. By that, she meant she understood the world that a dark-skinned actress not seen as conventionally beautiful was navigating. She knew the barriers in the industry, all the ways, explicit and covert, that someone with my nose and my lips and my hair is told she isn’t enough. She was aware of how we Black women are expected to water down our complexity, how our pathology is seldom allowed exposure within the narratives written for us. She had confronted those obstacles. At the end of our call, she urged me to relish the path ahead, the accolades, all of it. Just as she’d once granted me permission to dream, she now nudged me to delight in the bounty. Here she was, offering me another gem, this time as a wise ally, lifting her lantern to light my way.

  This book is Ms. Tyson’s abundant treasure to each of us: her life, in her words, just as she is. She shares truths usually whispered between sisters and close friends in the dim light of a back bedroom, those candid declarations not often spoken aloud. And she tells her story the way only a Black woman can: in all of its dazzling authenticity, heels off and voice undulating, shifting between anguish and exuberance. The art of acting is the art of exposing, an emotional unveiling before others. Ms. Tyson is as revelatory on these pages as she has been on the stage. She is not just the performer who has so deftly captured the breadth of the human experience, with all of its unslicked edges. She is Cicely the woman, someone who has grappled with the fears and fragilities many of us carry. And during a season when so much in our culture is changing so quickly, she has now blessed us with a timeless jewel: her written legacy.

  And what a heritage it is—one not gauged by her number of extraordinary roles, but by the countless lives, like my own, that she has lifted. “You’ll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse,” Denzel Washington often said as we worked together on Fences. “I don’t care how much money you have or what level of notoriety you’ve achieved, you can’t take any of it with you.” There is a cap on earthly success, a ceiling on the amount of joy that possessions and awards can bring before disillusionment sets in. Our appearance, our prosperity, the applause: all of it is so fleeting. But a life of true significance has unlimited impact. It is measured in how well we’ve loved those around us, how much we’ve given away, how many seeds we’ve sown along our path. During her ninety-six years, Ms. Tyson has discovered the potent elixir: she has lived a life that is bigger than she is, an existence grounded in purpose and flourishing in service to others. That is her defining masterpiece. That is her enduring gift to us all.

  Introduction

  This Life

  I NEVER intended to write an autobiography. Decades ago, after I presented an award to Barbara Jordan—the trailblazing civil rights activist and the first African American elected to the Texas Senate—I asked her, “When are you going to write your book?” A smile spread across Barbara’s face. “When I have something to say,” she told me. In that moment, I decided that if a woman as accomplished as Barbara could get away with such a reply, so could I.

  Years later, a gentleman from The Washington Post interviewed me. “When are you going to do your book?” he asked. And just as I’d been doing for quite some time by then, I borrowed Barbara’s response. “When I have something to say,” I told him. “Well, I’ve been talking to you for three hours,” he said, chuckling, “and it sounds to me like you’ve got plenty to say.” I nodded and gave him the same wry grin Barbara had once given me, with no plan of ever committing my story to the page.

  Back then I did not see an autobiography as personal. I thought of it as a written record of a public journey—for me, an account of my stage and film roles, the parts of my experience in view of the world. It would be my story through the lens of Miss Jane Pittman, through Rebecca in Sounder and Binta in Roots. To be sure, there are traces of who I am in every woman I have portrayed. In the tenacity of Harriet Tubman and the quiet strength of Coretta Scott King, I can be glimpsed. In the trembling fingers of Constantine in The Help and in the determination of Mrs. Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful, my thumbprint is recognizable. Every one of these characters has left me with an emotional, spiritual, and psychological inheritance I will forever carry with me. But while each, in some way, reflected me, none could reveal who I am in my entirety.

  A few years ago, my manager, Larry Thompson, started in on me again about writing a memoir. “You’ve got to do a book,” he said one afternoon. “Yeah, you and the world think that,” I told him, shaking my head. “No, I’m serious,” he persisted. “It’s time.” I uttered the same refrain I’d been repeating to him for months: The lights and the trimmings of my career, the accolades—as far as I was concerned, none of it needed to be recounted. For me, the greatest gratification has come in refining my craft, not in gazing upon its merits. He stared at me for a long moment. “You’re talking about a Christmas tree,” he finally said. “What?” I asked. “Everybody thinks they know who Cicely Tyson is,” he explained. “But what they see are the ornaments on the branches, the decorations. They know nothing about the roots.”

  That conversation is what planted the seed for Just as I Am. Larry’s observation captured, for the first time, what I have felt for so many years. The glitter, the ribbons, the garnish—as wonderful as those things are, I have little desire to reflect on them solely. What I am far more interested in is how my tree, my story, first sprang into existence. How its roots, stretching far beneath the soil, have nourished and anchored me. How each tree ring whispers memories sometimes too troubling for me to recall. How its bark and rugged exterior have both guarded and grounded me. Every one of my experiences on the public stage has been rooted in my upbringing, those years spent at my mother’s elbow and on my father’s knee. That foundation, that rich earth, has given birth to who I am. Even now, in the winter of my life, I am just beginning to truly understand my identity.

  Every holiday season in the heart of New York’s Rockefeller Center, a spruce stands, proud and glistening, in a magnificent exhibition. And yet its display is but a snapshot of that tree’s history, one brief and final episode in its lifespan. The thousands of lights adorning its branches disclose nothing about its path, about its nurturing and growth over decades. Only when that tree is stripped of its embellishments does it bare its scars and show its true nature.

  Just as I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and a mother, a sister and a friend. I am an observer of human
nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by his hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.

  I stand amazed at this tree, this life. I stare up in awe at its branches, raising up toward heaven. I wonder about its origins, how a seed so minuscule could grow into a structure so vast and resilient. I’m still examining its genesis. To examine, to question, to discover and evolve—that is what it means to be alive. The day we cease to explore is the day we begin to wilt. I share my testimony in these pages not because I have reached any lasting conclusions, but because I have so much to understand. I am as inquisitive about life now as I was as a child. My story will never be finished, nor should it be. For as long as God grants me breath, I will be living—and writing—my next chapter.

  Part One

  Planted

  Like a tree planted by the water,

  I shall not be moved.

  —NEGRO SPIRITUAL

  1

  The Vow

  I KNOW instantly whether I should take a role. If my skin tingles as I read the script, then it is absolutely something I must do. But if my stomach churns, I do not touch the project, because if I did, I’d end up on a psychiatrist’s couch. Either my spirit can take the story or it cannot, and my senses have never misled me. That is how I knew, with unequivocal assurance, that I was meant to act in Sounder, the 1972 film about a loving family’s struggle during the Depression. What I didn’t know is how Sounder’s tide would carry me toward a profound purpose—one spawned by comments from strangers.

  The role offered to me in the film wasn’t the one I would’ve chosen. “We want you to play the schoolteacher,” the producers said to me as they handed me the script. Yet as I read the story, I felt certain I was meant to portray the mother, Rebecca, the wife of Nathan. Nathan was his family’s backbone, Rebecca its robust and steady heartbeat. In that mom’s devotion—in the tender way she cared for their three children even as she rested her palm in the small of her husband’s back—I recognized my own mother. “But you’re too young, too pretty, too sexy to play the mom,” I was told. I was forty-seven then, though for years at the suggestion of my first director, Warren Coleman, I’d been claiming to be a full decade younger, with taut cocoa skin clinging to my secret. “What does my appearance have to do with acting?” I retorted, amused that I, a schoolgirl once called a skinny little nappy-head, was now being ruled out as too attractive. “As an artist, I should be able to portray anyone.” But the producers wouldn’t hear of it.