Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  Emily got an early start with the boys, long before Mom granted us official permission to court. My sister might have been a year and a half younger than me, but when it came to awareness, she stayed five paces ahead. From age fourteen on, she was out there living her best life. I don’t think she was having sex, but she had boyfriend after boyfriend. She’d meet them wherever she went. Down the sidewalk she’d waltz, with her Coke-bottle curves and her beaming smile, drawing stares from young men. My mother, who was away a lot working, had no idea Emily was running around. Also, Mom was so busy worrying over me that she took her eye off Emily. “I went to see Miss Taylor this afternoon,” my sister would fib when Mom questioned her whereabouts. Or “I went to the store with my friend Ruby,” she’d claim. In actuality, she’d have her tail down at the park, carrying on with her newest heartthrob. I’m surprised word never got back to Mom.

  When Emily and I each turned fifteen, Mom at last allowed us to begin socializing with young men. She didn’t refer to it as dating. She also didn’t reconcile her previous insistence that I stay away from boys with her consent for me now to keep company with them. She had her reasons for loosening the reins. Her dream for Emily and me was that we’d meet and one day marry nice church boys—a desire made clear by her parameters. My mother’s first commandment: Thou shalt go out only with a young man who is the son of a minister. All other socializing had to be with family members she’d vetted. The Dores family and their four teenage boys (cousins on my mother’s side of the family) were on the approved list. So were our other cousins who were around our age, the Tysons and the Swanstons, all of whom were brilliant musicians. Schubert Swanston, the eldest of four, was a piano prodigy who eventually worked with Louis Armstrong. He and his siblings played at least two instruments each, from the cello and the violin to the bass fiddle and the organ. After dinner on Sunday evenings, our family would gather for a concert at the Swanstons’ place near us on the East Side. Church, school, cousins: that was our protected world. Emily’s parallel universe, invisible to Mom, was twice the circumference of my own.

  Horace Chenery was my first crush. He was a year older than me and as tall as heaven, with kind eyes. He lived a few doors down from us on the same street and attended my school. Horace didn’t go to church (strikes one, two, and three in Mom’s book), but Horace’s mom, Miss Violet, was an usher in our congregation. Violet’s mom, Miss Lawrence, was half-white and half-Black, and she’d passed her honey complexion on to her grandchildren. Though Miss Violet was my color, Horace was quite fair, with a dreamy smile and dimples. On the day when Horace and I caught each other’s eye in our neighborhood, I blushed and quickly looked away.

  It wasn’t just Horace’s appearance that gave me goose pimples. As we got to know one another on long walks home from school, I felt drawn to him because of how he made me see myself, through the soft light of his adoring lens. “You know,” he’d often tell me as we walked home from school, “your face is shaped like a heart.” He’d then gently trace his thumbs around my face as I snickered. I couldn’t get home fast enough to study my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Could I be cute? I thought, as “nappy-headed nigger” memories reeled through my head. What’s he talking about, a heart? I didn’t see any such shape. Yet there was no mistaking the flurry of monarchs flapping inside me when I was with him. I told no one about our budding romance, if it can be called that. We never even held hands or kissed. But Horace was the first boy who made me feel like I might be attractive, just maybe.

  I also fell for his brilliance. In those years, I was an admirer of the mind. That is true even now. If you can tell me something I don’t know, you’ve got me. Horace was intuitive and smart, an A student who shared my curiosity and affirmed my inquisitiveness. When I’d ask “Why?” he’d meet my question with another. “Have you been to the Empire State Building?” he once asked me. Even with all of our family’s traipsing around the city, Mom hadn’t yet taken us to view the Midtown marvel, completed in 1931. With his eyes dancing, Horace recounted every detail of the structure, which was erected in a race to build the world’s tallest building (an honor it held for forty years, until the World Trade Center’s North Tower soared higher in 1970). And he was as sensitive as he was bright, his eyes often brimming with tears of emotion when he’d share stories from his boyhood. Our puppy love might’ve become a full-grown poodle if Mom hadn’t cut off its nourishment.

  One afternoon, Melrose saw Horace and me walking down our street together. I realized he’d noticed us but thought nothing of it. That changed when, later that evening, Mom approached me with a sentence I knew meant trouble. “Come here, I want to talk to you,” she said. I took a place at our kitchen table and she sat down across from me.

  “Now this Horace Chenery business,” she said, “it has to stop. I don’t want you seeing him anymore.”

  “I’m not seeing him,” I retorted. “What do you mean?”

  Right then, my brother rolled into the kitchen with his public service announcement: “You and Horace were on 101st Street together today,” he said.

  I glared at Melrose, not sure why he’d ratted me out to Mom, perhaps out of some (annoying) instinct to shelter me the way our parents always had. “Well I live on 101st Street and so does Horace,” I said. “Where else was I supposed to walk?”

  “You’re supposed to walk anyplace but next to him,” Mom shot back. “I don’t ever want to see you talking to that boy again.”

  Horace may not have been a minister’s son, but he was an upstanding young man—which, as I saw it, should’ve earned him boyfriend clearance. Mom saw it differently, and in a house more dictatorship than democracy, I knew not to question her mandate. Also, giving her lip would’ve led to further restriction on my social agenda.

  I spotted Horace from my window the next day, just as he swung around the corner onto our block. Mom was at work and Emily and Melrose weren’t around, but my neighbor, Elizabeth, was visiting me. When Horace got close to my building, he looked up and waved at us. Elizabeth, who didn’t know Horace and I were sweet on one another, waved back at him and grinned. “You know him?” I asked her. “No,” she said, “but I’ve seen him around here and he’s cute.” That’s when I got an idea.

  I called out to Horace, shouting for him to wait. Elizabeth and I dashed downstairs and met him in front of the apartment. Out of breath, I scanned our surroundings to be sure tattle-snitch Melrose and Mom were nowhere in sight. I then turned toward Horace.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “My mother and my brother don’t want me to see you anymore,” I said, hardly pausing between each word.

  He frowned. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I can’t really explain it,” I told him. “I just can’t see you anymore.”

  I stared at the ground and then looked up at Elizabeth. “But I want to introduce you to my friend,” I said to Horace. “She’s really nice. You’ll like her.”

  For a long moment, none of us said anything as the awkwardness of the situation hung in the air. Horace, befuddled and yet clear that there was no more information to be gathered from me, finally spoke. “Well look,” he said to me, “this has nothing to do with us.” Then as the perfect gentleman he was, Horace warmly greeted Elizabeth. I’m sure she’d been standing there wondering what the devil she’d walked into.

  That was in the summer of 1939. Horace and Elizabeth dated throughout high school and eventually married and raised a family together. Both of them, my maiden crush and my neighbor, are long gone now. And all of these years later, I am left with questions, with specks of wistfulness and regret in the spaces between them. How might my life have turned out if I’d stayed with the beau who’d stolen my heart even as he traced its shape with his thumbs? What if I, rather than my friend, had been the one to marry Horace? What would have happened if I’d defied my mother and secretly followed my inclination? I can only ponder.

&nb
sp; After Horace had been forced from my world, there entered another young man—someone who, in the view of my mother, was an ideal match for me. Our team of pastors often hosted gatherings in their homes for members, and you’d better believe Mom ensured that Emily and I turned up at all of them. “I’d like you to meet someone,” one of the ministers said to me one evening during the party. I stared at the pastor as if he’d just announced the Second Coming. I was seventeen then, but I was no less reserved than I’d been a decade earlier. The pastor nodded in the direction of a young man who approached. “This is my son, Kenneth,” he said.

  I’d of course seen Kenneth around church, but in our large congregation, he and I had never been formally introduced. I smiled and straightened the collar of the velvet dress Mom had sewn for me, just for this occasion. I didn’t know what to say, which is why I stood there and gawked. Kenneth had a close-cropped ’fro and dewy chocolate skin, with a smile stretching from ear to ear. He wore a three-piece suit, with a row of gold buttons lined up vertically along the vest. At more than six feet tall, he towered above me, just as my dear Horace had. While sipping soda, we traded stories. He’d just completed his last year of high school. I was still a student. He was working as a security guard and planned to become a police officer, and his older brother, a lieutenant, was already stationed overseas ahead of the Second World War. I knew absolutely nothing about war, aside from the one that had destroyed my household. Years earlier, Kenneth’s mother had died in childbirth, and he’d been raised by his father. He now had his own apartment on Morningside Avenue in Harlem. I still lived under my mother’s roof and rulership.

  Days later, Kenneth came by our apartment. The pastor had told Mom that he’d introduced the two of us, and Mom met him at the door. “So I hear you’re the son of a minister,” she said with a smile bright enough to light up Times Square. “Yes, Miss Fredericka,” he said, beaming. And I, recognizing the absolute delight on their faces, knew an unspoken understanding had been reached—an agreement not requiring my consent.

  * * *

  I may not have had much of a voice during adolescence, but I did have aspirations. Given my talent for the piano and organ, I initially thought I’d become a concert musician, a dream my mother birthed on my behalf. My goal shifted the year I was fifteen. By then, I was taking lessons from a lady by the name of Miss Mann. Her eldest son was the organist at Convent Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem, and I’d sometimes accompany the choir or play for the congregation there. During a concert one Sunday, I played, from memory, “Poet and Peasant,” a fifteen-page overture composed by Franz von Suppé. At the close of the piece when I stood and bowed at the warm applause, I said to myself, I will never ever do this again.

  Sure enough, on that afternoon I walked away from the piano, and it was the last day I set my fingers on ivory. Not only had the Franz piece worn me out, the piano demanded far too much of my time. I’d wake up early to rehearse for two hours before school, only to return to that hard bench before bed. “All that money wasted!” my mother fussed. In hindsight, I’m stunned she let me quit, however insistent I was. Mom continued in her mission to rear us with some culture, and by then, I felt I’d soaked up my share.

  By age sixteen, I’d moved on to hairdressing. For years, Mom had her hair pressed by a woman who lived two blocks from us, Miss Jones. (How on earth can I remember these names? No wonder I have a headache . . . so many details in my head!) After Miss Jones passed, her hot comb got handed down to me. I was good enough at pressing and curling that I turned it into a little business, a way to earn my own money in a house where cash was scarce. On Friday nights, I’d pack my bag with the hot comb and bobby pins and curling irons and begin making my way around to the homes of all the sisters in the church. My road show continued on Saturdays. Then on Sundays, I’d peer out across the sanctuary to see my handiwork on display, in pew after pew of fresh presses and pin curls.

  Horace had convinced me I was cute, and my hot comb contributed to my vanity. I stayed by the bathroom mirror, running between there and the stove as I laid down my edges and pressed out my bangs. All that primping made me constantly late for class, because no way was I showing up at school with my hair all over the place. I had a different style for every day of the week, from deep waves on Monday to a chignon on Friday. I pressed the life out of my strands every morning, restoring them to order after I’d slept them into a mess the night before. Once when I strode into French class, tardy as usual, my teacher, Miss Byrnes, lifted an eyebrow. “Cicely, why can’t you get here on time?” she asked. I pointed to my hair. “Well,” she said, smirking, “one day that hair is going to put you on the top of the world.” Neither of us could have known just how prescient she was.

  My shyness began melting away during junior high and high school, but only a touch. In eighth grade, I served as secretary of the student body. I also auditioned for the class opera and was somehow chosen, but I sang so softly during rehearsals that I got fired because I was too reticent to project my voice. Even now, I find it impossible to speak from my core until I find a character’s voice within myself. In high school, I was slightly more outgoing, thanks to Horace’s loving perception of me. But even in my brief moments of extroversion, there lived a quiet, questioning girl inside. At one point during my teen years, I thought I’d become a psychologist because I was fascinated by people, by what made them do and say the things that they did. I wanted so badly to get inside their minds. But then, clutching a pressing comb, I gradually became more interested in what grew out of their pores. Everyone, including me, predicted that I’d become a professional hairdresser. This was years before acting got ahold of me—and boy, has that allowed me to get inside some heads!

  Emily also earned her own money. Having inherited our mother’s skill as a seamstress, she landed a job at a lingerie factory, sewing gorgeous and expensive slips, underwear, and bras. That’s when our arguing began. I’d sneak into her bureau and pull out one of her lacy camisoles, tie it into a knot so it would fit me (or string a ribbon around my waist to cinch it up), and wear it beneath my clothes. After school, I’d race home to shove the camisole back in the drawer before Emily could discover it was missing. She usually caught me, and when she did, an explosion ensued. “Stay out of my things!” she’d yell. I’d smile and scamper off, with no intention of keeping my hands to myself. That lingerie was far too pretty to lie there unworn. Melrose worked as well, at any job he could hustle up on the streets. For a time, he had a job at a bagel shop, and in the evenings once his shift was done, he’d come through our apartment door carrying fresh-baked bagels, with an aroma tantalizing enough to pull us out of bed for a taste.

  In addition to our side hustles, we of course had our chores. My job as resident window washer remained intact throughout my teens. Every weekend, I’d climb through each window opening and balance myself on the ledge, with no fire escape or guardrails to prevent me from toppling onto the pavement five floors below. Decades later when that building was named after me, I returned there and stared up at that window in disbelief. I still get chills thinking about all those Saturdays I risked my life in service of spotless glass. Lord Jesus, how did I do it? I could have easily fallen into an urban grave. God literally had my back, just as he does now.

  My father still lived close by, and I saw him frequently. The year I was sixteen, my Aunt Zora, Dad’s sister, hosted a party with her social lady friends and some family. Dad took me along. The two of us were off in a corner, catching up. He had his back up against a chest of drawers, with his arms loosely draped around me as he stood behind me. “Cicely,” he said, “why don’t you come over here?” I swiveled around and looked at him. “Dad, why are you talking to me like I’m on the other side of the room?” I asked. “Oh, so you think you’re the only Cicely in the world?” he said, laughing. He nodded toward a tall, elegant Black woman in a far corner. “That’s the lady you’re named after,” he said.

  As soon as I stepped through our apartment door t
hat evening, I gave Mom the news. “I met my namesake today,” I announced.

  “What kind of foolishness you talking, child?” she said.

  I told her about my father’s confession. “I always knew I wasn’t named after no little girl next door,” I told her. “I just had a feeling.”

  Mom stared in my direction but did not speak. “Did you hear me?” I said. “I met the lady I was named after.”

  My mother remained silent. Even after she and my dad had separated, even after he’d raised his palm and bruised her spirit, she never spoke negatively of him to us, other than her occasional reminder that “Willie Tyson,” as she always referred to him, had refused to accompany her to the hospital when I was born. Despite how my dad had hurt my mother, he was still our father, still the man she insisted we respect. When she did mention my dad’s shortcomings, she usually did so indirectly, by folding in his transgressions with all those of his gender who’d been unfaithful. “These mens,” she’d say in the plural. “They no damn good.”