Just as I Am: A Memoir Read online

  Three months went by and the team was still searching for an actress to play Rebecca. Meanwhile, feeling no less convinced that I was destined for the role, I had Rebecca’s lines down, do you hear me? After another month had passed, I received a call from Bill Haber, my agent at the time.

  “Well,” he said, exhaling into the receiver, “you got the role of the mother.” I didn’t say a word.

  “Did you hear me?” he pressed.

  “Yes, I heard you,” I answered calmly. “So when do we begin?”

  “But aren’t you excited?” he asked.

  “About what?” I said. “I knew all the time that the role was mine. I was just waiting for them to discover it.”

  An actress the producers had gone after had wanted more money than they were willing to pay, and so she’d passed on the film. I could’ve saved them the trouble of their negotiation because the role was never for her. The money wasn’t much, Haber explained; I’d earn around $6,000—a pittance even in those days. Yet I would’ve taken the role for half of that. It’s how convinced I was that Rebecca was my character.

  When filming began in Baton Rouge in spring 1971, the nation had teetered off balance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gone, his life sliced short three years earlier by a bullet thundering across a hotel balcony. On that fateful evening in Memphis, the Civil Rights Movement had lost not only its leader but also its way, wandering in search of a new path forward. It was in this America, one grieving and limping from a deep racial reckoning, that Blaxploitation cinema found a fertile audience. In a spate of films during the early 1970s depicting urban life, the Black man, muted over centuries by bigotry’s cruel muzzle, at last got to play the hero in his own story line. But this newfound creative freedom came at a cost. In my mind, these films gave rise to a misery more harrowing than the realities they portrayed. The Black woman was often cast in a powerless supporting role, or as a hypersexual female eager to fall into bed. Ghetto life and vulgarity were glorified. Even still, theatergoers seemed ravenous for this movie genre, and directors, driven by profits, rushed to satiate that appetite. During this period, a producer had the gall to say to me, “Niggers want sex and violence, and we plan to give them both.” He did not flinch as he spoke.

  Given the box-office success of films such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, making a movie about a tight-knit Black family of Louisiana sharecroppers took some nerve. Marty Ritt, a gem of a director, clearly had plenty of it. With characteristic zeal, he forged ahead with filming Sounder, which was based on an award-winning children’s novel and adapted for the screen by Lonne Elder. I did not know how the movie would ultimately resonate, nor was that my chief concern. I was focused on emptying my soul into Rebecca, my first lead role in a major film. Sharing the stage with me was Paul Winfield, who played Nathan, and Kevin Hooks, who portrayed David, the eldest of our children and the son who narrates the story. Paul, who’d already become known for his star turn in the 1968 NBC sitcom Julia with my beloved friend Diahann Carroll, was to be Sounder’s headliner. I, then in the infancy of my film career, wasn’t slated to even have my name listed on the movie’s poster. Circumstances would later have something to say about that.

  Before Sounder’s release, I traveled across the country on a promotional tour with some of the other cast members. From San Francisco to Boston, Indianapolis to Richmond, reporters who’d previewed the film gathered to interview me about the production. It was during my stop in Philadelphia that the earth quaked.

  Among the group of reporters stood a Caucasian gentleman, auburn-haired and around age thirty. He cleared his throat, lifted the microphone to his lips, and locked his gaze on me. “I have a confession to make,” he said slowly, as if calculating the impact of what he would reveal. “I never thought of myself as being the least bit prejudiced,” he said. “But as I watched the film, I just could not believe that the son was calling his father ‘Daddy.’ That is what my son calls me.” Silence blanketed the room.

  Well, child, I’ll tell you: my mouth fell open like a broken pocketbook. As the man’s words shuddered through me, I forced a smile. But all the while I was thinking, My Lord, how appalling. This man clearly knew nothing about our shared humanity. He had no understanding of God’s multihued creation, of his place, next to yours and mine, in that colorful family mosaic. From his perspective, there had to be something radically wrong with a Black child calling his father “Daddy,” a term he thought reserved for his own kind. How could Nathan, once declared three-fifths human by our Constitution, be worthy of such endearment? How could a fraction of a man stand forehead to forehead with him? That would put Nathan on par with all those born into the privilege of whiteness, as he had been. I don’t know what stunned me more: the fact that the man believed what he did, or that he had the audacity to say it aloud.

  After a lengthy pause, I regained my composure and my tongue. “I have to congratulate you, sir,” I said, my tone tinged with sarcasm. “It takes a lot of courage to stand up here, in the midst of your peers, and admit you never thought you were prejudiced until you saw the film. Thank you.” I was so disturbed by what I’d heard that, in that moment, this was the only response I could muster.

  I left that press conference saying to myself, Maybe it’s just this one. Surely, amid the shrill call for equality sounded during those years, there couldn’t be many who shared this man’s view. That is how I attempted to console myself.

  Yet as I continued touring the country, I became acquainted with an America I’d seldom encountered up to then. At the time, I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about this nation I have always called home. I’d grown up in New York and lived either there or in Los Angeles, two culturally progressive cities. But outside of that bubble, in the many towns and communities I regularly flew over, the seed of Dr. King’s dream might have been sown, but it obviously had not germinated. During a stop in the Midwest, another reporter’s comment reinforced that notion.

  “I didn’t know that Black men and women had the kind of loving relationship that we see between Nathan and Rebecca,” a young woman stated. “Their connection didn’t seem believable to me.” I was so taken aback by her assessment that I did not respond. So seldom had Black families been portrayed nurturing one another on-screen that, when art indeed imitated life, the truth of that narrative was met with deep skepticism. Embedded in this woman’s observation was an assumption that lives at the center of all bias: You are not like me. You are intrinsically different. And that difference deems you inferior.

  I recognized these comments for what they were: pure ignorance. Anger would’ve been the justified response, and for a time in private, I was certainly apoplectic. But as life has taught me more than once, resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it. These reporters’ beliefs, however offensive they may have been to me, were not a bitterness to be nursed; they were a lesson to be heeded. So rather than recoiling in exasperation at the ideas expressed, I leaned in and listened intently at every remaining tour stop. Much of what I heard mimicked what those two reporters had dared voice. And the more aware I became of the bigotry that existed against Black people, what might’ve been reason to seethe became, for me, a reason to pursue my craft with new purpose. I returned home from the road saying to myself, Sister, you’ve got some educating to do.

  It was at this juncture that I made a conscious decision: I would use my profession as my platform—a stage from which to make my voice heard by carefully choosing my projects and portrayals. I could not afford the luxury of simply being an actress. Yes, I was already selecting only those roles that gave me goose pimples, just as Rebecca in Sounder had. But as an artist with the privilege of the spotlight, I felt an enormous responsibility to use that forum as a force for good, as a place from which to display the full spectrum of our humanity. My art had to both mirror the times and propel them forward. I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people—to change the way Black women in particular wer
e perceived, by reflecting our dignity.

  When I made the choice to pursue acting, the last thing in the world I intended to be was an actress for the cause. Like most artists, I expected to continually hone my craft by playing all types of roles, with little consideration for how those portrayals might impact the cultural dialogue. But the racial climate called for something more of me, and while traveling this great land, I resolved to answer in the one way I knew how.

  Never once, during the billowing smoke of the Civil Rights Movement, would I be spotted at a Woolworth lunch counter, braving a sit-in while hate-mongers hurled spit and spite. Never would I parade up and down the boulevards of Selma or Montgomery, a picket sign thrust high alongside my shouts. I admire the valiant freedom fighters who took to the streets, but it wasn’t in my makeup to demonstrate in these ways. Nonetheless, I was set on speaking in the only place I felt courageous enough to do so—on the stage. I protested using not my own words, but those of the characters I inhabited. Fifty years after I made a silent pact with myself to play women whose legacies uplift us, that vow still guides me.

  This life is something. When you’ve lived as long as I have, others always seem to be asking how you are. “I’m here—still,” I’m fond of responding. “God must have more work for me to do that I haven’t yet done.” Over nearly a century, I’ve witnessed the times shifting even as I’ve watched them come swinging back around, full circle, to the moment we are standing in today. There is more of this glorious pilgrimage in my rearview mirror than there is up ahead.

  When I think now on the promise I made all those seasons ago, I recognize it as a defining moment, one from which scores of others would flow. And what preceded that pivot was a miracle that confounds me: that a reticent girl, born in the slums and bathed in the mighty timbre of a church organ, ever stumbled into such a grand arena.

  2

  String Bean

  MY MOTHER strolls along the sidewalk, pushing me, six months old, in a carriage. The South Bronx is just yawning awake, its wide boulevards not yet teeming with immigrant families scrambling toward their trains. Mom has risen early for some solitude before the day’s responsibilities intrude. A Jewish woman, with short black curls framing her kind face, approaches. My mother’s instinct is not to flee. It is 1925, an era in which neighbors are still more trusted than feared. The lady leans under the large hood of the carriage and studies my squinty face and bald head.

  “Take care of that child,” she whispers. Mommy scans the woman’s eyes in search of what she means. “She has a sixth sense,” she continues. “She’s going to make you very proud one day—and she’s going to take care of you in your old age.”

  The lady smiles and nods and then disappears down the sidewalk as my mother stares after her. The two had never spotted each other amid the factories and alleyways of the neighborhood. They will never again cross paths. Yet on this morning, during the daybreak of my life, providence sweeps them together for a singular exchange. And there I lay, swaddled and slumbering, as oblivious to the roar of passing locomotives as I am to the prophecy of a stranger.

  * * *

  My parents grew up together in Nevis, an island cradled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea in the British West Indies. My mother, Fredericka Theodosia Huggins, was the only child of Mary Jane Sargent, a seamstress, and Charles Huggins, a fisherman who drowned when his boat capsized during a storm. Mary Jane and Charles were never married. My father, William Augustine Tyson, was one of eight children, or at least the eight he knew about. His dad, John Edward Tyson, the overseer of a wealthy family’s estate, was said to have fathered twenty-four children. Eight of them were with my dad’s mother, Caroline “Carol” Matilda Wilkes Tyson.

  Carol—or “Kyar,” as my mother mispronounced her name, along with nearly every other word she spoke in her thick Caribbean accent—was a wayfarer by nature, a spirit unable to tolerate stillness. Whenever Carol felt good and ready, she’d leave the house for weeks, with no indication of when she’d return. In would step Mary Jane, a dear friend of Carol and John’s. My maternal grandmother had a heart more wide open than her embrace. She’d sweep those Tyson children into her long arms, caring for each with the same gentleness as she showed her own daughter. It was squeezed around her supper table, in a shanty the size of a thimble, that my mom and dad became acquainted. One evening as Mary Jane bowed her head, the sound of grace rising to mix with the smell of goat stew, my father winked clandestinely at my mother. He was just twelve years old then, already gregarious and rehearsing his mannish charms. My mother, one month his senior and more timid than I’d one day be, blushed and looked away.

  Nevis is tiny, even when it puffs out its chest and stands tall alongside its big sister, St. Kitts. The entire island is about thirty-five square miles; you can drive its full length, from Newcastle in the north to Saddle Hill near its bottom edge, in less than a half-hour. The island’s capital, Charlestown, on the western coast, was the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton. My parents’ homes were on opposite ends of Nevis. Mom and her mother shared their two-room hovel on the northwest shore, in the village of Westbury in St. Thomas parish. My father was born in that same parish, but his father, then a laborer desperate to lift his low wages, moved the family from one village to the next. When my dad and his siblings weren’t huddled around Mary Jane’s table in Westbury, they mostly lived in the southern village of Gingerland, so named for the plenteous crops of the spice once grown there.

  My parents’ villages sat miles apart, but there was no distance at all between the values that governed each. My mother and father grew up in the Episcopal Church, under the watchful gaze and doting palm of the faithful. Rearing was done in the collective. With a side eye and an unsparing rod, a priest or parishioner could train up a child, be that youngster his own or another’s. It was in this kind of spiritual community, one encircled by the guardrails of love and discipline, that my parents’ heels were grounded. It is also where, on a Sunday when my mother was thirteen, her path in life was set.

  On that morning, the congregation gathered for my mother’s confirmation. In keeping with their tradition, every saint was dressed, head to toe, in ivory. After my mom received the Holy Sacrament, she and the other youth stood near an enormous window in the sanctuary. Through the opening flew a white dove, fully extending its wings before landing right onto my mother’s head. Any other child would have shrieked and bolted, but not my mom. Even then, she was as steady as she was reticent. She just stared ahead as if such an unusual occurrence had been expected. “This child should not stay here,” the pastor declared to the congregants. “She should go to America.”

  Years earlier, my mother’s Aunt Miriam had moved from Nevis to the nation of dreamers. The dove, said the minister, was appointing Fredericka as the next in the family to follow. Soon after, Mary Jane wrote to Miriam about her special niece, this chosen child, and asked that she prepare the way for her. A decade later, once her papers were in order, she indeed made the journey. My father had arrived a year before her.

  As my father grew through adolescence, he became more sweet on Fredericka. Her introversion was a perfect balance for his charisma. Love, invisible but palpable, lingered between them. And yet the relationship’s strongest connective tissue was their shared sense of faith and family. My mom never told me how my dad proposed to her. I know only that, by the time my father set out for the United States, he’d made clear his intention to one day make Fredericka his bride. Years into their union, as my dad carried on during one of his raving fits, he told my mother he’d asked her to be his wife because Mary Jane had always been so good to him. Choosing her, he said, was his way of reciprocating that grace. My father’s lips had been loosened that evening by whatever strife had prompted his rage. Still, his revelation bore a kernel of truth. Mary Jane’s profound kindness had been part of what initially knit them together. Their care for each other and common values, and later, an abiding affection for their children, tightened th
e knot.

  My father arrived at Ellis Island in the summer of 1919—just before his twenty-second birthday. The First World War’s dust was still settling, and Jim Crow’s cloud hung over the land. Woodrow Wilson was president. In 1918, the year before my dad sailed ashore on the S.S. Korona, Wilson screened, in the halls of the White House, The Birth of a Nation—a silent motion picture exalting Klansmen as saviors and depicting Black people as apelike, menacing degenerates. That is the America my dad entered, one with a legacy of assault on the heroes who tilled its soil. But my father and millions of others came here nonetheless, compelled by a force more powerful than hate: a hunger for opportunity. In his front vest pocket, my father held close the same resolve to better himself that still lures the most strident to our shores.

  The throngs of West Indians flocking to New York in those years typically moved into either Hell’s Kitchen or the Bronx. But my father settled first in Brooklyn, with my mother’s Aunt Miriam (and her husband, Uncle Patrick), whom he’d met in Nevis. He divided his time between there and East Orange, New Jersey, in the home of his eldest brother, George, who’d transitioned to the United States before he did. My uncle and his family eventually moved from East Orange to nearby Montclair. My dad had honed a talent for carpentry in Nevis and brought the skill with him. In addition to handcrafting wood pieces, bureaus, and bed frames that drew squeals of delight from his patrons, he operated a fruit and vegetable pushcart. On the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, as well as in Uptown Manhattan on the East Side—another neighborhood with a strong West Indian presence—he set up his cart, hawking everything from green plantains to fresh ginger for those yearning for a taste of home. He and a good friend, Mr. Benjamin Taylor, jointly operated the business.