Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  Once they were done charting what they thought about themselves and what they thought others thought about them, we would ask them about each of the other groups: the Black group and the white group and the Latino group and the Asian/Pacific Islander group and so on: “How do you view people who are different from you? How do you view white people? How do you view Latinos?” And again, all the stereotypes would come out.

  Everything anyone said was written down, and at the end of the allotted time, we put the charts up on the walls and everybody walked around and viewed them. And oh, the fury, the anger, the people sitting down with big spaces between themselves and the other groups. They’re not sitting with their friends anymore. They’re asking, “How could you say that? How could you allow anyone to say these things?” And then we would have to diffuse all that.

  To me, it was interesting that, when talking about negative stereotypes, no one ever looked at it as what they thought. They would say, “Well, we don’t think that; that’s what other people think!”

  And we would come back at them: “You must think it too because you put it up there. We didn’t make you say it; we just asked the question. You could have just said that you had no comment or made it clear that that was not how you feel.”

  The main thing was that once you’ve opened it up, it’s a can of worms, so to speak, and you have to sit there with them and bring it back together. All the students who stayed the two and a half days could see that people view others differently, that they attach stereotypes to you, that they look at you and the first thing they look at isn’t necessarily what you want them to see. But then, how do you look at others? Are you looking for what they truly are or just confirming what you’ve heard about them? It could be very humbling, but it could also be very equalizing: everybody gets stereotyped and nobody likes it. And then you just go from there.

  I enjoyed that job because it was something I didn’t know much about—an opportunity to learn, a step in a new direction. They gave us training, which not only helped a lot with the camps but also gave me tools to use in my own life. Some people have written that I participated in the student integration program as a form of activism, as a way of helping Black youth, but that is not true; it was never something I did as activism. I was doing it as work, and the camp was open to all the students in LA Unified, not just the Black students.

  * * *

  I worked at the student integration program for six or seven years, but then they ended the program, and I was looking at not having a job again. Fortunately, there were other things going on in my life.

  Before I started working on student integration, I met my current husband, Duane Tillman, at the wedding of one of my best friends, Cora, who went to Tennessee State but was not a Tigerbelle. Like I said, Mr. Temple always preached that you need all kinds of friends: you need people who are smarter than you in your life because you can always learn from them, and people who are not involved in sports so that everyone you know is not having the exact same experiences as you. You don’t want to have to talk about sports every time you sit down. You want to be able to talk about the whole wide world. Cora and another friend of mine, Clara, play that role in my life.

  I was separated from Art and going through my divorce then, and considering that and my responsibilities as a bridesmaid, finding a date was not on the top of my mind. Duane was also in the wedding party; he worked for LA County with Ken, the groom, and I got to know him over several days because we had rehearsals and all that. At one point, I took Cora aside and said, “Ken’s friend Duane? He’s nice-looking.”

  “You got too much on your plate,” she told me, “to be talking about anyone like that.”

  “Well, yes, but he’s still good-looking.”

  “Yes. And that’s his girlfriend over there.”

  “Oh. Okay.” And that was the end of that.

  Then Duane and his girlfriend broke up, and Cora and her husband broke up, but Ken and Duane were still friends, and Ken and I were still friends, and we used to talk all the time. To make a long story short, one night some years after their divorce, we were talking, and I said, “Where’s your friend Duane? I think he’s nice-looking. I should go out with him one day.”

  “Yeah, you should,” said Ken. “You want me to give you his number?”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “You can’t do that?” he said. “You? The one who believes that women can do anything?”

  “It’s not that. I just don’t think he even knows I’m around.”

  “Oh,” said Ken, “don’t worry. He likes you too.”

  “Were you talking about me?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said he likes you. I’m going to give you his number. You always say that if you see something you want, you have to go get it. That’s what you believe. Call him.”

  “Yeah, but—I don’t know. I have to think about this.” Because I could still remember Cora saying, “You got to get your life together!” At that point, it was about three years after I had first met Duane at the wedding, and my life was still only somewhat together. At least I was divorced; that was one step in the right direction.

  Anyway, I called him—I called him that night because Ken would not let me go without doing so. We didn’t go anywhere that first time I asked him out. He had said he would stop by at nine, but it wasn’t until ten thirty that I got the call: “You have a visitor.”

  I lived in a gated community, so Duane had to get past the guard. I also came from a school that said when you tell someone you are going to be someplace, you are there on time. So when Duane wasn’t there at nine fifteen, I put my pajamas on. I was in the mood to watch television and do nothing. But still, when I got that call from the gatehouse, I said, “Well, yes, you can let him in. Tell him where to park.”

  When Duane came up, I still had my pajamas on. I wasn’t going anywhere. “I didn’t think you were coming,” I told him. “You didn’t call.”

  He didn’t have much of an excuse for being late—there’s no excuse, unless you call—but we sat and talked, and when he left, around twelve, he said, “Maybe we could try this again.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  He called a couple of days later. He and Cora were going to a New Year’s Eve party; I went with them, and after that, Duane and I were together. We didn’t get married right away, but now we’ve been together for what seems like forever. Duane is the type of person who just says, “If that’s what you want to do, then do it,” which has always worked for me. He doesn’t like to fly, so most of the time when I go on trips, he stays home. He has always been very supportive of me, and he has always given me space; he’s very giving in general. When I worked for ABC in 1976, he came to the Olympics in Montreal, despite the fact that he doesn’t like to travel, just so we could bring Simone. So right from the beginning, the three of us made a nice little family.

  * * *

  To me, it’s important for children to know both sides of the family. Every summer, Simone would go to my mom’s in Georgia for a month, and then she would go to see Art’s mom Pearlie in Berkeley. Pearlie is from Montreal, and her family is there, so Simone sometimes went to Canada in between Georgia and Berkeley to see that side of the family too.

  Before Simone would go to Georgia, she would practice trying to talk Southern, because when she first went there, her cousins sat her down and said, “Talk.” They liked the way she spoke. Which was not Southern. “She speaks so proper!” they would say, and then they would just sit there and look at her. “Just talk! Say something! Say anything!”

  She hated it. “They just want me to talk all the time!” So she conjured up in her head that, before going to Georgia, she would practice saying y’all and all that. And then she would come to me to see how she was doing.

  “You got to talk a little slower,” I would tell her.

  “Mommy, you don’t talk that way.”

  “I did, and I still do sometimes. You can hear the twang.”<
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  After a year, she had gotten it down, talking like that, and then she would leave there and go to Canada, or go to Pearlie’s in Berkeley, and it was a whole different accent and a whole different culture.

  My mom was always saying things to Simone like, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that—nothing can happen on my watch!” Strict. And then in Berkeley, Pearlie would have her enrolled in everything, from tennis to art classes, whether she wanted them or not, or Simone would go off to Canada for a week and that would be a whole other lesson, because they were outdoor people and they would swim in lakes and travel to all different parts of the country. It was really good for her. She learned a lot, and I was happy for her.

  My son Tyus came into our lives in 1979, and from the time he was a little boy, he had those thick Tyus eyebrows, just like my father. One time we were in a store in Griffin, and some of my relatives saw him, but they didn’t know that he was my child. They went right up to him and said, “You must be a Tyus. You got those eyebrows—those Tyus eyebrows.”

  In addition to the Tyus eyebrows, Tyus has the Tillman height—and the Tillman asthma. When he was little, I was in a doctor’s office every week and the emergency room at least once or twice a month—not just stopping in but staying over. It seemed that it would only happen late at night. His regular doctors worked out of UCLA, and I used to drive very fast to get him there, pass through every red light, just flying. He had been going to UCLA forever, so they knew him, which made things much easier. They would say, “Oh Tyus, you’re here again?” And they would make him feel comfortable even though he could hardly breathe.

  Not that he ever let his illness take over his life. He’s a fighter that way. He was always the kid who wanted to do what all the other kids were doing even when it was not the best thing for him—like when he decided that he needed to play flag football. He’s allergic to grass and pollen and weeds, so he would have to put on gloves and a long-sleeved shirt and have his legs completely covered. That way, if he fell in the grass, he wouldn’t have such a bad reaction. But no matter how many attacks he had, he would always find a way to do whatever he wanted. He has a lot of his mama in him. When Tyus was eight or nine, I let him sit in on an interview I was doing, and the reporter asked him, “What do you think about your mom? About the fact that she has won gold medals and can run really fast?”

  “She’s not very fast,” Tyus told him. “I can beat her. I beat her all the time. She’s not fast at all. Matter of fact, she’s very slow.”

  That was the last time I ever let him beat me—who’s slow now?—and the last time I let him sit in on an interview. Because he told things out of school. By that time, he had become quite a talker, and he’s still a talker to this day. You wouldn’t think that such a big talker could come from such quiet parents, but he did.

  A lot of people send their children “back South,” and I sent mine east and north as well because I wanted them to know their families, and their families’ cultures, which can be very different from what we have in California. Family is one of the most important things to me, and I wanted them to see the difference in how people live. My great-aunts—the ones who used to tell me that I shouldn’t be running?—they were twins, and I wanted my children to know all about them: the way they talked and the crazy things they said and the fact that they dipped snuff. My kids did not know anybody in LA who dipped snuff. They didn’t necessarily like it, not any more than I did, but there were their aunties, trying to kiss them, saying, “Don’t be scared of me, I’m your family!”

  Knowing that someone who is so different from you is also a part of you makes you a stronger person. It helps you to be able to appreciate life, to really laugh at life, to see the things that people do as part of a culture. I wanted my kids to know that my dad’s side of the family is different from my mom’s side, and both are different from Duane’s family in Ohio and his grandmother who grew up in Tennessee. This is your family. This is part of you, so you should appreciate difference and not put other people down. You might find yourself ten years from now doing the kinds of things your great-grandmother used to do, so you should know: This is the blood that is running through you. This was also a part of my life. And for them to really know me, they have to understand that part. On top of that, when we went to Georgia, they got to see the people I grew up with, and some of my close friends had kids their age, so that’s another family for them right there. You can’t buy that.

  Now that my kids are grown, we’re carrying on that same tradition: every summer, Tyus’s three children—Tyus Junior, Amare, and Sukari—visit with me and Duane for two whole months. Tyus Junior—we call him TJ—comes to us from Hanford, California, so we see him a lot throughout the year, but Amare and Sukari stay in St. Louis, and the summers give them an opportunity to learn what our California culture is like. Simone’s kids, Damani and Anika, live right here in LA, but they come around a lot more when their cousins are in town, and they get the other side of the picture from them. Because family should know family, and when you know your family, you know yourself.

  Me, my kids, and my grandkids. (Photo by Leslie Penn.)

  * * *

  Tyus was in middle school when I found my last job—the job I had before I retired. The way I got there was through one of the people who worked with me at the student integration program—we called him Bear, but his name is Mark. When that job ended, he went on to work at the Clear Creek Outdoor Education Center, which was another program through LA Unified. After a while, Bear got to be assistant director, and when he heard I was out of work, he convinced me to come work with him as a naturalist.

  It was not the perfect job in the beginning. For the first six months, it rained every day because of El Niño, and it was an outdoor program, so we had to be out in the rain most of the time. And I just kept thinking, I must be out of my mind. But I enjoyed it—even a lot of the rains, I enjoyed. The hardest part was that when you came off the trails, if you didn’t have a break right away you just stayed wet until your break time rolled around. We also had to do a lot of indoor games, and I guess that’s where my education came in, my degree in recreation, because I kind of knew all those things. Over time, it got to be something that I really wanted to do, and it gave me a way not only to build off my education but also to build off of what I had been doing with the student integration program.

  We worked mainly with fifth and sixth graders, but during the summer we had high school students as well. There would be two different schools at a time, and we would try to get them from two different neighborhoods, around forty kids from each school. There were four naturalists, so we each had eighteen or twenty kids in our groups. We did a lot of team building; we had to get the kids to believe that we were a real team because we were together for a full week. All the students had to stay in the groups they were assigned; they couldn’t change groups, which meant that the first thing I had to do was get them to like me and believe in me as a leader. Then I had to get them to work well with kids they didn’t know.

  Not just at the beginning, but for a while, I was thinking that I was a little too old for all that. I mean, I had two kids of my own. And it was like camping although we didn’t sleep outside; we got to sleep in cabins, and we didn’t have to sleep in the cabins with the kids. We got our own, but still. It’s just that whole thing you get yourself into whenever you work with kids—the constant supervision, constant interaction. We had the kids from eight in the morning until noon; we got them again from two o’clock until five; and then we got them one last time after dinner for a night hike or a campfire. So when you were on, you were on pretty much nonstop.

  But I accepted it, and it was one of the best things that could have happened for me because there was so much about it that I loved. Just the mere fact of being able to work with students from all different backgrounds was one thing—seeing them get off the bus that first day, all wide-eyed and a little queasy from driving up those twisty mountain roads. Then, a fe
w hours later, they would be mad because you didn’t put them with their friends. And then they would think they got put in the “wrong” group: “I want to be in that group because that group seems to have more fun.”

  “They do have more fun,” I would tell them. “In my group, there’s no fun; it’s all about the learning.” And then by the time they had to leave, they didn’t want to go; they would have enjoyed it all that much. It was wonderful to see how they had learned to appreciate nature and being outdoors.

  I also liked being outside, walking on the trails and being under the trees, just like when I was walking the farm as a child with my father. And all the teaching, all my teaching, I did outside, kind of like my dad. The only time I wasn’t teaching outside was when it was raining very hard, but if it was misting or scattered rain, we could sit under the trees and stay dry. And I enjoyed getting to know the children—even the ones who liked to complain and the ones who could always figure out a way to have a problem: “My mom told me I better not mess up my new shoes!”

  “But we told you not to bring new shoes. So what are you going to do?”

  “I can’t, I can’t . . . I don’t know.”

  “Okay. We have a lost-and-found. We can find you some shoes.”

  “I’m not wearing someone else’s shoes!”

  “Well, one or the other. Let’s figure it out.” So it was all about problem-solving and thinking things through. Those kinds of things. The things I had learned to do not only in the student integration program but also from all those years of working with Mr. Temple: thinking things through and working as a team, everybody making a contribution. And it was fun, kidding them, bothering them about this or that, and watching them grow.

  One of the things we would do when the kids first arrived was bring them into our museum, which had a geology section and pelts from different animals that they could touch, as well as living creature like newts and turtles and cockroaches and hamsters and snakes. Outside the museum there were other creatures, ones that we could not touch: a red-tailed hawk, a turkey vulture, an owl, and a bobcat. The snakes in the museum were gopher snakes, and I’m not a snake person, but I learned to like them, and I loved to watch the kids warm up to them, to go from being afraid of being eaten to touching them—even if it was only with one finger.