Cicely Tyson: A Shining Titan of Black Excellence In an exceptional memoir, one of the greatest actresses in American film deconstructs her craft and bears witness to history. C AT E YO U N G B
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his week, the Academy of Motion Pictures 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 bestseller 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
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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,
The American Theater Wing honors Cicely Tyson at its annual gala in New York, September 2016.
ascribing her career choices to divine intervention, luck, and hard work. 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. 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
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