Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 345

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Just As I Am," by Cicely Tyson.

I couldn’t believe the same actress had played both the young woman and the elder one, but Deloris insisted she had. I stared at my sister, and then back at the screen, marveling at Ms. Tyson’s mastery of her craft, the brilliance with which she had transformed herself. It planted in me a seed that immediately took root. She was the manifestation of excellence and artistry, a dark-skinned, thick-lipped woman who truly mirrored me. I can pinpoint the exact moment when my life opened up, and it was there, in front of that set, that mine did. With one mesmerizing performance, with one gorgeously poignant rendering of her character, Ms. Tyson gave me permission to dream. (Viola Davis)

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.

Even with my childhood long behind me, I find it difficult to lay bare my parents’ blemishes. My instinct is to protect their legacies in a world where we are too often demonized. My mom and dad, with all of their frailties, are part of a centuries-long story, a narrative setting that hangs behind myriad Black lives. That story harkens back to when our foreparents were herded onto ships, their naked bodies stacked, row after row amid vomit and sewage, for the treacherous Middle Passage. That tale continued as more than two hundred years of enslavement pressed its foot down on our necks. Our men were emasculated and thrashed, our women raped and brutalized, our families ripped apart and auctioned off like cattle, our grueling labor uncompensated. We still bear the emotional and economic scars. The assault on us, and its resulting trauma, spans generations. Our traditions, our communities, our dignity—all of it has endured barbarous attack. And when someone makes an assassination attempt on your tribe, you adopt a posture of self-defense. You fold in on yourself as a way to cover your wounds. And you dare not hand your assailant another weapon, another piece of shrapnel he or she will use to further shame and dehumanize your people. 

This is the painful history my parents were born into. And it is only against this backdrop that their many choices and faces can be understood. Two human beings whose ancestors were declared savage beasts. Two imperfect souls loved by a perfect God.

It was the first time I’d ever been approached in a sexual manner. It was the last time I felt truly safe. With his hungry gaze, this stranger had stolen from me a sense of security. That is what violation does: it wrenches away one’s God-given freedom to exhale, to feel relaxed and unguarded in this world. You don’t have to be physically touched to be emotionally robbed.

Black children learn where they stand in this world by recognizing the spaces where our people can and cannot enter, and if granted access, whether our presence and humanity will be regarded as equal.

As long as we play our various designated roles—as court jesters and as comic relief, as Aunt Jemimas and as Jezebels, as maids whisking aperitifs into drawing rooms, as shuckin’ and jivin’ half-wits serving up levity—we are worthy of recognition in their meta-narrative. We are obedient Negroes. We are dutiful and thus affirmable. 

But when we dare tiptoe outside the lines of those typecasts, when we put our full humanity on display, when we threaten the social constructs that keep others in comfortable superiority, we are often dismissed. There is no archetype on file in which a Black woman is simultaneously resolute and trembling, fierce and frightened, dominant and receding. My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight.

I know now that Joan pined more for my presence than she did for my pocketbook. She needed my provision, yes, but decidedly more of the emotional sort, a cheek-to-cheek coexistence. I do not regret that I chose to earn a living in the manner in which I did, or that I arranged for Joan to attend school in a world miles north of mine. But I do mourn that my child, during the years she hungered to have me close, felt my absence so profoundly. My utmost, well intentioned as it was, fell short of her needs and desires.