by Cicely Tyson
I stepped toward her, and though she didn’t push me, she raised her leg as if she were going to. Well honey, she should not have done that, because the next thing I knew, that woman was on the ground. I’m not entirely sure how she got there. Trauma has a way of clouding one’s memory. But on the other side of my momentary blackout, I do recall that both the doorman and the building manager whisked me into the elevator. “Ms. Tyson, Ms. Tyson . . . come with us,” the doorman urged. With that woman still sprawled out on the ground, they escorted me up to my apartment where Miles awaited.
Before I’d had a chance to light into Miles, the doorbell rang. Miles stayed in the bedroom as I flung open the door. There stood the woman’s husband, his face the color of cotton. He was dressed in a suit, as if he’d been on his way to work.
“Hello, Ms. Tyson,” he said. “I’m so sorry to disturb you. My wife said the two of you had a little problem.”
I glared at him through eyes wide as dinner plates. “A problem?” I said. “No sir, I don’t have a problem. Your wife is the one with the problem. You tell her that I said she is to stay out of my apartment.”
He loosened his tie, dropped his eyes to the floor, and then looked back at me. “She tells me they’re working on an art project together,” he went on. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding . . .”
My laugh cut him short. “Yes, they’re working on something all right,” I smirked, “and I’m glad that you know that they are.” That was my way of revealing to him that, despite whatever his wife had told him, she and Miles had fallen into bed. I straightened my spine and stared at him without flinching. “Now I’m going to say this one more time,” I said slowly, emphasizing every syllable. “Please tell your wife to stay out of my apartment.” Before he could respond, I closed the door.
Over the next hour, brimstone spewed between Miles and me. Skillets were thrown. Insults were hurled. Empty apologies fell to the ground. The pathos and passion, the cataclysmic energy that fueled both our artistic endeavors, set our living room ablaze. Gone was my instinct to simmer in silence, as I’d done during my first years with Miles. In place of that impulse arose a fury, towering and untamable, unleashed with the velocity with which my mom had often cursed the husband who’d so deeply wounded her.
Our conflict curtailed the affair for a time but did not end it. The disgrace, however, did relocate across town to Miles’s brownstone, or else to the woman’s apartment when her husband was at work. Our Thrilla in Manila in the building lobby had scared both her and Miles away from my four walls. My maid, who cleaned all of our residences, dutifully continued her field reports, once telling me of the day when this woman had left a stoned Miles just outside of the front door of my apartment, several floors above hers. She apparently didn’t want to put him on the elevator in such a state, so she’d led him up the stairwell. She then rang the bell and left him for my maid, who dragged him to the shower and rained water over his head to hasten his return to sobriety.
Human behavior is a mystery, one riddled with contradiction. I don’t excuse Miles’s conduct any more than I dismiss my willingness, consciously or unknowingly, to indulge it. We mortals breathe incongruity. That I chose to stay with Miles is still, in many ways, confounding to me. And yet I’ve come to realize that Miles’s behavior felt sorely familiar, a song, blaring and dissonant, that I’d learned in my early years. Some part of my spirit recognized that discord, had memorized the haunting notes of its refrain. My father had taught me the music. And my mother, in her own way, had emphasized each measure, hummed along with the clamor even as she railed against it. “Men will be men,” she’d sometimes mutter following a feud with my father, her way of rationalizing his adultery. In a hovel at 219 East 102nd Street, I’d absorbed every nuance of that song, its words hovering beneath the floorboards and floating along the ceilings: Willie would be Willie, at turns tender and abrasive, and at tremendous cost to those he loved. And in my Upper East Side high-rise, a world away from the slum of my girlhood and yet overlapping with it, Miles would be Miles. The question became just how long I’d let the tune repeat.
* * *
As my marriage stretched apart at the seams, Black Democrats rallied around the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the first African American to run a nationwide primary campaign in pursuit of the presidency. Jesse set his political table on the legacies of Channing E. Phillips, the civil rights leader who, in 1968, made history as the first Black nominated for the presidency by a major political party; Charlene Mitchell, the first African-American woman to run for the nation’s highest office, which she did in 1968 as a third-party candidate; and of course the formidable Shirley Chisholm, whose place in the 1972 presidential campaign widened the public’s imagination of how power can look and sound. Jesse had been with Dr. King when a bullet, ricocheting across a motel balcony, had killed the Dreamer and threatened to snuff out the Dream. Then a young soldier of the Movement, Jesse eventually emerged as the keeper of Dr. King’s flame, as well as the founder of the social justice organizations Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition. Like no other candidate of color before him, Jesse’s campaign galvanized the Black community as we glimpsed, for the first time, a viable candidate for the Oval Office.
Reverend Jackson ran twice, in 1984 and 1988, and his first campaign coincided with my heyday as an actress. This was my era. Sounder and Jane Pittman had introduced me to the masses, while King, Roots, and A Woman Called Moses had deepened the connection. The scores of roles that followed—those I played, as well as those I wouldn’t touch because they chipped away at our dignity—reinforced my stance as a race warrior. Throughout the late seventies and eighties, my phone rang off the hook with requests for me to speak here or appear there. On the eve of the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, Reverend Jackson came a-calling.
“Ms. Tyson,” he said with a smile in his voice, “would you be kind enough to speak at this year’s convention?”
I laughed as a shot of nervousness surged through me. “Absolutely,” I heard myself telling Jesse. “It would be my honor.” I was asked to reenact Sojourner Truth’s electrifying “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, which she delivered, with nary a flinch or stutter, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. When Sojourner marched to that podium, few might have guessed that she, an escaped slave who could neither read nor write, would ignite a cultural revolution. For that matter, only the Father could have known that I, once a quiet and lanky girl with my thumb parked on my tongue, would channel Sojourner’s fierceness on a stage before millions. God is the Master of the unlikely.
By the time Jesse requested that I speak, we already knew each other. Sometime in the late 1970s, I’d connected with his wife, Jacqueline, and the two of us became close. I’d dined with her and Jesse on several occasions. So when Jackie heard that one of my films would bring me through Chicago to shoot, she graciously invited me to stay in her family’s home during my weeks of filming. The year was 1983. Jesse hadn’t yet announced his presidential bid, but he was gearing up. The public Jesse, the one I’d marveled at from afar, commanded a room with his soaring rhetoric. The private Jesse, the one I came to know, was, by contrast, markedly reserved. On many evenings, Jesse, Jacqueline, and their children gathered around the dinner table. I often joined them. While the group of us laughed and recounted the happenings of the day, Jesse listened intently but said little. When he did speak, there wasn’t a hint of flamboyance in his voice and manner. Perhaps he was saving his charisma for the spotlight he’d soon inhabit. On November 3, weeks after I’d departed Chicago, Reverend Jesse Jackson, then forty-two years old, declared his quest to unseat President Ronald Reagan.
The following year as I arrived at the convention, my hands got to trembling. They trembled even more when, backstage, Jesse’s team ushered me around like I was a queen. I rarely get nervous before taking a stage, but this was no ordinary event. I’d never even attended a political convention, much less spoken at one, and judging by the way my
poor heart palpitated, it frightened me. I whispered a prayer before walking out to the roar of spectators, hundreds of them, waving banners for Reverend Jackson and Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Upon taking the podium, dressed head to toe in white as my nod to the suffragists, I paused, overcome by the notion that I was standing there. My palms felt as cold as clay.
I’ll tell you, boy, Sojourner’s spirit carried me through that speech. I drew in a breath, squared my shoulders the way she must’ve, and imagined the bravery she’d had to summon. Calling on her courage, I began. “Well children,” I said into the microphone, “where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that betwixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North all talking ’bout rights, these white men gonna be in a fix pretty soon.” The stadium erupted into whoops and shouts, which gave me a moment to further compose myself. “But what’s all this here talking about?” I went on. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place. And ain’t I a woman?”
Thunderous applause ascended to the rafters, while I, exhaling with every refrain, gave myself over to the experience. Nerves have a way of disappearing when you think less about your performance and more about your purpose in speaking. By the end, I’d moved from reticent to rapturous, lifting my arms each time I repeated “And ain’t I a woman?!” What a fire Sojourner had lit! And what a privilege it was for me, the daughter of her legacy, to stoke the blaze. Jesse, of course, did not become the nominee that year. Former vice president Walter Mondale claimed the challenge of taking on Reagan, who ultimately triumphed in securing his second term. But Reverend Jackson, in both his 1984 bid and the one to follow, had made his statement. He’d also made space, just as Sojourner once had. Reverend Jackson’s candidacy cleared the path that Barack Obama, then just twenty-three and fresh out of Columbia University, would one day navigate.
Jesse’s campaign came bearing additional treasures, one for me personally. Backstage at the convention, I met a young lady by the name of Minyon Moore, who was then on Reverend Jackson’s team. She’d been the one to arrange my appearance, and in so doing, the two of us struck up a friendship that extends to this day. Following her work on Jesse’s campaign, the brilliant Minyon went on to become a political powerhouse, overseeing the Democratic Party as chief executive officer of the Democratic National Committee; advising the campaigns of Michael Dukakis, both Clintons, and a long list of other Democratic luminaries; and serving as a principal political adviser to President Bill Clinton and then–First Lady Hillary Clinton. She’s part of that tribe of mighty sisters known as the “Colored Girls,” five unstoppable truth-tellers who answered the call to political service (Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Tina Flournoy, Leah Daughtry, and my dear Minyon: I see and celebrate each of you).
During the years when Minyon worked in the Clinton administration, she’d invite me to various White House events, including the elaborate 1994 state dinner for Nelson Mandela, then president of South Africa, and the man who pushed apartheid down onto its knees. Not long after Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, I’d met him and the vibrant Winnie in South Africa. I’d even stood in the eight-by-seven-foot concrete cell at Robben Island where Nelson spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in captivity. That was an experience and a half. On the day of my visit, an iron bed sat in a corner of the cell. “That was never there while Mr. Mandela was imprisoned,” the guard told me. Nelson slept on the hard floor for all his years in prison. There, during long nights down on that unforgiving pavement, Nelson secretly handwrote the first drafts of what would become his internationally acclaimed 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. What a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Before the state dinner, Minyon welcomed me to stay with her, and child, why did she do that? Because now, decades later, she cannot get me out of there! Her home has become my haven away from New York. Anytime I’m in the area or just in the mood, I show up at her doorstep, pull off my wig stocking cap, and settle into the upstairs bedroom she keeps ready for me. What a beautiful human being, that Minyon, so full of warmth and exuberance. I cherish that woman. And I don’t have to lift a fingernail when I’m at her place. Sometimes I sleep. Other times my daughter comes with me, and the three of us just sit around, cackling over Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta, with me trying to keep up with all the young folks’ lingo. Occasionally one of my old films will pop up on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). That’s my cue to leave the room. “No, you’re going to sit right here and see this!” Minyon always teases. It was on Minyon’s couch that I, for the first time, sat through The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman from start to finish. I’ve never gotten used to seeing myself on-screen. I hope I never do.
A few years after I first met Minyon, another blessing flowed my way. In the fall of 1987, Pope John Paul II visited the United States, with a stop at the Registry Hotel in Los Angeles. I, along with dozens of other artists and leaders, was invited. My seat was on the aisle, along the right side of the large hall. When the pontiff entered, silence blanketed the room as all eyes turned toward him. Then just as I was shifting my focus to the front of the hall to see what was happening there, I felt a hand on my head. It was his. I froze, not sure what he would do next. He didn’t utter a sound as others around us looked on, probably wondering what was happening. He just stood there with his warm palm cradled over my skull.
Finally, after a long moment, he lifted his hand, met my eyes, and then made his way to the front of the hall. On his slow walk to the podium, he did not touch another soul. He delivered his remarks, none of which I can recall. All I could think of was that day, decades ago in Nevis, when a white dove had landed on my young mother’s head. She’d been marked. She’d been consecrated. She’d been anointed and appointed to make the journey to America. I do not understand why the Pope singled me out, but God did. He knew that, like my mother before me, I’d need God’s favor for the thorny terrain ahead.
21
Lesson Before Dying
MILES carried on constantly about white folks. “These mothafuckas don’t even see me,” he’d often say. “And when they do, all they see is a nigga.” Racism, as it does, sat down on Miles’s spine during his boyhood, and over decades, its sheer enormity and weight cracked his back. He’d absorbed the injury, endured the indignities that come with being a brother—the more Black, the more invisible. But once your spine has been broken, you can never quite straighten it again. You navigate the world with a hunch and a limp. Miles’s spirit, hobbled and fractured in a million places, bore such injuries.
Miles didn’t even want to live among whites, or so he claimed. When I first bought my apartment along Fifth Avenue on the East Side, a stretch known more for its pretension than for its diversity, I didn’t even tell him about it until two years after I had purchased it, mostly because I did not want to hear his rants, and also because I craved a respite away from his escapades. “Why would you want to move over there with all those white folks?” he predictably said when I finally mentioned the apartment. The Upper West Side where we’d lived, while not exactly Atlanta, was more integrated. Then one day a few months later when we were speeding up Fifth Avenue, he looked over at me and grinned. “Don’t you have an apartment over here someplace?” he asked. I nodded, which marked the end of my safe haven. Soon after, Miles brought his antsy rump over there. Lord, that man could never sit still; he barreled restlessly toward the next experience, the next high, both in music and in life. The impulses that made him a genius innovator perhaps also fueled his promiscuity. Miles hadn’t been in my East Side apartment but five minutes before he’d hooked up with the bushy-haired married woman I eventually taught a lesson.
For someone who supposedly couldn’t stand whites, Miles sure kept a rotating cast of them in his bed. The woman in my building was one. There were many others—women he car
ried on with when he was on tour in Europe. Word of his liaison with a young French woman of course got back to me, because with Miles, a secret never stayed that way for long. His body language, his guilty behavior always told on him, and when his gestures weren’t speaking, my sixth sense was. During those years, I had traveled to Africa on a tour with the United Nations, and when I returned, Miles surprised me with a Rolls-Royce—a sure sign that he was still skirt-chasing. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the woman he’d been seeing in Paris started calling day and night, demanding that he return there to visit her. He didn’t go, nor did he succeed in hiding from me the whispered phone calls. I heard it all, even as I delivered my finest performance in pretending I was plumb deaf.
Miles and I had spoken our promises in 1981, and by 1985, I knew the marriage was over. One day I spotted a cluster of small red bumps just above his right lip. “What is that?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “It’s just a rash.” He eventually admitted it was herpes, which I knew nothing about. I looked it up and then called my physician. “Be careful,” the doctor warned me, explaining that the sexually transmitted disease had no cure. “You must always use protection.” I’d already been doing so for years by then, but at that juncture, I altogether ended our physical intimacy—a lagging indication of our emotional distance. Still, Miles would often reach for me in the middle of the night, with scratch marks all over his stomach and groin after having carried on with his various women. I did not reach back. Jesus clearly lives in my back bedroom. It is only because he hovered so close by that Miles never passed herpes or any other disease on to me.
