Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  I live right around the corner from my doctor—and he and I fight all the time. “When people talk about how good you look,” he teases, “I take credit.” I can’t imagine why. Just about all I ever let that man do is examine me. “Tell me what the issue is,” I say to him, “and I will take care of it myself.” These US doctors are trained to cut you and write prescriptions. That is all. They don’t know a thing about healing you. They treat symptoms, not causes. Like other professionals, they’re working to buy their homes and send their kids to Harvard. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about your wellness, or that they’re not good at diagnosing, and some of their treatments are excellent and should be followed. But before you let anyone go sticking a knife or needle in you, you’ve got to investigate. You’ve got to be sure you know what’s happening with your body. You’ve got to advocate for yourself and your loved ones.

  For someone who doesn’t like to visit the doctor, my daughter teases, I seem to darken my physician’s door quite frequently. I’ll go to him over something as small as a hangnail, or anything else that strikes me as odd. “Why is this here?” I once asked him about a tiny patch of flaky skin on my arm. He examined it closely. “It’s just dry skin,” he concluded. “Do you feel fine otherwise?” I nodded yes. “I’ll get you some cream to put on it,” he said, pulling out his Rx pad. “I don’t know why I even bother,” he said, chuckling as he scribbled. “You’re not gonna have the prescription filled, let alone use it.” He was right. Beyond my basic physical exams, the most I’ve ever let him do is draw my blood and order chest x-rays. I’m not taking any drugs or using any creams, do you hear me? I haven’t had an aspirin in so long, I don’t even recall what it feels like on my tongue. If you’re having pain, you don’t want to simply kill it. You want to get to the bottom of what’s causing it. That is why, in addition to my primary care physician, I stay in touch with a naturopathic doctor trained in Eastern medicine. I also keep close a copy of The Juicing Bible, a compendium of recipes meant to address various ailments. And once a month, I see my masseuse and an acupuncturist—or at least I did before this pandemic hit.

  I never expected to live as long as I have. Up in heaven, my mother must be laughing and shaking her head, in between watching reruns of Guiding Light. Of her three young’uns, I was the one who wasn’t supposed to make it. I was the child who came here with a bald head and murmuring heart, the scrawny babe she and my father hovered over. And yet here I am, perched on the doorstep of one hundred years, the last remaining member of the Tyson five. Nowadays, I do wonder about when I’m going, about how many sunrises I have left. In 2019, I dreamed I was shopping for a white dress, and since white can stand for funerals in my culture, I took that as a sign that my time was near. But the dream wasn’t about me. Soon after my vision, fashion designer Arthur McGee, my friend for many decades, passed on, and may he rest in peace. I don’t know when my day is coming. None of us does. Which is why, as soon as my lids slide open each morning, I say thank you. Thank you, Father, for the gift of another day. Thank you for just one more breath. Thank you for the sacred opportunity to live this life.

  The way I see it, I’m still here because God isn’t finished with me. And when I’ve completed my job, he’ll take me. Until then, I’ve got plenty to do. I glimpse my purpose every time I’m in the presence of my darling daughter, whom I see frequently. Joan and I continue to work on our relationship, as fragile as it is precious, and even as I write of her in my story, I leave space for her to one day share her own. I see my purpose in the faces of my students. I also recognize it in my characters, in their heartaches and victories. I am the sum total of the women I’ve portrayed. Each has endowed me with an invaluable gift. From Rebecca, I learned grace. From Jane, I gleaned determination. From Coretta, Harriet, Binta, and others, I borrowed courage. That these Black women were able to survive what they did, in the manner in which they did, has allowed me to believe that I, too, can hold steady. My existence is tied up in theirs.

  My remaining purpose is also connected to this surreal season in our world. I’m here, as we all are, to meet this moment. Like you, I can feel the times shifting even as we’re standing in them, can sense history stirring and moaning. I’ve lived through sixteen presidents, witnessed movements come and go. Seldom have I felt so strongly that our nation is at a turning point. The COVID pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, far too many of them Black. The disease has laid bare the structural inequalities that have always existed for us. It’s not by accident that we always find ourselves languishing near the bottom of the social caste system. Our communities have been exploited and overpoliced. Discriminatory economic policies have relegated large swaths of us to low wages and crowded neighborhoods. More often than not, we are the essential workers. We are the ones who lack access to quality health care. We are the group that suffers when jobs vanish and schools shut down amid infection.

  During a good year, to be Black is to live with an ongoing hum of anxiety, a static ever present beneath life’s high notes. During a plague and a racial revolution, to be Black is to be rendered deaf by the uproar, knowing that if this virus doesn’t take you down, a blue knee on your neck or bullets in your back just might. When you leave your house, you’re never quite sure whether you’ll make it back alive, and that is no exaggeration. In this country, Blacks don’t have to go looking for trouble. It finds us. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in cold blood while out for a jog. Botham Jean was sitting in his own apartment, enjoying a bowl of ice cream and watching television, when a white police officer exploded through his door and snuffed out his life. As bullets rained down on Breonna Taylor, that child was asleep in her bed. All of these young people were under the age of twenty-seven. Stop and take that in. If you’ve been fortunate enough to surpass that milestone, think back on what your life was like at that point, on what your aspirations were.

  Can you imagine how many years these babies might’ve had ahead of them, how their dreams were cut short by the roar of gunfire, how their families have been left reeling? And then folks have the nerve to bring up Black rage. Wouldn’t you be seething if, for centuries, the world placed such little value on your existence? Wouldn’t you feel wounded if your ancestors had been treated like beasts, your features and your culture disparaged, your families wrested apart on auction blocks? Wouldn’t you cry out in anguish if your country’s leaders, rather than renouncing and rectifying such injustice, stoked the flames of it? We’re not even allowed our humanity when it comes to expressing the full spectrum of our emotions. Whether we’re sitting quietly in a corner or forthrightly stating our concerns, many are quick to label us as “angry,” which goes right along with the age-old narrative that we’re dangerous savages, recklessly spewing vitriol. And even as they brand us, they dismiss the abuse that first lit the smoldering embers. The youth, exhausted with the criminalizing of our bodies, are taking to the streets like no time in recent memory.

  For years, I’ve been quietly concerned that my generation, the one led by Dr. King, gave our young people too much. It seemed they had little idea about the price that had been paid for them to vote, to attend integrated schools, to improve their prospects through higher education, to drink from any water fountain. When we were fighting for civil rights, we did so with the hope that our children would never have to suffer the humiliations we’d endured. We wanted to free them to use all their talents to further lift themselves. Over this past year, my worry has been allayed. I am heartened by the response from our young people, by how they’ve risen up en masse to demand more, by how they’ve organized to make our voices heard at the ballot box. They are impassioned and knowledgeable and fierce. They are linking arms with those who want to join us on the front lines. And to my delight, they are taking on Dr. King’s mantle and soldiering forward.

  This recent racial reckoning is but a comma in a centuries-long sentence, a pause during which many, for the first time, have awakened to the horror of Black genocide—and I choose
that word intentionally, because over and over throughout history, attempts have been made to extinguish us in one way or another. That Americans of all races are now focused on the massacre is indeed progress, just as it was when Emmett Till’s heinous lynching, his mutilated body in that open casket, shook the nation from its slumber in 1955. In our current times, I see the outcry as an opportunity for us to unite in action, to move from demonstration to legislation, from picketing to building economic parity. If history and human nature are reliable measures, this window won’t be open for long. And as it closes, I find myself wondering, What will become of Black people, and of Black women in particular? That, as it has been for all of my career, is my chief concern.

  * * *

  “Sit down here and let me talk to you,” my mother would say when she wanted to get my attention. If I heard that sentence, I knew she was about to speak some sense to me, as she did on that day when she told me, despondent after an audition, “What’s for you in this life, you will get. And what is not for you, you will never get. Do you hear me?” I did hear her, and that wisdom has buoyed me through the decades. It is in my mother’s name, in her spirit and memory, that I ask you, Black women, to gather ’round. Sit down here and let me talk to you—just us.

  I often ponder what has happened to us as a people. I know the overarching plotline. I understand that our existence stretches back to the Nile River Valley, when our ancestors erected vast kingdoms, advanced civilizations the Europeans wrenched from our palms. I understand how our story eventually floated its way across the Atlantic, on Middle Passage ships where Black corpses—so-called cargo—were hurled overboard for sharks to devour. I’m aware of the many ways in which two hundred–plus years of enslavement maimed us, and of the countless other ways it never could. I understand that any time we sought to rise—as sharecroppers struggling to earn our way to freedom in an unjust system, as workers laboring in the long shadow of Jim Crow, as aspiring homeowners locked into redlined ghettos and, thus, locked out of wealth for generations—we’ve been repeatedly shoved onto our knees. What I find most troubling nowadays, given this history, is how little we seem to value ourselves. Centuries of abuse have taught us to regard one another with disdain, to treat ourselves with the same contempt plantation owners once held for us. What else can explain why some of us still use terms like nigger and whore when referring to each other, why we partake in narrative homicide of ourselves in films, in music, in books, in culture? It pains me. It also makes me aware of just how acute our wound is.

  And make no mistake, my dear children: whether or not we recognize it, you and I were born into a legacy of trauma, just as surely as we’ve inherited our foreparents’ resilience. The wound, festering for centuries, morphs frequently in appearance. It has traversed through woods and swamps, navigated in darkness from the South to the North, and presented itself right here in the present. Upon arrival, it looked a whole lot like fortitude, which it is. But beneath that brave face is another, one bruised and ailing, bloodied by the indignities of the journey. That wound, in our times now, manifests as self-injury. It shows up in behaviors, conscious and unconscious, that demean us. It appears in the form of sharp-tongued mothers more apt to take up their switches than to display tenderness toward their young’uns. It rises to the surface as hypertension and anxiety and depression. It looks like Miles Davis, trying to deaden a lifetime of agony with a cocaine high. It has revealed itself in my life over and over, priming me to tolerate an abuse so achingly familiar in both my own story and that of my mother. No amount of Black Girl Magic, no repeated proclamations of our worth, can fully treat the wound, although acknowledging its persistence is a beginning. The ultimate remedy, as I see it, is supernatural. I look daily toward heaven for restoration, for spiritual healing. My true identity isn’t rooted in our history, grievous and glorious as it is. It is grounded in my designation as a child of God, the daughter of the Great Physician. In his care, I find my cure.

  My hope for you is the same one I carry for myself. I pray that, amid the heartache of our ancestry, you can grant yourself the grace so seldom extended to us. I pray that you can pass that compassion on to your children, and to their children, so that it slathers comfort on our sore spots. I pray that, as a people, we can give ourselves a soft place to land. I pray, even as we rightly express our fury at being regarded as subhuman, that we don’t dwell in that space, that we don’t allow anger to poison our spirits, that we embrace love as our one true antidote. I hope, too, that you recognize your specialness, the distinctiveness the Creator has imbued us with. I see you as clearly as history has, and in unison with it, I nod. I know that swivel in your hips, that fervor in your testimony, that ebullience in your stride, that flair in your song. The fact that others are constantly trying to diminish you, ever attempting to dismiss your talents even as they mimic them, is proof of your uniqueness. No one bothers to undermine you unless they recognize your brilliance.

  More than anything, I pray that you can carve out a purpose for yourself, a calling beyond your own survival, a sweet offering to the world. You gain a life by giving yours away. Not everyone is meant to raise a picket sign. And yet each of us can choose a path of impact. Rearing your children with affection and warmth is a form of activism. Honoring your word impeccably is a way to raise your voice. Performing your job with excellence—with your chin high and your standards higher—is as powerful as any protest march. Sowing into the lives of young people is a worthy crusade. That is what it means to leave this world of ours more lit up than we found it. It’s also what it means to lead a magnificent life, even if an unlikely one. The Father has a way of choosing the flawed to attempt what many deem improbable. My journey upon the stage, and every moment in between, is a testament to the mystery in God’s choosing.

  Here in my twilight years, as my Christmas tree towers and glistens, folks are always asking me what legacy I want to leave—what roots beneath my soil I most hope will outlive me. I want to go home knowing that I loved generously, even if imperfectly. I want to feel as if I embodied our humanity so fully that it made us laugh and weep, that it reminded us of our shared frailties. I want to be recalled as one who squared my shoulders in the service of Black women, as one who made us walk taller and envision greater for ourselves. I want to know that I did the very best that I could with what God gave me—just as I am.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is a special gift to my mama, Fredericka Theodosia Huggins Tyson; my daddy, William Augustine Tyson; my brother, Melrose Emmanuel Tyson; and my baby sister—although she thought I was her baby sister!—Emily Rebecca Tyson-Henry. Each of you, in your own way, molded me into the woman I have become.

  * * *

  I’ve loved flowers all my life. At daybreak before my father went to work, he’d walk me over to Central Park so that I, his frail child, his firstborn girl, could breathe in fresh air amid the lush gardens. It was our special time together. My father would spread a blanket on the grass for us to sit, close as we could, and watch the world stir awake. We’d be out there for an hour or more, the dew settling on our cheeks, the day’s newness filling our lungs. I must’ve been around five when, near our blanket one morning, I spotted a patch of yellow daisies. I reached over and began plucking them. Just then, a white lady stopped and smiled at me.

  “Little girl,” she said, “you don’t like flowers?” With three daisies clutched in my palm, I stared at her, studying her face for what she meant. She laughed. “I’m sure you do like flowers,” she went on, “and I do too. But you know, if you pick them, they won’t be around for other people to enjoy.”

  I’ve never forgotten that kind woman or the awareness she left me with. Flowers, she understood, were meant to be savored, but most of all to be shared. They are God’s gift to humankind, his bounty springing up in sidewalk cracks and manicured gardens alike. It is for us to relish the beauty, even as we leave it for others to delight in. My path to writing this book has been lined with such flowers—
those who have gifted me with their skills, their passions, their partnership. I offer them to you here, my bouquet of blessings, for us to appreciate together.

  My family is my most cherished blossom, my source of strength. I might be the only remaining member of my immediate tribe, but the powerful Tyson spirit lives on in my daughter, in my nieces and nephews, in my cousins, and in their children and grandchildren. Thank you for giving me roots. I am grounded by your love and nourished by your devotion.

  Were it not for my manager, Larry Thompson, you would not be holding this book. Our relationship spans four decades, and at every juncture, he has encouraged me to share my story, on my terms, before others could rush in with their erroneous versions. Larry, thank you for your insistence that I be the sole author of my memories, now committed to paper for eternity. I could not ask for a more ardent advocate. Your partnership means so much to me, as do you and your family. To Robert G. Endara II, who has worked alongside Larry for more than two decades: Thank you for your diligent service over so many years—for the late nights, the long hours, and your extraordinary attention to even the smallest of details. I am deeply grateful for your patience, dedication, and dependability. And to my literary agent, Jan Miller, and her team at Dupree Miller & Associates: I sincerely appreciate your phenomenal efforts and publishing expertise in bringing Just as I Am to the world. Your advice and judgment have been invaluable to me. Thank you for your outstanding work on my behalf.