Just As I Am
Just As I Am
By: Cicely Tyson (with Michelle Burford)
[Nominated for ‘Best Memoir/Biography’ category of the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge]
“By nature and by choice, I was a wonderer and a wanderer. I still am.”
It’s possible I live under a rock because I had no idea who Cicely Tyson was. At least by name. Turns out I had seen her play Viola Davis’s character’s mother in the TV show How to Get Away with Murder. That was one of her latest roles among many apparently notable performances in things I have not seen.
Cicely Tyson died in January of last year right after this book was published.
She has written her memoir and aptly titled it, Just As I Am. She is independent and fierce, authentic and unapologetic. She holds to her convictions and works as hard as she needs to to accomplish what is before her. She is who she is and she won’t change who she is to make others comfortable; she won’t cover up the struggles that made her who she is.
She had always said she wasn’t going to write a memoir until she had something to say. And she did have quite a bit to say because it’s a pretty long book. I would say probably a smidge too long.
But here are the ups and downs of her last work here on earth:
Good Framework
When I opened the book and saw the table of contents I was excited to read the book.
Viola Davis (who plays Annelise in How to Get Away with Murder) gives the foreword, explaining how Cicely Tyson’s work and person planted a seed in Viola that grew to push her into acting.
“For six decades, Ms. Tyson has shown us who we are; vulnerable, magnificent, pain-ridden, and beautifully human. Time and time again, she has put our humanity on display, never compromising her dignity while creating a new chapter in Black history.”
The book is divided into three parts: Planted, Rooted, Bountiful.
Cicely gave a beautiful illustration of how she is like a Christmas tree, her achievements the ornaments and lights wrapping the branches. But there is far more to her than the baubles and lights:
“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… That foundation, that rich earth, has given birth to who I am. The thousands of lights adorning its branches disclose nothing about its path, about its nurturing and growth over the decades. Only when that tree is stripped of its embellishments does it bare its scars and shows its true nature.”
I love this concept! I think it’s a beautiful thing to reflect on if we were to imagine ourselves as trees— the seeds that were planted, the things that nourished us and grew us, the roots that establish us, the branches that stretch and shade and produce fruit. We may hide behind our decorations, but that’s not what makes us who we are.
So my first impression of this book was this powerful framework to set up how she would share with us her story.
Cicely is authentic and transparent in sharing her story. She truly strips down the garnishes and lays out the truth, hard truths that people usually keep hidden. I respect that about her. More on that later.
I will say that I was a little disappointed in the execution of this framework. I wish she would have come back to this illustration throughout each chapter to tie it all together. It felt a little disjointed to me and it was hard to trace which part of her ‘tree’ she was describing for us and how that influenced her life.
There were also so many names and references to things I had no clue about (same as Yes Please, Scrappy Little Nobody, and Mobituaries) so a lot of the book in that way didn’t mean much to me and felt boring to read.
Okay, I did know SOME of the names: her cousin played with Louis Armstrong; she is godmother to Lenny Kravitz and children of Tyler Perry and Denzel Washington; she’s bffs with Maya Angelou, MLK’s wife, Oprah, and James Earl Jones; Obama gave her the Medal of Freedom; she got married to Miles Davis at Bill Cosby’s house.
As with most celebrity memoirs that I read, a lot of the name-dropping and such feels a little braggy but they are celebrities and it makes sense that they would be well-connected in the celebrity circles. It’s clear that Cicely Tyson meant a lot to a lot of people!
Faith
A big, yet a little confusing, part of her memoir is her statements of faith and her devotion to the Lord. She describes herself as a church girl and says she will bow to nothing else except her Creator.
She also says,
“The same Master who holds the firmaments in the crease of his palms, who commands oceans to recede, who maintains humanity’s entire existence with the mist of his breath—that God, the Source of time itself, the Creator of all life, has forever been directing mine.”
“What God means for you to have, no one can take away from you. It’s already yours. Our mission, as God’s children, is to surrender to what he has ordained—and to freely let all else just pass us by.”
It is clear that her faith is important to her, that she is devoted to God and believes in his sovereignty and leading in her life.
The confusing part for me is the ‘sixth sense’ she says she has that led her to seek out a palm reader to understand her visions, and she doesn’t really talk about desiring others to be saved, especially with all the pain and drama surrounding her relationship with Miles Davis.
She also says this,
“The Spirit is ever beckoning us to heed that wisdom, to get on with what we’ve been put here to do. And whatever that calling looks like, however it may seemingly vary from one person or season to the next, at its core, it is simply this: cherish one another. That is all. That is our purpose in its entirety, to bestow God’s care onto others.”
This statement is partially true but it is borderline Therapeutic Moral Deism which is Christianity skewed into a belief that God just wants everyone to be nice to each other and we all just follow our hearts and do whatever feels right. Our purpose on earth is certainly not less than to bestow God’s care on others, but it is definitely more. We are here to glorify God. To love God and love others. But to cherish God’s truth and make disciples.
Miles Davis was a very troubled man who was addicted to drugs and womanizing. Cicely saw the same behavior in her own father yet ultimately, though she spent years avoiding him, she gave in to her attraction to Miles and subjected herself to years of pain and heartache before she eventually divorced him.
She claims this of their relationship:
“Relationships are knitted together by need. When two people connect, the purpose each is serving in the other’s life is what holds the union in place, keeps the ragged edges of its hemline sewn.”
She says Miles needed her to save him and she needed to be able to save him and care for him in ways she couldn’t do for her own father. I admire that she recognized this about herself and doesn’t necessarily claim it to be the right way to do a relationship, but she never voices how her faith plays into this.
She views herself as Davis’s savior instead of expressing a desire for him to know her true Savior, the only one who can really save him and change his heart. Maybe she shared the gospel with him and just doesn’t share that in her book. But it seems odd/sad to me that she would love him so much but not enough to try to save his tormented soul with the words of Life.
Plus a marriage founded on Christ is not knitted together by needs because Christ is the only thing that satisfies us. It is a mutual commitment to love and sacrifice for the other. Relationships held together by need are at their core selfish and are bound to fail.
I don’t want to review her memoir with judgment and I’ve probably already failed on that already. I don’t doubt that her faith in God is authentic and foundational to her life and career path, but I just wish I would have seen her share more of what drives her with others and especially in her relationship with Miles Davis.
Life Highlights
She shares about her parents’ upbringing in Nevis and their relationship in America. She is honest about her father’s failings and the ways her mother took care of her family.
She shares some of her defining moments as a black woman and ways she was taken advantage of.
She describes how she became pregnant at a young age and was forced to marry. She explains her struggles as a young mother and providing for her daughter, the choice to send her to boarding school and the ways that she is working to make up for the time she spent away from her daughter. It was crazy to me that she’s been able to keep her daughter’s life so private! I tried to google about her and couldn’t find anything beyond what she shares in this book.
She talks a lot about her roles as an actress. She turned down numerous roles because it was very important to her to only portray the best of black women.
She talks about Blaxploitation in the film industry that reinforces stereotypes or portrays black people, and in particular black women, in a negative light.
I admire that she stuck with her convictions on what she would play, even if it cost her jobs or popularity. She had a calling to raise up black women and remind the world about their fortitude, their resilience, the strength, and their humanity. And though I haven’t seen her body of work, it seems apparent that she more than accomplished that in her life.
“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.”
“Black women—our essence, our emotional intricacies, the indignities we carry in our bones—are the most deeply misunderstood human beings in history. Those who know nothing about us have had the audacity to try to introduce us to ourselves, in the unsteady strokes of caricature, on stages, in books, and through their distorted reflections of us… 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.”
Politics
The primary focus of this book is a memoir, yet she makes it clear that she intends to be a voice of strength in a particular political climate.
She was alive when MLK was assassinated. She experienced pay discrimination as a black woman. She has seen a lot.
I wanted to hear about her life and her own experience as a black woman in America during the time of the Civil Rights Movement. But she made some strong statements that seemed less about her own experience and more about promoting the mainstream narrative today about systemic racism and that white males are still trying to oppress black people— that our system was specifically designed for black oppression.
Even the fact that black is capitalized in her book and white is not is a strong statement. (Jemar Tisby did this as well in his book How to Fight Racism.) Whether that was Cicely’s decision or her co-author, I don’t know. I don’t deny there is still racism today and that there were practices in the past like redlining that were systematically racist, but I’ve done a lot of reading on this and I don’t buy into this entire narrative.
Here are some of Cicely’s quotes:
“The lie of Black inferiority was built right into America’s infrastructure, and to this day, that framework remains stubbornly intact.”
“It’s no wonder that many African Americans carry a lingering distrust of whites, even those we sincerely love and embrace. Given the horrors of our abuse in this nation, we are understandably wary. To ever heal this deep racial traumas—and seldom has it felt more urgent that we do—we must acknowledge that they indeed still exist, throbbing and tender beneath the surface, spilling over, like molten rage, into the streets… It is critical that we connect that centuries-long ugly history with, in our times now, a cop’s knee on George Floyd’s neck and bullets riddling Breonna Taylor’s body… even when the impulse arises to cringe and look away from a system predicated on Black oppression, a system that is still doing precisely what it was designed to do…”
I found it interesting that she brings up George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as the primary examples of racism in America. She even mentions that Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed while she slept. This is not true.
To me, she loses a little credibility when she has an entire lifetime of experiences to draw from yet she quotes these straight from the liberal script. It’s odd to me that everyone keeps holding up Floyd and Taylor as the primary and star examples of injustice and racism— if we’re looking at injustices done to innocent people by racist people, these examples are pretty far from that standard. I wish Cicely would have told us her own experiences and kept the political rhetoric— that is a lot of times based on incorrect or misleading reporting by the mainstream— out of her book.
(These books offer some good information and perspective on those topics: Fault Lines, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, and Blackout.)
“So precarious has our financial position been that too many of us have been forced to choose between economic security and safety for our children.”
“When you know your history, you know your value. You know the price that has been paid for you to be here. You recognize what those who came before you built and sacrificed for you to inhabit the space in which you dwell.”
I don’t know if this is necessarily a political statement, but I feel like I want to challenge the idea that our history is what tells us our value. I think she is referring to the black race in general and all that they went through and that that provides black people with an incredible value because of what their ancestors endured to carry on. It’s definitely something momentous to remember and reflect on. But our value and worth is found in the fact that people of all races were created in the very image of God. It’s the sacrifice of Jesus to rescue us from our sin that tells us how valuable we are to our Creator. Our value and worth is bestowed on us in unconditional and perfect love outside of humanity’s efforts that always fall short.
Yes, we need to remember history and acknowledge the sacrifices of those who have gone before us. Yes, we need to remember history so that we do not repeat the failures of those before us. But sometimes I feel like we’re emphasizing the past too much when it comes to our identities. We are not defined by history. History shapes us, to be sure, but if we cling too much to the past, I feel like it hinders progress and it keeps us from moving forward. It keeps us from being truly unified in the body of Christ. There’s more to be considered here, but those are my initial thoughts.
“During a plague and a racial revolution, to be black is to be rendered deaf by the uproar, knowing that if this virus doesn’t take you down, a blue knee on your neck or bullets in your back just might. When you leave your house, you’re never quite sure whether you’ll make it back alive, and that is no exaggeration.”
“In our current times, I see the outcry as an opportunity for us to unite in action, to move from demonstration to legislation, from picketing to building economic parity.”
These are bold statements. Do black people really feel like every time they leave their house they are at risk to be killed? I cannot answer this question, but the word ‘never’ feels like an exaggeration.
She also wants to build to economic parity. But she doesn’t expound on what that means or what parity looks like. She mentions the wealth gap between whites and blacks but white people’s median household income falls behind 14 other ethnicities. Redlining happened, but how do we realistically correct that? I plan to read Thomas Sowell’s book Discrimination and Disparities that I think will tell me a little bit more about this concept. But if Cicely is going to make such strong political statements, she should probably support them with something more concrete. Otherwise it’s just another attempt to saturate the market with the mainstream narrative. To me, it takes away from the strength of her book.
Just As I Am
She said this title comes from the hymn with the same name, however she never quotes the hymn or refers to it in the book. I wish she would have brought elements of that into her story and bolstered that concept.
I think the title fits the book so well because she does not try to share her story to showcase her perfections. She is honest about the struggles of herself and her loved ones, even as she worries others will use it to try to prove stereotypes of black people. But this is her story and she will tell her truth. Just as she is.
Cicely Tyson was a strong woman who a lived a long life. Her portrayals of noble black women inspired so many and she truly did leave a legacy.
“I want to go home knowing that I loved generously, even if imperfectly. I want to feel as if I embodied our humanity so fully that it made us laugh and weep, that it reminded us of our shared frailties. 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.”
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