Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  As if those two jobs weren’t enough to fill my dad’s workdays, he enlisted in the 369th Infantry Regiment, the first all-Black National Guard unit, famously known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Dad trained at Camp Whitman in New York but never served overseas. The men in his unit who did fight in the First World War were among this country’s most gallant and well-decorated. After white American soldiers refused to perform combat duties alongside Blacks, the US Army assigned the Hellfighters to the French Army. The men spent 191 days in the frontline trenches—more combat time there than any other American unit. During their triumph in staving off the Germans, the troop also suffered the most losses, with fifteen hundred casualties. Despite their extraordinary valor and sacrifice, they returned home to the democracy my dad was navigating: a woefully prejudiced society that, at every turn, denied Black people equal citizenship.

  My father and mother corresponded across the Atlantic, expressing, in hastily rendered cursive and without the luxury of a telephone, their longing to reunite. In 1920, the year my parents were both twenty-three, my mother at last joined my father in New York. On the afternoon she boarded the Macedonia, I can only imagine the brew of excitement and uncertainty she felt about leaving the world she knew and entering another, one unfamiliar to her. It was the last time she’d ever see her mother in this life, and as Mom tearfully waved goodbye from the ship’s deck, her spirit surely sensed that finality.

  Mom moved into Aunt Miriam and Uncle Patrick’s brownstone. As she and my father resumed their courtship, Dad left Miriam’s place. Living together before marriage, or “shacking up” as it was known, was frowned upon in their church community. So Dad stayed between the homes of his brother, George, and his favorite sister, Zora, who had settled in the Bronx neighborhood of Mount Vernon. My mom began work as a sleep-in nanny, taking care of a little white boy during the week and returning home to her aunt and uncle’s place on the weekends. She and my father, elated to be near one another, picked up where they’d left off. They also squirreled away every nickel they could in preparation for an eventual wedding. Not long after Mom’s arrival in the United States, she and my father became formally engaged.

  In a cultural tradition known as the Calling of the Band, my parents’ forthcoming nuptials were announced, three separate times, in Mom’s home church in Nevis—in the same sanctuary where the dove had descended on her. “William Augustine Tyson and Fredericka Theodosia Huggins will be married on September 25, 1921,” the reverend proclaimed. Mom, upon receiving news of the announcement in a letter from her mother, beamed as she read and reread the words. At the altar of St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church in Hell’s Kitchen, my parents spoke their promises—vows that circumstances would test.

  My parents began their married life together in a Bronx tenement before later relocating to Manhattan’s East Side. The year after they wed, they welcomed my brother, Melrose, a name my father had loved since the day he spotted it on a street sign in the Bronx. Six days before Christmas in 1924, I arrived with my thumb poked in my mouth and nary a strand of hair. A year and a half later, my sister, Emily, came along to complete our family, crossing the “T” on the Tyson five.

  * * *

  I was born scrawny and with a heart murmur, twin liabilities in West Indian culture. When the doctors discovered the murmur, they told my mother and father that I probably wouldn’t make it to three months old. My parents, who knew God and thus knew better, set out to prove medicine wrong. They got right to work on restoring me to good health and fattening me up, which, as they saw it, were one and the same.

  Mom and Dad hovered over me constantly. If I whimpered in the slightest or my eyes fluttered awake, my mother pulled me close to her bosom and nursed me as she stroked my head. After we’d moved from the Bronx to the East Side, Daddy would put me in my stroller early in the mornings and walk me over to Central Park. “This child needs some fresh air in her lungs,” he’d say on his way out the door.

  After she’d weaned me, Mom kept on trying to put weight on me. Though my mother was naturally petite like me during her twenties, she wasn’t about to have it on her parenting record that she’d lost a child to malnourishment. She’d mash up yams and shovel them in my mouth. I’d spit them out. As I got older, she’d push a bowl of oatmeal toward me at our breakfast table. I’d hardly even look at it. Everything about oatmeal disgusted me then: its lumpy texture, its drab color, the way it slid off the spoon. And if I didn’t like what I saw, no way was I sticking it in my mouth. The fact that I love oatmeal now is a source of amazement to me, because for most of my early childhood, I was too enamored of my thumb to be bothered with oats or much else.

  My murmur ultimately disappeared, but I was still skin and bones. So Mom trotted me all around town, to this physician and that one, seeking assurance that I was healthy. “Will you please leave this child alone?” a doctor finally told her. “She’s not fat and she’s never going to be.” Mom was embarrassed. Not because she’d smothered me half to death, but because her suffocating had become noticeable enough to draw rebuke.

  My mother had wanted to name me Miriam, after the aunt she treasured. By the time I was born, Aunt Miriam had passed away in a house fire, her body consumed by flames but her presence never more strong. My dad, though he also cherished Miriam, insisted on another name. “I want my first daughter to be called Cicely,” he said. An adorable girl who lived next door to them in the Bronx had the name, and the first time he heard it, he’d decided that he’d one day bestow it upon his daughter. That is the barefaced story he told my mother. Years later when I was grown, the truth would come spilling forth.

  On the day I arrived home from the hospital, my father said to Melrose, “This is your sister.” From then on, my brother called me Sister, or Sis for short. The rest of the family followed his lead, even as they added to my list of nicknames. My mother often referred to me as Father Face, because I’d inherited my dad’s cheekbones. My father had two names for me: String Bean and Heart String. The former was because I was so skinny; the latter was because I was his first girl and therefore his most beloved. I could feel his affection for me. When I was a toddler, he’d scoot to the edge of the sofa, somehow balance me on his left knee while resting his guitar on his right thigh, and then belt out his favorite spiritual, “I’m gonna lay down my burdens . . . down by the riverside . . . and study war no more!” As he sang and strummed, he’d motion for Melrose, who sat cross-legged on the floor with his eyes dancing, to sing along. Up and down I bounced to the sound of Dad’s booming baritone, his care for me reverberating between each note.

  Most parents wouldn’t dare admit to preferring one child over another, but in our home, that fact was not hidden. My father adored me and Emily. I don’t know why, but Daddy just preferred girl children. Melrose, on the other hand, was my mother’s heartthrob. No one called my brother by his given name. He abhorred the sound of it and insisted that his friends refer to him as Tyson. Our family mostly still called him Melrose (or Me’rose, for short), though Mom had her own term of endearment for him. “Beau, don’t be gone too long,” she’d say when he’d dart out our front door, his pockets bulging with a collection of marbles. Whenever Melrose was sick of being surrounded by two sisters, which was often, he’d scamper off to roughhouse with the neighborhood boys. Sometimes he wouldn’t return for hours, long after dusk had descended. My mother would go out looking for her dear son, fussing at him the whole time as she dragged his behind up our stairs for an inevitable backhand from Dad.

  In the streets, Melrose received more attention than my dad often paid to him. A faded family photo captures the spirit of their puzzling dynamic. My smiling father stands tall, dressed sharp as a Rockefeller with his shoulders squared. My brother, conversely, wears a somber expression and high-water pants. Whenever my mother would pass that photo on our living room wall, she’d shake her head and murmur, “Your father should’ve taken Beau to get a proper suit.” Not only did my dad show little interest in grooming his
son, he was also very hard on him. If Melrose cut up in class or brought home a less-than-stellar grade, my father’s scolds were louder than his encouragements. I have no doubt that my dad cared for my brother as much as he did my sister and me. He provided for all of us just the same, and in our culture, provision speaks a love language that the tongue may seldom profess. But with me and Emily, my father’s care manifested as an instinct to protect. With Melrose, it showed up as an urge to toughen him up by slicing him down, perhaps as a way to prepare him for a world that villainizes Black men. My brother’s heart, soft and golden at its center despite his unflinching exterior, couldn’t sustain the reprimands. It was why he so frequently escaped outdoors.

  Emily was my father’s other crown jewel. Dad borrowed my sister’s nickname, Molly, from the Broadway show tune “My Blue Heaven.” “Just Molly and me and baby makes three,” Daddy would sing, “and we’re happy in my blue heaven!” Emily’s given name came courtesy of my father’s cousin. When she heard that my parents’ third child was to be born on her birthday, she said to my dad, “If you name the baby after me, it’ll be the happiest birthday I’ve ever had.” Though Mom called me Father Face, I always thought Emily looked more like Dad. My sister’s face was a full moon, like his, whereas Mom and I had an almond shape; in my mind then, shape rather than color was the strongest marker of similarity. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize both of my parents’ faces in my own, depending on the character I’m portraying. In Sounder, I spot Willie. In How to Get Away with Murder, I notice Fredericka. In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, I see both.

  Emily was plump. When we were growing up, everyone always thought she was older than me, in part because her clothes were two sizes bigger than mine, and also because she was more forward and worldly than I was. In school, she gravitated toward classmates who were a year or two ahead of her, tilting her ear to catch any tea they spilled. The same was true when my mom’s friends would stop by to visit. She’d crane her neck to overhear their grown-folk conversations until Mom urged her out of the room. My mother was often surprised at what tumbled from that girl’s mouth. So was I. When my sister was still quite young, she heard a rumor that having sex keeps one from having headaches. One afternoon, she said to my mom, “Well I’m not gonna die from no headaches.” Had my mother not been so shocked, she would’ve smacked Emily for that piece of sass, as well as for mentioning a subject never discussed in our religious household.

  My sister possessed features celebrated in our culture: a full mane of hair, a thick and healthy body, and a gregariousness passed on to her from our father. I had none of those attributes. When I was eight, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror on my way out of my cousins’ house. I stood there for the longest time, studying my reflection. Huh, I thought. I’m bowlegged. I wasn’t. But because I was so lanky, my stick legs had enough space between them to wedge a football in there. My hair, once I had some, was thin and wouldn’t grow very long. Lord knows my mother attempted to both lengthen and groom it as she then saw best. While seated on our couch, Mom would clutch my head between her thighs as she greased my scalp with thick pomade before taking a hot comb to my tresses. I still have burn marks on my earlobes. And then there were my teeth. After arriving in this world with my thumb in my mouth, I kept it there for all of my early childhood. My mother did all she could to cure me of the habit, from wrapping my thumb with gauze to threatening that it would fall off. Her tactics were unsuccessful. As a result, my two front teeth turned to greet one another and have since held their positions.

  As a child, I was quiet. My mother would take me and Emily with her to an outdoor market, one that stretched up Park Avenue from 111th Street to 116th. After his stop in Hell’s Kitchen, my father usually parked his cart there. It was the West Indian meeting spot, our public square. The hub pranced to its feet on Saturdays, with women in vividly colored head wraps throwing back their heads in laughter and trading gossip about whatever was happening in church or in the news headlines. “Tyson!” someone would yell out at my mother across the stands. “Girl, where you been? I ain’t seen you in two weeks!” As Mom and her friends cackled and communed, I’d stand silently at her side. “Oh, she’s just so shy!” one of the women would say. Mom would glance down at me and smile and then go back to talking, until Emily had to pee so badly she’d contort her body into a pretzel.

  It’s not simply that I was shy; mostly, I was observant. I paid close attention to details, allowing the passing world and its peculiarities to seep into my pores. I was curious about all of it. When I did open my mouth to speak, my favorite word was “why.” “You’re too jam noo-zy,” my mother would say, never able to pronounce “damn” or “nosy.” Mom said I nearly why’d her to death. I now know that “Why?” is the most important question an artist can ask. But try explaining that to my mother, who threatened to knock the devil out of me when I’d pester her with my constant queries.

  Even as a child, I longed to understand what motivated people to do and say what they did, why the sun opened its lids in the East and shut them in the West, why my battery-operated doll named Dolly, with her blond locks and white paint peeling from her face, was constantly crying. I was so inquisitive that I once took apart a wristwatch, determined to find out what made it tick. I studied everything. When we were out in the streets, I’d notice people’s feet. I still do. In fact, my eyes fall first on people’s shoes even before I look up at their faces. Our feet tell our stories. They carry us through this life, moving us from one sorrow and season to the next. Our gait can reveal us to be buoyant or bullish, dispirited or steadfast.

  I was a deep chestnut brown in a nation that considers the darker sister the less attractive one. Colorism, which cut its teeth on slave plantations, thankfully was not nurtured among the Tysons. I grew up surrounded by cousins whose hues spanned the color spectrum, from lily white (there are a couple of albino children in my extended family) to jet black. My Uncle George and Aunt Beatrice in Montclair had five children who were like siblings to me: George, Helen, Robbie, Beatrice (aka Bette, who was every bit as spirited as Miss Bette Davis herself), and Emily. George was darker than me, just as his father and grandfather were, while Helen was quite fair. My favorite cousin, Robbie (when he’d visit us, I wouldn’t let anyone else sit next to me—oh, how I loved Robbie!), was a shade darker than Helen. In my immediate family, my siblings and I had Dad’s ebony complexion. Mom was café au lait. There was dazzling variety in our tribe and every color was embraced, if only because it wasn’t commented upon. Our elders regarded us as God’s most gorgeous creations. I could feel that.

  And yet when it came to colorism in society at large, I was certainly not immune. No one had to tell me that the fairer your skin and the narrower your nose and lips, the more stunning you were considered. That belief permeated the atmosphere. Caucasian women were upheld as the standard of beauty while our features were denigrated. In print media, Black hair was portrayed as unkempt, a crop of wild, irascible wool that required taming. My mother and other Black women were mostly invisible to whites, and when they did see us, it was through the cracked and muddied lens of racial bias. In their view and in their advertisements, we were mammies and maids, subservient and ignorant, filthy and lazy—and yet somehow diligent, clean, and honorable enough to prepare their meals and rear their children. At best, our presence was tolerated or ignored. At worst, we were systematically locked out of homeownership and wealth creation, redlined into ghettos, and lynched. In no regard were we thought worthy of emulation. And not just our appearance was scorned. Our intelligence and very humanity were questioned, considered genetically unfit. The lie of Black inferiority was built right into America’s infrastructure, and to this day, that framework remains stubbornly intact.

  Given my dark complexion, I spotted no future for myself as a pinup girl. Much as my father in particular affirmed me, I did not feel pretty—and my classmates amplified that feeling. On the playground, I heard a looping trio of insults: s
kinny, nappy-headed, and nigger. The latter truly stung me on the day an Italian boy in my class, my bosom buddy, called me that. He and I lived across the street from one another, so even when we weren’t in school, we played together. That ended on the morning he came into our first-grade class with a grin on his face and a little poem.

  “Hey, Cicely,” he said, “you want to hear something funny?” I nodded. He cleared his throat and began. “God made the niggers, he made them at night, God was in a hurry and forgot to make them white.”

  I stared at the boy, refusing to let the devastation in my heart spill over onto my face, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing his words had pierced me. In the life of every Black child, a moment arrives when he or she becomes wrenchingly aware of how we are perceived. This bruising recognition was among my first.

  * * *

  My earliest memory is a street address. On a Saturday in the spring of 1927, my mother took my brother, Emily, and me with her to visit some friends in Hell’s Kitchen. We stayed out so long that by the time we got home, the sky was dark. We made our way up Third Avenue, crossed over to Second, and then rounded the corner onto our street. Melrose walked next to us as he kicked along a tin can. I, then age two and a half, had one hand clasped in my mother’s right palm and the other of course in my mouth. Emily was holding Mom’s left hand. As we approached the apartment, I stared up. At the top of our building stood a row of numbers, in large gold letters on the glass frontal: 219 East 102nd. The first chapter of my childhood unfolded at that address, the home we shared until I was nine.