by Cicely Tyson
Following the airing of Oprah’s Brewster in 1989, other roles came my way, though still never with the same frequency with which they flowed for my white contemporaries. But you take what you can get, and sometimes, what you can get is a delightful character like Sipsey in the 1991 classic Fried Green Tomatoes. Sipsey, a family cook dressed in a head wrap and an apron, lacks in glamour what she makes up for in guts. Still, some of my mother’s old friends, those who’d been murmuring since the day I showed up on-screen in Sounder donning a do-rag, piped up with their chorus of complaints. Asked one, “Why are you always looking like a ton-a-lodgin?”—the West Indian expression for a ragamuffin. I don’t write the roles, sweetheart, I simply authenticate them. And why on earth would a home cook be made up in lipstick and heels? Anyway, I loved that Sipsey because she was ballsy. In the film, Sipsey stirs up some trouble for a certain wife beater, and that maverick act leads to her best line: “The secret’s in the sauce!” To this day, when folks come up to me and utter that phrase, I know they’ve reveled in Sipsey’s chutzpah as much as I do. Madame Queen, another audacious character I portrayed, in the 1997 crime drama Hoodlum, had twice Sipsey’s moxie. You talking about feisty, boy. That woman was something, a gangster through and through. She brought the numbers racket to Harlem. Oh, how I loved playing her.
The mid-nineties, for me, is a misty watercolored blur of films that could put me fast to sleep right now, save for my star turn in the 1994 CBS miniseries The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which chronicles the life of a ninety-nine-year-old woman once married to a Civil War veteran. I can tolerate playing a maid and a former slave when doing so shines a light on an important chapter in history, and when the role just might earn me an Emmy, which this one did. The tail end of the decade brought me another cinematic gem. In 1999, I joined the cast of A Lesson Before Dying, a made-for-TV film based on the number one New York Times bestselling novel by my friend Ernest Gaines, who of course also wrote The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. The story centers on Jefferson (Mekhi Phifer), a young man who has been wrongfully convicted of murdering a white man and thus sentenced to death. Enter Grant Wiggins (Don Cheadle), my godson in the film and a teacher tapped by God to come alongside Jefferson. The spiritually devout Tante Lou, my character, worked herself into my pores the way Rebecca and Jane once had, so much so that when I look now at photos from my time on set, I don’t see my own face, but hers. I knew the soul of that woman. She embodies the scores of steadfast, faithful Black women who have always surrounded me. I channeled them into Tante Lou, who feels determined that if young Jefferson must die, he do so with dignity.
A lesson before dying—that is what Miles, in his passing, left for me. We don’t have long here, children. Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred. “What is your life?” the scriptures ask us. “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14, NIV). The Spirit is ever beckoning us to heed that wisdom, to get on with what we’ve been put here to do. And whatever that calling looks like, however it may seemingly vary from one person or season to the next, at its core, it is simply this: cherish one another. That is all. That is our purpose in its entirety, to bestow God’s care onto others. “Do you think Miles knew just how loved he was?” a friend asked me after his passing. Sadly, he did not. That awareness is why now, in these times today, I hold my dear ones ever closer.
In the years immediately after Miles’s passing, I grieved in the way that I always have, between the crevices of my art. Stepping into another’s reality gives me shelter from my own. Slowly, as I become a conduit for someone else’s anguish, the raw pain of my own throbs less. Healing, as I see it, is not the absence of pain. Rather, it is a gradual reduction in the ache. The lessening of that hurt eventually makes room for fond memories to surface. Miles has been gone for three decades now, and to this day, when I see a photo of him, or else recall one of his crazy sayings (“Can’t no one monkey stop a show,” he’d quip when someone attempted to block his path), it can take me right back to our years together. At the start of this journey called grief, I teared up upon remembering him. These days, I do more smiling than weeping. Though Miles is long gone, he is right here with me. Our love story will never be finished. After his passing, I went out with other men, some of them in the industry, none of whom I care to name. Nothing serious ever came of it. We’re fortunate, in this life, if we’ve known true love once. I have and I relished it.
About eight years after Miles’s death, sometime around 1999, God showered me with a fresh round of his mercies. I turned seventy-five in 1999, though I still allowed the world to believe I was a decade younger. While on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York, I spotted an advertisement about a new vegetarian restaurant in the Village. I took a cab to the restaurant, which turned out to be the size of a teaspoon, with just four tables and a counter. I ordered my meal to go. Then, given that it was a bright Sunday morning, I felt like going to church. I’d been wanting to attend Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, the internationally renowned congregation headed by the Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts. I arrived late, after the service was already well on its way.
The sanctuary was packed to the gills. An usher directed me downstairs to an overflow area, where I stood alongside a wall. A woman by the name of Cheryl Washington, the news anchor who has since become my friend, recognized my face and noticed me holding up that wall. “What are you doing down here?” she asked me.
“Well, I wanted to go to church,” I told her. She laughed and took me by the hand.
“You don’t stand nowhere, Ms. Tyson,” she said. “Please come with me.” She led me upstairs and found me a seat in a pew on the main floor. She must’ve also sent word to Reverend Butts that I was in attendance, because not long after, he called my name from the pulpit. “I hear there’s a young lady here today that I have long respected and admired,” he said, beaming. He went on to explain that, as part of his cherished music collection, he still owned Miles’s 1967 album Sorcerer, the one bearing my profile. “If you’re here, Ms. Tyson,” he went on, “I am extremely grateful that you chose to visit us today. Please stand if you are present.” I sheepishly rose as he and the congregants applauded. That day marked my first visit to Abyssinian. Today, more than twenty years later, it is still my spiritual home.
Many summers ago at the church, I dedicated a third-row pew to my mother’s memory. The plaque bears the inscription, “To mother—Blessed Assurance,” a reference to the hymn that anchored her. In 2019, when Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue, she captured me right there in that pew, humming the song that carried my mother through this life’s toils and triumphs. On Sundays when I take my seat near her name, I think of all she endured, the many times she surely wanted to give up but pressed onward. I recall her swaying, eyes tightly shut, as the words of that hymn washed through her. “This is my story, this is my song,” she’d belt out during the refrain. “Praising my Savior, all the day long.” Her powerful testimony, grounded in grace and nourished in glory, has since become my own.
Part Three
Bountiful
We are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
—GWENDOLYN BROOKS
22
A Strong Harvest
FOR everything there is a season, the Bible teaches us. There’s a time to mourn, as I did greatly after Miles’s death, and a time to laugh, a habit that has always been my sanity. There’s a time to sow, as my dear parents once did into the soil of my young life, and a time to pluck the harvest. In these years now, my crop is plentiful. I marvel daily at its abundance. The yield, sweet and ripe, has brought unexpected fruit, riches I never dreamed would come my way. Among them is a school in New Jersey.
I never set out to have a school. Som
etime around 1994, a sweet woman by the name of Laura Trimmings called my agent. Mrs. Trimmings was then serving as principal of Vernon L. Davey Middle School in East Orange, New Jersey. District officials wanted to rename the school, as well as to expand it into a high school at a new location. Their bold vision: to eventually demolish the vacant East Orange High School and, in its place, construct a three-hundred-thousand-square-foot campus with state-of-the-art facilities—a school where students could rigorously pursue the arts while also undertaking traditional academic disciplines. The new campus, cradled between Walnut and Winans Streets, would include a television studio, an eight-hundred-seat theater, and music rehearsal rooms. The school’s name had not yet been chosen, which is what prompted Mrs. Trimmings’s call. “The board would like to name the school after Ms. Tyson,” she told my agent. By this time I’d moved on from Bill Haber and was working with Erwin Moore. When Erwin relayed her proposition, my jaw grazed the floor. “Why on earth would anyone want to name a New Jersey school after me?” I said. I’d never lived there, nor did I know anything about partnering with a school. I told him to thank Mrs. Trimmings for her kind offer but to decline it.
That Mrs. Trimmings, she was persistent. Over the next year, she rang my agent time and again, pleading to talk directly with me. I finally relented, mostly to get her off our backs. On the phone, she passionately made her case. I paused and drew in a breath. “You know,” I told her, “Dionne Warwick went to school in East Orange. So did John Amos. Why don’t you ask one of them?” She chuckled. “Ms. Tyson, the board has voted unanimously, more than once, that they want the school to bear your name,” she said. “That’s why you haven’t been able to get rid of me!” I told her I’d give it some more thought and get back with her that week. I did—and the answer, for all the initial reasons, remained no.
Around that time, I had lunch with my cousin, Emily, the one my sister is named after. She’s a professor at Montclair State University and the daughter of my father’s eldest brother, George. I told her this principal had been badgering me for months. When I mentioned the school’s location, she put down her water glass. “Listen,” she said, “you really oughta let them go ahead with that.” “Why?” I asked. She explained that when my father had first arrived in the United States from Nevis in 1919, he’d moved in with my Uncle George and his family in East Orange—a fact I hadn’t known up to then. “And you want to hear something else?” she went on. “The home they lived in was six houses down from that campus.” I stared at Emily, stunned that this piece of family history had somehow escaped my ear. An awareness rippled through me. Oh my Lord, I’m supposed to complete the cycle, I said to myself. I’m meant to pour back into the community that nourished my father. I instantly knew that I had to get involved, just as I’ve always known when I should take a role. My skin tingles. My pulse quickens. My soul just says amen.
That very afternoon, with goose pimples all over my neck, I got Mrs. Trimmings on the phone again. She was of course surprised to hear from me so soon after I’d given her my regrets. “I humbly accept your invitation with one stipulation,” I told her. “If the school will have my name on it, I want to be actively involved with the students.” She laughed. “Of course, Ms. Tyson,” she said. “That’s what we’d hoped would happen.”
Thus began a divine assignment that, to this moment, continues. On November 5, 1995, the Cicely L. Tyson Community School of Performing and Fine Arts flung open its doors. Then fourteen years later, when the state-of-the-art campus was at last completed, Mrs. Trimmings and I hosted a gala that felt like a family reunion. So many of my longtime friends, my extended family, joined me in celebrating. Oprah attended. “Please let me know exactly when it is because I want to be there,” she’d been telling me for months, and true to her word, she was there with bells on. Angela Bassett and Lynn Whitfield also honored me with their presence, as did Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, Susan L. Taylor, Soledad O’Brien, BeBe Winans, and too many other dear ones to list. Jon Corzine, then the New Jersey governor, was on site, along with David Dinkins, the former New York City mayor. The grand unveiling of the new campus, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, set the table for a feast I’m still savoring.
From the beginning, the school’s motto hoisted the bar heavenward: “We aim high, we soar high” is our creed. My intention is to have every student who strides our halls, every one of the more than seven hundred lives we have the privilege of imprinting, surpass all limitations, real and perceived. There is nothing our children cannot achieve when they’re given the proper tools and nurturing, starting with a belief in their own brilliance despite social messages to the contrary. I don’t simply want to teach these young folks to reach for excellence; I want them to breathe excellence, wallow in it, allow it to saturate their beings. With that goal in mind, our administrators and teachers are carefully chosen. We bring in only those who see our children through the lens of their full potential.
I love visiting campus. Some semesters, I teach a master class in acting, which is why I know there’s a pipeline of stage warriors set for Broadway. Other times, I just drop in and surprise the students, who gather ’round excitedly to show me their art pieces, their vibrantly colored wall murals, their newest A grades. And let me tell you about our award-winning choir. They are nothing short of sensational. They’ve enchanted audiences everywhere, including at the United Nations and, in 2019, at the McDonald’s Gospelfest held at Newark’s Prudential Center. Those singers not only raised the roof with their spine-tingling rendition of the Negro spiritual “I Know I’ve Been Changed,” but they also bested ten thousand international competitors to garner the top prize.
Graduation has become my annual can’t-miss affair. The ceremony feels like a church revival, and given that it spans three hours, it’s nearly as long as one. Song, dance, and poetry drift skyward. In 2018, two seniors gave me chills when they played “The Star-Spangled Banner” on their saxophones. Maya Angelou once served as our graduation speaker. All of New Jersey turned out, with parents and community members lined up against the walls. The same was true when civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks graced the stage. What a wonderful woman she was, soft-spoken and humble, yet fierce enough to shake our nation awake. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she said of the day in 1955, on a Montgomery bus, when she refused to give up her seat to a white patron. That Rosa was a sturdy oak, with strong roots stretching far beneath the soil. I gloried in witnessing my students, in rapt attention, soaking in Miss Rosa’s wisdom.
In the twenty-five years since we enrolled our first class of artists on the rise, our seniors have consistently been admitted to our nation’s finest institutions of higher education, from Spelman College to Boston University. Many of them earn academic scholarships. I’m so proud of these young folks, I hardly know what to do with myself. I wake up in the mornings thinking about what else we can offer them, how we can sow more powerfully into their lives the way my own village once did for me. I smile when I recall my third-grade teacher, Miss Sullivan, prancing by my desk singing “You oughta be in pictures!” In her own way, she made me feel seen, lifted my eyes toward a future I couldn’t have known was coming. We may never realize the extent to which our behaviors impact our children, how they seek validation in our every word and smile, gaze and gesture. That awareness guides how I connect with my students. I’ll tell you, boy, this work just lights me up. That’s how service operates: it blesses the giver more than it gifts the recipient.
I’ll forever remember Darryl, a delightful young man with a warm smile. He was as sharp as a jackknife, an honor roll student respected by his peers, and yet there was not a trace of arrogance in his manner. In the months leading up to graduation, he applied to multiple schools and was accepted by all of them, including the number one historically Black men’s college, Morehouse. Though he was admitted and yearned to attend, he didn’t receive a scholarship. “Let me tell you something,” I said to Carl Foster, my assistant then. “T
hat young man is going to Morehouse, do you hear me? That’s all there is to it.”
Over that weekend, we both made calls to everyone we knew who was affiliated with Morehouse. The admissions team asked for more of his particulars, and within a week, we received word. “This is the kind of young man we want here,” an administrator told us, explaining that he’d be awarded a scholarship. Yet another challenge soon emerged. Darryl’s mother wasn’t keen on his moving to Atlanta. I never heard what his father thought. But particularly since Darryl was his mom’s eldest, her Heart String, she wanted him to study locally. “You’d better talk to her, Carl,” I said, laughing. “That woman does not want me to knock on her door.” Obviously, it was the parents’ choice where to send their child, not mine, and that had to be respected. Yet with everything in me, I longed to see Darryl take flight. I knew attending Morehouse would raise his shoulders as it broadened his horizons. To soar toward what’s possible, you must leave behind what’s comfortable.
Thanks to Carl’s persuasive lobby, the parents ultimately agreed to send Darryl to Morehouse. Carl even became his mentor. In fact, because Darryl’s mother and father weren’t able to make the trip to Atlanta, Carl accompanied Darryl to campus, helped him settle in, and introduced him to some top administrators. Four years later, Darryl graduated with honors, and I flew down to celebrate his accomplishment. Squelching tears, I embraced him like he was my son, as he has come to feel like to me. And you want to know what else? Darryl’s younger siblings were so inspired by his achievement that they made plans to attend college. Even his mother went back to school and earned her diploma! That’s the power of education. It expands one’s field of vision, and in so doing, it lifts entire families and communities. When you witness better, you often want better.
