Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  When I recounted the day’s happenings for a third time, Mom leaned back in her rocker and uttered a phrase she used often. “You do well,” she said, shaking her head. “You do well.” That was her way of saying, “So you finally know something you didn’t know, huh? Well good for you. What you’re claiming might be true, but I’ll never admit it.” It was also her way of urging you past an uncomfortable conversation and back to the Land of Mute. You’re dismissed. The end. A period and a closed subject. You do well—and you’d do best to move on.

  * * *

  Kenneth had been on my mother’s approved list even before she’d seen him. He checked the only box that seemed to matter to her: he was the offspring of a reverend. At the party, when Kenneth had asked whether he could take me out, I’d agreed, knowing in my heart that he wasn’t for me. He was respectful and attractive, but in his presence, I felt none of the magnetism that had pulled me toward Horace. That much I knew. All else, my mother would decide.

  Urged on by Mom, Kenneth and I began officially seeing one another. One afternoon, he showed up, unannounced, for a visit. Because I hadn’t been expecting him, I was wearing one of my mother’s old housedresses. I’d also just unbraided my hair, and it was scattered all over my head. After Kenneth greeted me, I quickly excused myself to tidy up, feeling embarrassed that he’d seen me in such a state. When I returned, Emily had turned on the radio for our daily episode of Amos ’n’ Andy. An announcer interrupted the program: “Pearl Harbor has been bombed,” he said. I stared at Kenneth, who sat expressionless on the couch. “Did you hear that?” I asked him. “We’re at war!” Kenneth looked straight ahead, his eyes dazed. “At war?” he finally said. He’d heard the announcer as clearly as I had, but the news didn’t immediately sink in: the conflict overseas had at last thundered onto our shores.

  Not long after, my personal world was likewise overturned. I don’t remember everything about the day that permanently ended my childhood, that finished it off with a painful and lasting punctuation mark. The moments I do recall, many of them now dim and faded, unfolded in slow motion. It was late spring, toward the end of my junior year in 1942. With Mom’s permission, I’d planned to see Kenneth at his apartment around four o’clock that afternoon, following school. “I want you home by seven,” she said. I nodded and left.

  This wasn’t my first visit to Kenneth’s place. Over the months, as he’d charmed my mother with his impeccable manners, with his “Ms. Tyson” this and his “Ms. Tyson” that, she’d been increasingly permissive of our spending time together on our own. I think she was more smitten with Kenneth than I’d ever likely be, in love with the idea of our possible future together. Our evening progressed pleasantly, like many others before: we sat on his living room sofa, talking about the news of the day and listening to the radio. After we’d been together for a while, I glanced at my watch: 6:20. “I have to go,” I said, imagining the hell I’d catch if I returned home even one minute late. I pulled on my jacket and walked to the door. He followed me.

  “Why do you have to leave so soon?” he said playfully, resting his hand over mine. “You should stay a little longer.” I smiled and he slid my palm off the knob. He turned me around and pulled me toward him, my back resting against the door. He slowly unbuttoned my coat. He then gently began kissing me, first on my forehead, then on my neck, and finally on my lips. As our tongues intertwined, he pulled me even closer, pressing his aroused body into mine, running his palms along my breasts, breathing heavily with desire. Our caressing grew more intense and he lifted my dress. I recoiled slightly, but before I could back away, he was inside me. He immediately exploded.

  With my thighs trembling, I looked at my watch again. It was 6:40. “I really do have to go now,” I said, straightening my dress and rebuttoning my coat. As I grappled internally with what had just occurred, he and I said nothing, and I left. On the bus ride home, I replayed the scene in my head. Did we just have sex? Is that what that was? I honestly was not sure. Like my period and all other topics of a sensitive nature, Mom had never had a forthright conversation with me about intercourse.

  I thought of the pregnant woman my friend Fannie Lou had pointed out on the street. Was this how a baby got inside of her stomach? Maybe, but I was not certain. I thought of a photo I’d once seen in a book of a naked couple having intercourse on a bed. Kenneth and I couldn’t have had sex, I reasoned. We were standing up with most of our clothes on. And though I didn’t fully understand the mechanics of sex, I did sense we’d done something my mother would have prohibited. Maybe this is what she’d meant when she’d told me, at age nine, “Stay away from the boys.” A small part of me felt scared that perhaps we’d stumbled across a red line I hadn’t known was there. But a much larger part of me exhaled, grateful that I’d stopped short of engaging in what I imagined sex to be—an act carried out horizontally. Nothing could’ve happened, I kept telling myself. You cannot have intercourse standing up. By the time I arrived home exactly at seven o’clock, I’d convinced myself I had nothing to be concerned about.

  Nature had a different take. A few weeks later when my period went missing, Mom, fearing the likely but praying for the improbable, booked a doctor’s appointment. After I’d been examined and given a pregnancy test, the doctor pulled my mother aside in the hallway. “Your daughter is pregnant,” I heard him tell her through the half-open door. “She’s probably almost a month along.” Silence.

  In the exam room, my heart hammered away in my chest as my brain raced. Pregnant? How could I be pregnant? Kenneth and I didn’t do anything for me to get pregnant. We didn’t even lie down! Mom returned to the room and stared at me, aware by my stone face that I’d overheard the doctor. A tear escaped down her cheek. “If only you’d waited,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “And now, dear God, Willie Tyson is going to kill me for his child.” After Mom and Dad had separated, my father had often said to her, “If anything bad ever happens to my Sis, I’ll kill you.” My circumstance, in the view of my religiously raised parents, indeed qualified as something bad. Their seventeen-year-old daughter, herself still a child in many ways, was going to become an unwed mother.

  I sat numb in the cold exam room, vulnerable in my thin blue paper gown and sock feet. I could not comprehend what I’d just been told, just as Kenneth hadn’t been able to process that our country was under attack. I’d heard the doctor. And yet the reality of what he’d said felt inconceivable to me, entirely surreal, as if he was talking to some other girl in some other life, while I simply listened in. I dressed as Mom waited in the lobby. Sitting side by side on the number 6 train toward home, neither of us spoke.

  7

  Ground Shifts

  NEAR the close of my senior year, the principal called me to her office. “What is this?” she asked, holding up a folded paper. I instantly recognized it as an invitation to my daughter’s christening and wondered how she’d gotten hold of it. I shrugged.

  “So is it true?” she pressed. “Do you have a child, Cicely?”

  Seeing no end run around the evidence, I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered. “It’s true.”

  She lowered the invitation and sighed. “Well then I’m sorry,” she said, “but we cannot allow you to graduate from this school.”

  I stood there staring blankly at her, hoping she’d amend her ruling with an exception. But her judgment was final. Only four weeks before I was to receive my diploma, just one measly month before graduation, the secret I’d carried beneath my dress had now somehow made its way onto my principal’s desk. And as a result, she and the school’s administrative staff disregarded my whole senior year and made me repeat that coursework at the school’s night program.

  The year before, when I first learned that I was expecting, the resulting torrent of emotion nearly took me under. I was confounded about how I’d ever gotten into such a predicament and fearful about my path forward. Yet amid the confusion about how I’d become pregnant, amid the immense sadness I felt about how I’d let myself
and my parents down, there emerged in me an unmitigated resolve: I would earn my diploma. That was, for me, as much a matter of practicality as it was of honor. I wanted to complete my course and stand proud at the finish line. If I had to keep my belly undercover in order to march across that graduation stage, I was determined to do so.

  The concealment turned out to be effortless: I had no discernible baby bump at the start of my senior year, nor did I ever develop a large stomach. Before the pregnancy, I’d been a stick at five feet four inches and around ninety-seven pounds. Six months into gestation, my belly had grown only to the size of a small cantaloupe, one mostly unnoticeable beneath my clothes. My principal and teachers had no idea I was pregnant, nor did my classmates. My own mother could hardly tell. “That baby must be standing up inside of you,” she’d often say. I wore the same A-line, button-down dress to school that fall as I wore to the hospital on the day I gave birth the following February. If Emily and Melrose noticed I was pregnant early on, they did not mention it, and frankly, I did not want to talk about it, did not want to acknowledge my shame aloud. Even once they eventually overheard the news from our mother, my sister and brother and I never discussed it. Their sorrowful gazes, from my eyes to my stomach and back to my eyes, said plenty.

  When you get pregnant during adolescence, you grow up in the space of two minutes. In minute one, your feet are dangling from an exam table as you hold your breath and wait. In minute two, all wondering is replaced with reckoning, all equivocating with the definitiveness of the doctor’s words. And in that instant, you are no longer a girl, wandering and curious and innocent. You are, by proof of a urine sample and by declaration of a physician, ushered to a doorway labeled “Parenthood.” Through that entrance is an uncertain future, filled with adult anxieties and responsibilities. All at once, your center of gravity shifts from me to us. Your existence is no longer just about you, but rather about this defenseless child who will rely on your strength as a source for his or her own. That is the state I found myself in on the day of my appointment: half-clothed and glassy-eyed, seated at the corner of life as I’d known it and a frightening forever.

  Upon learning I was pregnant, I spent two full weeks just trying to figure out how it had happened. Sex, as I’d misunderstood it, necessitated pleasure. What I’d experienced was the swift ascent of my hemline and a three-second burst of warm liquid. Years later, my friend Maya Angelou would describe her own pregnancy this way: “When I was sixteen, a boy in high school evinced interest in me, so I had sex with him, just once,” she wrote. “And after I came out of that room, I thought, Is that all there is to it? My goodness, I’ll never do that again!” Next thing she knew, she was expecting—which is precisely how I felt. I hadn’t even lain down, for God’s sake, much less experienced any kind of euphoria. I’d been cheated out of intimacy’s pleasure ride, yet I was still required to pay its full entrance fee. That is what happens when parents think they’re protecting their children by withholding the truth. They are in fact exposing them to heartache.

  There was never any question I’d keep the child. In my family and church community, abortion was not even a thought or conversation. With that consideration off the table, I moved right along to the next: whether Kenneth and I would marry. In many ways, that question had also already been answered, because Mom had long since decided that Kenneth was the One for me. The fact that he and I now had a child on the way simply accelerated that eventuality. Just as my mother had pressed me to go out with Kenneth, she likewise demanded that we marry that December. “I’m not signing any papers for you to marry before you’re grown,” she murmured. “We’ll wait till you’re eighteen.”

  When Maya had first told her mom she was expecting, her mother asked her calmly, “Do you love the boy . . . and does he love you?” When Maya answered no, her mother said, “Then there’s no sense in ruining three lives.” If only things had gone that way in the Tyson house. At the time, I experienced my mom’s insistence that I marry Kenneth as an extension of her autocracy, her maintenance of a control she felt slipping away. Looking back on it, however, I recognize her behavior for what I believe it was: an attempt to redeem herself, as well as to redirect the plotline of our family’s generational narrative.

  “No unmarried daughter of mine is going to bring a child here,” my mother said to me repeatedly. And yet her mother, Mary Jane, had done exactly that. She and my grandfather, Charles, were not married when they became intimate, and by the time Mary Jane discovered she was pregnant, Charles had been killed at sea, his fishing boat overturned by a violent storm near Nevis. Years later and a world away, my parents of course traded vows, and I’d always assumed they’d done so long before welcoming Melrose. Emily, who sat down one day and did the math, eventually steered me to the truth: my dad and mom married after conceiving my brother. And then, to my mother’s heartbreak, her daughter had unknowingly repeated the very familial pattern she’d longed to end. I think now that my mom pressured me to marry not just to spare me a public disgrace, but as a penance for her own and her mother’s choices. Her adamance was a kind of peace offering—a way to restore her purity in the eyes of a heavenly Father she felt she’d disappointed.

  I don’t remember Kenneth’s reaction, or even my own, when I first told him I was pregnant. I’m sure I mumbled it and then devolved into tears, probably backing out of the room as he absorbed the news. My mother’s conversation with the pastor, her confrontation of Kenneth, her declaration to him that we must wed—it all feels as illusory to me now as it did in the summer of 1942. Our spirits have a way of dulling the traumatic, of blunting painful memories to lessen their ache. I do recall that Kenneth wanted our child, however unexpected her arrival. I also remember that he never proposed to me. He didn’t need to. Our future had been cemented on the evening he’d lifted my dress. Following my pregnancy, the only thing left to do was repent of our unholy act by embracing holy matrimony. I held both of us responsible for our situation, but truthfully, I blamed him more than I did myself. He hadn’t exactly forced himself on me, but he had asserted his will in place of mine, let loose on the fertile ground of my ignorance. That is how I felt then. I see now that my perspective was my way of coping with a world upended for us both.

  I wasn’t there when my father heard about my pregnancy. That whole summer, I was so busy hiding from him, as well as from all of the nonsense I knew might occur, that I didn’t know who was saying what—or whether Mom broached the topic with him. In an extended family as large as ours, where news spreads more easily than butter on hot cornbread, I knew he’d eventually hear it from someone. If Mom didn’t tell him, one of his siblings or cousins certainly would, which is what happened. I managed to avoid seeing my father for the entirety of my pregnancy. Given that his previously frequent visits came to an abrupt end, it was clear he was avoiding me as much as I was him. Perhaps he was attempting to spare his heart the dagger that would eventually have to land.

  My first trimester was excruciating. I did not suffer from morning sickness, yet I could not escape a burgeoning sense of remorse. My mother had her way of deepening my regret. Whenever we’d pass a department store window, she’d repeat the refrain she’d first spoken in the doctor’s office. “If only you’d waited, Sis,” she’d say, shaking her head as she eyed the ornate white gowns. “If you’d just waited.” If only you’d told me the truth, I’d be thinking. For years, Mom had dreamed of hosting a big wedding for Emily and me. Yet she’d been so consumed with the notion of a day, of an elaborate one-time affair, that she’d neglected to explain the basic facts of life.

  My eighteenth birthday arrived on December 19. Just after Christmas and just before the start of my last school term, Kenneth and I took our places at the altar for a small ceremony in our church. His father officiated. My own father did not attend. I learned later that Mom hadn’t invited him, and if I’m honest, I was relieved he wasn’t there, thankful to escape his mournful gaze. From the pews, a small group of our family members
looked on and wept throughout the service. Everyone cried, tears of lament disguised as those of happiness. It felt more like a funeral than a wedding.

  As I stood at the altar in my pale blue gown, my pregnant belly still hardly perceptible, I cried because I did not want to be married. It didn’t matter that Kenneth loved me. It didn’t matter that he was a respectable young man, which he was. He had not shirked his responsibility to me, to us, to our unborn child. He’d even welcomed our nuptials. And yet despite how he might’ve felt or behaved, plain and clear, I was not ready for the commitment. Repeating my vows felt like surrendering my freedom. Just as I was beginning to find out who I was, this marriage placed a chokehold on the discovery. With the exchange of our gold bands and the declaration by the reverend, I was no longer Cicely, the autonomous. I had become a wife, an underling to be commanded and shepherded.

  The day after the wedding, I moved out of my mother’s apartment and into Kenneth’s place. Though I’d relocated, I never truly left Mom’s home. Kenneth worked the night shift as a security guard. Since I was so close to delivering, my mother insisted I stay with her in the evenings. She wanted to keep close watch over me, just as she’d been doing since the day I was born.

  One day in February after arriving at Mom’s apartment, I felt unusually energetic. Powered by my burst of vigor, I cleaned her apartment from stem to stern, pulling down the drapes and pulling off the sheets, throwing everything in the bathtub so I could scrub it clean on the washboard. By the time my mother arrived home from work, I was wiped out. “I think I’ll go home now,” I told her. “Kenneth is off tonight.” “No you can’t go home now,” she said, glancing at the clock. “It’s after nine. It’s too late for you to be out in the streets. You should stay here.” Practically before she could complete that sentence, I was laid out on her bed.