Just as I Am

by Cicely Tyson

  * * *

  I had my own share of romances before I met Miles. After my brief marriage to Kenneth, I hadn’t wanted much to do with men. My priorities were my daughter, Joan, and the stage. Still, a few relationships sprang up, some of them lasting the length of my pinkie finger. I dated a disc jockey for a time, a man I met at a jazz club. That went on for only a few months. After he’d worried me half to death with too much talking, I dumped him by calling into a radio station and dedicating the Billie Holiday song to him “You Ain’t Gonna Bother Me No More.” Another man, a dancer, lasted just weeks before I let him go. I don’t even recall why. But anytime I’d break up with someone, my mother would start asking about him. Men loved to charm her with gifts and flowers, and she gladly accepted the bounty. “Why you didn’t marry so-and-so?” she’d lament. “He was such a nice man.” “Look, get out of my business,” I’d retort. “If he’s so nice, why don’t you marry him?” That was enough to close her mouth.

  Even when I wasn’t dating, others always seemed to be speculating that I was, or else trying to get in on the action. Backstage at The Blacks, someone once cut a peeping-Tom hole in the curtain covering my changing area. “Who did this?” I asked, grinning. A few of my male castmates snickered but none of them said a word. I later found out it was Godfrey Cambridge, who admitted he’d been trying to catch a glimpse. I didn’t pay him any mind, especially after I made a discovery off set. I once went to the library to do some research on Jean Genet, and there it was in black and white: the playwright and I had the same birthdate, December 19. I decided then that I, too, must be an artistic genius. Well, sir, the next day, I strode backstage with my head up in the air, never looking to the left or right. I stepped into my changing area and yanked closed my holey curtain. “It doesn’t matter what tricks any of you all try to pull on me,” I blurted out, “because I know I am a genius.” We all got a good laugh out of that one.

  Godfrey wasn’t the only suitor trying to sneak a peek. Once I became known around town as Cicely Tyson the promising young star, my phone never stopped ringing. I got calls from just about every Black man in theater. “Can I help you?” I’d say. “This is so-and-so,” I’d hear, “and I just want to welcome you to the business. How about dinner?” One man would call and then say nothing once I picked up. Another actor, one who was married, would call and try to disguise his voice. James Earl Jones, after he’d moved past his shyness and gotten to know me well (in 1962, we did Moon on a Rainbow Shawl together), once said, “All of the guys in all of the plays around town were just trying to take Cicely out.” I didn’t go out with any of them. I wanted to keep my stage life and my personal one separate.

  It was during these years that I met my closest friend, Arthur Mitchell, the acclaimed dancer. One night when I was leaving The Blacks, walking over to the Hotel Albert, I heard someone behind me say, “Ms. Tyson.” I turned around to see him, tall and beaming. “My name is Arthur Mitchell,” he said. “I know who you are,” I said, chuckling. A few years earlier in 1955, Arthur had already cemented his place in history as the first African-American dancer with the New York City Ballet; soon after, he went on to become the principal dancer. He’d just seen The Blacks that evening, and he told me how much he’d enjoyed the play. That topic led to another, and Lord knows how long we stood on that corner and talked! Finally I told him, “I’ve gotta go.” “Okay,” he said, turning to leave, “but we’re gonna work together someday.” He’s crazy, I thought to myself. I’m an actress, he’s a dancer. How in the world are we ever going to work together? Time would prove me to be the crazy one.

  We ran into each other again, this time on the Upper West Side. He, too, had an apartment there, a few blocks away from mine. He walked me from the number 1 train at Seventy-Ninth Street to my front door. Thus began a ritual: when I’d return from The Blacks, Arthur would meet me at the train, escort me to my place, and then walk to his own. And every single night, he’d stop by a candy store and buy himself a pint of vanilla ice cream. Once home, he’d call me, as if years had passed since we’d last connected, and we’d talk as he scooped up his dessert. We’d laugh and carry on for hours, talking about everything and everyone. That conversation went on for sixty years.

  * * *

  In those times, I did have one romance that survived longer than five minutes. Just as I was hobnobbing my way into the business, I crossed paths with Bert Andrews, the photographer. I still marvel at how destiny’s gossamer strings pulled us together. Sometime around 1956, I was walking down Seventh Street when I spotted a gentleman on the other side of the road. His eyes lit up as if he knew me, and he made his way over to my side of the avenue. With a camera around his neck and a leather bag overflowing with film, he introduced himself. “Ms. Tyson, my name is Bert Andrews,” he said, extending his hand. He was working for the Amsterdam News at the time, he explained, but he once had worked with the photographer Chuck Stewart, who’d photographed me for the cover of Our World. “If you ever need some more photos for your portfolio,” Bert offered, “I’d be happy to take them.” The whole time he spoke, I stood there staring at him and thinking, Where have I seen this face before? I couldn’t place him. And suddenly as he was leaving, it came to me, clear as crystal: This is the man from the wedding.

  Several years before, I’d attended a wedding with my family. I was seated at a table with my mother and Emily, enjoying the meal and the celebration, when a man walked into the ballroom. He was there to take photographs, and a host greeted him. I was so taken with this man—the kindness in his expression, the depth in his eyes, the gentleness of his manner—that I could not look away. That is how arresting I found his face. The two of us were never introduced that day, and moments after he arrived, he disappeared into another room to take pictures of the wedding party, I’m sure. And here he was, a decade later, as drawn to my face, from across a street, as I’d once been to his. Isn’t that something? I told him what I’d recalled, and after a round of amazement, he handed me his card. “Give me a call when you are ready,” he said. “It would be my pleasure to photograph you.”

  Bert began shooting me, and eventually, we started seeing one another. We were two young strivers, he poring over photos in his darkroom in the wee hours after midnight, me making relentless rounds to build my modeling career. In was in that commonality of dreams, as well as the warmth I first recognized in him, that our relationship flourished, both personally and professionally. After I’d landed the lead in Dark of the Moon, Vinnette said to me, “I need a photographer.” “I have one for you,” I told her. Bert came to a rehearsal and met my mentor, and after looking through his portfolio, she hired him. In the years to follow, Bert became the foremost photographer of Black theater, his work featured in a book I cherish and still purchase by the dozens, In the Shadow of the Great White Way: Images from the Black Theatre. The 1950s and 1960s were a momentous era in Black theater, and through his wide lens and open heart, he captured and memorialized all of it.

  Bert and I dated for a few years, and even once life moved us on, we remained good friends. “Whatever happened to ‘Buhk’?” my mother would of course ask, mispronouncing his name. “He was such a nice man.” I’d just smile and shake my head. I saw Bert frequently around the business, and while I was in The Blacks, he once came by to show me some photographs he’d taken. During the show’s run, I’d sometimes stay at the Hotel Albert down on Tenth Street and within walking distance of St. Mark’s Playhouse. Bert met me there and as we looked through his shots, he noticed a review I’d just clipped out of the New York Times. The piece was about Paule Marshall, the renowned Barbados-born writer. In 1959, she’d penned her first book, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a novel about a Trinidadian immigrant family eking out an existence in 1940s Brooklyn, while confronting the dual scourges of racism and poverty. “Some day they are going to do a movie of this book,” I told Bert, “and I am going to play the lead character.”

  “Oh, do you know Paule?” he asked.

  �
��No,” I said, “but I am going to know her.”

  A smile spread over his face. “We did our first job together,” he told me, “she as a writer and me as a photographer. I’ll call her up and arrange for you to meet her.”

  On the appointed day, Bert and I, along with Paule and her husband, gathered at the couple’s home. Over dinner, Paule and Bert, who hadn’t seen each other in the longest time, caught up about everything under the sun—but no mention of the book. When it came time to leave, Paule leaned in to talk with me. “You know,” she said, “this book that I’ve written . . . CBS is talking about turning it into a television movie. But I don’t have any confidence it will happen.” She then handed me a copy of the book. “Read it—and when I return from Barbados in a few weeks, I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.”

  I inhaled the book in one sitting. Paule didn’t just write a novel teeming with authenticity of the immigrant experience. We know now, in hindsight, that her writings became what scholars have called a “critical bridge” between early Black female writers like Zora Neale Hurston and later ones such as Toni Morrison. She also did what so little art, then and now, manages to do: shine a light on the interior world of Black women, and in so doing, render us fully human. The novel features two characters, sixteen-year-old Selina Boyce, and her sister, Ina, nine. As I read, my skin tingled as it does when I absolutely know I am meant to take on a project. Soon after, Paule called me. “Yes, CBS is going to do it,” she told me, “and they want you to play Selina.” I paused. “Well I don’t want to play the older sister,” I told her. “I want to play Ina.” God knows I was nowhere near age nine, and playing Ina would strain credulity for the audience, but that is the role that resonated with me. That child was in me.

  Still, when I showed up to meet the casting director, I read for Selina. And as I was leaving, the director said to me, “Ms. Tyson, come back here. Why don’t you read Ina.” When I was done, he reached over, took my script, folded it, and tucked it under my arm. “Call me after six o’clock this evening” is all he said. As it turns out, he’d been prepared to bring in a young girl to play Ina, but once he heard me, that plan vanished. I did call him that night, and to my astonishment (I was thirty-five at the time!), he offered me the role of Ina. Benita Evans, then twenty, played Selina. Ossie Davis played our father. The CBS Repertoire Workshop marked my first role on a TV show, and it all came about through a fortuitous reconnection with Bert. This life amazes me.

  Between Bert and Miles stretched a long canyon, one filled with no serious romance to speak of. The loves of my life then were Joan, who I kept at my side whenever I wasn’t working, and the stage. I dated here and there, of course, but had no intention of marrying, not in the years when I was building my career. My friend Roxie went a different way.

  When we weren’t cutting up over at Sardi’s, Roxie and I would sometimes meet at the Carlyle, near Seventy-Sixth and Madison. During her run in The Blacks, she began dating Sy Kravitz, then a news producer at NBC. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said one evening when we met for dinner. She smiled. “What?” I said, leaning in. “Sy asked me to marry him,” she said. My eyes widened. “Oh really?” I said. She nodded. “Well my guy hasn’t asked me to marry him,” I said with a smirk, “so you better hurry up and marry that one.” I of course had no desire to tie the knot then, nor do I recall whom I was even seeing. Yet I was thrilled to witness the joy on my friend’s countenance. Roxie and Sy indeed married in 1962 and soon moved around the corner from me on the Upper West Side. Two years later, they welcomed their son, little Lenny. Lenny Kravitz is my beloved godson, and I’ll tell you, I am so proud of that man.

  Years later when Lenny was grown, I was still living on Seventy-Fourth Street. I heard some loud music in Riverside Park. I opened the door to the terrace and spotted a group out there carrying on. So I put on my shoes and went down to see what all the commotion was about. As I entered the park, there stood Lisa Bonet, Lenny’s wife at the time and then playing Denise Huxtable on The Cosby Show. “Ms. Cicely!” she said, hugging me.

  “What are you all doing over here in my neighborhood?” I asked her. “We’re cutting Lenny’s record,” she told me. When I made my way back upstairs, I called Roxie.

  “You hear all that noise?” I said, raising the phone’s receiver out on the terrace. “That’s your son and daughter-in-law making all of this noise in our neighborhood.” We both just fell out laughing.

  * * *

  During my years in The Blacks, and as winds of dissent bristled through the nation, I once considered relocating to Atlanta, the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. My castmates—and especially Maya, who’d been quite involved with the Movement and knew Dr. King well—talked me out of it. They feared for my life.

  My sister, Emily, had traveled down South several times. A girlfriend of hers was married to a minister, and he was from Georgia, I think. After visiting there, Emily would come back raving about how wonderful it was to be surrounded by Black people who had their own schools, their own churches, their own cultural events and communities. She had a ball. Visiting a loving Black family in Atlanta provided my sister with one vantage point, but driving through the small towns and byways of the South gave me a different one.

  During the 1950s, I took a road trip with a friend of mine, a musician by the name of Eddie. He and I drove from New York to Georgia, winding our way through Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Somewhere along the back roads of Alabama, we stopped at a small restaurant, more like a shack, to get something to eat. He parked and went around back to put in his order. I stayed in the car. Moments later, he jumped back in the car, out of breath and gripping a brown paper bag containing his food. He shoved the key into the ignition.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him, laughing a little. “Why can’t we sit here and eat?”

  “Shhh!” he said, starting the engine. “Don’t laugh. We gotta get out of here.”

  After we’d driven a distance, he exhaled and I started in with my questions.

  “Why did we leave there so fast?” I asked him.

  He looked straight ahead at the road. “We’re in the South, Cicely,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means it wouldn’t take them but a second to pull me out of this car and lynch me right here.”

  I will never know what happened around back outside of that restaurant. Eddie never revealed it to me. Perhaps, while he waited for his order, someone had shot him a look that sent shivers through him. Perhaps he’d dared to breathe in a white person’s direction. Perhaps, thinking of Emmett Till, he feared the imminence of death, his own lifeless body floating down a river.

  That experience piqued my first deep interest in the mistreatment of our people in this country. I began reading, taking in all I could about our history, about the assaults that tested us but could not break us. It stung me even as it flung open my eyes. America has our blood on its palms, our flesh between its teeth. When you come to understand what we have endured, when you let the barefaced savagery of it all truly penetrate, you are forever haunted by the horror.

  Years after my journey south, when I mentioned to Maya that I wanted to temporarily leave acting to become part of the Civil Rights Movement, I thought I had a fairly good idea of what I’d be getting into. Maya disagreed. “You can’t go down there,” she insisted. “You’ll end up dead.” The quiver in her voice, one I’d never once heard up to then, persuaded me she was right.

  12

  Going Natural

  I NEVER set out to start a natural hair craze. On the day I showed up at Shalimar barbershop in Harlem, I simply wanted a haircut. What came next stunned even me.

  The year was 1962. I was in The Blacks by then and had also been asked to take a role in Between Yesterday and Today, the CBS Sunday morning drama. In a single live episode, I was to play an African wife, a woman who, once in the United States, wished to preserve her cultural heritage. Th
e cast rehearsed the day before the show, and like many Black women in those times, I was then wearing my hair relaxed. This character wouldn’t have worn her hair straightened, I kept thinking as we ran through the script. So adamant was this woman about embracing her native culture, there was no way she would have chemically processed hair. It didn’t feel right to me.

  So I took myself up to Shalimar’s, the place where Duke Ellington used to get his hair cut. A barber greeted me and introduced himself as Streamline. “How may I help you today, Miss?” he asked.

  “I would like to have my hair cut,” I said, “and I want it as short as you can possibly get it.”

  The man stared at me as if I had a unibrow. “Excuse me, what do you want?”

  “You see my hair?” I said, pointing at it. “I want it cut. And then I would like to have it shampooed so that it goes back to its natural state.”

  He coughed. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  He put me in his chair and draped a cape around me. He then turned on his clippers. As he proceeded to cut, I closed my eyes, mostly because I didn’t want the sight of my neck-length hair to deter me from my mission. He cut for fifteen minutes or so before saying, “Well . . . how do you like it?” I flung open my lids.

  “It’s not short enough,” I told him. My hair then was probably eight inches, and he’d cut it down to about five. “I want it as close to my scalp as you can get it,” I told him. “Okay, Miss,” he muttered. “Whatever you want.”

  I closed my eyes again and let him buzz away. Even once he turned off the clippers and said, “Okay, let’s go to the shampoo bowl,” I kept my eyes closed as he led me to it. He shampooed me once, twice, and a third time. He then took me back to his chair, blow-dried my hair, rubbed some pomade through it, and patted it down. “What do you think?” he said. When I opened my eyes and saw myself in the mirror, I said, “That’s her!” My half-inch ’fro looked exactly to me like the one my character would’ve worn.