Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  When I was seven, Nana said to me and Emily, “Wouldn’t you girls like to sing for our congregation next Sunday?” Emily thought the idea sounded silly and declined. I, basking in the glow of a recent star turn as Mary in my own church, agreed. Mom, Emily, and Melrose went to St. John’s, as usual, while Dad and I joined Nana in her service.

  “Please give a warm welcome to little Miss Cicely!” Reverend Hawkins announced. As the congregation applauded, my father led me, in my emerald velvet dress and lace-trimmed socks, to the pulpit. The pastor handed me a microphone, and for a moment, I just stood there, not sure what I’d sing. In lieu of a plan, I belted out the opening line of a number I’d often heard and loved there in Nana’s church.

  “How do you do, my lovin’ pastor, how do you do?” I hollered, half-singing and half-chanting. The room erupted as the organist quickly found my key and began accompanying me. A row of women in colorful wide-brimmed hats jumped up, lifting hankies and hallelujahs before I could launch into the next couple of refrains. “How do you do, congregation, how do you do?” I sang. “How do you do, choir, how do you do?” On and on I went until, moments later, something occurred that still makes me smile.

  Four deacons made their way from the front pew to the pulpit and set me on a small wooden chair. Each of them clasped one leg of the chair, hoisted me heavenward in unison, and began parading me through the aisles. “How do you do, God’s children, how do you do?!” I sang, increasing my volume and climbing an octave each time they lifted me higher. “How do you do, saints, how do you do?!” The congregation joined in, howling in disbelief that a child as young as me was singing with such fervor and conviction.

  After service, my father couldn’t get home fast enough to tell my mother how proud he was of his Sis. “She turned the place upside down!” he gushed. Before he could finish his recounting, others from church stopped in to give my mom the details as I stood by blushing. Honestly, I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. All I knew was that when I was up there on that chair, my Mary Janes dangling, my voice rising up from someplace deep within me, I felt a rush. The Spirit, twisting and flailing and arching its back, had shuddered through me. And as it did, my shyness vanished.

  * * *

  As far back as I can recall, I’ve known I have a sixth sense—an innate ability to see, feel, hear, taste, and smell events before they happen. Strong evidence of this prescience came in the winter of 1932, the December I turned eight.

  On an afternoon when my parents were out working, I smelled smoke and thought the scent was coming from the building next door. Melrose and I went out to look around, as well as to check on our neighbor, a woman our family knew well.

  “I smell smoke,” I told her when she opened the door.

  “What do you mean you smell smoke?” she asked.

  “I think something is burning,” I said.

  She glanced at the living room and kitchen behind her and then stared back at me. “Well nothing’s on fire in here,” she said. “I don’t smell anything.”

  That week, my mother had bought me a new pair of Sunday shoes. I felt so convinced of an impending blaze that I went into our closet, pulled out my box of Mary Janes, and cradled it close to my chest. I wasn’t about to let my shoes go up in smoke. In fact, I even slept with that box next to me on the rollaway. When no sparks flew that evening, I forgot all about what I’d smelled.

  Two days later, I awakened to the squeal of sirens slicing through the frigid air. In the building next door, there’d been an electrical fire—one that began in our friend’s apartment. The fire crew thankfully arrived soon enough to evacuate the place and douse the flames before they spread. Later, when our neighbor came by and gave us that report, all I could think was, Good Lord, I knew it.

  I had these premonitions frequently. Like the many times when I’d be talking about someone, and ten minutes later, that person would appear at our front door. Or those occasions when I’d tell my mother that someone in our church was quite sick. “How do you know?” she’d ask. “I saw it last night in a dream,” I’d say. And sure enough, Reverend Byron would stop in with news that the person I’d seen in my dream had taken ill. In other instances, I’d overhear my parents talking in their bedroom. My dad would tell my mom that he’d run into so-and-so that day at the market. Mom would laugh and say, “I know.” “What do you mean?” he’d ask. “Sister told me that yesterday,” she’d say. “She dreamed it.”

  My mother also had this sixth sense. I don’t know whether her parents were born with it as well, but there’s no question that my mother possessed it. “Sister, come here and sit down,” she said to me one morning before she left for work. I slid into a chair at our table and she locked her eyes on mine. “I dreamed last night that I saw you going through the window,” she said. “Do not wash any windows today, you hear me?”

  “It’s a school day,” I reminded her, “and I only wash windows on Saturdays.”

  “Did you hear what I told you?” she snapped. “Do not wash any windows today.” I nodded and hushed my mouth.

  That afternoon after school, Emily and I were playing in our apartment near a set of glass French doors that separated the living room from the bedroom. My sister flung open the two panels and then slammed them behind her. In an effort to keep her from closing me out, I lunged toward the doors. As I did, the glass shattered and sliced through my right arm, starting near my inside wrist and extending up two inches. Our neighbor, Miss O’Connor, heard the commotion and rushed over to find me lying in a pool of crimson. She wrapped my wrist in a towel and rushed me to a nearby drugstore. The pharmacist urged her to take me to the emergency room, where the doctors stitched me up. Nine decades later, the scar remains—a reminder of my mother’s uncanny ability to predict, often with chilling accuracy, what would occur.

  When I was small, my sixth sense did not seem odd to me or scare me. I had only my experience as a reference point, only knew what it felt like to live in my own body. And though that fire did get my attention (What if our neighbor hadn’t made it out of her building in time? How could I have lived with myself for not insisting that she clear the premises?), I didn’t give most of my premonitions much credence or thought. That began to shift as I grew older and my insights increased in both number and significance. One incident in particular spooked me.

  I was eleven when my Aunt Beatrice passed away, a few years after we’d lost my Uncle George. Before the memorial, our family stayed overnight with my cousins in Montclair. Mom and I slept together on the second floor. My aunt’s casket was already there in the house. In those days, it was common for a loved one’s body to be transferred from the funeral parlor to the family’s home on the night before the service.

  At 2 a.m., I made my way downstairs to the main floor to use the bathroom. While in there, I heard the front door to the house creak open and then slam shut. I thought little of it. With so many relatives around, folks had been going and coming a lot.

  “Who came in?” my mother asked when I returned upstairs to bed.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” she pressed. “Weren’t you just downstairs?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t see anyone,” I told her.

  I drifted to sleep. And in my dream, Aunt Beatrice appeared and spoke to me. “I hope I didn’t frighten you this morning,” she said. “I wanted to say goodbye to all of my loved ones, and I was trying to make it back into my casket before anyone missed me.”

  The second my eyelids slid open later that morning, I sat up straight and announced to my mother, “It was Aunt Beatrice who slammed the door.”

  Mom didn’t say a word. She also didn’t seem surprised by my revelation and didn’t quiz me about it. She just grinned, shook her head, and rose from the bed to begin preparing for the day. Maybe Aunt Beatrice had also shown up in my mother’s dream. Or maybe Mom thought I was talking some foolishness. Or maybe my mother’s smile was one of recognition as s
he recalled the woman who’d once predicted my clairvoyance.

  Unlike my earlier extrasensory perceptions, this one unnerved me. It’s one thing to have an ability to foretell the future; it’s a completely different matter to actually be visited by a ghost. The vision was so brilliantly lucid: I could see my aunt in all of her color and dimensions, could practically reach out and take her hand. It seemed as real as if she’d actually been there in the room with me, and in the world of my dream, she was. The experience of her presence, even in the reality of its absence, truly spooked me. Why was I the one sensing these spirits and hearing these voices? Why didn’t other children, or even my own brother and sister, have these intuitive insights? In place of answers, I had only my fear to contend with.

  During my whole childhood, my mother and I never openly discussed her sixth sense or mine, nor did she tell me then about the stranger’s prophecy. Like a great many other topics in the Tyson house, Mom simply chose not to address my third eye, even amid irrefutable evidence of its presence. Years would pass before I’d view my ability not as a burden to be frightened of, but as a rarity to be embraced.

  * * *

  We each have many faces, various ways of appearing and behaving. In one moment, we may show remarkable steadfastness, and in another, an aching vulnerability. We can be at turns tranquil and belligerent, jubilant and despairing. We are inherently multifaceted and yet marvelously complete. This was true of my mother and father, two human beings as nuanced and complex as any of us.

  As I grew up, I became acquainted with each of my mother’s faces. There was her reserved nature, the quiet girl once known as Dosha. Whenever I heard someone call my mother by her childhood nickname—which was short for Theodosia, her middle name—I knew the person had known my mom since her days in Nevis. Dosha nodded more than she spoke; if a cashier greeted her in a store, she smiled sheepishly. That face of my mother reflected all that was innocent and generous and good in her, all the warmth and care her own mom once bestowed. Mom seldom talked about her Mu-ma, as she called her, but my mother’s kindness across the miles said plenty. She did not have the financial resources to visit Nevis, but every chance she got, Mom would pack a large barrel with food and clothes and have Reverend Byron ship it to her mother. During holidays, she’d also send a large ham. Before she closed the barrel, she’d round up a few dollars, tie the bills in the foot of an old nylon stocking, and stick it someplace in between the other gifts.

  Then there were Mom’s other sides. At times she was joyous, like when she sang while preparing supper. As she stirred one pot and lifted the lid from another, she’d have her head tied up in a scarf, her cotton Hoover apron over her house clothes, and her bare feet slid into my father’s old shoes, which she’d turned into her slippers by smashing down their backs. In those moments, she was carefree. In other instances, she revealed her fiery streak. Feisty Fredericka would blurt out “Damn it to hell” if she was tested, which life and my father ensured she was. It was this Fredericka who thought nothing of throwing a hairbrush in my direction when I defied her.

  In public, my mother wore yet another demeanor: proud and unwavering, a sturdy oak refusing to be uprooted. She had the same rigid back she passed on to me. No matter what she was struggling with or how short on money she found herself, she held her head high and marched onward. She had the pocketbook of a pauper but the posture of a queen, exuding a regality that prompted others to regard her as such. “We may be poor,” she’d often say, “but once you leave your house, people don’t have to know whether you’ve got a pot of tea or a back door to throw it out of.” She was what I call swelegant, a combination of “swell” and “elegant”—blessed with a model’s figure and a wardrobe she’d tailored so precisely to her frame. When she and my dad strode into St. John’s—Mom in her rayon frock, high heels, and straw hat cocked to one side—a hush fell over the sanctuary. She and my father were the most handsome couple in church. They dressed to maim and to kill.

  My father was a study in contrasts. Even as a boy, he brimmed with the vitality that drew my mother to him. Magnetism coursed through his arteries. “Your father is a star,” my cousin Bette would often say. She was right. Dad was artistically gifted, like all of the Tysons. My father’s cousin, Donald Walbridge Shirley, was the renowned classical and jazz pianist whose life is depicted in the 2018 Oscar Award–winning film Green Book. My dad himself wasn’t a trained musician, yet he played the guitar and sang with perfect pitch, enchanting all who heard his robust yet smooth vocals. And like my mother, he was a dresser and a stepper. Talk about a Dapper Dan . . . that man had swagger! Like many soldiers, he wore metal heel taps on his shoes, and boy, you could hear him coming long before you saw him. Even when operating his produce stand, he strutted through town in a stylish suit to go along with his air of confidence.

  My father also had an unpleasant face, one I’m still trying to reconcile with his other, more admirable ones. When he was good, he was very good—a man so committed to us that he often pushed around that cart fifteen hours a day to keep our rent paid and our stomachs full. But when my father behaved badly, he was horrid. He was a womanizer. He never drank alcohol, but ego was his strong tonic. Throughout my childhood, he carried on illicit affairs around town. Maybe these sexual escapades allowed him to temporarily escape the burden of his circumstances, to forget the indignities of being Black and poor. To be colored in early-twentieth-century America was to brave an existence even more fraught with anxiety than our current times are. Whatever forces might have lured my father into the arms of women, he did not resist.

  Word of my father’s liaisons snaked through our community and slithered onto my mom’s doorstep. Even before she heard tell of his infidelity, she’d spotted it in my father’s every gesture, in the flecks of remorse on his brow. Dad had been brought up to respect his vows and his spiritual values, but he cast both aside when temptation turned his single roving eye into two. Beneath Dad’s charisma lived an underbelly of compulsiveness, a tendency to allow his passions, virtuous and vile, to overtake him. Those passions rose to the top surface when he and my mother argued bitterly about his philandering. He sometimes struck her.

  Much of the conflict between my parents happened behind closed doors. In the late evenings as I lay huddled next to my brother and sister on the rollout, I’d hear Dad’s footsteps as he stomped home after hours of revelry with various women. He wore his emotions on his feet. I knew by the thumpity-thump of his heavy steps, that loud tapping of his heels, that war was imminent. Bang. Bang. Bang. Ba-dang. He’d bound over our threshold and onto the battlefield, the flames of his coming antagonism toward my mother stoked by his own guilt. Mom, who’d be up waiting, stood ready to confront him. So as not to wake us, they’d take their brawl into the bedroom. Through sobs, Mom hurled shoes and accusations, demanding that Dad end his trysts.

  I don’t know how Emily and Melrose slept through these ordeals, but they always seemed to. I’d overhear everything. I’d pretend to be knocked out as I quivered beneath my blanket, nursing my thumb in an effort to soothe myself. Occasionally, their discord would spill over, like smoldering lava, into the kitchen and across the living room where we slept. When my parents’ arguments there became physical, I’d leap from bed and wedge my body between theirs, pleading for my father to lower his voice and his hand. “Stop, Daddy!” I’d wail, hot tears flooding my face as I banged on my father’s chest. “Please stop! Leave my mother alone!” That interrupted the fighting but seldom ended it. My parents would put me back in bed, disappear into their room, and carry on with their ruckus.

  Just as we each have more than one face, we also carry an array of conflicting emotions. I revered my father, then and now. At the same time, I could not stand how his infidelity humiliated my mother, how his outbursts frightened me to my core. When he’d pound up those stairs, ready for a fight, the Daddy I so admired became the one I resented, the one who raised a fist to my mother and to his own wife. And yet this was the same devo
ted father who’d balanced me on his knee, the man who’d celebrated me, his little String Bean, every chance he got. This was the Willie who’d courted Dosha from across an ocean and forged a life for his family in their new homeland. But he was also someone who, at times, fell devastatingly short in demonstrating his love.

  Even with my childhood long behind me, I find it difficult to lay bare my parents’ blemishes. My instinct is to protect their legacies in a world where we are too often demonized. My mom and dad, with all of their frailties, are part of a centuries-long story, a narrative setting that hangs behind myriad Black lives. That story harkens back to when our foreparents were herded onto ships, their naked bodies stacked, row after row amid vomit and sewage, for the treacherous Middle Passage. That tale continued as more than two hundred years of enslavement pressed its foot down on our necks. Our men were emasculated and thrashed, our women raped and brutalized, our families ripped apart and auctioned off like cattle, our grueling labor uncompensated. We still bear the emotional and economic scars. The assault on us, and its resulting trauma, spans generations. Our traditions, our communities, our dignity—all of it has endured barbarous attack. And when someone makes an assassination attempt on your tribe, you adopt a posture of self-defense. You fold in on yourself as a way to cover your wounds. And you dare not hand your assailant another weapon, another piece of shrapnel he or she will use to further shame and dehumanize your people.

  This is the painful history my parents were born into. And it is only against this backdrop that their many choices and faces can be understood. Two human beings whose ancestors were declared savage beasts. Two imperfect souls loved by a perfect God.

  * * *

  In the days after my parents clashed, I’d often notice another of my mom’s dispositions—the reflective one. She would sit in her rocking chair in the bedroom, shaking her head and repeating under her breath, “This life, this life.” A canvas bag filled with peanuts was her sole companion during those times. Every weekend, she’d buy a pound of them. She’d give Emily, Melrose, and me a handful, and then she’d take to her wooden chair, shelling those nuts one by one and peering out the window. I could feel her anguish. That is why I found it so bewildering when she’d occasionally chuckle.