Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  When I opened the door, Miles stumbled toward me, absolutely stoned out of his mind. He was so high he could barely stay on his feet. He reached for me, and with my heart thundering in my chest, I closed the door halfway. “Please, Cic, let me in,” he begged. I widened the door slightly, and in he fell, down onto his knees in front of me, with his shirt halfway unbuttoned and saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth. I closed the door behind him, stood him up, led him to the edge of the bed, and lowered him onto it. He sat there for a moment before he tried to get up again, but he fell to his knees once more. He then crawled over to a large window overlooking Fifth Avenue, which was dotted with high-rises. He pointed out to them.

  “Cic . . . Cicely,” he stammered, “you see all of those apartments?” I stared at him and did not answer. “Every person in those buildings knows who you are,” he slurred. He began to cry. “Tell them I’m your boyfriend,” he went on. “I’ll take ya’ any place you wanna go . . . just tell them I’m with you.” I stood there dazed, saddened to my core at the state he was in. It was so pitiful. Here was this man, among the most gifted musicians who has ever trod this earth, desperately seeking the validation I had attained on my own.

  “Where do you want me to take you?” he muttered, trying but failing to stand again. “I’ll get myself a tuxedo and get cleaned up, Cic. Let’s get outta here.” Even now, decades after that day, envisioning Miles down on that floor fills my eyes with tears. It was wrenching to see him stoop so low, heartbreaking to witness the depth of his brokenness. Millions had hailed him as a living legend, and still, this genius of a man, this master of sound, believed his presence in this life was inconsequential. He had no idea what he meant to the world, because he meant so little to himself.

  I had a hell of a time getting him on his feet and back to the door. I called the front desk and asked that a bellman be sent up to help him to a taxi. As I put my hand on the knob to let him out, Miles toppled back to his knees. “Cic, let’s get married,” he slurred. “I want you with me.” I shook my head slowly from side to side and turned the knob.

  15

  Jane Pittman

  DURING breaks in Sounder’s filming in Baton Rouge, I kept my weekend ritual out in California. I’d get up, do some cleaning, and head to my car. I drove a red Ford Pinto wagon then, one lent to me by 20th Century Fox. I eventually asked to keep the car, and the studio heads agreed, which was the least they could’ve done, given the peanuts they’d paid me to play Rebecca. Every Sunday, I’d get in my Pinto, ride over to Hollywood, and dart in and out of bookstores, browsing for novels that might tie in to future film projects. One afternoon my eyes landed on a book jacket bearing the photograph of an elderly Black woman. She gazed into the distance, as if trying to recall some memory from long ago. The lines in her brow, creased and gently folded, spoke of contentment. I picked up the novel, pulled it close, and read its cover: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines. Based solely on the arresting face, I purchased the book.

  That evening, I read the novel in one sitting. The 110-year-old Miss Pittman, once an enslaved girl, reflects on her long journey from bondage to freedom, and in so doing, she captures the breadth of the struggle of Black Americans from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement. The next morning, bleary-eyed but joyous, I called a few friends to tell them about the book and this remarkable woman, Jane Pittman, whom I was convinced was real. “No, she’s not real,” said one friend, laughing. “It’s fiction.” “Oh no, darling, this is an actual woman,” I insisted. “And Ernest Gaines knows her personally.” That’s how convincingly Ernest had rendered Jane Pittman. From the first page to the last, I found her story as captivating as I had her cover photo.

  Near the end of Sounder’s filming in Baton Rouge, Marty Ritt, the director, pulled me aside. “Do you know Ernest Gaines?” he asked. “No, but I just read his latest novel,” I said. “Well Ernest sent the book to me some time ago and asked me to read it,” he said. He hadn’t yet gotten around to reading those galleys, he explained, which made him feel a bit embarrassed when Ernest circled back to ask him to go to lunch. “He’s interested in turning it into a film and possibly having you play in it,” Marty said. My eyes widened. “Really?” I said. “Yes, and he wants to have lunch with us,” he said. “Well I have read the book, so I’ll go to lunch,” I said casually, though the requisite tingle had already made its way up my spine. My sixth sense seemed to be clearing its throat.

  The lunch was pleasant, and days later, Ernest, a Louisiana native whose extended family still lived there, warmly welcomed me into the home of one of his relatives. On that afternoon, he’d assembled the glorious bevy of Black women—his mother, cousins, aunts, friends—upon whom he’d based Jane Pittman’s story. He’d taken all of the beloved women of his childhood and rolled them into one mesmerizing composite who leaped from the page. On the way out, Ernest said to me, “There’s talk about turning the book into a movie, but you know how these people are.” He explained that he was going away for a couple of months, but when he returned, he’d be back at his home in San Francisco. “If you’re ever up that way,” he said, “give me a call and let’s have lunch.” I smiled and thanked him, but for whatever reason, we did not reconnect that year.

  That was around 1971. Sometime between then and 1973, Ernest’s novel was turned into a screenplay, one penned by Tracy Keenan Wynn. His script ended up on someone’s desk at CBS, and late one Friday evening, a junior producer on his way out happened to spot the screenplay. He picked it up, tucked it in his satchel, and over that weekend, became as taken with Jane Pittman as I had been. On Monday morning, he rushed into his supervisor’s office. “We’ve got to do this,” he said breathlessly, flopping the script down on his boss’s desk. The head producer flipped briefly through the screenplay and then looked at him. “Who wants to listen to an old Black woman tell her story?” he said. “It won’t sell.” But this young producer insisted there was something there, and over the next weeks, he channeled his belief into a crusade. I do not recall the producer’s name, nor do I know whatever came of him, but I’d give my eye tooth to talk with him now. Because had it not been for that man’s passion in championing Jane Pittman within CBS, the film may never have been made. Things don’t just happen—they happen just.

  The producers called me in for a reading, and like with Sounder, I could’ve saved them the appointment. I knew the part was mine and so did Ernest, who was delighted to hear I’d auditioned. The CBS team indeed offered me the role, for more money than I’d made on Sounder, though still a pitiful amount. But I would have done Jane Pittman in the basement of a basement, do you hear me? Her story was critical to the cultural moment. Between 1972 and 1973, Blaxploitation had shifted into sixth gear with disgraceful movies like The Legend of Nigger Charley and Trick Baby. Father, help me.

  How is it that we are “sticking it to the man,” as some proponents of Blaxploitation cinema argue that these films do, by committing narrative assassination of ourselves? Why would we spend money reinforcing deeply stereotypical depictions of who we are? It pains me. I understood the desire for high-octane fantasy films, just as I understand that deeply flawed Black people exist. But when those are the only characters and plotlines put forward about us, it is disturbing. Crack cocaine exists as well, but its existence is not reason enough for me to take to the pipe. I once declined to play a maid who had five children, each with a different father—a stereotypical two-for-one. When I later ran into the director, a white woman, she seemed perplexed by why I’d turned down the part. I explained my misgivings. “But women like her exist, and in fact, my own maid . . .” I stopped her before she could get the rest of that poppycock off her tongue. “Look,” I told her, “I have nothing against such women, and I’m not debating whether they exist. I am simply telling you that I do not wish to project them.”

  At the heart of Black theatergoers’ hunger for Blaxploitation films was, I suspected, a profound sense of our o
wn worthlessness, rooted in ancestral trauma. We’d been taught, time and again in this nation, to see ourselves either as inferior or not at all. Though our minds knew better, our spirits, engraved with that lie over hundreds of years, still bore the scars. A story like Jane Pittman’s seemed to me a challenge to that falsehood. In those years, some Blacks scorned films like Sounder and Jane Pittman for featuring us as downtrodden, for dredging up a painful past we’d just as soon forget. I saw it differently. As a people, we’ve done what we’ve had to do to survive, and rather than feeling ashamed of it, we should celebrate it. It is upon Rebecca’s and Jane Pittman’s broad shoulders that our feet rest.

  Resolute as I was to play the role, the enormousness of the part initially paralyzed me. I retreated under my covers, too frightened to even look at the script, terrified by the responsibility of inhabiting such a monumental character. How am I supposed to portray this woman from the time she’s 19 till she’s 110? I was forty-nine at the time, nearly in the middle of that age span. I felt confident I could play her in her young adult and middle-age years, given that I had my own lived experience of those seasons. What unnerved me most was capturing who she was during the winter of her life. After a few days of cowering, I finally decided I’d better get up and get to work. The part is yours now, I thought, so you had better do something with it. I never start with memorizing lines. In fact, the dialogue, for me, is usually the last to come. “Please call the producers and tell them that I need to do some research,” I told Haber. I’d begin where Ernest had—by sitting and listening to the stories of the elders. Acting, for me, has always been an organic process that involves absorbing my character’s reality, allowing her to saturate the cells and fibers of my being.

  Well before shooting commenced, I began my preparations. The studio arranged for me to visit a home for the elderly. The three remarkable women I met there, ages 90 to 105, shared freely about their lives, throwing back their heads in laughter at some moments, cupping their faces in agony during others. I’ll always remember Pearl Williams, my primary model for Miss Pittman. She was the eldest in the group, and yet she had the best memory, not to mention a quick tongue. “God gave me a good mind,” she once quipped, “and I like to tell people what I think.” Each of the women had a different take on the times in which they’d been reared. A woman whose name was Eula, I think, reminded me of Beal, the elder who’d become my godmother on that day she spotted my mom approaching with me in her arms and said, “Give me that child.” Eula had spent her life as a domestic worker, caring for the two small children of the wealthy woman her family lived with. And yet that servile role—which began when Eula was just six years old, and the woman’s children were two and three—hadn’t dimmed her light. Her expression still bore the kindness of Beal’s. “I didn’t know any other life but being the help,” she said. “My mother grew up picking cotton out in the fields, so for me, working indoors felt like a step forward. I thought I had a wonderful life.” Another woman was clearly wounded by the indignities that came with just growing up colored. She spoke of the day a white woman in a dime store hurled spit in her eye. I spent long hours with these women, visiting many times over several months, allowing their humiliations and their memories to be inscribed upon my heart, recording their speech patterns. I felt that by way of those three, I’d truly glimpsed Jane’s interior world. My next challenge became embodying her physically.

  I had a few concerns about whether I could authenticate Jane’s appearance in her later years, but I felt certain I could capture her voice. During my years at the Red Cross when I was trying to break into modeling, I’d mastered how to fake a scratchy voice in order to get time off for auditions. “Ms. Ruben, I can’t come in today,” I’d call and claim, straining and reaching deep into my diaphragm for a low pitch. “I can’t even talk. I’ve got a bad throat.” That is where Jane’s voice came from. Years after the film was released, I heard that CBS had reached out to an older character actor, intending to dub in her voice over mine. They didn’t need her because from the first day on set, I had that voice down. When one of the producers heard it, he pulled me aside and said, “That’s incredible. How did you do that . . . and can you keep it up?” I smirked and nodded yes.

  As for whether I could mimic Jane’s other characteristics, I had my worries, starting with my teeth—too white. Then there was my straight body, which bore none of the hallmarks of advanced age. As one gets older, the body naturally hunches forward, and a hump often develops in the upper back. And my eyes? I wondered how I could change them from bright to more yellowish over the course of filming. In the weeks leading up to my first day on set, heaven sent me help in a couple of those departments.

  When it came to my teeth, the producers considered staining them with makeup. That became largely unnecessary. One night when I dreamed of Jane, she smiled at me—and I spotted gold around her front tooth. My eyelids flew open at 3 a.m., and I rang a producer, Rick Rosenberg, right then. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” I shouted.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “It’s Cicely,” I said. He paused.

  “You’ve got what?”

  “The tooth! I’ve got the tooth for Jane Pittman.”

  “Cicely, would you please call me at nine o’clock?”

  I agreed and quickly moved onto my next assignment: finding a local dentist. I recalled I knew a dentist by the name of Valerian Smith, the father to actress Lynn Whitfield. They lived in Baton Rouge, our film location then. I’d met Valerian through my cousin Don Shirley, and I rang Don—who was also less than amused by my early call—to get Valerian’s phone number. Later that morning, I dialed him. “Can you make me a tooth with gold around it?” I asked. “Yes, I can,” he said. Days later, he’d done exactly as he’d promised, fitting the gilded faux pearl right on top of my front one, as well as creating a row of dental veneers. That’s how Jane Pittman’s grill came to be.

  The hump came next, as Jane Pittman made her presence known in me. I was up early one morning, mopping my floor, when suddenly, my whole left side collapsed. I set aside the mop handle and thought, What’s this? With my left side still caved in, I walked to the bathroom mirror and studied my reflection. I was hunched over, with a large protruding onion at the very top of my back. Oh God, I got it, I thought. I’ve got the hump. By then, the CBS team had ordered a body suit with a hump built into it. “You can send back the fake hump,” I called my producer and told him. “I’ve got a real one.” My hump—an actual hump, not one I created by contorting my body—miraculously remained during all five weeks of filming and then just went away. A third gift, realistic old eyes, came courtesy of an ophthalmologist who fitted me with cloudy contact lenses.

  On set, the physical transformation continued. I arrived at four o’clock each morning and sat through six hours of special effects makeup, applied by a duo of artists. Stan Winston was then credited for applying my makeup, and he rightfully earned an Emmy for his work. The second artist, Rick Baker, could not be publicly acknowledged at the time because he wasn’t in the union (though he was later credited). Rick was the true master. He and Stan divided my face in half, with Rick guiding Stan in creating a masterpiece on the canvas of my face, adding a stroke on my cheekbones here, a swirl or three there, a spin of the brush along my brow line. Once the makeup application was complete, I then spent seven hours in character, delivering take after take, followed by another two hours of removing the liquid layers. I was fortunate to be home by ten on most evenings, only to be up before the chickens the next morning to do it all again.

  So many moments in the film send shivers through me, but there’s one scene that always makes me tear up. Near the end of the movie, Jane sits alongside a four-hundred-year-old oak tree, recalling what it has seen during its long life, compared to what she has seen during hers. “When you talk to an oak tree that’s been here all these years, and knows more than you’ll ever know, it’s not craziness,” she says. “It’s just the nobility you respe
ct.” During filming as I took my spot near that tree—its arms spread wide, its massive trunk rooted deep in the Louisiana soil, its head adorned with a crown of leaves—that Billie Holiday song from 1939 reeled through my head:

  Southern trees bear a strange fruit

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

  Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze

  Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.

  I couldn’t help but think of the innocent Black men and women who’d hung from the branches above me, their cries cut short by the pull of a noose, their feet swaying back and forth, the blood draining from their faces along with their unfulfilled dreams. When I remember the thousands who died, many whose stories were never recorded in history, I bow my head. And when my wailing is done, I get up and I carry on, not in my own name, but in theirs.

  The film’s most climactic scene comes when Jane Pittman makes a long, solitary walk toward a whites-only water fountain and then drinks from it, in defiance of Jim Crow. When she sets out on the walk, an officer tries to stop her, but she moves ahead, with a cane in her right hand, her pocketbook on her left arm, and determination written on her face. “That walk,” folks still say to me, smiling and shaking their heads, marveling at how I could capture the gait of a 110-year-old woman. I’m like, “What walk?” I was so divorced from myself in that moment during filming, so completely immersed in Jane, that I had no idea what they were talking about. I did the scene in one take.

  As pivotal as Jane’s drink from the fountain is, the most memorable part of that scene, for me, is the moment when she pulls away from the family member who’s helping her down the sidewalk. It’s as if she’s saying, “I know how to walk. I’m going down to that fountain, and I don’t need nobody holding on to me and ushering me nowhere.” That notion is the gift Miss Pittman left me with, the treasure that guides me now. If you’re fortunate enough to live as long as I have, you come to realize how others will try to make a cripple out of you. They think you’re fragile, and perhaps in certain moments, you are. But rather than waiting for you to reach out, to ask for help, they grab on to you. They figure if you’re seventy-five or eighty or ninety-six, you’re supposed to be decrepit, that you can’t even go up the steps anymore. They assume you’re unable to function. And before you know it, they’re even finishing your sentences for you. Please—let me speak for myself! I’m not addled yet. The minute you hit a number, boy, folks are ready to put you in a box, and Jane Pittman knew that. By making that walk on her own, she was saying what I say now: Let me live. Let me keep going till I can’t go no more. Let me walk to that fountain, pocketbook on my arm, and fulfill my purpose here. Don’t cripple me.