Just as I Am

by Cicely Tyson

  During the months after that conversation, particularly if Erwin brought me a role that made my stomach churn, I’d grin and say to him, “I’m still waiting on my Trip to Bountiful.” It became our running joke, only in my case, I was 100 percent serious. Over my career, I’d been blessed with far more substantive roles than the average Black actress, from Rebecca and Jane Pittman, to Binta and Harriet Tubman. And yet I longed to further sharpen my instrument, to stretch myself in new ways. Geraldine’s performance, for which she earned an Oscar, spoke to me. It moved me to tears. It transported me. And like every other actor I know, I’m in the transportation business.

  Sometime in 2012, my phone rang. It was my assistant, Carl. “Van Ramsey is looking for you,” he told me. Van, a costume designer I’d worked with many times, wanted to connect me with a friend of his to speak about a possible project. I agreed, and a day later, this friend called me. She explained she was producing one of her father’s plays with a mostly Black cast. The show, she said, was The Trip to Bountiful, and she wanted me to play Carrie Watts. My heartbeat quickened. “What did you say your name was?” I asked her.

  “Hallie Foote,” she said.

  “And what is your father’s name?” I asked.

  “Horton Foote,” she told me. “My dad was such an admirer of your work,” she went on, explaining that she’d lost him in 2009, when he was ninety-two years old. “And I know he wouldn’t want anyone else to play the role. In fact, if you don’t agree to play the lead, I’m not sure that we’ll do the production.”

  I nearly fell out of my chair. More than twenty-five years after I’d seen Bountiful and declared my intention aloud, here came this project, dropping right into my lap. God heard my proclamation as a prayer, and a quarter century later, he finally got around to answering. If you don’t believe in miracles, my dear, I don’t know why, because this is exactly how my last Broadway run began. The revival production of Bountiful, Hallie then hoped, would feature a talent-rich cast. She got her wish: Cuba Gooding Jr., Vanessa Williams, and Condola Rashad eventually joined the ensemble.

  I of course accepted the role and began making plans to visit Texas so I could sink into the research. As you know, I approach every role as if it will be my only, and I’d never even visited the Lone Star State. Before my trip in the spring of 2013, someone overheard me talking about my upcoming tour. “I’ve gotta experience the smells, the tastes, the feeling of where Mrs. Watts lived,” I said to a friend. “How can you project a character if you don’t know where she’s from?” Next thing I knew, CBS had contacted me about capturing my journey on film. I laughed, astonished that my offhand comment had spurred such a request.

  I’d yearned to go alone. I simply wanted to walk around in silence, hear folks talk, visit the market, breathe the air. That plan went south. In the end, I did allow the CBS crew to accompany me to Wharton, Texas, Horton Foote’s birthplace and his inspiration for Bountiful. Hallie walked me around the grounds of her father’s homestead, giving me the particulars of the family history. I also ventured over to East Gate Baptist Church and took my place alongside the locals, who sang the old hymns I grew up on. Later, I wedged my hand down into the soil of a cornfield, just to get a feel of the earth. I even put a handful of that dirt in a Ziploc bag so I could carry it home and remember the smell. By the time I left Wharton, I understood exactly why Mrs. Carrie so longed to return. Magic lives in that place, in the arms of the oaks and in the whisper of the cool breeze off the Gulf of Mexico.

  With much study, I came to know Carrie Watts through and through. At my age now, I understand her all the better. Do you have any idea how many elders find themselves in her position? They suddenly lose their spouses, their faculties, or both. They’re then often living with their grown children, even as they crave an autonomy that has slipped away. Praise God I still have my independence and my mind, but I do know how it feels to grow vulnerable. No matter the measure of fortitude you carry, a certain anxiety arises. You know you cannot control all you once could, so you hold fast to the little you can still govern. In the case of Mrs. Carrie, that is her one last journey home.

  As opening night drew nigh in the spring of 2013, I became more nervous than I usually get. I’d been away from stage acting for nearly three decades. There’s a rigor to performing live, a muscle that atrophies without use. You don’t get a second or seventh take. You’re completely in the moment, gaffes and all. Every single night, you’ve got to bring your best, because despite how well you might’ve performed the evening before, this audience has never experienced the story. The last big show I’d played in was The Corn Is Green, that short-lived Liz Taylor production that ended in a legal brouhaha. Upon my return, I didn’t know upstage from downstage from around stage. And at age eighty-eight, I was also substantially older than I’d been in Corn. I worried that my voice, which had lost some robustness over the years, wouldn’t project well enough for the audience members in the back row of the balcony to hear me. Day and night, I practiced vocal exercises meant to move my voice from my head into my diaphragm. A little at a time over weeks of rehearsals, I made progress.

  Another concern I had was whether I’d remember my lines. I probably own two dozen digital recorders, most of them junk, not to mention too fancy for my preference. Why do they make these machines so complicated, huh? I unearthed the one I could tolerate and carried it in my pocketbook, speaking my lines into the microphone and then listening back every chance I got. By the time I showed up for our first previews at the Stephen Sondheim Theater just off Times Square, I had my part down, do you hear me? I also had my prayer beads draped around my neck. I used them to quiet my mind before each performance, moving along each bead with my thumb as I recited my mantra. Hallie gave me that set, which she’d purchased in Japan. It got me through 187 performances.

  The show resonated with theatergoers even during previews, so much so that the audience took part in a pivotal scene. Near the start of the Second Act, Mrs. Carrie—on the run from her son and daughter-in-law—awaits on a bus station bench, alongside Thelma (Condola Rashad), a young woman she has just befriended. Mrs. Carrie bursts into song, lifting her arms heavenward while delivering the rapturous refrain of “Blessed Assurance,” the hymn that is written on my soul. “This is my story, this is my song!” she belts out. “Praising my Savior, all the day long!” Spontaneously, the audience, filled with people of all stripes, with a heavier-than-usual smattering of brown faces, joined in, their collective voices echoing through the theater. Let me tell you something about Black folks: we love to interact. Whether we’re in the house of the Lord or gathered in our living rooms, we talk back. It’s part of that call-and-response tradition birthed in the pews of the Black church. Initially, I didn’t notice folks singing along. That’s how focused I was on channeling Mrs. Carrie, to the exclusion of all else. But after the first preview, when a journalist pointed out the audience participation, I began taking note—and it was absolutely thrilling. That hymn was Horton Foote’s favorite, just as it was my mother’s. Can you imagine? God’s handprints were all over this experience.

  Though I remembered my lines and projected quite well, there was of course the occasional disturbance—including one behind the scenes that annoyed me to no end. An actor I won’t name was a bit of a troublemaker. Just before I’d stride onto the stage, he’d pop up in my face and say, “Hoop-dee-do-dee-do!” He thought it was amusing. I did not share his sense of pleasure. Anyone who has ever worked with me can tell that, while I have a well-developed sense of humor away from the stage, I approach my work with a clear-eyed seriousness. I told our director, Michael Wilson, that if he didn’t put an end to this man’s antics, I’d leave the production. That straightened everyone right up.

  The revival was such a hit that it was extended once. Then again. Then a third time. We even took the show on the road, performing in Boston and Los Angeles. Over two years, ancient as I was, I never missed a single performance. The show was later turned into a Lifeti
me film, released in 2014. Vanessa Williams and I played in that version as well, along with Blair Underwood and Keke Palmer. The accolades poured in, a harvest as unexpected as the call I’d first received from Hallie. The Broadway production received four Tony nominations, including one for me as Outstanding Actress in a Play. I was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award, as well as an Emmy for my Lifetime performance.

  Before the Tonys, the distinguished designer and my beloved longtime friend B Michael created my haute couture masterpiece, an indigo trumpet-silhouette gown with hand-draped ruffle seams in silk Mikado. I’d worked with B Michael for the first time before Oprah’s Legends Weekend in 2005. Boy, was he a nervous wreck! He couldn’t get over the fact that he was making a gown for Cicely Tyson, for a ball at Oprah’s house, for a once-in-a-lifetime affair. He took my measurements and spun up a work of art, and though it was a little big in a couple of places, I pinned it here and tucked it there until it was a stunner. I never know what that man is going to create. Nor does he, I’m sure, like most of the greats. He works best under pressure, and though his creations often reach me at the nail-biting last moment, I rarely use any other designer. His talent is unparalleled. For the 2013 Tonys held at Radio City Music Hall, he aimed to make me feel like royalty. On that evening and a great many others, he succeeded.

  I did not prepare an acceptance speech. That is obvious by the astonishment on my face when my name was called as the winner. I think it’s presumptuous to write remarks ahead of time, when you’re in competition with four others, all of them supremely gifted. You have no idea who will win, and though I hoped I might, I did not arrive with that expectation. As my mother so often reminded me, if you expect nothing, you will never be disappointed. And what is the point of preparing anyway? If you’re chosen, the room begins spinning, so you might as well stay in the moment and speak from the heart, which is exactly what I did.

  “It’s been thirty years since I stood on the stage,” I said. “I really didn’t think it would happen again in my lifetime, and I was pretty comfortable with that. Except that I had this burning desire to do just one more great role . . . just one more! And it came to me through no effort on my part.” Before I could get through the names of the many I aimed to thank, the music began to play, with the intent of hastening me from the stage. Right then, a message flashed on the teleprompter. “‘Please wrap it up,’ it says!” I read as the audience laughed. “Well that’s exactly what you did with me,” I concluded. “You wrapped me up in your arms after thirty years. Now I can go home with a Tony! God bless you all, and thank you.”

  Throughout that entire evening, I smiled so much that my cheeks ached for several days afterward. The award, for me, felt like a pinnacle. Over six decades, I’d earned an Oscar nomination, two Drama Desk Awards, three Emmys, and now I could add a Tony to my mantel. I’d gotten my Trip to Bountiful all right, and though I still wasn’t ready to retire, I felt as if I could. But rather than placing my feet on an exit ramp toward retirement, God put me on a bridge to another production.

  In the fall of 2015, James Earl Jones and I costarred in the Broadway revival of The Gin Game, our first onstage reunion since we played in 1966’s A Hand Is on the Gate. At the start of the production, I was ninety, and James was eighty-four. While age and experience had sharpened our instruments, they hadn’t altered our core tendencies. James, who by then had earned Tonys for Fences and The Great White Hope, was nearly as shy as he’d been years earlier, and still far more reticent than I ever was. He seems to draw his energy from silence, the kind of quiet one wouldn’t expect from a man with such a burly baritone. Backstage and between takes, he spoke so little that, at times, I’d look over at him with a question in my eyes: “Are you all right?” He’d glance at me and smile before again retreating inward. But when that curtain lifted, boy, we both fluttered to life. The show is about two friends who shuffle cards and emotions on the front porch of their nursing home. What it’s truly about, I understand more clearly as I grow older, is two elders coming to terms with their choices, their mistakes, their joys, their disappointments. Amid the pair’s laughs and testy exchanges, they seek solace and a space in which to be heard. That is, in this life, who we are for one another—fellow sojourners and witnesses. We are here to see and hear one another.

  * * *

  A couple of years following my Tony triumph for Bountiful, two more riches arrived in relatively quick succession. The first prompted me to lift the curtain on my real age. The second left me blushing. Both involved a certain history-making president.

  When Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States on a frigid January morning in 2009, I had never thought I’d see a Black president in my lifetime, just as Jane Pittman had never believed she’d drink from that whites-only fountain. And yet there he stood, both a manifestation of Dr. King’s dream and an extension of it. He rested his palm on that Lincoln Bible as Michelle, as steady with the Good Book in her hands as she’d be at her husband’s side, gazed on with pride. I didn’t know whether to shout or weep, and from my seat in the audience, I did both. There is a time to rally, to raise our collective voices in protest. There is also a season to celebrate, to set aside all crusading and just stand in awe of the harvest. For me and for millions, Barack Obama’s inauguration was such a moment. I get choked up talking about it even now. And what I love is that, during Barack and Michelle’s eight years in the White House, there wasn’t a whiff of a scandal. What an honorable legacy. Who knows whether another Black leader will ever inhabit the Oval Office, but I can leave here joyous that I witnessed the first.

  In 2015, near the end of Obama’s second term, another gift came my way. “You’ve been chosen as an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors,” my manager, Larry Thompson, told me. I pressed the phone to my ear. “The what?” I asked, not sure I’d heard him right. Once he repeated himself, I did not go speechless—I went breathless. After a long pause, I said to myself, My dear, you had better start breathing if you want to be here to accept this award. The festivities were to be held in a matter of weeks.

  I’d of course heard of the prestigious awards, which recognize achievements by Americans in the arts. But I never imagined I’d stand among the chosen. For the ceremony that year, Larry explained, the songwriter Carole King would be honored, as would filmmaker George Lucas; actress Rita Moreno; the rock band the Eagles; and conductor Seiji Ozawa. The president and the first lady, as per tradition, would be in attendance.

  For decades up to then, folks had been trying, and largely failing, to guess how old I was. When I’d starred in Bountiful, most news outlets erroneously reported me to be in my late seventies, when in fact, I was on my way out of the eighties. The New York Times got it right, and yet the younger age had already taken hold in much of the press. The truth is, I’ve always been quietly proud of my real age. Why wouldn’t I want to celebrate every crease in my brow, all that hard-earned wisdom that lives between the folds? If my first manager, Warren Coleman, hadn’t been so insistent that I age myself down—he feared, and perhaps rightfully so, that an industry rife with female age discrimination would count me out of a lot of roles—I may have just omitted my age, rather than changing it. It’s nobody’s business. But when the Kennedy Center honor came around, I felt it was important to at last set the public record straight. Months before I learned I was to receive the award, I’d celebrated my ninetieth birthday. During the press blitzkrieg surrounding the Kennedy Center ceremony, I spoke that number aloud with nary a quake in my voice. “When were you born?” one reporter asked me. “December 19, 1924,” I answered. For me, it was not a matter to be ashamed of. It was a journey to delight in. When the news of my age got around, many couldn’t believe that I’d been eighty-eight when I’d done Bountiful a couple of years before, and that I was ninety at the Kennedy Center Honors. “If that woman is ninety,” one social media poster joked, “then I need names and numbers! How is it that she’s still working?” That comment, though made in jest,
goes to show the limits we place on ourselves. Why wouldn’t I be working? The alternative is to sit around making butt prints.

  One of my favorite memories of that evening came before the ceremony even began. I’d invited my great-nephew, Devin, to join me at the awards show. He came on his own, and when he arrived, he set out to find me in the crowd. “Aunt Boo Boo!” I suddenly heard ring out over the lobby. “Where are you?” I cupped my hand over my mouth in embarrassment, squelching laughter as I scanned the room to find him. I knew it had to be Devin. Because since the day, all those decades ago, when Emily’s daughter, Verna, began calling me Aunt Boo Boo, the family had joined the chorus. Devin and I finally located one another, and when we did, I threatened to pop him in his mouth. “Why on earth would you be shouting ‘Aunt Boo Boo!’ when I’m about to receive one of the most distinguished awards of my career?” I said to him. When I recall what he did, I grin and shake my head.

  During the ceremony, Aretha Franklin, whom I’d adored for years, tore up the house. She’d been an honoree herself back in 1994, and she returned to pay tribute to Carole King with a soul-opening rendition of “(You Make Me Feel like) A Natural Woman,” a song Carole penned. With her fur coat dragging across the stage floor, honey, she brought Pentecost to that building. The audience, rising to its feet, erupted in shouts and applause. Once she was done, there wasn’t a dry eye on the premises. Even President Obama, who was seated in the box next to mine, shed tears. As Aretha made her way up an aisle carrying a bouquet of flowers, an audience member teased, “Oh, thank you, those must be for me.” Aretha smiled. “No,” she said, chuckling, “these are for my lady.” She later placed the flowers in my arms.