by Cicely Tyson
On the day Emily called to tell me our mother was gone, I fainted momentarily. Once I lifted myself from the floor and picked up the phone again, Emily, through tears, explained how my mother had passed. She’d been dressed in her Sunday best, on her way to an appointment in the city. As a precaution while walking the streets of New York, she, like the old-time West Indian woman that she was, always attached her pocketbook to a safety pin and pinned it inside her coat. She’d then carry a decoy pocketbook, an empty one, so that if someone snatched it, the thief would find nothing in it. That’s how smart she was. While strolling along the sidewalk, likely scoping out her surroundings, my mother suffered a major stroke. A couple of passersby spotted her and rushed to her side to try to revive her, but she was already gone. She lay sprawled on the pavement, with her left hand stretched toward heaven—in exactly the position I had dreamed. The woman in my second dream had been her.
I never made it to London. Once I hung up the phone, I called my brother in Florida. After he’d left Montclair and his job at the post office, he’d married Bernice. Their union became strained and they eventually separated, but like our parents, they did not immediately divorce. My brother then joined the Merchant Marines, but having inherited our father’s temper, he was dismissed for brawling with a fellow mariner who’d provoked him. Melrose, ever the drifter, moved from here to there, and truthfully for a time, we didn’t know where he was. But at some point, he called my mother and asked for his papers so that he could apply for reentry into the Merchant Marines. That is how I knew he was living in Florida. And as I see it, it is a miracle that, because he’d called asking for his papers, I even knew where to find him when our mother passed. “Come home,” I said when he answered the phone. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Just come home,” I repeated. “We need you.” I met him at the airport with the news that I am sure, based on the quiver in my voice when I’d called him, he was expecting to hear. My poor brother, Mommy’s Heart String, crumpled into a heap of wails.
My mother did not want to be buried in pink. I don’t know why, but she disliked the color. For her funeral she’d set aside the silk beige gown she’d worn to my sister’s wedding decades earlier. Upon inspecting it, I noticed its frayed edges and stains and decided it was not good enough for my mother’s journey through the pearly gates. So I went and bought her a gown that would best complement her figure, and it happened to be rose colored. I’ve sometimes imagined my mother up in heaven, sitting alongside her own mother, recounting scenes from Guiding Light while fussing, in a deep West Indian accent, about that pink gown and the rebellious last word of her eldest daughter.
After my mother’s passing, my brother and I were cleaning out her apartment, a sorrowful duty that, each time I breathed Mom’s scent on a piece of her clothing, felt like losing her all over again. We took apart her queen bed frame, and beneath it, I spotted a stationery box. When I pried it open, a slew of envelopes fell out, letters I’d sent to her over the years. Inside them was a stash of money totaling several thousand dollars. Along with my letters I’d always included checks, which she’d cashed but never spent. Instead, she’d tucked the money in the envelopes, perhaps forgetting the stockpile was there. I used the money to send my daughter, Joan, then in her early thirties, on her first trip around the world. “This is your grandmother’s gift to you,” I said as I pressed an envelope containing a check into her palm. She whispered thank you.
I may never know what my first dream meant, or why the fair-skinned woman resembling Frances appeared. God’s ways are indeed a mystery to us mortals, and as the scriptures have proclaimed, we see dimly in this life what we shall one day know in full. And yet my second dream, as well as my mother’s own vision, seem undeniable in their message. The woman my mother had envisioned in white had not been me, but her. My instincts had rightly told me that. My mother, in her own way, had foreseen her own passing, as clearly as she’d once known that shards of glass would slice open my forearm. The scar that still runs alongside my right wrist reminds me of her prescience. The pain rippling through me in these times now reminds me of losing her.
You can never predict how you will feel when your parents pass away. You think you know, but you do not. You may believe you’ll be too stunned to speak, and perhaps at moments, the grief will indeed render you voiceless. But your silence may also be punctuated with bouts of wailing, of cowering beneath your covers for days, trying to suspend the bleeding, trying to find the ground beneath you again. You may believe that if you have been estranged from or in conflict with your mother and father, you will experience a strange relief upon their passing. None of this or all of this may come to pass. The truth is that, like a great many crises in this life, you cannot truly know how you will respond until you are standing in them. There is no preparing.
Losing my father and mother felt, to me, like walking through the world without arms. Your skin is freshly bruised and exposed. The pain is raw. Through death, you realize that the word heartache is not metaphorical but literal. Every part of you throbs and burns. After the rice and peas and plantains have been brought over by caring neighbors, and once the mourners are long gone, you are left only with the silence, the knowing, the realization that you are on your own. Others you hold dear surround you, of course. But when the people who gave you life have departed this earth, you enter a strange new corridor of detachment. You are untethered, disconnected from the two story lines that gave birth to your one.
As much as I adored my father and ached after his passing, I felt the loss of my mother most profoundly. Once our family split apart when I was nine, my mother became the ever-present force in my childhood, the one who wrote most prolifically upon the canvas of who I am. When you bury a parent, you lower his or her casket into the ground, but the history between you lives on. The funeral is an ending, yes, but it is also a beginning—the start of a true reckoning with those hurts between you that must be laid to rest. When we buried my mother, I mourned her then and in the years that followed. As I grieved, I thought I’d long since come to terms with my father—with how he’d both delighted and failed me, with the ways in which he’d unknowingly bruised me just as all parents do, despite their best intentions. But once Miles stumbled back into my world, I learned just how much of a father wound I was still nursing.
17
The Ladder
WITH my spirit still ailing from the loss of my mother, I returned to work. When you’re Black in Hollywood, and frankly, when you’re Black and doing just about anything in this life, you do not have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines for long. Work beckons amid the reality that when you slow down, so does your income. The wealth gap between Blacks and whites in the United States, created by decades of systematic injustice, was as evident in the 1970s as it is now. That gap has always been more pronounced for Black women. I don’t know one Black actress who works with the consistency of a white actress who has the same credentials. That truth holds when it comes to gender. Accomplished artists such as Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, and Halle Berry do not have nearly the same script opportunities as, say, Denzel Washington—and even Denzel, brilliant as he is, has fewer options than white male actors of his caliber. In every aspect of society, we Black women find ourselves on the bottom rung of what I call The Ladder. We are holding on for dear life, I tell you, surviving as our knuckles bleed.
As a Black actress, even when you’re at the so-called pinnacle of your career, your choices are severely limited. Characters such as Bree Daniels in Klute, the 1971 film role for which Jane Fonda earned an Oscar, come along for a Black artist perhaps once in a career, if at all. How can a Black actress ever become a Meryl Streep or a Glenn Close if she cannot build the illustrious body of work that is generally available to actors of that stature? It’s impossible. The opportunities are just not there for us, which is why I so strongly encourage the efforts of Black scriptwriters and directors. If our stories do not exist in the mainstream—in part because, despite evidence
to the contrary, the industry’s power brokers do not truly believe Black protagonists will resonate with white audiences—we do not have the chance to showcase the full extent of our capabilities. That will change only as we continue bankrolling and scripting our own stories.
Even when Black women are written into a story line, we are often cast as characters with no evident depth or backstory, largely included as scaffolding to hold up narratives centered on whites. I was quite fortunate to have landed two layered and emotionally complex characters in Rebecca and Jane, though as you know, I earned practically nothing for them. The Women’s Movement of the sixties and seventies was focused primarily on the needs of middle- and upper-class white women, which meant our unique concerns as Black women were largely overlooked. Ever present was the reality Zora Neale Hurston wrote of when she called Black women “de mule uh de world” in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. We are subject to the dual scourges of racism and sexism, a reality articulated by the first Black woman elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm. In 1972, Shirley made history again as the first sister to launch a presidential bid as a major-party candidate. “In the end,” she once said, “anti-Black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.” Shirley understood that we live in a world constantly seeking to reduce us as Black women, be it through racism or sexism. The Women’s Movement made its strides, and to be sure, many Black women lifted their voices alongside those of whites. But in our America, precious little shifted.
And then there’s the issue of pay. Even with the same competencies, and often stronger ones, Black female artists are routinely paid less than their white colleagues. Out in California, I once ran into renowned actress Alfre Woodard. I was just about to do my daily set of stairs, leading up to the beach in Pacific Palisades, when I spotted her from a distance, exercising with her baby strapped to her chest. She was storming up and down those stairs, boy, as if something had upset her. “Alfre, what’s the matter with you?” I called out to her when she drew close. She looked over and smiled when she realized it was me. “I’m so sick of these blankety-blanks not paying me,” she said. “I’ve been in this business a hundred years, and they still don’t want to pay me what I’m worth.” Hmm, I said to myself. So it’s not just me.
Every Black woman knows that reality. This country has never valued us. Sure, many now take to the streets, declaring that Black Lives Matter, and I believe the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have at last removed the scales from the eyes of countless whites. I applaud the awakening. Yet in a country that prioritizes commerce above all, a nation where money has always talked louder than rhetoric, the proof of a perception shift will be evidenced in the payment rendered, enough to put us on par, I hope, with less talented whites who’ve been earning more for decades. It’s easy to say Black Lives Matter. The question is, do they matter enough for this nation to treat and compensate them fairly? Historically, the answer has been a resounding no.
In 1972 while promoting Sounder, I’d traveled all over the country, speaking to mostly whites, including that journalist who couldn’t believe Nathan’s son had called him Daddy, just as his own son referred to him. How could that be the case if Nathan, as this nation had taught him to believe, was more animal than human? Once I realized such ignorance abounded, I chose to become an ambassador of sorts, helping whites understand what clearly was not apparent to many: that Black people experience the full spectrum of human emotion. With the success of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1974, my platform widened, and I again took to the road. Given that I was turning down roles left and right during the Blaxploitation era, there were long stretches when I did not have enough work or enough money, and often both. Speaking is how I remained solvent. For a full month every year throughout the seventies, I toured on college campuses, talking to young people about the roles I’d played, hoping to wield my microphone as a force for good. It was my way of picketing, my contribution to hastening the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.
Following a dry spell in film roles after Jane Pittman, I did play two characters I am proud of. The first was Coretta Scott King in the NBC miniseries King. I reunited with my costar in Sounder, Paul Winfield. After our romance had faded, we remained quite fond of one another, a bond that surely bolstered our on-screen chemistry. He took the role of Dr. King, and boy did Paul embody him in both appearance and spirit. I’d never met Dr. King, but by the time I finished the series, I felt like I had. In 1977, Mrs. King, the essence of grace, invited me to stay with her in her Atlanta home while I was researching the role. We spent hours across from each other at her dining room table, covering the terrain of her love story with Martin, whom she’d lost nearly a decade before. He had a wonderful sense of humor, she told me, a lighthearted side the cameras often did not capture. She spoke of the time they traded their well-appointed Georgia home for a much more humble one because Martin, answering his passion’s siren call, wanted to live among the impoverished.
“When I was decorating the bathroom,” Coretta told me, “I put a simple rug down on the floor in front of the shower, and a matching cover on the toilet seat. When Martin saw the toilet seat cover, he said, ‘We’ve gotta take this off.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Poor people don’t have money to buy food. How are they going to buy a rug just to cover the toilet?’” I thought I would die laughing when she told me that story. So committed was Reverend King to the Movement that he wanted every detail of his surroundings to reflect his rallying cry for justice. The same applied to the modest way they dressed their four children.
It’s both a challenge and a blessing to portray someone who is still alive. The blessing is that the person is a living, breathing body of research you can tap into. The challenge is that there’s pressure to get it exactly right. For me, the process of portraying someone living is not markedly different from the one I usually undertake. I listen. I watch. I smell and taste and touch and inhale. I take in every mannerism, every grimace and head turn, every smile and flutter of the eyelids. My intention was never to completely imitate Coretta, and I couldn’t have if I’d tried. As an actor, I am not a puppet, but rather an open vessel—a channel through which a character flows. My portrayals are, in essence, an interpretation. With Coretta, I listened for the emotional truth beneath her words and gestures with the hope of infusing my portrayal with that truth. And as an aside, I initially wore a full head weave for the role. But they brought in a stylist who put in the weave so tight I couldn’t even sleep! My head was on fire. It was the first time I’d worn a full weave. It was also the last. “Send that guy back in here to take this stuff outta my head,” I told a producer. From then on, I wore a wig.
I asked Coretta about losing Martin. I recall seeing images of her at the funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the way she’d held close in her lap her daughter Bernice, then five, as she stared straight ahead. She did not shed a tear. From afar, she appeared solemn and unflinching, like a soldier just called into battle. When I met her in person, she was the same. I asked her children whether they’d seen her break down during the week of the funeral. They hadn’t, which told me a lot about Coretta. Can you imagine what it takes to hear the news that your husband has been murdered, and then to restrain yourself from falling apart? Do you know the strength that must’ve been required for her to carry on in such circumstances, the kind of fortitude Black women, time and again, have been called upon to demonstrate? During the few weeks that I spent with Coretta in her home, I never once saw her cry, not even when she was talking about losing this man she loved so much. That does not mean she was not devastated. In her private moments, I am sure she wept. But she knew she had to keep it together for the sake of her children and the country that was watching. She had a job to do, and the grieving would have to wait. That is precisely how I felt when I lost my mother. I did not cry when Emily first told me Mom was gone. My initial shock immediately gave way to an
urgent sense of responsibility, to carry on with making arrangements. The mourning would come later.
A fresh wave of grief over my mother’s passing had flooded me near the end of 1975 while I was in Russia. I’d landed a role in The Blue Bird, an American-Soviet children’s fantasy film based on the 1908 play L’Oiseau bleu. The film had been slated to begin months earlier than it did, but when I lost my mother, shooting was delayed. Liz Taylor, every bit the grande dame in life as she was on-screen, played the lead in the star-studded cast. Jane Fonda and Ava Gardner also had roles. I played Tylette, a cat incarnate. The filming took place in both Leningrad and Moscow. When I arrived in the capital, I was greeted by the sounds of the Russian national anthem, which I knew by heart after all the time I’d spent at that bar in New York, the Orchidian. Even after I’d been in Russia for several weeks—long enough to have gotten past my jet lag—I could not sleep well. I’d awaken in the middle of the night howling, “Momma, Momma, Momma!” One evening, I must’ve wept for three hours straight. By then, my mother had been gone for a year. And yet it was the first time I’d been able to fully release my sorrow, like exhaling after holding my breath for months.
The Blue Bird was trouble from the beginning. George Cukor, the American director, assembled a Russian crew, most of whom could not speak a lick of English. How is it that you’re shooting a film in a foreign country and do not bring in a Russian translator or associate director? It was a mess. And George, who often reverted to sign language to get his point across to the crew, should have known better. The whole process was one big argument after another. At one point, my role required me to fly, leaping into the air toward a passing bird. The crew hoisted me up on ropes, with the (non-English-speaking) cinematographer down below, poised to film the shot. As I swung, he clearly was in the wrong position to capture the scene. He started screaming out directions in Russian, like I could understand him. I was directed to shoot the scene again, so I got back into position. When I heard “Action!” I leaped up . . . and same song, second verse. “I’m not doing this another time,” I told the director. “This cameraman has no idea what he’s doing.” The whole production was lost in translation. In fact, I’m not sure how we even got that film done. It was an absolute disaster.
