by Cicely Tyson
As time went by, I’d occasionally see Miles on that bench. In those years, I routinely walked from my place clear up to 125th Street in Harlem. And when I’d run into him, every one of our conversations would end the same way: “You know, you’d like Burlina,” he’d say. “She’s a good cook. You should come see me.” Curiosity at last got the better of me, so I called Harold.
“Miles invited me to come over and have lunch with him and your cousin,” I told him. He laughed. “I don’t know about Miles,” he said, “but you’ll love Burlina.” That was enough to slow my stride for another few months.
I then ran into Miles again, this time on my street late one afternoon. I was walking up to my apartment when I heard footsteps behind me. I swiveled around. “Oh this is where you are?!” he said. “What are you doing here?” I said. “I just wanted to know where you live,” he said, laughing, “but you wouldn’t tell me.” He asked to come in but of course I wouldn’t let him. So we sat out on my front stoop and talked for the longest time until, by sunset, he’d persuaded me to come by and have that lunch with him. Soon after, I finally did.
Burlina, a plump older Black woman, answered the door. “Come on in!” she said, arms outstretched as if I were one of her own. Over smothered chicken and collards, we laughed and talked, her kidding Miles the entire time. She was as funny as they come, Burlina was, would laugh as easily as she embraced; you couldn’t be Miles’s friend and not be humorous. She also knew Miles better than just about anyone, I came to realize. To truly know that man, you had to see him away from the lights.
That day’s lunch turned into more, and before long, Miles and I were seeing one another frequently. He’d invite me over any time there was cooking. First of all, that man loved to eat. And second, he did not like to be alone. Every time I’d come by, the house bustled with folks coming in and out, the smell of oxtails mixing with the sound of laughter. If Burlina wasn’t cooking, Miles was. “Hey, got some chili in the pot, come over,” he’d call his friends and say. Soon after, a house full of guys would be sitting at his table, with or without spoons and forks—didn’t matter, he was going to feed them. I loved his oxtails in those days, but that chili, it was way too hot for me. His okra, however, was like none other. I used to hate okra, but when he made it, I began loving it. This was the way of things for a long while between Miles and me. He’d cook, I’d show up, and long after the others had gone, we’d linger in the shadows, lying across the foot of his bed with the aroma of black-eyed peas hanging over us.
When the world speaks of Miles, the legend, they have no idea who the man really was. The Miles I knew was sensitive and ailing, bruised by the hurts this life metes out. With trembling lips, he told me of the years during his childhood in East St. Louis when he’d been called Blackie by his friends and even some of his family, gazed down upon as a nobody, rendered invisible by his dark hue. He told me of the time, at age thirteen, when he’d been seduced by a grown woman, forced into his first sexual encounter with a friend of a relative. He spoke of the years when his father, a well-to-do dentist, had wanted him to follow in his career path, until a teacher who’d recognized Miles’s gift intervened. “Forget it. Little Davis is not going to be any dentist,” that teacher told Miles’s father. “He’s going to be a musician.”
The first time Miles blew that horn, he’d found his consolation. In playing that trumpet, he did the only thing he knew how, the one thing that made him feel worthy. That is the Miles I knew and, in time, grew to cherish. Our conversations rippled with honesty, with depth of understanding. There is a love that gently guides your palm toward the small of another’s back, a care that leads you to ensure no harm ever comes to that person. From the beginning, that is the love I had for Miles. That is the soft place where our connection rested its head. I’d been wary to get involved initially. But once I glimpsed his innards, and once it became clear that he and Frances had truly moved on (and I was with him on the day in 1966 when Miles received her divorce papers), my misgivings were swallowed whole by the warmth between us.
One night as I was leaving Miles’s place, he asked me to stay the night with him. I blushed. “But I left the lights on and the windows up at my place,” I told him. “I’ve gotta go lock up.” “No you don’t,” he said teasingly. “Nobody’s going to bother that place.” When I insisted, he walked me around to my apartment to close it up. He then led me back to his place, pulled me close, and for the first time, we made love. It was beautiful. It was gentle. It was an expression of our deep care, our bodies undulating gracefully in the shadows of dusk. It was also everything I’d imagined it would be—and all that my connection with Kenneth had lacked. There was love. There was devotion. There was understanding. And in our embrace, there lived an enduring connection.
That was in 1966. As my heart fluttered to life for Miles, the nation’s conscience stood at a crossroads. Just more than a decade earlier, in 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was accused of flirting with a white woman in Mississippi. The woman’s husband and his half-brother brutally beat Emmett, shot him in the head, and hurled his corpse in a river. They were acquitted. Months later that same year, Rosa Parks, weary after a day’s work and no doubt tired of her second-class relegation, refused to give up her seat for a white passenger and sit at the back of a segregated Montgomery bus. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a young local pastor, helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott during 1956, which turned her stance into a rallying cry for justice and sent shudders from shore to shore.
That protest swelled into the Civil Rights Movement, a stewpot of agony and aspiration. In 1957 at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Little Rock Nine, determined to live out the 1954 promise of the US Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, braved their way through violent mobs spewing spit at their stone expressions. Then in 1960, the Greensboro Four—students emboldened by Emmett’s murder and steeped in the tenets of peaceful protest—scooted up to a whites-only Woolworth counter and staged a sit-in. Dr. King, the face and pulse of the Movement, gave voice to their dream during the 1963 March on Washington. On that muggy August day, a quarter of a million souls crowded onto the National Mall in Washington, DC, to hear Dr. King declare a hope that, up to then, had eluded us. The country, as it does now, faced a choice—to peer over its shoulder at a wrenching past and continue along its trajectory, or to march toward a different season, a powerful new beginning. The summer I began seeing Miles, I faced that very decision.
* * *
By the time I met Miles, my career had taken root. Warren had introduced me to the theatrical world, and my role in Vinnette’s production widened that world’s scope and sphere. Every year in those times, directors pulled together a variety show including some of Broadway’s powerful scenes, a festival to showcase up-and-coming actors. For the Talent ’59 festival, a scene from Dark of the Moon was selected. My castmate Hal DeWindt and I were chosen to perform. I was absolutely blown away by the experience. Everybody in the theater world, it seemed, was there to see us, and because of the exposure, my phone started ringing. “Can we get Cicely Tyson to come to this audition?” they’d ask Warren. Things were happening, boy, and I could feel the shift in the air, the electricity. I’d do a little part here, another there, and before I could finish, there’d be more requests: “We want Cicely Tyson.” Honey, the moment I heard, I was down my apartment steps and out of there. I’d sometimes go to three auditions in a day.
I can still feel the exhilaration of that time. I tried out to portray a girl from the slums in the film 12 Angry Men, a courtroom drama starring Henry Fonda. “You’re too chic for the role,” I heard from the casting director. That was my cue to regroup. I scurried home, fished out an old skirt and ripped its hemline, scattered my hair all over the place, and topped it off with a dirty raincoat. When I turned up again, the secretary, who didn’t recognize me, attempted to block my entrance. But once I got through to the casting director, I read the part again and was hired on the sp
ot.
Around that time, I was also called in to audition as an understudy for the intrepid Eartha Kitt, as Jolly Rogers in the play Jolly’s Progress. I landed the role but never performed. Still, it was thrilling just to be there, alongside a star who played veteran to my rookie. Eartha never spoke to me or even glanced in my direction, and no way would I have approached her. So you can imagine my surprise when I overheard her on the phone in her dressing room. “Who, Cicely?” she said. “Oh my goodness, she’s a fantastic actress.” You could’ve tipped me over with a feather. I didn’t think Eartha even knew my name, much less regarded me as talented.
During this whirlwind of opportunity I’d moved to the Upper West Side. In many ways, I and a handful of other Black artists integrated that neighborhood. Eartha Kitt, who was already there when I arrived in 1960, added one of the first dabs of color. After I’d settled into my place on Seventy-Fourth, Diahann came to visit and loved the area. She was married then to Monte Kay, the music entrepreneur and agent, and the two of them moved around the corner from me, near Seventieth and West End. Then Harry Belafonte, who was being managed by Monte, moved a few blocks north of their place. Brock Peters of To Kill a Mockingbird fame soon followed. So did Lena Horne, who moved into the same building where Harry lived. (And by the way, it was Harry Belafonte’s hit 1957 song “Mama Look a Boo Boo” that led to another of my nicknames. I loved the tune, and when Emily’s youngest daughter, Verna, would come toddling over to me, I’d call out “Boo! Boo!” She assumed that was my name and began calling me that, and now three generations of Tysons know me as Aunt Boo Boo.)
We were still “colored” in those years, so just renting an apartment required an act of God. To supplement my feast-or-famine stage work pay, I’d taken a secretarial job at Save the Children. During my lunch break one day, I scoured the classifieds in the New York Times, looking for apartments. I found one, and when I turned up, a white woman answered the door. “I am inquiring about the apartment you have vacant,” I said. She slammed the door before I could even finish my sentence. I found another place, and this time, I called first. The woman explained that she was about to vacate the apartment, to which I replied, “I am Black. And if you have feelings about allowing your apartment to be rented by someone of that race, tell me now.” She laughed. “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “My husband is Black.” That’s how I ended up as the lone Black person in an all-white building, a few streets away from a love story.
* * *
The Blacks—the critically acclaimed play written by French dramatist Jean Genet—became the defining role of my blossoming career. I am not one to feel as if I have arrived, for even at age ninety-six, I am still arriving. But being cast in that show was the closest I’ve come to experiencing that delight. From the pen of a provocateur flowed a masterpiece of racial reckoning, an incendiary visual display meant to cajole. The spectacle unfolded nightly, down at St. Mark’s Playhouse in the Village, and marked the beginning of avant-garde theater.
For Genet, The Blacks was a commentary on prejudice, a play within a play urging white audiences to gaze upon themselves. For me and a cadre of other rising Black actors, it was also sustained exposure and steady earnings. The show became the longest-running off-Broadway nonmusical of the 1960s, debuting in May 1961 and not lowering its curtain until September 1964. I played Stephanie “Virtue” Diop, an impish streetwalker, and a steadily paid one, thank you very much. The show lasted so long that I came and went over its three-year, 1,408-show run, squeezing in other work where I could. The same was true for much of the cast. Dignitaries filed through the audience regularly, and in 1962, Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, took their seats in the audience. I wasn’t performing on that evening, but his attendance demonstrated the show’s importance. It was more than a play. It was a landmark cultural moment, an indictment of white supremacy and a theatrical pivot point.
Just about every young actor of note was, at some point, connected with The Blacks. The grand ensemble included James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett Jr., Billy Dee Williams, Charles Gordone, and Maya Angelou. The circle of Black actors was then fairly small, so I knew several of my castmates. Others, like James Earl Jones, I met for the first time. He was painfully shy in those years, reticent enough to make my own bashfulness seem like extroversion. He kept to himself backstage, but boy, once that curtain rose, he spoke plenty. Maya, who played the queen—both in The Blacks and in real life—intimidated me at first. At six feet, she towered over me, and she had the confidence and booming voice to match her stature. She walked around like she owned the world, whereas I always sat in a corner and waited for Gene Frankel, the director, to shout, “Come onstage!” before I moved a hair. At the read-through for the show, I first spotted Maya alongside Abbey Lincoln, the actress and jazz vocalist, who was also in the cast. Maya and Abbey were quite close then, before they later had a falling-out. Recalling it brings me to tears, because they had been such good friends.
Maya was larger than life, a force of nature, and every other cliché inadequate for capturing her essence. Over the years, we’d often debate about when we met, with me insisting it was during The Blacks. “No, I met you two years before that,” she’d claim, but she could never recall where. “You are the one friend I’ve known the longest.” I’d deny her recollection, and back and forth we’d go. It didn’t matter to me when we met, because we became so close. Maya was many things to many people, but perhaps one of her greatest roles was that of a hostess. That woman’s home, then at Park West Village near 100th Street and Columbus, was always full! She seemed to know everybody, from Duke Ellington to James Baldwin, as well as the scores of artists she’d connected with through the Harlem Writers Guild, part of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s: Rosa Guy (the guild’s cofounder, along with John Oliver Killens), Audre Lorde, Sarah E. Wright, Douglas Turner Ward, on and on. For Maya to pull out her finest cutlery and Baccarat crystal, there needn’t be a holiday or special occasion, other than the blessing of still breathing. She was always welcoming people, throwing pots onto the stove, lending her generous spirit and constant laughter to her Southern home-cooked recipes, just like Miles did.
I was precisely the opposite. Once I retreated into my apartment after a show, my home became my haven. “I don’t know how you have any friends,” my mother would often say. “You never have anyone over.” I didn’t need to. I did plenty of socializing at Maya’s place. My friend Roxie Roker—who in The Blacks eventually replaced Maya as the queen before going on years later to play Helen in the TV sitcom The Jeffersons—was often over at Maya’s. Roxie and I clicked from the first hello. She’s also Caribbean (her father was from Andros in the Bahamas), and when we’d get together, we’d yammer back and forth in a heavy West Indian dialect. It was very funny.
The Blacks cast did everything together: we dined, drank, gossiped, and even traveled with one another. One summer we were invited to perform our show at a festival in Venice, my first time in Europe. I loved Venice, but my eagerness for adventure lured me beyond. “Why don’t you just stay here?” Roscoe asked me. “You can stay,” I told him, “but I’m going on.” I took the train to Rome and then to Munich. Lex Monson, who played the bishop in The Blacks, came with me. Lex hopped off in Germany, but I boarded a sleeper train on to Barcelona. I found it thrilling to be on the road by myself, wandering and wondering as I’d done in childhood, taking in the smells and sounds and rich history of each passing city, storing away the experiences in that place where I keep all my sense memories. I relished my time in Spain in particular. Having grown up in an integrated neighborhood that included Puerto Ricans, I enjoyed the warm spirit of the Latin culture. The Spaniards greeted me with open hearts.
Home in New York, the crew got back to talking smack. On most nights after the show, a bunch of us would gather at Sardi’s, an Italian eatery on West Forty-Fourth Street in the theater district. Child, we talked about each other like dogs! If you weren’t in attendance on a particular e
vening, boy, you can be sure you were being bad-mouthed. Everybody gathered there, even those who weren’t in the show. Lonne Elder came through a lot. So did Diana Sands, Bobby Hooks, and of course, Diahann and Sidney. That show not only kept us employed, it also kept us laughing. Those were some fun times.
Everyone, and especially me, knew that Sidney and Diahann had eyes for one another. The two of them went to France to work on the movie Paris Blues in 1961, and while they were there, they must’ve forgotten they were both married. From the beginning of their relationship, I never believed Sidney would leave his wife to be with Diahann, but next thing I knew, Diahann was divorcing Monte so she could be with Sidney. She even bought a place and furnished it, waiting for him to come, but he never did. She set that record straight herself in her own book, The Legs Are the Last to Go.
Not long after Diahann separated from Monte—and was waiting on Sidney to divorce his wife, as he’d said he would—I ran into Sidney near Carnegie Hall. As usual, he came over and hugged me. “Hey, Cic!” he said, beaming. “How are you?” “I’m good,” I told him. After we’d caught up, I said, “Well congratulations . . . I hear you’re finally going to take the walk again.” He looked down at the pavement and started kicking around a can, and in that moment, I knew: Sidney wasn’t ever going to marry Diahann. He didn’t have to say another word. His body language did his speaking.
During the years to follow, Diahann carried on with her life and career, earning a Tony for No Strings, an Oscar nomination for Claudine, and a Golden Globe for her lead role in Julia, the 1968 sitcom that was the first to defy Black female stereotypes on television. I’m not sure whether she ever got over Sidney. But through her portrayals and an extraordinary six decades on the stage, the swelegant, elegant Diahann Carroll surely spoke a resounding word.
