Just as I Am: A Memoir

Introduction

This Life

I NEVER intended to write an autobiography. Decades ago, after I presented an award to Barbara Jordan—the trailblazing civil rights activist and the first African American elected to the Texas Senate—I asked her, When are you going to write your book? A smile spread across Barbara’s face. When I have something to say, she told me. In that moment, I decided that if a woman as accomplished as Barbara could get away with such a reply, so could I.

Years later, a gentleman from The Washington Post interviewed me. When are you going to do your book? he asked. And just as I’d been doing for quite some time by then, I borrowed Barbara’s response. When I have something to say, I told him. Well, I’ve been talking to you for three hours, he said, chuckling, "and it sounds to me like you’ve got plenty to say." I nodded and gave him the same wry grin Barbara had once given me, with no plan of ever committing my story to the page.

Back then I did not see an autobiography as personal. I thought of it as a written record of a public journey—for me, an account of my stage and film roles, the parts of my experience in view of the world. It would be my story through the lens of Miss Jane Pittman, through Rebecca in Sounder and Binta in Roots. To be sure, there are traces of who I am in every woman I have portrayed. In the tenacity of Harriet Tubman and the quiet strength of Coretta Scott King, I can be glimpsed. In the trembling fingers of Constantine in The Help and in the determination of Mrs. Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful, my thumbprint is recognizable. Every one of these characters has left me with an emotional, spiritual, and psychological inheritance I will forever carry with me. But while each, in some way, reflected me, none could reveal who I am in my entirety.

A few years ago, my manager, Larry Thompson, started in on me again about writing a memoir. You’ve got to do a book, he said one afternoon. Yeah, you and the world think that, I told him, shaking my head. No, I’m serious, he persisted. It’s time. I uttered the same refrain I’d been repeating to him for months: The lights and the trimmings of my career, the accolades—as far as I was concerned, none of it needed to be recounted. For me, the greatest gratification has come in refining my craft, not in gazing upon its merits. He stared at me for a long moment. You’re talking about a Christmas tree, he finally said. What? I asked. Everybody thinks they know who Cicely Tyson is, he explained. But what they see are the ornaments on the branches, the decorations. They know nothing about the roots.

That conversation is what planted the seed for Just as I Am. Larry’s observation captured, for the first time, what I have felt for so many years. The glitter, the ribbons, the garnish—as wonderful as those things are, I have little desire to reflect on them solely. What I am far more interested in is how my tree, my story, first sprang into existence. How its roots, stretching far beneath the soil, have nourished and anchored me. How each tree ring whispers memories sometimes too troubling for me to recall. How its bark and rugged exterior have both guarded and grounded me. Every one of my experiences on the public stage has been rooted in my upbringing, those years spent at my mother’s elbow and on my father’s knee. That foundation, that rich earth, has given birth to who I am. Even now, in the winter of my life, I am just beginning to truly understand my identity.

Every holiday season in the heart of New York’s Rockefeller Center, a spruce stands, proud and glistening, in a magnificent exhibition. And yet its display is but a snapshot of that tree’s history, one brief and final episode in its lifespan. The thousands of lights adorning its branches disclose nothing about its path, about its nurturing and growth over decades. Only when that tree is stripped of its embellishments does it bare its scars and show its true nature.

Just as I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and a mother, a sister and a friend. I am an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by his hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.

I stand amazed at this tree, this life. I stare up in awe at its branches, raising up toward heaven. I wonder about its origins, how a seed so minuscule could grow into a structure so vast and resilient. I’m still examining its genesis. To examine, to question, to discover and evolve—that is what it means to be alive. The day we cease to explore is the day we begin to wilt. I share my testimony in these pages not because I have reached any lasting conclusions, but because I have so much to understand. I am as inquisitive about life now as I was as a child. My story will never be finished, nor should it be. For as long as God grants me breath, I will be living—and writing—my next chapter.

Part One

Planted

Like a tree planted by the water,

I shall not be moved.

—NEGRO SPIRITUAL

1

The Vow

I KNOW instantly whether I should take a role. If my skin tingles as I read the script, then it is absolutely something I must do. But if my stomach churns, I do not touch the project, because if I did, I’d end up on a psychiatrist’s couch. Either my spirit can take the story or it cannot, and my senses have never misled me. That is how I knew, with unequivocal assurance, that I was meant to act in Sounder, the 1972 film about a loving family’s struggle during the Depression. What I didn’t know is how Sounder’s tide would carry me toward a profound purpose—one spawned by comments from strangers.

The role offered to me in the film wasn’t the one I would’ve chosen. We want you to play the schoolteacher, the producers said to me as they handed me the script. Yet as I read the story, I felt certain I was meant to portray the mother, Rebecca, the wife of Nathan. Nathan was his family’s backbone, Rebecca its robust and steady heartbeat. In that mom’s devotion—in the tender way she cared for their three children even as she rested her palm in the small of her husband’s back—I recognized my own mother. But you’re too young, too pretty, too sexy to play the mom, I was told. I was forty-seven then, though for years at the suggestion of my first director, Warren Coleman, I’d been claiming to be a full decade younger, with taut cocoa skin clinging to my secret. What does my appearance have to do with acting? I retorted, amused that I, a schoolgirl once called a skinny little nappy-head, was now being ruled out as too attractive. As an artist, I should be able to portray anyone. But the producers wouldn’t hear of it.

Three months went by and the team was still searching for an actress to play Rebecca. Meanwhile, feeling no less convinced that I was destined for the role, I had Rebecca’s lines down, do you hear me? After another month had passed, I received a call from Bill Haber, my agent at the time.

Well, he said, exhaling into the receiver, you got the role of the mother. I didn’t say a word.

Did you hear me? he pressed.

Yes, I heard you, I answered calmly. So when do we begin?

But aren’t you excited? he asked.

"About what? I said. I knew all the time that the role was mine. I was just waiting for them to discover it."

An actress the producers had gone after had wanted more money than they were willing to pay, and so she’d passed on the film. I could’ve saved them the trouble of their negotiation because the role was never for her. The money wasn’t much, Haber explained; I’d earn around $6,000—a pittance even in those days. Yet I would’ve taken the role for half of that. It’s how convinced I was that Rebecca was my character.

When filming began in Baton Rouge in spring 1971, the nation had teetered off balance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gone, his life sliced short three years earlier by a bullet thundering across a hotel balcony. On that fateful evening in Memphis, the Civil Rights Movement had lost not only its leader but also its way, wandering in search of a new path forward. It was in this America, one grieving and limping from a deep racial reckoning, that Blaxploitation cinema found a fertile audience. In a spate of films during the early 1970s depicting urban life, the Black man, muted over centuries by bigotry’s cruel muzzle, at last got to play the hero in his own story line. But this newfound creative freedom came at a cost. In my mind, these films gave rise to a misery more harrowing than the realities they portrayed. The Black woman was often cast in a powerless supporting role, or as a hypersexual female eager to fall into bed. Ghetto life and vulgarity were glorified. Even still, theatergoers seemed ravenous for this movie genre, and directors, driven by profits, rushed to satiate that appetite. During this period, a producer had the gall to say to me, Niggers want sex and violence, and we plan to give them both. He did not flinch as he spoke.

Given the box-office success of films such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, making a movie about a tight-knit Black family of Louisiana sharecroppers took some nerve. Marty Ritt, a gem of a director, clearly had plenty of it. With characteristic zeal, he forged ahead with filming Sounder, which was based on an award-winning children’s novel and adapted for the screen by Lonne Elder. I did not know how the movie would ultimately resonate, nor was that my chief concern. I was focused on emptying my soul into Rebecca, my first lead role in a major film. Sharing the stage with me was Paul Winfield, who played Nathan, and Kevin Hooks, who portrayed David, the eldest of our children and the son who narrates the story. Paul, who’d already become known for his star turn in the 1968 NBC sitcom Julia with my beloved friend Diahann Carroll, was to be Sounder’s headliner. I, then in the infancy of my film career, wasn’t slated to even have my name listed on the movie’s poster. Circumstances would later have something to say about that.

Before Sounder’s release, I traveled across the country on a promotional tour with some of the other cast members. From San Francisco to Boston, Indianapolis to Richmond, reporters who’d previewed the film gathered to interview me about the production. It was during my stop in Philadelphia that the earth quaked.

Among the group of reporters stood a Caucasian gentleman, auburn-haired and around age thirty. He cleared his throat, lifted the microphone to his lips, and locked his gaze on me. I have a confession to make, he said slowly, as if calculating the impact of what he would reveal. I never thought of myself as being the least bit prejudiced, he said. But as I watched the film, I just could not believe that the son was calling his father ‘Daddy.’ That is what my son calls me. Silence blanketed the room.

Well, child, I’ll tell you: my mouth fell open like a broken pocketbook. As the man’s words shuddered through me, I forced a smile. But all the while I was thinking, My Lord, how appalling. This man clearly knew nothing about our shared humanity. He had no understanding of God’s multihued creation, of his place, next to yours and mine, in that colorful family mosaic. From his perspective, there had to be something radically wrong with a Black child calling his father Daddy, a term he thought reserved for his own kind. How could Nathan, once declared three-fifths human by our Constitution, be worthy of such endearment? How could a fraction of a man stand forehead to forehead with him? That would put Nathan on par with all those born into the privilege of whiteness, as he had been. I don’t know what stunned me more: the fact that the man believed what he did, or that he had the audacity to say it aloud.

After a lengthy pause, I regained my composure and my tongue. I have to congratulate you, sir, I said, my tone tinged with sarcasm. It takes a lot of courage to stand up here, in the midst of your peers, and admit you never thought you were prejudiced until you saw the film. Thank you. I was so disturbed by what I’d heard that, in that moment, this was the only response I could muster.

I left that press conference saying to myself, Maybe it’s just this one. Surely, amid the shrill call for equality sounded during those years, there couldn’t be many who shared this man’s view. That is how I attempted to console myself.

Yet as I continued touring the country, I became acquainted with an America I’d seldom encountered up to then. At the time, I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about this nation I have always called home. I’d grown up in New York and lived either there or in Los Angeles, two culturally progressive cities. But outside of that bubble, in the many towns and communities I regularly flew over, the seed of Dr. King’s dream might have been sown, but it obviously had not germinated. During a stop in the Midwest, another reporter’s comment reinforced that notion.

I didn’t know that Black men and women had the kind of loving relationship that we see between Nathan and Rebecca, a young woman stated. Their connection didn’t seem believable to me. I was so taken aback by her assessment that I did not respond. So seldom had Black families been portrayed nurturing one another on-screen that, when art indeed imitated life, the truth of that narrative was met with deep skepticism. Embedded in this woman’s observation was an assumption that lives at the center of all bias: You are not like me. You are intrinsically different. And that difference deems you inferior.

I recognized these comments for what they were: pure ignorance. Anger would’ve been the justified response, and for a time in private, I was certainly apoplectic. But as life has taught me more than once, resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it. These reporters’ beliefs, however offensive they may have been to me, were not a bitterness to be nursed; they were a lesson to be heeded. So rather than recoiling in exasperation at the ideas expressed, I leaned in and listened intently at every remaining tour stop. Much of what I heard mimicked what those two reporters had dared voice. And the more aware I became of the bigotry that existed against Black people, what might’ve been reason to seethe became, for me, a reason to pursue my craft with new purpose. I returned home from the road saying to myself, Sister, you’ve got some educating to do.

It was at this juncture that I made a conscious decision: I would use my profession as my platform—a stage from which to make my voice heard by carefully choosing my projects and portrayals. I could not afford the luxury of simply being an actress. Yes, I was already selecting only those roles that gave me goose pimples, just as Rebecca in Sounder had. But as an artist with the privilege of the spotlight, I felt an enormous responsibility to use that forum as a force for good, as a place from which to display the full spectrum of our humanity. My art had to both mirror the times and propel them forward. I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people—to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.

When I made the choice to pursue acting, the last thing in the world I intended to be was an actress for the cause. Like most artists, I expected to continually hone my craft by playing all types of roles, with little consideration for how those portrayals might impact the cultural dialogue. But the racial climate called for something more of me, and while traveling this great land, I resolved to answer in the one way I knew how.

Never once, during the billowing smoke of the Civil Rights Movement, would I be spotted at a Woolworth lunch counter, braving a sit-in while hate-mongers hurled spit and spite. Never would I parade up and down the boulevards of Selma or Montgomery, a picket sign thrust high alongside my shouts. I admire the valiant freedom fighters who took to the streets, but it wasn’t in my makeup to demonstrate in these ways. Nonetheless, I was set on speaking in the only place I felt courageous enough to do so—on the stage. I protested using not my own words, but those of the characters I inhabited. Fifty years after I made a silent pact with myself to play women whose legacies uplift us, that vow still guides me.

This life is something. When you’ve lived as long as I have, others always seem to be asking how you are. "I’m here—still, I’m fond of responding. God must have more work for me to do that I haven’t yet done." Over nearly a century, I’ve witnessed the times shifting even as I’ve watched them come swinging back around, full circle, to the moment we are standing in today. There is more of this glorious pilgrimage in my rearview mirror than there is up ahead.

When I think now on the promise I made all those seasons ago, I recognize it as a defining moment, one from which scores of others would flow. And what preceded that pivot was a miracle that confounds me: that a reticent girl, born in the slums and bathed in the mighty timbre of a church organ, ever stumbled into such a grand arena.

2

String Bean

MY MOTHER strolls along the sidewalk, pushing me, six months old, in a carriage. The South Bronx is just yawning awake, its wide boulevards not yet teeming with immigrant families scrambling toward their trains. Mom has risen early for some solitude before the day’s responsibilities intrude. A Jewish woman, with short black curls framing her kind face, approaches. My mother’s instinct is not to flee. It is 1925, an era in which neighbors are still more trusted than feared. The lady leans under the large hood of the carriage and studies my squinty face and bald head.

Take care of that child, she whispers. Mommy scans the woman’s eyes in search of what she means. She has a sixth sense, she continues. She’s going to make you very proud one day—and she’s going to take care of you in your old age.

The lady smiles and nods and then disappears down the sidewalk as my mother stares after her. The two had never spotted each other amid the factories and alleyways of the neighborhood. They will never again cross paths. Yet on this morning, during the daybreak of my life, providence sweeps them together for a singular exchange. And there I lay, swaddled and slumbering, as oblivious to the roar of passing locomotives as I am to the prophecy of a stranger.

* * *

My parents grew up together in Nevis, an island cradled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea in the British West Indies. My mother, Fredericka Theodosia Huggins, was the only child of Mary Jane Sargent, a seamstress, and Charles Huggins, a fisherman who drowned when his boat capsized during a storm. Mary Jane and Charles were never married. My father, William Augustine Tyson, was one of eight children, or at least the eight he knew about. His dad, John Edward Tyson, the overseer of a wealthy family’s estate, was said to have fathered twenty-four children. Eight of them were with my dad’s mother, Caroline Carol Matilda Wilkes Tyson.

Carol—or Kyar, as my mother mispronounced her name, along with nearly every other word she spoke in her thick Caribbean accent—was a wayfarer by nature, a spirit unable to tolerate stillness. Whenever Carol felt good and ready, she’d leave the house for weeks, with no indication of when she’d return. In would step Mary Jane, a dear friend of Carol and John’s. My maternal grandmother had a heart more wide open than her embrace. She’d sweep those Tyson children into her long arms, caring for each with the same gentleness as she showed her own daughter. It was squeezed around her supper table, in a shanty the size of a thimble, that my mom and dad became acquainted. One evening as Mary Jane bowed her head, the sound of grace rising to mix with the smell of goat stew, my father winked clandestinely at my mother. He was just twelve years old then, already gregarious and rehearsing his mannish charms. My mother, one month his senior and more timid than I’d one day be, blushed and looked away.

Nevis is tiny, even when it puffs out its chest and stands tall alongside its big sister, St. Kitts. The entire island is about thirty-five square miles; you can drive its full length, from Newcastle in the north to Saddle Hill near its bottom edge, in less than a half-hour. The island’s capital, Charlestown, on the western coast, was the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton. My parents’ homes were on opposite ends of Nevis. Mom and her mother shared their two-room hovel on the northwest shore, in the village of Westbury in St. Thomas parish. My father was born in that same parish, but his father, then a laborer desperate to lift his low wages, moved the family from one village to the next. When my dad and his siblings weren’t huddled around Mary Jane’s table in Westbury, they mostly lived in the southern village of Gingerland, so named for the plenteous crops of the spice once grown there.

My parents’ villages sat miles apart, but there was no distance at all between the values that governed each. My mother and father grew up in the Episcopal Church, under the watchful gaze and doting palm of the faithful. Rearing was done in the collective. With a side eye and an unsparing rod, a priest or parishioner could train up a child, be that youngster his own or another’s. It was in this kind of spiritual community, one encircled by the guardrails of love and discipline, that my parents’ heels were grounded. It is also where, on a Sunday when my mother was thirteen, her path in life was set.

On that morning, the congregation gathered for my mother’s confirmation. In keeping with their tradition, every saint was dressed, head to toe, in ivory. After my mom received the Holy Sacrament, she and the other youth stood near an enormous window in the sanctuary. Through the opening flew a white dove, fully extending its wings before landing right onto my mother’s head. Any other child would have shrieked and bolted, but not my mom. Even then, she was as steady as she was reticent. She just stared ahead as if such an unusual occurrence had been expected. This child should not stay here, the pastor declared to the congregants. She should go to America.

Years earlier, my mother’s Aunt Miriam had moved from Nevis to the nation of dreamers. The dove, said the minister, was appointing Fredericka as the next in the family to follow. Soon after, Mary Jane wrote to Miriam about her special niece, this chosen child, and asked that she prepare the way for her. A decade later, once her papers were in order, she indeed made the journey. My father had arrived a year before her.

As my father grew through adolescence, he became more sweet on Fredericka. Her introversion was a perfect balance for his charisma. Love, invisible but palpable, lingered between them. And yet the relationship’s strongest connective tissue was their shared sense of faith and family. My mom never told me how my dad proposed to her. I know only that, by the time my father set out for the United States, he’d made clear his intention to one day make Fredericka his bride. Years into their union, as my dad carried on during one of his raving fits, he told my mother he’d asked her to be his wife because Mary Jane had always been so good to him. Choosing her, he said, was his way of reciprocating that grace. My father’s lips had been loosened that evening by whatever strife had prompted his rage. Still, his revelation bore a kernel of truth. Mary Jane’s profound kindness had been part of what initially knit them together. Their care for each other and common values, and later, an abiding affection for their children, tightened the knot.

My father arrived at Ellis Island in the summer of 1919—just before his twenty-second birthday. The First World War’s dust was still settling, and Jim Crow’s cloud hung over the land. Woodrow Wilson was president. In 1918, the year before my dad sailed ashore on the S.S. Korona, Wilson screened, in the halls of the White House, The Birth of a Nation—a silent motion picture exalting Klansmen as saviors and depicting Black people as apelike, menacing degenerates. That is the America my dad entered, one with a legacy of assault on the heroes who tilled its soil. But my father and millions of others came here nonetheless, compelled by a force more powerful than hate: a hunger for opportunity. In his front vest pocket, my father held close the same resolve to better himself that still lures the most strident to our shores.

The throngs of West Indians flocking to New York in those years typically moved into either Hell’s Kitchen or the Bronx. But my father settled first in Brooklyn, with my mother’s Aunt Miriam (and her husband, Uncle Patrick), whom he’d met in Nevis. He divided his time between there and East Orange, New Jersey, in the home of his eldest brother, George, who’d transitioned to the United States before he did. My uncle and his family eventually moved from East Orange to nearby Montclair. My dad had honed a talent for carpentry in Nevis and brought the skill with him. In addition to handcrafting wood pieces, bureaus, and bed frames that drew squeals of delight from his patrons, he operated a fruit and vegetable pushcart. On the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, as well as in Uptown Manhattan on the East Side—another neighborhood with a strong West Indian presence—he set up his cart, hawking everything from green plantains to fresh ginger for those yearning for a taste of home. He and a good friend, Mr. Benjamin Taylor, jointly operated the business.

As if those two jobs weren’t enough to fill my dad’s workdays, he enlisted in the 369th Infantry Regiment, the first all-Black National Guard unit, famously known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Dad trained at Camp Whitman in New York but never served overseas. The men in his unit who did fight in the First World War were among this country’s most gallant and well-decorated. After white American soldiers refused to perform combat duties alongside Blacks, the US Army assigned the Hellfighters to the French Army. The men spent 191 days in the frontline trenches—more combat time there than any other American unit. During their triumph in staving off the Germans, the troop also suffered the most losses, with fifteen hundred casualties. Despite their extraordinary valor and sacrifice, they returned home to the democracy my dad was navigating: a woefully prejudiced society that, at every turn, denied Black people equal citizenship.

My father and mother corresponded across the Atlantic, expressing, in hastily rendered cursive and without the luxury of a telephone, their longing to reunite. In 1920, the year my parents were both twenty-three, my mother at last joined my father in New York. On the afternoon she boarded the Macedonia, I can only imagine the brew of excitement and uncertainty she felt about leaving the world she knew and entering another, one unfamiliar to her. It was the last time she’d ever see her mother in this life, and as Mom tearfully waved goodbye from the ship’s deck, her spirit surely sensed that finality.

Mom moved into Aunt Miriam and Uncle Patrick’s brownstone. As she and my father resumed their courtship, Dad left Miriam’s place. Living together before marriage, or shacking up as it was known, was frowned upon in their church community. So Dad stayed between the homes of his brother, George, and his favorite sister, Zora, who had settled in the Bronx neighborhood of Mount Vernon. My mom began work as a sleep-in nanny, taking care of a little white boy during the week and returning home to her aunt and uncle’s place on the weekends. She and my father, elated to be near one another, picked up where they’d left off. They also squirreled away every nickel they could in preparation for an eventual wedding. Not long after Mom’s arrival in the United States, she and my father became formally engaged.

In a cultural tradition known as the Calling of the Band, my parents’ forthcoming nuptials were announced, three separate times, in Mom’s home church in Nevis—in the same sanctuary where the dove had descended on her. William Augustine Tyson and Fredericka Theodosia Huggins will be married on September 25, 1921, the reverend proclaimed. Mom, upon receiving news of the announcement in a letter from her mother, beamed as she read and reread the words. At the altar of St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church in Hell’s Kitchen, my parents spoke their promises—vows that circumstances would test.

My parents began their married life together in a Bronx tenement before later relocating to Manhattan’s East Side. The year after they wed, they welcomed my brother, Melrose, a name my father had loved since the day he spotted it on a street sign in the Bronx. Six days before Christmas in 1924, I arrived with my thumb poked in my mouth and nary a strand of hair. A year and a half later, my sister, Emily, came along to complete our family, crossing the T on the Tyson five.

* * *

I was born scrawny and with a heart murmur, twin liabilities in West Indian culture. When the doctors discovered the murmur, they told my mother and father that I probably wouldn’t make it to three months old. My parents, who knew God and thus knew better, set out to prove medicine wrong. They got right to work on restoring me to good health and fattening me up, which, as they saw it, were one and the same.

Mom and Dad hovered over me constantly. If I whimpered in the slightest or my eyes fluttered awake, my mother pulled me close to her bosom and nursed me as she stroked my head. After we’d moved from the Bronx to the East Side, Daddy would put me in my stroller early in the mornings and walk me over to Central Park. This child needs some fresh air in her lungs, he’d say on his way out the door.

After she’d weaned me, Mom kept on trying to put weight on me. Though my mother was naturally petite like me during her twenties, she wasn’t about to have it on her parenting record that she’d lost a child to malnourishment. She’d mash up yams and shovel them in my mouth. I’d spit them out. As I got older, she’d push a bowl of oatmeal toward me at our breakfast table. I’d hardly even look at it. Everything about oatmeal disgusted me then: its lumpy texture, its drab color, the way it slid off the spoon. And if I didn’t like what I saw, no way was I sticking it in my mouth. The fact that I love oatmeal now is a source of amazement to me, because for most of my early childhood, I was too enamored of my thumb to be bothered with oats or much else.

My murmur ultimately disappeared, but I was still skin and bones. So Mom trotted me all around town, to this physician and that one, seeking assurance that I was healthy. Will you please leave this child alone? a doctor finally told her. She’s not fat and she’s never going to be. Mom was embarrassed. Not because she’d smothered me half to death, but because her suffocating had become noticeable enough to draw rebuke.

My mother had wanted to name me Miriam, after the aunt she treasured. By the time I was born, Aunt Miriam had passed away in a house fire, her body consumed by flames but her presence never more strong. My dad, though he also cherished Miriam, insisted on another name. I want my first daughter to be called Cicely, he said. An adorable girl who lived next door to them in the Bronx had the name, and the first time he heard it, he’d decided that he’d one day bestow it upon his daughter. That is the barefaced story he told my mother. Years later when I was grown, the truth would come spilling forth.

On the day I arrived home from the hospital, my father said to Melrose, This is your sister. From then on, my brother called me Sister, or Sis for short. The rest of the family followed his lead, even as they added to my list of nicknames. My mother often referred to me as Father Face, because I’d inherited my dad’s cheekbones. My father had two names for me: String Bean and Heart String. The former was because I was so skinny; the latter was because I was his first girl and therefore his most beloved. I could feel his affection for me. When I was a toddler, he’d scoot to the edge of the sofa, somehow balance me on his left knee while resting his guitar on his right thigh, and then belt out his favorite spiritual, I’m gonna lay down my burdens . . . down by the riverside . . . and study war no more! As he sang and strummed, he’d motion for Melrose, who sat cross-legged on the floor with his eyes dancing, to sing along. Up and down I bounced to the sound of Dad’s booming baritone, his care for me reverberating between each note.

Most parents wouldn’t dare admit to preferring one child over another, but in our home, that fact was not hidden. My father adored me and Emily. I don’t know why, but Daddy just preferred girl children. Melrose, on the other hand, was my mother’s heartthrob. No one called my brother by his given name. He abhorred the sound of it and insisted that his friends refer to him as Tyson. Our family mostly still called him Melrose (or Me’rose, for short), though Mom had her own term of endearment for him. Beau, don’t be gone too long, she’d say when he’d dart out our front door, his pockets bulging with a collection of marbles. Whenever Melrose was sick of being surrounded by two sisters, which was often, he’d scamper off to roughhouse with the neighborhood boys. Sometimes he wouldn’t return for hours, long after dusk had descended. My mother would go out looking for her dear son, fussing at him the whole time as she dragged his behind up our stairs for an inevitable backhand from Dad.

In the streets, Melrose received more attention than my dad often paid to him. A faded family photo captures the spirit of their puzzling dynamic. My smiling father stands tall, dressed sharp as a Rockefeller with his shoulders squared. My brother, conversely, wears a somber expression and high-water pants. Whenever my mother would pass that photo on our living room wall, she’d shake her head and murmur, Your father should’ve taken Beau to get a proper suit. Not only did my dad show little interest in grooming his son, he was also very hard on him. If Melrose cut up in class or brought home a less-than-stellar grade, my father’s scolds were louder than his encouragements. I have no doubt that my dad cared for my brother as much as he did my sister and me. He provided for all of us just the same, and in our culture, provision speaks a love language that the tongue may seldom profess. But with me and Emily, my father’s care manifested as an instinct to protect. With Melrose, it showed up as an urge to toughen him up by slicing him down, perhaps as a way to prepare him for a world that villainizes Black men. My brother’s heart, soft and golden at its center despite his unflinching exterior, couldn’t sustain the reprimands. It was why he so frequently escaped outdoors.

Emily was my father’s other crown jewel. Dad borrowed my sister’s nickname, Molly, from the Broadway show tune My Blue Heaven. Just Molly and me and baby makes three, Daddy would sing, and we’re happy in my blue heaven! Emily’s given name came courtesy of my father’s cousin. When she heard that my parents’ third child was to be born on her birthday, she said to my dad, If you name the baby after me, it’ll be the happiest birthday I’ve ever had. Though Mom called me Father Face, I always thought Emily looked more like Dad. My sister’s face was a full moon, like his, whereas Mom and I had an almond shape; in my mind then, shape rather than color was the strongest marker of similarity. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize both of my parents’ faces in my own, depending on the character I’m portraying. In Sounder, I spot Willie. In How to Get Away with Murder, I notice Fredericka. In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, I see both.

Emily was plump. When we were growing up, everyone always thought she was older than me, in part because her clothes were two sizes bigger than mine, and also because she was more forward and worldly than I was. In school, she gravitated toward classmates who were a year or two ahead of her, tilting her ear to catch any tea they spilled. The same was true when my mom’s friends would stop by to visit. She’d crane her neck to overhear their grown-folk conversations until Mom urged her out of the room. My mother was often surprised at what tumbled from that girl’s mouth. So was I. When my sister was still quite young, she heard a rumor that having sex keeps one from having headaches. One afternoon, she said to my mom, Well I’m not gonna die from no headaches. Had my mother not been so shocked, she would’ve smacked Emily for that piece of sass, as well as for mentioning a subject never discussed in our religious household.

My sister possessed features celebrated in our culture: a full mane of hair, a thick and healthy body, and a gregariousness passed on to her from our father. I had none of those attributes. When I was eight, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror on my way out of my cousins’ house. I stood there for the longest time, studying my reflection. Huh, I thought. I’m bowlegged. I wasn’t. But because I was so lanky, my stick legs had enough space between them to wedge a football in there. My hair, once I had some, was thin and wouldn’t grow very long. Lord knows my mother attempted to both lengthen and groom it as she then saw best. While seated on our couch, Mom would clutch my head between her thighs as she greased my scalp with thick pomade before taking a hot comb to my tresses. I still have burn marks on my earlobes. And then there were my teeth. After arriving in this world with my thumb in my mouth, I kept it there for all of my early childhood. My mother did all she could to cure me of the habit, from wrapping my thumb with gauze to threatening that it would fall