Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  I truly did not want to move back in with my mother. And yet the heavenly Father, in his omniscience, obviously saw fit to keep drawing us together, perhaps because he knew I had some spiritual business to complete. When you ask God for strength, as I do daily, he doesn’t usually just drop it from the sky. He often answers by placing you in a circumstance that requires you to build fortitude while relying solely on him. Motherhood had thrust me into adulthood prematurely, and yet emotionally, even by my late twenties, I was still a child in some ways—still a girl guided by the rise and fall of my mother’s brow, by her approval and displeasure. While living with my aunt, I towered in my sense of autonomy, wrapped myself tight in the cloak of my position as an independent parent. But back in my mother’s apartment, I found myself regressing into the voicelessness of my earliest years, cowering beneath the reign of the woman who’d always steered me. By voiceless, I do not mean mute. I bickered weekly with my mother, railed against her rule more than I dared to during childhood. I see now that I wasn’t fighting against her, but for myself. Defying her voice was my way of making space for my own, however feeble and uncertain. At the heart of our disputes lived my struggle for womanhood, my yearning to trust God’s whispers and tune out all others.

  A year after I’d been with my mother, the Father’s whisper crescendoed into a shout. After work late one evening, I returned home to find Joan out on the street in front of the apartment, hop-scotching with another girl from the block. I peered around. On one shadowy corner sat a row of old men, slamming down dominoes on a fold-up table and swigging beer. Across from there, a group of women balanced themselves on crates, cackling and carrying on as a radio blared. I then looked up. There, near the top floor of our building, my mother sat on the ledge of her apartment’s window sill, gazing down at the scene. I glanced at my watch: 10 p.m. What on earth is my child still doing up? I approached Joan, who skipped over into my arms when she spotted me.

  “What are you doing out here at this hour?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “Playing,” she said, oblivious to the worry on my face.

  “Do you know what time it is?” I said. “You have to go to school in the morning.”

  Upstairs, my mother had no reasonable explanation for why she’d allowed Joan to linger in the streets. “Mom, why is this baby outdoors so late?” I asked, my voice rising by the syllable. She shrugged. “Don’t come in here fussing,” she snapped. “I had my eye on that girl all evening. I could see her from where I was sitting.”

  Joan was ten at the time. When I was that age, the earth would’ve had to topple off its axis for my mother to allow me outdoors after dark. What was she thinking? I did not know. The one reason I conjured had to do with my tense dynamic with Mom since I’d returned to live with her. Our disputes were vociferous and constant. In fact, that very week, we’d had a doozy of a quarrel. I cannot recall what triggered the clash, probably because it wounded me so. Our strife must be spilling over into her treatment of Joan, I thought. Or maybe, after raising her own three children, Mom had understandably grown weary with caretaking. Whatever had prompted her strange behavior, I knew our arrangement had to end. I did not discuss this with my mother, nor did I ask for her opinion. I simply made a grown-up decision, one markedly absent of her input: I would secure my baby’s care. I didn’t know how I would do so, but I was convinced that I must.

  The next morning, I began researching boarding schools. With the fifty- and sixty-hour workweeks I was clocking, I knew I could not be there for my daughter in the way that I wanted, the way countless working mothers long to be. And yet if I was going to partner with others in caring for Joan, I had to be sure I could trust the palms I placed her in. When you don’t know what to do, you do what you know—and all of my life, I’d been taught to trust those guided by the same God who led me. That is why, when my eyes fell on an advertisement for a Christian boarding school in upstate New York, I immediately became interested. Upon calling, I learned that the school was run by a minister and his wife, a couple who once had presided over a church in Harlem.

  The next week, I traveled to meet the couple. I toured the middle-school campus, talked with some of the teachers and students, and inspected the all-girl dormitories. My spirit said yes. But you can never be too careful when it comes to your child, your treasure, which is why, weeks later, I visited again, to be sure all was in order. I returned home carrying both a greater sense of certainty that this was the right place for Joan and a financial arrangement with the school that put the cost within reach for me.

  When I revealed my plan to my mother, with nary a stutter as I spoke, she of course protested. “Why are you taking that child up there?” she pressed. I stared at her but felt no urge to explain, no desire to reveal how her behavior had prompted my choice. I knew what I had to do, and nothing she could say would unbutton my resolve. I would stay on with my mother and continue working in the city, I told her, but Joan’s care could not be compromised. That was that. In the fall of 1953, at the start of my daughter’s fifth-grade year, I packed her belongings and took the train with her upstate.

  Joan was more excited than hesitant about her adventure. But that changed the farther north we rode. An hour into our journey, she folded her palm into mine and leaned in to my shoulder. “Mommy, why can’t you come with me?” she asked. I squeezed her hand. “Sweetie,” I whispered, “I promise I will visit you as often as I can. But Mommy has to work.” How do you explain to your daughter, the center of your existence, why you must separate from her? How do you tell a child, one you love to the stars and beyond, that a long stretch of sunrises will live between you? You don’t. In place of clarifying, you weep inside, your lips trembling as towns and pine trees and colors blur by your train-car window. You wish it did not have to be, this distance between your worlds. You cringe as you hear your baby’s plea and grip her hand more tightly.

  And yet you know. You know with the same immutable assurance that rose up in me on the day I walked away from my marriage. By all outward appearances, there was a decision to be made, a lever to be pulled: stay or go. But inwardly, the only true choice for me was onward. I understood that to my core, knew it with the same certainty I’d once known our neighbor’s apartment would go up in flames, knew it as surely as I know there is a Creator. And yet the truth, however irrefutable it is, does not spare its pursuer the accompanying anguish. On that fall afternoon when I waved goodbye to my child, the red-orange leaves above us lowering their heads in lament, every part of me ached.

  I kept my promise to visit frequently. In the following months, I traveled north any time I could yank my fingers away from my typewriter. I also brought Joan home for spring break and holidays and sometimes on weekends. I missed her as much as I knew I would, multiplied by far more than that. Whenever Joan was in the city with me, I whisked my angel around town, loading up shopping bags with more dresses and shoes and coats than my checking account could bear. Our eventual partings, our eyelids brimming with sadness and adoration, were no less excruciating than the first had been. That year of long division flowed seamlessly into 1954, the year I turned thirty and was still living with my mother, still finding my way. That’s when God cleared his voice and again spoke. His message, undeniable in its clarity, penetrating in its delivery, came in several spine-tingling installments.

  9

  Shoulder Taps

  SHOW me a West Indian woman, and I’ll show you an enterpriser holding down three jobs. Years before the arts swept me up in its gale winds, I strung together a living by adding multiple side gigs to my main one. I wielded my hot comb all over the five boroughs, leaving a trail of charred scalps in my wake. After my primary job at the law firm was finished each day, I staggered over to my second gig, what was then known as a typing pool: a group of work-for-hire secretaries who transcribed shorthand notes for (male) executives who did not have their own administrative staffs. I worked nights.

  Typing pools were not for the feeble. In a cavernous
warehouse space, row after row of ambitious young women, with their tie-neck blouses and ruler-straight postures, swiftly churned out documents on mammoth Imperial typewriters. Just to break into most pools, you had to accurately type eighty words per minute. Repeated mistakes, which cost the employer both time and paper in a world still absent of correction fluid, could get you dismissed. I can still feel the brush of my fingertips against the cold steel keys, can hear the cacophony of taps and dings wafting to the ceiling. I’d thankfully mastered both stenography and shorthand in high school, and by graduation, I could deliver pristine copy at one hundred words per minute.

  Aside from that graveyard shift, I rounded up scores of other jobs over the years. One summer, I worked as a transcriptionist for Save the Children. The next, I took a spot on the assembly line of a nail factory. Toward the end of the war, I was hired as a secretary inside the Navy Purchasing office, a sprawling edifice at 90 Church Street. That job put a spring in my father’s gait.

  “After you finish high school,” Dad would often tell me when I was a youngster, “I want you to go to work in one of those tall buildings downtown.” Mind you, he did not care what position I held. My mere presence in a soaring structure, one representing upward mobility, was accomplishment enough for him. In his mind, earning a living in a skyscraper where few Blacks were ever spotted meant I’d made it, that his offspring had fared better than he could’ve when he arrived in America, empty-handed and hopeful. On the day I landed the job, I called him. “Well Dad,” I said, “you got your wish. I’m in one of those tall buildings downtown.” That week, he took the number 6 train south to see it for himself. Arm in arm, the two of us stood together on the sidewalk, gazing up in awe. He looked over at me, then skyward again, and then back at me. “Congratulations, String Bean,” he said, planting a kiss on my cheek as he beamed.

  The year Joan went to boarding school, I renewed my search for temporary gigs I could fit around my position at the law firm. In those days, everyone at the employment office of the Urban League in Harlem knew me by name; I was in that office more than I was in my mother’s apartment. One afternoon, I pranced in, my short hair freshly pressed and precisely styled. Audrey Hepburn, with her pixie cut and her delicate pearl earrings, was the golden girl to mimic in that era, and my family, noting my take on the icon’s cut, began calling me the Black Audrey. Even strangers would often proclaim, “Oh, you look just like Audrey Hepburn.” Not quite, but I embraced the compliment.

  “What kind of position are you looking for?” asked a young woman I hadn’t yet met.

  “Anything,” I said.

  “How fast can you type?” she asked.

  “Over a hundred words a minute,” I said.

  She nodded approvingly, picked up the receiver on her phone, and dialed one of her contacts. Afterward, she scribbled something on a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Go here,” she said. I eyed three words at the top of the paper—American Red Cross—with the address, in Midtown near Thirty-Eighth and Lexington, scrawled beneath. That afternoon, I was hired as a fill-in secretary to the vice president, Ms. Ruben. The part-time position, which involved typing case histories for the organization, eventually morphed into full-time work. It also became the vehicle for God’s strong tap on my shoulder.

  It was 1954. I’d been at the Red Cross for about a year when Ms. Johnson, a sweet older Black woman who sat three feet from me in the office, retired. She’d spent most of her career at the company, hunched over a typewriter, producing hundreds of case histories. A farewell party was organized, complete with a sheet cake and well wishes from those who’d worked with her. Ms. Johnson’s longtime supervisor gave a sentimental speech about how much she loved this woman, how noble her service had been over many decades. As she closed, dabbing at her eyes with a white hankie, she presented Ms. Johnson with a parting gift: a gold wristwatch. Everyone around me clapped. I did not. I stood there feeling dumbfounded, observing all the tears and grins and applause while a thought gripped me: A watch? You mean she spent nearly all her adult life in this place, and all she gets is a measly watch? It seemed absolutely pitiful to me. It also seemed like an opinion best kept to myself.

  Which is why, later that afternoon when my perspective came sputtering forth, it stunned me. As Ms. Johnson said her final goodbyes around the office, the rest of us clerks settled back at our typewriters, eyeing the wall clock to calculate the number of click-clacks till quitting time. That’s when, seemingly out of nowhere, a proclamation tumbled out of my mouth. “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I’m not gonna be any place for no thirty years until somebody hands me a wristwatch and says, ‘Thank you very much.’ I’ll buy myself a watch.” Silence. If a strand of my hair had fallen to the carpet, you would have heard it. That’s how quiet that room got.

  Two of my co-workers glanced over at me and another giggled nervously, peering around to see whether our boss had heard me. The girl closest to me stared at me like I’d plumb lost it. In a sense, I suppose I had. As life has taught me time and again, you often have to lose your present circumstance to make room for your forthcoming one. A moment later, I went back to typing even as the sentiment lingered. I’m never going to be in Ms. Johnson’s position, I said to myself. Not me. Some might call it a thought, or perhaps a quiet resolve. I firmly believe it was the voice of God, presenting itself in the form of my own instinct.

  Leading up to that declaration, God had already planted a seed. For months, I’d been feeling an increasing sense of dissatisfaction, an uneasiness born of the query buried in the bosom of all humanity: Is this all there is? That question had been gnawing at me for quite some time. The party, and the gift to Ms. Johnson, simply prompted its expression. To be clear, there is nothing disgraceful about how this woman had chosen to spend her working years. For all I knew, Ms. Johnson had fulfilled her grand vision for herself in a perfectly honorable pursuit. When she’d entered the workforce in the 1920s, this sister would’ve been considered quite fortunate to have office work, never mind a job steady enough to sustain her through the Depression and beyond. And yet I had a powerful sense that my journey would be less stationary and more adventure-filled, that it would wind and bob its way through a landscape devoid of steno pads and number-two pencils. I couldn’t imagine spending decades at a desk, all for someone to congratulate me, in the end, with a watch from a department store. My life, my service, my time—they were worth far more to me than a hundred-dollar timepiece.

  Not long after, that feeling intensified. I was given a new case history to transcribe, one involving a young Black wife and mother. In her consultation with my supervisor, the woman confided that her husband was having sex with their eight-year-old daughter. When I got to that line, I stopped typing and picked up the paper, rereading and praying I’d seen it wrong. I hadn’t. “Why didn’t you report him?” Ms. Ruben had asked the mother. Her answer still sends a shiver through me: “I was afraid he would lose his job,” she had said.

  I’ll tell you, I was no good for the rest of that week. Your child is being molested by her father, and you won’t go to the authorities because you’re scared he’ll be fired? It sickened me to my core. It also served as a painful reminder of what it meant, and still often means, to be Black in this country. So precarious has our financial position been that too many of us have been forced to choose between economic security and safety for our children. Even now, all these years later, recalling that transcript makes me want to retch. No way could I, year after year, bear witness to such agony, memorializing heartache with ink-stained iron keystrokes. After typing up the full case that afternoon, I pushed myself back from the desk and made another major proclamation. “I am sure God didn’t put me on the face of this earth to bang on a typewriter for the rest of my life,” I said. “There is something else for me to do. I don’t know what it is, but I will find it.” From my lips to God’s ears—or, as I see it now, the other way around.

  The next week, I re
ceived another love note from heaven. During my lunchtime, I shot out of the office and headed straight for nearby Lord & Taylor. Oh, how I loved that department store! During the holidays, its windows along Fifth Avenue featured the most breathtaking Christmas displays, lavish and sparkling, casting a spell and glow over the entire block. Admirers traveled from all parts of the globe just to stand before those windows in all their twinkling glory. I frankly had little business in a store, given what I earned, but that never stopped me from roaming the aisles, dreaming about a new pocketbook or a scarf for Joan. It broke my heart when, decades later in 2019, the store closed its doors after a century in business. Anyway, on that day, I flounced out to shop, feeling attractive in my wraparound pinstripe dress and patent-leather pumps, eager for my midday routine. What happened next was anything but.

  Just as I was rounding the corner onto Fifth Avenue, a Black man decked out in a business suit and a scarlet bowtie tapped me on the shoulder. I swiveled around.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” he said, “are you a model?”

  “No,” I said, searching his face for where this was going.

  “Well if you aren’t,” he said, “you should be.”