by Cicely Tyson
But when we dare tiptoe outside the lines of those typecasts, when we put our full humanity on display, when we threaten the social constructs that keep others in comfortable superiority, we are often dismissed. There is no archetype on file in which a Black woman is simultaneously resolute and trembling, fierce and frightened, dominant and receding. My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight. On the day I went back to Paul Mann’s school, I was unswerving in my resolve to study with Lloyd. I was also vulnerable—as traumatized by Paul’s behavior as any woman might have been.
My decision to return became a defining one, a choice that sent a resounding echo through the decades of my career. After I’d endured Paul’s course, eyes averted, nose in my notebook, I went on to train exclusively with Lloyd, one of two genius coaches who molded me during those years. I managed to completely avoid Paul, showing up at the studio only when Lloyd was teaching. By the time Lloyd and I connected, I’d begun work on Carib, flitting between New York and Key West, Florida, where the movie was shot. When I returned to the city during breaks in filming, I couldn’t get over to Lloyd’s office fast enough, ready to soak in all he had to teach me—about exploring my character’s emotional truth, about enhancing my understanding of her given circumstances, about making artistic choices commensurate with that awareness.
At the school, I got to know Ruby Dee. She was also in training then, though alongside my shade of bright green, Ruby and her husband, Ossie Davis, were already deep-emerald sages of the stage. Ruby, diminutive yet spirited, was as much a firecracker then as her decades of civil rights crusading, in front of the curtain and beyond it, would reveal her to be. “Girl, I’ll tell you,” she’d often say to me then, “if you can be Black and live in this world, you can be anything you want to be.” Ruby, who by 1956 was nearly two dozen stage and film credits into her career, had experienced the humiliations that come with Acting While Black, of having nearly every available role be that of a domestic, of loaning her talents to directors who, away from the lights, sneered down at her as genetically and intellectually subpar.
Ruby had cut her thespian teeth amid such insults. She, Ossie, Harry, Sidney, Isabel Sanford, Alice Childress, Hilda Simms, and scores of other then-unknown artists had come up through the American Negro Theater, a 1940s community theater group founded by Black actors, in part as a response to the dearth of roles illuminating the breadth of our experience, and in part to create a warm cocoon for Black actors confronting bigotry in the shadows of the Great White Way. In the group’s early years, actors rehearsed in the basement of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library and performed at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ruby and the rest of them understood that the most difficult part of our work happened not in studios and rehearsal spaces, not on stages and sets. Just walking through this life as a Black person, and actually surviving that, was and still is an ovation-worthy performance.
During those times, I knew Ruby and the others not as the theatrical giants the world would come to regard them as. I knew them as human beings, first and foremost, grappling with their private insecurities and frights, struggling to breathe air into their characters’ lungs. I knew them as waitresses and as dishwashers, as clerks and as survivors, as dreamers moonlighting their way to some semblance of solvency. The introverted Sidney Poitier, who began work on A Raisin in the Sun in the late 1950s, was always more confident on film than he was before a live audience, when nerves, at times, got the better of him. Such tremors had arisen during Sidney’s 1946 Broadway debut in Lysistrata, when his preshow peek at a packed house sent his teeth to chattering. When he walked out onstage, he forgot his first line and skipped straight to his eighth. But still, his talent shone through. The show was critically panned, yet Sidney received favorable reviews, enough of them to untie his tongue and put fresh wind at his back.
It was Sidney who connected Lloyd and Lorraine Hansberry—the soft-spoken revolutionary who had penned Raisin as a head-nod to Langston Hughes’s poem, and in memory of her own childhood marred by flagrant prejudice. Sidney had a long-standing pact with his friend and director. While a student at Paul Mann Actor’s Workshop, Sidney once said to Lloyd, “If I ever do anything on Broadway, I want you to direct it.” So when Lorraine’s scintillating script landed in his possession, he knew exactly where to take it. In Lloyd’s gifted and nimble hands, and with the prowess of an all-Black cast headlined by Sidney as Walter Lee Younger and Ruby Dee as his wife, Ruth, the play lit Broadway ablaze, even as it reordered theater’s playbook. Before Raisin, the prevailing wisdom among the industry’s power brokers was that white audiences would support an all-Black show only if it was a musical, with us shimmying and guffawing our way toward an enduring stereotype. The rapturous applause and repeated curtain calls, with a verklempt Lorraine urged by the roar to take her bow of validation, demonstrated otherwise. “Never before,” James Baldwin commented of the play, “had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on stage.” And it was Lloyd, God rest his soul, who had, in one way or another, molded every performer in that trailblazing production.
For months before I connected with Lloyd, Warren often asked me, “What are you looking for in a teacher?” I never quite knew how to answer. Once Lloyd and I began training together, I realized I’d been looking for a rock, which Lloyd provided. His method acting approach was not substantively different from what I’d become familiar with up to then. But his manner of delivery, the patience with which he illuminated the tenets, the haven he created for actors—he became the Gibraltar that I and countless others stood upon.
Stylistically, Lloyd was more copilot than captain, more laissez-faire than commander, a teacher who preferred his student to fly solo as he, reservedly in the wings, whispered cues during the route. He was less apt to deliver a sermon, more likely to raise a thoughtful question. “Who is she?” Lloyd would ask me about a character I was preparing to depict. “What are the moments that have shaped her?” He understood that meeting a character on the page was akin to making her acquaintance in life. To study that character—to insatiably pursue her backstory, to dissect her memories and her motivations—was to begin the process of becoming her. That is why, to this day, I read a script a hundred times over, steeping myself in the nuances of the character, searching for the silence between the notes in the melody of who she is. By the time I get on that stage, I’ve lived in my character’s skin so continuously that she often takes over my physical being. Where did that come from? I think when a gesture, a head tilt, or a smirk distinct from my own emerges. Lloyd laid the foundation for that to happen. These days when I talk to young people aspiring to the stage, I tell them, “You can spend half your life trying to find the right teacher for you.” Lloyd and I were simpatico from day one.
Had I allowed Paul Mann to short-circuit my dream, I might have missed out on the blessing of Lloyd, whose artistic skill was eclipsed only by his kindness. In contrast to his business partner, he was, for me, a torchlight of integrity. In 1984, decades after my experience with Paul, eight actresses accused him of sexual assault. In a civil suit that landed in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the scales of justice leaned in the direction of the women. Paul was issued a guilty verdict and ordered to pay his victims $12,000 in total, a paltry $1,000 to $2,000 for each of them. Before his death in 1985, Paul had given much of his life to the theater, training artists and accruing accolades. History has recorded him as a celebrated teacher, one who prepared numerous luminaries for the stage. Yet
in my book, he will forever be regarded as the man who, along my path toward Providence, hurled a brick—one I picked up and threw aside.
* * *
As I dedicated myself to honing my craft, my baby arched her back toward adolescence. When Joan had left for boarding school at age ten, her period had not yet arrived. Given that my own had shown up when I was just nine, I thought her first sign of womanhood might be imminent. One thing I knew: I could not allow silence to do my teaching for me, as my own mom had. So ahead of her departure, I had pulled Joan close to me on my bedside, and together, we read through a book about menstruation. She listened intently and nodded, but she did not speak—until a year later when she was home on Christmas break.
“Mommy,” she said to me while we were on our way to the hairdresser, “I got that thing you told me about.” Her lips spread into a smile.
I looked over at her. “What thing, darling?” I asked.
“You know,” she said, “that thing we read about in the book—my period.”
“Really?” I said, embracing her.
“Yes, really,” she said. In that moment, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d in some way traced over my mother’s blunder, her costly restraint, with an improved way forward for Joan. My daughter needn’t stumble her way through adolescence, piecing together nature’s truths without the benefit of a narrator. At the end of Joan’s break, I sent her to school well supplied with all that she needed to care for herself.
And yet, I realize now, Joan needed far more than that from me. Our separations were gut-wrenching for both of us, but most especially for her. She longed, as any child would, to linger at my elbow, to be there for the nightly suppers, the homework sessions around a kitchen table, the impromptu mommy-daughter conversations. I will always remember the summer I traveled to Key West to film Carib Gold. Joan, then on break from school, wanted to accompany me on the road. I considered it, of course, yet in my heart, I knew the experience would be wholly unsatisfying for her and might force an even sharper wedge between us. The job of a professional actor—the script memorizing, the dashing to and fro on set, the disappearance into a character’s interior world—demands an enormous intensity of focus. Joan might have been there with me in the flesh, but with my head somewhere beyond the heavens, she would have missed me all the more. So I arranged for her to stay with my sister, Emily, during that break—and it was yet another parting that bowed her head.
“Mom, why can’t I come back to New York and go to school here?” Joan often asked me. With remorse lodged in my throat, I did not always know what to say to make her understand. Any explanation I gave sounded to Joan like an attempt to relegate her to the sidelines of my world, to prioritize my career over her.
Joan viewed our situation the only way she then could, through a child’s eyes, whereas I observed it under the unsparing light of adult pragmatism. As grievous as our distance was, I was doing what I felt I had to do in order to provide. Provision, in my mind, was the barometer that bested all other gauges, the litmus test by which my parenting would ultimately be measured. Am I able to give Joan everything she requires? Does the life I make possible for her improve upon the one my parents could offer me? I know now that Joan pined more for my presence than she did for my pocketbook. She needed my provision, yes, but decidedly more of the emotional sort, a cheek-to-cheek coexistence. I do not regret that I chose to earn a living in the manner in which I did, or that I arranged for Joan to attend school in a world miles north of mine. But I do mourn that my child, during the years she hungered to have me close, felt my absence so profoundly. My utmost, well intentioned as it was, fell short of her needs and desires.
Joan began her freshman year of high school in the fall of 1956, around the time Carib Gold was released. I rarely view my own work and have watched only a handful of my own films. The gratification for me comes in the doing of the work, the creation—the embodying of a character so fully that the audience comes to believe, feel, see, smell, and taste her existence, climb into her reality, understand her humanity as a means for reflecting upon their own. That is where my satisfaction comes from. Once I’ve played a character, that portrayal no longer belongs to me. It is an offering to those who witness the unveiling. The joy, for me, comes in the crafting of that gift, the choosing and the nurturing of it, and then in giving it away. Art, in a sense, is the transference of pleasure. And also, once I’ve poured myself into a performance, I can’t do anything more about it—which is why I do not torture myself by viewing it.
And yet, out of curiosity and excitement as a newcomer to the industry, I did see Carib. Words fall short in conveying the pure exhilaration you feel, as an artist, of watching your work flicker to life for the first time, of seeing this strange likeness of yourself crackling across a screen in Black and white. I will always remember the row of words at the bottom of the opening credits, recall how it sent chills through me to see my name there, standing tall and majestic: “And introducing CICELY TYSON.” Dubious as I’d been, at moments, that this endeavor of mine would evolve into anything more than a recreational pursuit, there it was, indisputable in all caps, a confirmation that I was actually doing what I’d set out to do.
When an audience views a film, they experience the story on the screen. As an actress, I also recall the moments between the plotline, the occurrences off set. There were the myriad hours I spent tutoring with Lloyd, the trembling lips that brought me, over and over, to his doorway for help in developing Dottie. There was the weekend, while filming in Key West during Christmas, when Warren arranged for us to visit Cuba, before Fidel Castro wrested control from then-President Batista. That holiday was the first I’d ever spent away from New York and family, and my scowl was evidence of that. In an effort to buoy my spirits, Warren accompanied me from Key West to Havana on a day-long sail, the breeze playing patty-cake with my hair, the smell of the sea, for a time, vanquishing my wistfulness for home. Ashore, we were welcomed by the sounds of “Silent Night” and “Feliz Navidad” floating between row houses, pigmented in an array of pastel façades. Gorgeous as the island was, the ninety-degree temperatures failed to put me in the holiday spirit. At my insistence, Warren sent me home for New Year’s. Such memories are what flooded to mind when I saw Carib.
Piercingly, what I also recalled was my child’s sadness during my months of filming in Key West, how much we missed one another, how conflicted I often felt about our separation. When Joan finished middle school, I did move her back to the city to live with me for all four years of high school. When I needed to travel for work, such as during my time away filming Carib, she stayed in Mount Vernon with Emily and Reggie. By then, my sister and her husband had three children of their own, Maxine, Reginald, and Verna. Joan’s cousins became like siblings to her.
Having Joan close slathered consolation on the wound created by our years apart. On weekends, we attended concerts and plays together. One of her favorite memories is the day I took her to see the film Madame Butterfly. And yet decades would pass before the bruise of our earlier separation received the light and air it needed to begin healing. I ache in reflecting upon it now; I ache that, though my choices were planted in the soil of my deep love for Joan, she nonetheless felt cast aside. I live with that sorrow. It is why, in part, I write so scarcely of her. Joan felt, as a child, that she had to share me with the world. I give her now, in adulthood, what my heart has always longed to bestow—my undivided focus, along with the full measure of her privacy.
* * *
The first time I wandered into a Broadway show, I was mesmerized. I was still new at the Red Cross then, long before the gold-watch epiphany. During the holiday season, we office clerks took to the streets, shaking coin-filled tin cans at passersby, hoping to collect donations for the nonprofit. I don’t know why, but I was a nervous wreck rattling that darn can. Late one afternoon, I was assigned to raise my ruckus out in front of the Martin Beck Theatre on Forty-Fifth Street. The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s fictionalized dra
ma of the Salem witch trials, happened to be in previews there. At the end of my shift and near the show’s last act, I slipped through three sets of double doors and into the back of the theater. I’ve never gotten over what I saw.
Lord, what is this? I thought. I had no concept then of a professional stage production, had never even been inside of a playhouse. In my mind’s eye, I can still envision it: the eerily darkened amphitheater, the 1690s garb and the elaborate set, the lights shining down to dance upon the actors’ expressions, the row upon row of audience members, staring ahead in rapt attention. “You misunderstand, sir,” declared Walter Hampden, portraying the play’s villain, Deputy-Governor Danforth. “I cannot pardon these when twelve are already hanged for the same crime. It is not just.” The whole scene felt, at once, deeply haunting and wondrously magical. Which is why, years later, when Warren pressed me to step toward such magic, my goose pimples made a comeback.
“Vinnette Carroll is planning to direct a play called Dark of the Moon,” he told me a few months after Carib’s release. “She’s staging it at the Y in Harlem, and she’s looking for a lead. You would be perfect.”
