R.I.P. Miss Cicely Tyson – Remembering a life richly lived and a groundbreaking role that moved us all

(January 29, 2021).  No one ever views a person’s death as being a timely one, whether they lived to be nine or ninety.  

People often go “before their time” or it wasn’t this or that person’s “time to go” when they actually do leave us.

Yet doesn’t it just seem like Cicely Tyson’s life was, in essence, a complete one – and literally made so just days before she breathed her last on January 28, 2021?

After all, it was just two days before her passing on Thursday that her 400-page memoir, Just As I Am, was published, with seven stories detailing everything from her relationship and breakup with jazz legend Miles Davis, to how iconic filmmaker Tyler Perry once doubled and tripled her paychecks for the films she made with him once he learned how little she was paid for what were arguably her two most important roles – 1972’s Sounder and 1974’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

Sounder was the motion picture that earned Tyson a 1973 Best Actress Oscar nomination (she lost to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret), and Miss Jane Pittman was a made-for-TV film that gave her an Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy win (as well as an Actress of the Year – Special award that year).

Adding to this perception of life’s completeness for Tyson were the other recent events she lived just long enough to see happen.

Just a week before her memoir was published, the nation inaugurated its first female Vice President – Kamala Harris – an African-American and South Asian American woman who was also the first of those ethnicities to occupy the office.  

At the inauguration, another Black woman – Amanda Gorman, who, at 22, is 74 years Tyson’s junior – wowed Americans across the land as she recited with the same beauty and grace that recalled a young Cicely Tyson her breathtaking poem “The Hill We Climb,” while in the process becoming the youngest person to ever recite a poem at a U.S. presidential inaugural event.

How timely was it then that Tyson – the blaxploitation-shunning actress whose career-long mission was to bring honor, beauty and dignity to the stage and screen with her well-chosen and even better delivered roles – would end her earthly existence only after those poignant moments in history took place?  

The Harlem-born actress lived 96 years, one month and nine days – long enough to see more change in her lifetime than even her most famous fictional character, Miss Jane Pittman, had in 110 years.

Of the dozens, if not hundreds, of TV and movie parts Ms. Tyson played during her award-winning seven decades in showbiz, it is that stellar, career-shifting role the blog pays tribute to today.

Coming three years before Alex Haley’s groundbreaking TV miniseries Roots, Miss Pittman was the role that transfixed a nation for two hours on network TV back when the three main networks were all we had, yet they still were capable of delivering quality programming the likes of which they seemingly haven’t since.  

It was the age-honored role of a Black woman whose 110 years defied the odds, and whose age Ms. Tyson approached year after year with the same strength and tenacity until, at 96, time and nature took their tolls. 

It was Miss Jane Pittman who entered our collective hearts and unsuspecting TV households in January 1974, and who poignantly shed light on the true plight of Black Americans in the Deep South, particularly in the Bayou country where the fictional Pittman story took place.  

Tyson’s portrayal of the lead character, whose life spanned from the last dozen or so years of slavery to the height of the civil rights movement in 1962, was nothing short of mesmerizing.  Who among us that were too young to know any better at the time didn’t think her character was real?

I certainly thought so – at age seven – when Autobiography first aired.  It was – and still is – the role for which I’ll remember Cicely Tyson the most.  When watching it, I thought Miss Jane Pittman was an actual historical figure whose uncanny ability to recall major events like the end of slavery, two world wars, the Great Depression, the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the beginning of the civil rights movement, along with the impacts of institutionalized racism on her and those around her, was our unique window into how those things actually happened. 

As a recaller of history, she was our Forrest Gump, except differently challenged, and much more believable – much, much more so.

In a fictional world, the two lives – Miss Pittman’s and Ms. Tyson’s – overlapped, one beginning in 1852 and not ending until 1962; the other beginning in 1924 and, sadly, ending Thursday.

Having spanned 169 years from American slavery to the present, one of the women (fictionally) got to witness the American civil war while the other had the actual horror of witnessing the Jan. 6, 2021, white supremacists-led insurrection – the largest attack on the U.S. Capitol since, well, the early 19th century.

Coming during the 1970s in a post-Civil Rights era when TV had begun to more thoughtfully and thoroughly explore issues of race in America, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman packed nine decades of oppression and Jim Crow segregation, as recalled in flashbacks by the main character to an erstwhile journalist, into two hours of riveting television.

We watched with welled-up eyes (mine actually went far beyond welling) as Miss Pittman retold stories of her loves and her losses to an interested and sympathetic white male interviewer who persistently followed her around, wanting to document the extraordinary life story of this ex-slave woman who’d endured more in her lifetime than most people could write in a dozen history books.

Perhaps CBS Television, the network on which Autobiography first aired, was best suited for such a TV moment.  After all it had already pushed the envelope by giving us the politically incorrect and ignorantly racist – but somehow still lovable – family patriarch Archie Bunker in All In the Family.  

And CBS aired Miss Jane Pittman just three weeks before it premiered the groundbreaking sitcom Good Times, itself a once-removed spinoff of All In the Family (via Maude) that was the first TV series to feature a two-parent Black household as its regular cast. True to the times, however, it centered on the plight of a poor Black family trying to overcome racism and poverty in inner-city Chicago.  It, too, featured a strong Black female lead character – Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans – who was at once loved and respected for traits not that different from those of Miss Pittman. 

Unlike those sitcoms, however, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was a more serious take on the long journey of Blacks from our first taste of freedom in the 1860s to our yearning to be completely free from the shackles of racism and bigotry a century later.  

And perhaps no actress was better suited for the role than Cicely Tyson, who put in the performance of a lifetime while seemingly pouring her whole self into a character no one watching would soon forget.  The fact that the actress – already nearing 50 years of age when the movie aired – was able to portray a woman whose years spanned from her early 20s all the way up to 110 spoke to Tyson’s timeless beauty and amazing acting ability – who could forget that cracking, raspy, high-pitched voice she employed for the centenarian as she recalled her favorite oak tree or told of the one love of her life, Joe?

And who could forget the movie’s final moment that shook us all to the core?

As the 110-year-old, heavily wrinkled (thanks to an amazing make-up and prosthesis job) Miss Pittman made her final, most powerful stand against racism in Autobiography’s waning moments, there couldn’t have been a dry eye among those watching, regardless of race.  With sheer defiance and fearless dignity, Miss Jane disobeyed the laws of the segregated south by approaching a “Whites Only” water fountain and shakily taking a sip.

Her trembling wasn’t owed to any trepidation on her part as white law enforcement officers and fellow Blacks looked on – both groups seemingly in awe of her age and her boldness as she slowly made her way to the fountain.  Instead, it was from eleven decades of surviving being treated as less than human, with nature having taken its toll on her 110-year-old body – a body that still managed to carry her to the day when she could enjoy with dignity a drink of water from a proper public fountain.

Therein lies the parallel and the distinction between Miss Jane Pittman and the actress who so convincingly played her.

Like Pittman, Cicely Tyson lived long enough to see much change in America.  Her 96 years had spanned the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean War, John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, Jr., a man on the moon, the end of the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Cold War, the Gulf War, 9/11, two long wars in the Middle East, Hurricane Katrina, Donald Trump, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a worldwide pandemic.  

But she also lived to see the nation’s first Black president in Barack Obama and, later, the first Black and female vice president in Ms. Kamala Harris, who, like Tyson, is a member of the “divine nine” Black college sororities and fraternities (Tyson is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.).

One can easily assume that, given the dignified and history-conscious roles she chose throughout her nearly 70-year career, few milestones likely pleased Tyson more than Obama’s and Harris’ accomplishments.  Yet few people likely understood better than she that, even with that progress, so much more work was still needed.  

With Cicely Tyson having bore witness to all of that history and more, we can debate whether it was “too soon” for Ms. Tyson to leave us.  But few would argue that hers wasn’t a life richly lived.

R.I.P. Cicely Tyson (December 19, 1924 – January 28, 2021).  You brought to Hollywood an elegance, a beauty, a grace, and a proud blackness, the likes of which we may never see again.

DJRob

PS.  As this is a music blog, I’ll note that – aside from Tyson’s connection to her late ex-husband and jazz great Miles Davis – the iconic actress was a Grammy Award away from reaching EGOT status, as she had won Emmy, Oscar (honorary) and Tony awards for acting throughout her illustrious career. 

DJRob is a freelance blogger from Chicago who covers R&B, hip-hop, pop and rock genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Twitter at @djrobblog.

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