Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  The next morning for the show, I strode onto the set with my head tied in a kerchief. I got my makeup done, my costume on, and heard the director yell “Places, please!” Just as I walked onto the stage, I pulled off my scarf. The room stopped. By the dumbfounded look on the director’s face, I was sure I was about to be fired. “Cicely,” he said, walking slowly toward me, “you’ve cut your hair.” I nodded. “You know,” he said, drawing in a breath, “I wanted to ask you to do that . . . but I didn’t have the nerve.”

  My character is who gave me the audacity. Anytime I’ve changed my hair over the years of my career, it has had nothing to do with me personally. It has always been about being authentically in character, about staying as true to her essence and appearance as I can. That has always been my sole intention. And yet when that episode aired, all anyone could talk about was this actress who showed up on television with a nappy head. That was only the beginning.

  The next year, the actor George C. Scott saw me in The Blacks. He asked my agent to send me over to audition for East Side/West Side, the CBS drama series he starred in. I’d heard they wanted Diana Sands for the part, but my agent insisted they had always had me in mind. So soon after, I read for the role of Jane Foster, a secretary to an unflinching New York City caseworker (Scott). As I left the audition, I asked the casting director, “What should I do with my hair?” Again, I wanted to ensure my hairstyle would reflect the character. “Leave it the way it is,” he said matter-of-factly. I played on the series for one season and was the first Black woman to star in a television drama. I also was the first Black TV actress to reveal my hair in its bare-naked state.

  Within weeks of my first appearance, letters began pouring in. All over the country, hairdressers wrote to the network, claiming I was impacting their business. “My clients want to have their hair cut off like the Black girl on your show!” they wrote. Episode after episode, the letters continued arriving by the bushels. I now wish I’d had the sense to save some of them, just so I could read them again and laugh as I remember. “This actress has all our customers chopping off their hair,” the salon owners noted. In that sense, their business was thriving: never had there been such demand for female barbers, some said. But their earnings for chemical services? Gone, or at least noticeably curtailed. That is how the natural hair trend of the 1960s began.

  I loved wearing my hair natural. I felt beautiful with it, like the real me, which is why I continued with the style long after East Side. It was also incredibly freeing since, for the first time in my life, I could wash and go, minus any scalp abrasions from chemicals. Maya, of course, loved my new look. “We always wore our hair natural on the road,” she said, recalling earlier days when she’d traveled abroad with the touring company of Porgy and Bess. Overseas, no one was mixing lye or heating hot combs, so you had to wear it the way God gave it to you.

  The first time my daughter saw me with my ’fro, she gasped. She then called my mother and told her I’d cut off my hair. “What do you mean she cut off her hair?” my mom breathed into the receiver. “She wouldn’t be so damned foolish.” She was something else, that Fredericka, and certainly never one to clamp her tongue when it came to her children’s choices. For a while, she wouldn’t even let me come to her apartment. “You’re not gonna embarrass me in front of my neighbors,” she said. God help that woman.

  While I was on East Side, a Black organization in DC flew me in for a big award, to recognize me as a pioneer in the emerging trend toward natural hair. When the splendorous celebration was over, the leaders got down to the root of what they actually felt. They whisked me into a side room and told me how I was degrading Black women by wearing my natural hair onstage, for the entire country to witness. “You’re in a position to glorify our beauty,” one said, “and you’re doing the opposite. You’re wearing your hair nappy on live television!” Can you imagine the hypocrisy? Child, I set down the award they’d given me, marched right out the door, and never glanced back. How is it degrading to walk through the world displaying the hair I was born with? It wasn’t. It’s still not.

  And yet, over centuries, we’ve been taught to be ashamed. It did not begin that way. Our ancestors, long before they were sold from their homeland, took great pride in the appearance of their hair. Our foremothers created the world’s most ornate, intricate, and diverse hairstyles, squeezing their young’uns between their thighs, swapping laughter with every braid and twist. In our communities, to be groomed was to be loved. With our mothers’ hands down in our scalps, in the tenderness present in their palms, we felt cared for and connected. Hair, for us, was the opposite of disgrace. It represented intimacy. During the Middle Passage, our untended locks became matted, our rituals and unique hair tools were stolen from us. In the new land, European traders often cut off the tresses of their “cargo,” their animals covered in “wool,” not human hair.

  The dehumanization did not end there. In European narratives, our hair has been presented as mangy and unmanageable, dirty and rough. The American-born English writer Florence Kate Upton was among the first to degrade our appearance, with the creation in 1895 of her character Golliwog. Then in 1899, Scottish author Helen Bannerman published The Story of Little Black Sambo, which became widely popular around the world for more than a half-century. Both Golliwog and Sambo were presented as dark-skinned pickaninnies with big red lips and frizzy hair. Upton described her character as “a horrid sight, the blackest gnome.” The British golliwog doll carried over into a 1944 storybook by English writer Enid Mary Blyton, who formed the trio “Golly, Woggie, and Nigger.” (Blyton peddled her beliefs far and wide, selling more than six hundred million of her various books around the globe.) In the late 1800s all the way through the 1950s, B. Leidersdorf Company sold a product called “Nigger Hair Smoking Tobacco” in a metal tin can bearing the picture of a Black person’s head with an enormous afro and nose ring. White folks have been Other-izing us for hundreds of years, initially because that served their purpose in justifying our enslavement. Brutes, or those labeled as less than human, needn’t be accorded respect. Just as they have policed our bodies, they have criminalized our tresses while attempting to extinguish our very existence. In minstrel shows, in books, on television, in kitchen-table conversations, our natural hair has always been under siege in a calculated campaign to devalue us.

  In hindsight, I do not fault my mom, or even the leaders at that awards banquet, for decrying my natural hair. The crusade to hide our crowning glory, to consider its texture somehow inferior to that of whites, has hooked its claws into all of us in one way or another. It is as insidious as it is pervasive, like dust particles in the air. You breathe in the toxins without recognizing they’re even present. Moreover, a Black woman’s hairstyle in this country has often been linked to her survival. In the color hierarchy set up by slave owners, the closer you were to looking white—fair skin, loose curls rather than tightly coiled ones—the higher your status in their eyes. Over centuries we were taught to disregard ourselves, a habit we are still unlearning.

  How I hope that we can. And while striving to do so, I also pray we can begin defining ourselves for ourselves, dismissing the three hundred years of a Eurocentric beauty standard hovering over us. As gorgeous as our locks appear, as powerfully as they express our artistic genius, as often as they’ve been used as a barometer of our politics, our hair is not truly who we are. We are defined not by what grows from our heads, but what flows from our hearts. That is our greatest testimony. Our hair may be our crown, yet a life of love and service is our real glory. So as we navigate our journey, let us graciously make space for one another. Whether you relax it or coil it, weave it or dread it, cover it with a wig or cut it plumb off, the choice is yours. Good hair is your hair—however you decide to wear it.

  * * *

  The 1960s, for me, were filled with a spate of roles, some forgettable, others leaving an imprint. Most of the time I was just happy to be working, bringing in a steady income to support Joan.
In the years following her birth, I had a sense that I would not have more children, and I didn’t want my one child to ever go without. After landing roles in The Blacks and East Side/West Side, my first two steady income sources, I immediately took out a life insurance policy for $500,000. By then, Joan had finished high school, and her passion for social justice had led her to become a mentor with a church-affiliated organization based in the Village. For years, she both worked and lived in that community, growing close to her fellow mentors as they together supported children. Though Joan was no longer at my side daily, I still wanted to be sure she’d always be financially secure. Later on as I started earning more, I eventually increased the insurance policy to $1 million. And if I got a per diem on a show, I would not spend it. I’d instead take my lunch to work and set aside the money for her. I was sometimes surprised at how quickly those small amounts added up.

  Following my ’fro debut in East Side, I had some other television firsts. In 1966, the year Miles and I began seeing one another, I got a role on Guiding Light as Martha Frazier, a registered nurse known for handing out advice to her comrades (and the first Black character to appear on a soap opera). I never watched Guiding Light, even after I landed the part. That wasn’t the case for my mother and sister, however. They followed every single plot twist. My mother, who by then had loosened her entertainment-is-evil beliefs in favor of some daily amusement, would sit on her living room couch while shouting at the TV screen, telling so-and-so how wrong he was to steal someone’s wife. These conversations would go on for hours, do you hear me? And just about every time they saw me on an episode, they’d call me, saying, “You shouldn’t have done such-and-such.”

  Miles even got in on the conversation. After work when I’d see him, he’d meet me at the door with a smirk and his input: “Who do you think you are, giving these people advice? You’ve got some nerve getting on television and telling people what to do and how to do it. It’s none of your business.” Between hours-long sessions on his horn in the basement, he somehow also found the time to tune in to Guiding Light.

  In those years, I also played Princess Amara in I Spy, the NBC series starring Bill Cosby. That’s where I first met Bill. Years later, he and I costarred in The Bill Cosby Show (1969–1971), the first of two to bear his name. I portrayed Mildred Hermosa, the blind date and first girlfriend of Bill’s character, Chet (and for this role, I wore a bouffant afro wig). I’ll never forget the blind-date scene. The sun was out, a gorgeous day. For a costume, they had me in a full-length colorful silk dress that hit at my hips. I had to take this long walk to get over to Bill’s character. When I drew close, I walked into his arms, and we kissed. Right after we’d acted it out, the soundman yelled “Cut!” He’d heard some kind of ambient noise, he told us. We did it all over, and when he heard the same thing, we did it a third time. The commotion, it turned out, was Bill’s heart thumping away in his chest. In all of our years working together, he never laid a finger on me off set, but for that scene, I did get his ticker going.

  I got to know Bill and Camille well during that era. We all became close. Bill, jazz connoisseur that he is, worshipped the ground Miles walked on. From time to time, we’d all have dinner at their place. Bill was constantly laughing, always the comedian. You could never have a serious conversation with him, because whatever you said, he turned it into a joke. Camille was always wonderful to me, polite and kind, with impeccable manners. I remember her as innocent, and fairly reserved, in the early years of their marriage. Her parents hadn’t initially wanted her to marry Bill. I once noticed a piece of paper posted over Bill’s office door. “What is that?” I asked him. He told me it was a letter young Camille had once written to him while they were dating, explaining that she had to break off their relationship because her family did not approve. Bill of course went on a campaign and changed their minds, and he wanted everybody to know he’d won. The posted letter was proof of that.

  * * *

  A few months after Miles and I got together, my third eye started blinking. My sixth sense had never gone away. Since that year in my childhood when I’d foreseen the fire and heard whispers from my deceased aunt, I was constantly having premonitions. Much of the time, my clairvoyance showed up in the form of vivid dreams. I’d dream of someone, and then the very next hour or day, that person would either pass me on the street or show up at my door. Other times, I’d hear a voice, clear as if someone were standing in the room with me. As a child, this did not rattle me. But as I got older and the foresights came with greater frequency, they began upsetting me. With all these voices and visions, I truly started wondering whether I’d gone stark raving mad. A turning point came on an evening in 1967.

  I was staying at a hotel in Midtown, to be near whatever show I was working on then. My cousin, Don Shirley, had been on my mind all week, so I decided to call him. When I picked up the phone to dial, his voice was already on the line. “Hello, Cic?” he said. It startled me so that I slammed down the receiver and began crying, upset that such occurrences always seemed to be happening to me. Moments later, I heard a knock on the door. I didn’t answer. A key went into the lock and in stepped a hotel housekeeper.

  “Get out, get out, get out!” I yelled. “What do you want?”

  “Ms. Tyson,” she said, “somebody downstairs is trying to reach you. He said you hung up on him.”

  I stared at her. “Who is it?” I said.

  “Mr. Don Shirley,” she said. “He’s in the lobby. Shall I send him up?”

  I told her to first put him on the phone from downstairs, and when he’d confirmed it was indeed him, I asked him to come up. By the time he arrived at my door, I was hysterical.

  “Cicely, what on earth is the matter with you?” he asked, laughing a little.

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” I told him. I revealed everything: the dreams, the premonitions, the eerie experiences, like his already being on the phone when I tried to call him. My cousin, whose story was shared with the world in the movie Green Book, was not only a legendary pianist and composer; he was also a trained psychologist who’d earned his degree at the University of Chicago.

  He sat on the edge of the bed next to me. “Okay listen, Cic,” he said. “Let me tell you something. What you have is ESP—extrasensory perception.” I’d never heard the term, so I gave him a puzzled stare. “I believe everybody has ESP to some extent,” he continued, “and a few have a more developed intuition than others. Obviously you are very developed to be able to pick up things. Come with me and let’s take a walk.” Don took me by the hand, led me through the hotel lobby, and walked me over to a bookstore on the corner of Fifty-Seventh and Seventh Avenue. He bought me several books on ESP. “Read these,” he said, handing me the bag. “And if you have any questions, call me and I will explain it to you.”

  I scoured every page of every book he gave me, and one paragraph at a time, I began to understand this gift, this strange ability I’d been born with. The more I learned about it, the less frightening it seemed. Reading about it helped normalize it for me. If someone had given it a name and written an entire volume about it, this clearly wasn’t something I’d dreamed up. This was a known ability, and perhaps even one I could use to my benefit. A premonition I had not long after reinforced that.

  During the first months of my relationship with Miles, we’d grown quite close. In general, it took Miles a long time to trust others, fully let them in, but he’d opened his soul to me early on. Between Miles and me, there was never any pretense; what I saw is what I got. Miles was as true to his emotions as I was to my hair texture, and in the case of the latter, he preferred me that way—plain and natural, no wigs, no extensions, no nothing. When Miles asked me to be on the cover of his 1967 album Sorcerer, the Columbia team layered makeup on my face. “Wipe that shit off,” Miles said when he saw me. “I want you just as you are.” The resulting profile image reflects me, sans foundation, exactly as he loved me.

  In keeping with Miles’s desire f
or the real, he displayed the full spectrum of his emotions. I’d seen him act crazy as a loon, and I’d seen him cry like a newborn. Not long before we met, he’d lost his mother. He was also still grappling with his separation from Frances. The first time I saw him in tears was in 1966. One day when I was at his brownstone, he went out to get the mail, and when he returned, he bore an envelope and a dazed expression. Without a word, he went straight upstairs to his bedroom on one of the floors above. He stayed up there for the longest time, as I sat in the living room, debating whether to go up and see about him or to let him have his privacy. I finally went up.

  When I cracked open the door, there he was, lying across the bed on his stomach while holding a letter, sobbing and trembling. “What’s the matter?” I asked from the doorway. He did not even look up at me, so I closed the door and left him alone, figuring that whatever he was struggling with, he wanted to do so privately. A few days later, I asked him about the letter. He sat silent for a while and stared ahead. He finally told me he’d received divorce papers from Frances. “I failed,” is all he said before he cupped his head in his hands and cried once more. After that day, he never again spoke of the wound, at least not with words.

  In those early days of our relationship, everyone seemed to have an opinion about Miles, and especially about why I was with him. Rude. Arrogant. Mean. Enigmatic. Those are the terms others often used to describe him, as a person and as a performer. But I came to see Miles otherwise. He was always refining himself, always pushing the boundaries of what was musically possible, never settling. I eventually found out why he turned his back to the audience while onstage. “Because I can hear the orchestra better,” he told me. When you’re downstage, he explained, the notes float directly your way, and Miles, perfectionist that he was, positioned himself to take in each measure. He cared deeply about the creation of every tone, whether it came from his own instrument or from those of his guys. Turning his back had nothing to do with disdain for his audience. Yet in the eyes of some, it made him a “bad boy,” a man who gloried in insulting his fans. How wrong they were.