“The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are. Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat.” – Cicely Tyson
I have written about quite a few famous people in my day and one thing they generally have in common is a middle name. Well at least most of the ones I wrote about did. I was expecting something like, Cicely “Antoinette” Tyson or Cicely “Michelle” Tyson.. you know… something like that.. But Cicely did not have a middle name.. she was special… in more ways than one. So before we have a look at her incredible life, I thought I would say a little something about the origin of middle names. I heard that.. you asked why? Well you remember what our parents used to say when we asked a question they didn’t want to answer… “because.” So people started using middle names in the Middle Ages.. that is as Leona Hensley used to say the “little people,” started using middle names in the Middle Ages. Royalty had been using middle names for … excuse the pun “ages.” Leona Hensley was a multi-millionaire who died in 2007 and was known for putting the letter “B” in the word “*itch.” As a matter of fact she was known as the “Queen of Mean.” When she died she left all her money to her dog so her kids couldn’t get it. Her will was eventually overturned and her dog named “Trouble” ended up with $2 million. I know I have been known to stretch the truth, but you can’t make this stuff up. Anyway, middle names came about because Europeans couldn’t decide between giving their child a family name or the name of a saint. They eventually settled on naming their children with the given name first, baptismal name second, and surname third. I tried to find out why they just didn’t choose a family first name or a baptismal first name and forego the middle name altogether… but the only thing the reference said was “because.”
Cicely Tyson (center) in Carib Gold
Tyson started out her career as a model for Ebony magazine, not to be confused with Jet magazine, which had the centerfold pictures. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Nevis in the West Indies and were very religious. It wasn’t gonna be none of that centerfold ^%%$# in heeah! As a matter of fact when Cicely first told her mother she was going into the acting field, her mother refused to speak to her for years. It wasn’t until she saw her on stage that they began speaking again. Her first cameo appearance was in a show by NBC called Carib Gold. It featured Ethel Waters and Geoffrey Holder. Ethel Waters was a blues singer and sang a song that almost everybody knows… “Stormy Weather.” She was also the the first African American to star on her own television show called “Nig**, I Said Biscuits With My Eggs!” Okay.. I really should stop that.. but you got to know having your own show in 1933 America was saying something. You expected any show featuring African American had something to do with a pail and a mop or a frying pan and some Aunt Jemima. Not the case.. The Ethel Waters show was a special and featured a dramatic performance of the Broadway play Mamba’s Daughters witten by Dubose Heyward on racial tensions between rich whites and poor blacks in South Carolina. Geoffrey Holder is a well known for being a principal dancer in the Metropolitan Ballet and was also cast as Baron Samedi in the Bond film Live and Let Die. Anyway Carib Gold was Tyson’s first shot on the big screen. In the early 1960s, Tyson appeared in the original cast of French playwright Jean Genet’s “The Blacks,” and yeah I know you are expecting me to go there, but Ima leave it alone. Actually Genet was very forward looking as it applies to race. The play had black performers enacting a trial and ensuing murder of a white woman before a kangaroo court. There were 13 black characters in the play and five wore whiteface acting out principal parts. Now how he got away with a play about a white women being put on trial by black people and then the white woman is subsequently murdered… in 1958… well that’s a story that needs to be written about. Genet was found dead in a hotel room in 1986 and according to my research “Genet may have fallen on the floor and fatally hit his head,”… that’s it… that’s all it says… okayyyy…. The show was one of the longest playing off- broadway shows at that time, performing 1408 shows. Tyson won a Vernon Rice Award for her part. But before we move on.. I will leave you with what Genet wrote about his play, ” The Blacks,”
This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the show should welcome him formally, dress him in ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the first row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance.
But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used. – Jean Genet
Cicely Tyson In Sounder
In 1963 David Susskind saw a few plays that Tyson performed in including “The Blacks,” and cast her in a CBS television show called “The Whites.” ( You know I couldn’t let it alone..) Anyway the show was called East Side/West Side and starred George C Scott… ( there’s that middle name again..) It dealt with sixties contemporary social themes about race. Tyson played Scott’s secretary and she was at the time the only African American regular member of a TV cast. On one episode about an African American couple in Harlem, the show stepped across the “by gawd boy,” line so many times that it was blacked out in Atlanta and Shreveport, Louisiana. (By gawd boy if I see another nigra dissing a white man on TV … $$##@’s gonna die!!!) The racist were hot because of that show. It was only on for one season from 1963 thru 1964. In the mid sixties she landed other roles most notably, the Guiding Light and “A Man Called Adam,” starring Sammy Davis Jr. ( Sammy’s middle name was George..) Anyway, the “Guiding Light” was the longest running drama in American history.. they call it a drama series, but we know it as a soap opera… one of which my mother would make us go outside when it came on. I barely remember “A Man called Adam,” but I do remember it. Sammy was a musician and we had to leave the room during certain parts… In 1972 Tyson got her big break when she landed the role of Rebecca Morgan in Sounder. She played the wife of a sharecropper in 1933 Louisiana. Now the last place you want to be is in 1933 Louisiana, working as a black sharecropper.. during the Great Depression, which is what this movie was about. It was supposed to be uplifting by showing what real African American families are made of… scrounging for a meager living on somebody else’s land planting cotton, racist taunting you at every turn and massa giving you one week to pay up or get out.. but still you rise? I’d be like them racist in Atlanta and Shreveport… “somebody gonna die… naw. ere body gonna die!!” You can tell Sounder wasn’t my favorite movie. Anyway it was a breakthrough movie for Cicely Tyson. She was nominated for both the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her work. From then on it was straight to the moon.
During the seventies I was a young man feeling myself… not down there smarty pants… I mean I was doing what I want… and when I wanted to and watching TV wasn’t high on my list. So it was saying something when I stopped what I was doing to watch Tyson next breakthrough in 1974. “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Tyson’s portrayal of a centenarian black woman’s life from slavery until her death before the Civil rights movement won her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie and an Emmy Award for Actress of the Year – Special. Tyson was also nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work in this television film.” They said it better.. it was an extraordinary film! I think I will watch it this weekend.. anyway she cemented her role as one of the leading black actors of my time with that portrayal. In 1989 she struck gold again in “The Women Of Brewster Place.” I will never forget the character that played Oprah Winfrey’s son. His name was Basil. Oprah’s character spoiled him rotten and when he got older he killed a man. In order to keep him out of jail she put up her house as collateral for bail. A house that had been left to her by a kind white woman she worked for. Basil ran and the character Oprah played lost the house. That’s how she ended on Brewster Place. Tyson played a character named Mrs Browne, who visited her daughter who was living on Brewster Place. The character played by Tyson was snobbish and wanted to know why her daughter was living in such conditions. They had come from an affluent family and yada..yada yada.. During this latter part of her career she also played in other noteworthy roles such as the “Diary of a Mad Black Woman”, “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” ( one of my favorites), “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Hoodlum,” also a great movie. In 2011 she hit the nail on the head again with her performance in “The Help,” which won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. That picture made me not buy pie at the store again for a long, long time.. Everytime I looked at that white lady behind the counter I would imagine she saw “The Help” and was looking for payback… you know the part where Minnie puts a surprise in Hilly’s pie after she had been fired…yeah that made me think… especially when the bakery lady smiled and said enjoy… I started buying frozen pie from then on… Anyway one of her last film was the Netflix special “A Fall From Grace.” I didn’t watch most of it because it was depressing… I might look at it later… She also did a guest spot on “How To Get Away With Murder,” playing Viola Davis’s mother. I have talked about her film and TV awards but I don’t want to leave out that in 2016 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor in the United States. The lady was a Queen.
You know Cicely had a daughter when she was 17. She hardly ever talked about her during her professional career. I saw something in People Magazine in which she gave a dedication to her daughter in her memoir, it said… “The one who has paid the greatest price for this gift to all… Love, Mom.” Tyson married her first husband Kenneth Franklin in December 1942, gave birth to Joan in February 1943 when she was 18 years old. Joan is not her real name. The author changed it at Tyson’s request to maintain her daughters privacy. When their daughter was 2, Franklin abandoned them. Tyson worked several jobs to make ends meet and raise her daughter, with the help of her mother. Tyson would often wake up before the sun rose to prepare her daughter for school until she decided to send Joan to a boarding school miles away from their home in New York City. “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. I give her now, in adulthood, what my heart has always longed to bestow — my undivided focus, along with the full measure of her privacy.” Tyson was also married to Miles Davis. The ceremony was presided over by Andrew Young and was given at Bill Cosby’s home. I don’t have to tell you that it.. the marriage lasted about as long as the last rib at a barbecue. They lived across the country from each other and in 1988 Tyson filed for divorce. Davis died two years later. Her memoir, “Just As I Am,” was released last week. A few weeks before the end she had an interview with Gayle King in which she was asked, “What do you want to be remembered for?” Cicely Tyson said, ” I’ve done my best… that’s all.” She died January 28, 2021. May her memory be a blessing.
Be the first to comment