Just as I Am

by Cicely Tyson

  * * *

  When Jane Pittman aired in January 1974, it ran straight through for 110 minutes, with just one commercial break at the start and another at the end. I will forever be grateful to Xerox, the film’s sponsor, for making that possible. Nothing like that had ever been done, which let me know how much the work was respected. Viewers were able to enter Jane Pittman’s world and remain there, in rapt attention, as her story unfolded seamlessly. Fifty million people tuned in—nearly a quarter then of the nation.

  I was stunned by how swiftly the acclaim poured in, followed by a wave of nominations. The film received nine Emmy nods, all of which were awarded. For my title role, I won not just one Emmy, but a pair of them. The first was for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries. The second was for Actress of the Year, a specially created Emmy that, up to then, had never been given—nor has it been awarded since. With both awards, I made history as the first Black actress to receive them, and I also earned a British Academy Film Awards nomination. I’ll tell you, child, I beamed through that entire awards season, soaking in the joy at every turn, reveling in the many calls and notes I received from others in the business. In the evenings, I’d run myself a warm bath and sink down into it, lost for hours beneath the bubbles and the bliss. On the evening of the Emmys ceremony, I stood backstage afterward wearing a grin as wide as the Nile, clutching my golden statues, feeling like a princess in my flowing spring dress, in awe of my presence there. It may sound unbelievable, but for the first time, I started to think, Maybe this acting thing isn’t a fluke. Maybe I’m here to stay. Two years earlier, Sounder had set the table as my breakout role. Jane Pittman, it seemed, served up sweet confirmation—a word, from on high, that I’d earned my spot at the banquet.

  Jane Pittman marked the end of my anonymity. Everywhere I went, folks recognized me much more than they had after Sounder—a shift I found at once thrilling and a bit strange. It’s only after your sense of privacy slips away that you recognize how long you’ve taken it for granted. As my star rose, so did my number of public appearances. I served as a presenter, alongside Peter Lawford, at the 1974 Oscars. That same year, I cohosted the Tony Awards. I’ve never been one to cocktail my way around town, so unless I had official business, I happily retreated to my apartment. Yet when I did go out, strolling to the market became not a quick errand, but a circus that drew stares and crowds. I’d think to myself, What is all this fuss? I was once speaking to a receptionist when a woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “Hello, Ms. Tyson!” she said when I turned around. I chuckled. “How do you know who I am?” I asked her. “Your voice,” she said. It was the first time I became aware that my vocal chords alone were enough to give me away.

  I enjoyed the adulation, the words from those who approached me, tears in their eyes, to say how Jane Pittman had touched them. It was deeply satisfying. And yet the reticent girl in me still yearned for my space, and I found ways to carve it out. I’d slide into a matinee alone to watch a movie at noon, my way of avoiding the inevitable scene of attending a night show. Even now, I love to disappear into a film house at midday, relishing the stories of Black filmmakers in particular. In 2006, I slipped into a showing of Saturday Night Life, the directorial film debut of a young Black woman I knew little about then. Ava DuVernay, the movie’s gifted director, is now my friend.

  Among family, I was thankfully still just Sis. Neither my parents nor my sister, Emily, got caught up in the fanfare and celebrity. The same was true of my daughter. When Joan and I were with one another, I wasn’t Cicely Tyson, the big film star. I was simply her mom, though I’m sure it must’ve felt bizarre for her to notice others craning their necks to glimpse me. When our large extended family came together during holidays, gathering over fish curry, no one carried on over my film work. My brother was the exception. If Melrose had had his way, he would’ve paraded me through Times Square while yelling, “This is my sister!” I learned to keep my visits with him indoors.

  After the magic carpet ride of Jane Pittman, I couldn’t imagine what other experience might compare. I said to myself, That’s it. There’ll never be another Jane. I knew I’d continue acting, of course. But since I’d been blessed, back to back, with such substantive characters, I figured Jane and Rebecca were my high-water marks. My agent must have felt the same. After Pittman, someone asked Haber what he thought was next for me. “I don’t know,” he said, chuckling. “She may have acted herself clean out of the business.” On stage and off, God alone knew what thunderclaps awaited.

  16

  Endings and Beginnings

  I HAD two peculiar dreams in the fall of 1974 after Jane Pittman’s January release. Dance Theatre of Harlem was due to perform for Queen Elizabeth, so I took a red-eye from LA to New York, with plans to eventually fly on to London with Arthur. It was during my red-eye flight that the first dream came about. I was in Harlem, standing on a sidewalk across from Sydenham Hospital on 124th near my godmother’s apartment. I looked up and spotted her on her balcony, alongside a young woman with fair skin who looked exactly like Miles’s first wife, Frances. When I awakened, I thought, What is Frances doing in my dream? I wonder if Miles is okay.

  That afternoon, I got in a cab and went over to Casdulan salon to check in with Frenchie, who knew Miles well. “How is Miles?” I asked him. “Oh that bad boy, he’s all right,” he said, laughing. “I saw him yesterday, and he’s acting up as usual.” So I knew my dream wasn’t about Miles, but I felt tortured by the thought that someone was trying to get a message to me. And no way was I traveling across an ocean until I found out what it was. “Do you know anybody who tells fortunes?” I asked my then-assistant, Susan Siem. She didn’t. So I called Lorenzo James, Arthur’s friend, who gave me the number for a retired palm reader. We made an appointment for her to come and see me at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which is where I was staying while doing some press work for Jane Pittman. But before this woman and I could get together, the future revealed itself.

  Shortly after I’d booked the reading, I began having strange flashes. I’d be burning up one minute and cold as January the next. When the third heat wave hit, I leaped up from my bed, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. I gazed in the mirror, studying my face from every angle. Am I going to die? I thought. Between that and the dream, it was the only explanation I could come up with. That same evening, once I could settle myself down for sleep, I had a second dream, this one more disturbing than the first. In that vision, I was all dressed up, walking down a city street, when I suddenly stumbled to the ground. As I fell, I extended my left arm toward heaven, as if I were reaching out for God’s help. I had absolutely no idea what to make of either dream.

  A few days later, I’d just emerged from a clothing store on the Upper West Side when I spotted two guys staring at me. The first one, a tall man wearing spectacles, was leaned up against the hood of a Chevy, reading a newspaper that had my photograph on its front page. He looked at the picture and then at me. The other man, short and burly, stood next to him with his arms folded. My instincts told me to flee, so I ducked into Zabar’s near Broadway and Eightieth and waited there for thirty minutes, hoping they’d leave. I stepped out and scanned the block and didn’t see them, so I quickly hailed a cab to take me back to my hotel on Fifty-Ninth Street. I went up to my room, relaxed for a while, and came down that evening to go out walking. When I entered the lobby, I nearly screamed when I saw the tall man. I dashed into the hotel’s pharmacy, right off the lobby, and approached the clerk. “Can you please call security?” I leaned over the counter and whispered to her. “A man is following me.” Just then, the guy wandered into the store and began browsing the shelves. I nodded in his direction to let the clerk know that was him. A security officer soon arrived, questioned the man, and escorted him out of the hotel.

  That evening, I called my mother, who in those years was living near Emily in Mount Vernon. I told her about both dreams, as well as about the men who seemed to be stalking me. “You’d better
be careful,” she said. “Last night, I saw you in a dream—and you were dressed in white.” In West Indian culture, white is worn for both weddings and funerals, so the color can be associated with death. When my mother told me that she’d seen me in white, a wave of fear surged through me. It’s not me you saw in your dream, I thought. It’s you.

  One week later, I was packing my formal wear before the London trip when the phone rang. It was my sister. “How are you?” I asked her. “Not well,” Emily said, her voice trembling. “Mother just passed.” The phone slipped from my hand as the room blurred. That is the last thing I remember before my world went dark.

  * * *

  My mother had known the end was near. A couple of months before my arrival in New York, Mom had apparently called on my brother’s wife, Bernice. The two of them had been separated for years, and my brother was living in Florida then, but Bernice still lived in Harlem. “I’m going home to my mother,” my mom had said to Bernice. My sister-in-law stared at her, unnerved by her declaration. “Mama, please don’t talk like that,” she told her. “I don’t like to hear you say things like that.” When my mother repeated her assertion, Bernice said to her, “Why don’t you wait until Sister comes,” probably hoping that seeing me would return Mom’s thoughts to her loved ones here on earth. At the time, Bernice did not relay that conversation to me, Emily, or Melrose. I’m sure she must’ve believed that my mother, reflecting wistfully on her early years in Nevis when her dear mother had held her close, was just missing her mom. Bernice couldn’t have realized that my mother’s musings meant she’d already placed one foot inside heaven’s gates. She’d last seen her mother when she was twenty-three years old, on that day when she’d waved tearfully from a ship deck on her way to America. At age seventy-seven, the time had drawn near for my mother to at long last reunite with her mom.

  My mother, a year earlier, had given another sign that her earthly days were numbered. I was out in California when she called me up from her place in Mount Vernon one afternoon. “Come here, I want to talk to you,” she said, as if I was around the corner. Now mind you, Emily lived across the street, but it was me she sent for. When I arrived the next week, we sat in her bedroom in front of her television for the longest time, with Mom catching me up on the latest plot twists in Guiding Light, as I sat there thinking, Is this why you called me here from the other side of the country? As if she’d read my mind, she got up and walked over to a small safe she kept in the corner of her room. She opened it and began pulling out her important records, everything from insurance policies to war bonds to Christmas funds. One document at a time, she laid them out across the bed as I looked on. “Now this is for Melrose,” she began. “And this here is for Emily.” On it went, with her parceling out the few pennies she’d squirreled away over the years, wanting to ensure that those she loved most were taken care of. “I don’t know what you’re doing this for,” I said to her. “You ain’t goin’ no place.” She knew different.

  For me, my mother left not a teaspoon. Given my success in the film business, she knew I could financially provide for myself. She also knew I could be trusted to carry out her last wishes, just as a stranger in the Bronx had once predicted. “Take care of that child,” said the woman, an angel who’d appeared from nowhere and vanished just as quickly on that day in 1925. “She has a sixth sense. She’s going to make you very proud one day—and she’s going to take care of you in your old age.” By 1973, the year my mother called me across the country to see her, both prophecies had come true. She’d put her earthly possessions not in the hands of her eldest, her Heart String, Melrose. Nor did my mother entrust her belongings to her second daughter, her mirror. “I am so proud of Emily,” my mother had often said over the years. “She did everything exactly like me. She even had three children like I did, one boy and two girls.” Yet in her final days, my mother had placed her faith in me, a mirror of a different sort, the daughter who, at times, had reflected her untended hurts, those shadowy corners of her soul she cringed when staring upon. As God would have it, the child who did the opposite of everything my mother ordered, the one whose out-of-wedlock shame shined a light on her great unspoken one—that daughter turned out to be the child she relied on. I received that trust in the way I believe she intended it, as a final declaration of her forgiveness and love. That she left me nothing mattered not at all to me. Her pardon, alongside her final approval, was treasure enough.

  By the time we lost my mother in November 1974, my father had already gone home. He had passed years earlier in the summer of 1961, the year I landed a role in The Blacks. Around that time, doctors had discovered my dad had lymphoma, a blood cancer. By then, he’d remarried, much to my mother’s aggravation, because despite the heartache Willie Tyson had brought her, she’d never stopped believing he was her soul mate. In the months before his death, Daddy was in and out of the hospital, and much of the time, we didn’t even know he was there. On his hospital entry forms, he never listed his children, which I still find curious. Perhaps scrawling our names was a painful reminder of the day our family splintered into two. Or maybe he was just trying to avoid any conflict that may have arisen if my mother had shown up at the hospital, alongside us, to visit him. He was well acquainted with the potential thunderstorm lurking behind Fredericka’s placid exterior. Dosha, the quiet church girl from Nevis, was peace like a river. The fiery Fredericka, however, had once stoned the Other Woman in front of a church house. A cross glance from my father’s new wife might’ve been enough to unleash such fury, and Daddy knew it.

  Though he clearly preferred otherwise, news of my father’s hospitalizations still, at times, made its way around to me and the Tyson crew. On one such occasion, I visited him. Around that same time, his brother, my Uncle Charles, had also been ill and was staying in the same hospital on another floor, which meant my father was grappling with dual heartaches.

  Upon entering the room, I walked slowly to his bedside. There he lay in his hospital gown, propped up by pillows, frail and huddled beneath the white sheets, reduced to a fraction of the mighty presence he’d been during my childhood. A few of my cousins and other relatives were already gathered. His face was sallow, the vigor drained from his countenance. I knew he didn’t have long. Uncle Charles had passed away that very morning, but no one had yet had the heart to tell my father. He nodded and smiled as I entered, and I leaned over to kiss his forehead. “Hello, String Bean,” he whispered, the light returning to his eyes for the briefest of moments. I took a place at his side among the others. No one spoke a word. My father, sensing the palpable heaviness, scanned the faces of those gathered. “My brother died, didn’t he?” he said. A few of us traded glances as his wife nodded. The little remaining color in Dad’s cheeks faded. He lowered his head and wept like an infant, with a question in his sobs: Is my turn next?

  The next day I returned to see my father. I took the elevator up to his room, and when the doors parted, there he sat in a wheelchair, with a nurse ready to transfer him to another floor for x-rays. His cheekbones lifted when he glimpsed me, and I held open the door as the nurse wheeled him in. The elevator was somewhat crowded, so a few people scooted to the outer edges to make space for him. Once the doors closed, he peered around and smiled. “This is my daughter,” he announced to those around us, with pride in his eyes. “This is my eldest girl, come to see me.” He may not have written my name on his intake form, but he clearly wanted the world to know that I was his. He got his x-rays, and during our visit alone, we chatted about this and that, carefully sidestepping, per the Tyson code of silence, what we both knew was imminent. When I kissed him goodbye that afternoon, I sensed I might never see him alive again. I did not.

  Two weeks later, I was hanging out at the Orchidian, a bar then near Eighth Street and Second Avenue where a lot of us actors congregated after our shows. A Russian couple owned the spot. Over the loudspeakers every evening, they’d play the Russian national anthem as the wait staff hummed along. On this evening,
some old friends, including Sidney Bernstein, one of the producers of The Blacks, were with me, and I’d just auditioned for a small role in a production that day. The play was to be directed by my longtime friend and mentor Vinnette Carroll. Our waiter approached the table. “You have a phone call, Ms. Tyson,” he said. I made my way to the phone and took the receiver. It was Vinnette. “Have you talked to your family?” she said. That is all I heard before I passed out. The next thing I knew, I woke up in Sidney Bernstein’s living room. He and his wife were standing over me. “What happened?” I muttered. He told me what my spirit had sensed upon hearing Vinnette’s question. My father had passed.

  Like my mother, my father knew he was near the end. I later learned that, days earlier, he’d called the family to his bedside. I still have a hard time understanding what happened next. My mother and sister, along with Vinnette, had decided that because of my audition, it was best not to tell me that my father was in his last days. They did not want to pull my focus away from my preparation. I’ll tell you, boy, there are some things you can never quite pardon others for. This, for me, is one such occurrence. That my family would think that it was more important for me to prep for an audition than to be at my father’s bedside—it still puzzles and deeply pains me.