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The American Theater Wing honors Cicely Tyson at its annual gala in New York, September 2016.
This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
By Cicely Tyson
HarperCollins
This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences celebrated Cicely Tyson during the Oscars’ memorial tribute honoring the careers of film icons who had passed away since the last awards ceremony. It is fitting that Tyson died just two days after her memoir Just as I Am was published in January. Perhaps even more fitting, within days the long-awaited story of her life surged to number one on best-seller lists and, ultimately, into multiple printings.
At the ripe old age of 96, Tyson had finally committed the details of her life to the page, and so her job was done. She was free to move on, flowers firmly in hand, and with an ironclad grip on her legacy. The star of stage and screen had a career that spanned six decades and accolades that included three Emmys, a Tony, an honorary Oscar—the first for a Black woman—and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The quiet, skinny girl born to immigrants from the tiny isle of Nevis in the West Indies died as she lived—asserting and reinforcing the importance of her work and her contributions to the history of Black arts.
Tyson, with an assist from author Michelle Burford, writes with clarity and frankness about her time both in and out of the spotlight. This portrait gives the star’s many decades the space to both breathe and surprise. From unflinching accounts of her parents’ tumultuous marriage to the trials of her own relationship with legendary jazz musician Miles Davis, Tyson mines every aspect of her life for meaning and significance, ascribing her career choices to divine intervention, luck, and hard work.
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Miles Davis and Cicely Tyson at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 1982
This hefty tome exists because the legendary actress finally decided that she “had something to say” and the ebbs and flows of her life are so momentous as to be almost fictional. Indeed, Tyson recounts how she was scouted by a photographer right on the streets of New York, as if living in the movie of her own life. Initially waylaid by a teen pregnancy and a subsequent unwanted marriage, Tyson had already lived a whole life before she was discovered as a model and eventually made her way to the stage. But when she finally arrived, she made her presence known.
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In Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1973
Tyson describes the very intentional direction of her artistic career and painstakingly details her philosophy for choosing roles. She writes proudly of her star turns in Sounder, Roots, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Her experiences promoting Sounder, her first lead role, made her more aware of the bigotry that surrounded her when a white reporter admitted that he was surprised to feel empathy for the film’s Black characters. And so, in 1972, Tyson refocused her efforts on avoiding roles that leaned into stereotypes or indignities. The actor began taking roles she felt would venerate Black women and actively counteract the common assumptions about their humanity or lack thereof. In the TV drama East Side/West Side, Tyson became the first Black woman in a starring television role—and the first Black TV actress to “reveal my hair in its bare-naked state.” That achievement helped spark the natural-hair movement, and those tendrils remain in the cultural landscape today.
Alongside Tyson’s focus on roles that showcased the dignity of the women she knew and grew up with was a particular concern for respectability that has since fallen out of fashion. She recounts at length her distaste for the Blaxploitation films that blossomed in the 1970s, deeming them stereotypical fare that reveled in white America’s worst cultural assumptions about Black people. To her, Black artists and audiences could not and should not attempt to reclaim or reframe these stories of flashy, shameless criminals prone to vice. She believed, instead, that these movies revictimized Black people by encouraging them to applaud the limits of the racist white imagination, which could not see Black people as anything other than pimps and drug dealers. It’s an understandable perspective, but it discounts the achievements of actresses like Pam Grier, who was the first Black woman to star in an action film, 1973’s Coffy. However, viewed through the political lens of the early ’70s, as the civil rights movement continued to reckon with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it makes sense that Tyson concentrated on work that she felt “elevated the race.”
However, Tyson’s preoccupation with respectability was most likely a reaction to her mother’s rejection of both her teen pregnancy and her choice to be an actor. A traditional Christian woman in the West Indian tradition, Tyson’s mother was very sensitive to perceptions of impropriety, especially given her husband’s tendency to embarrass her with his very public infidelity. When Tyson was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in 1973 for her performance in Sounder, she lost to Liza Minnelli, who starred in Cabaret. But Tyson believed that proving her mother wrong and finally getting her blessing was the real achievement. On Hollywood’s biggest stage, she had at last received “the affirmation of the dear woman who gave me birth.”
Finally, Tyson writes candidly about her relationships with her creative contemporaries and creates vivid portraits of performers who were people before they were legends. She is frank about her tempestuous relationship and marriage to an ailing and drug-addicted Miles Davis and her legal spat with Elizabeth Taylor over back wages. Tyson rose to fame alongside her cousin, the classical pianist Don Shirley, landed in the same acting class as Marilyn Monroe, and dodged Marlon Brando’s flirtations. She collaborated with James Earl Jones and Maya Angelou in Jean Genet’s The Blacks and observed Diahann Carroll’s long affair with Sidney Poitier. Tyson breathes life into people who were as messy and scandalous as one would expect of young and passionate artists. In her lifelong quest to be a conduit for the human experience, she gives her colleagues and friends the space to be themselves.
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Secretary of State John Kerry greets the Kennedy Center Honors recipient, Washington, D.C., 2015.
Cicely Tyson’s story is long because it matches her impact. Clocking in at 432 pages, every chapter and punctuation mark has been earned. Tyson leaves behind not just a record of her own life, but a living history of a generation of talented, creative, and enterprising artists. But first and foremost, Just as I Am tells the stories of mid-20th-century Black American women and the hardships they faced as they labored to be appreciated for their intellectual contributions and their humanity—and how one actor sought to tell those stories: “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.” A shining titan of Black excellence before the term was coined, Cicely Tyson can rest easy knowing her job is done.
