The Times Magazine 37funeral, Cicely Tyson was not then an overt
political campaigner. She decided not to visit
the protests in the Deep South after Angelou
warned her she’d be killed.
Rather, her moment of political awakening
came at a press conference in Philadelphia for
Sounder. Having watched the film, a white
journalist stood up and said that although
he never considered himself prejudiced, he
was amazed to find that the son of the black
sharecropper calls his father Daddy, “because
that’s what my son calls me”. Tyson writes,
“I don’t know what stunned me more, that
the man believed what he did or he had the
audacity to say it aloud.” It was a profound
shock to find white America did not see its
black fellow citizens as fully human.
Tyson vowed to change this through her
work and in 1974 starred in the TV drama The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which
she plays a 100-year-old woman, born in
slavery, reflecting on her life. On being freed
from the plantation, she dreams of travelling
north to Ohio, yet never manages to escape
the poverty of the Jim Crow-era South. Ending
in a famous scene of Miss Pittman tremulously
stepping forward to protest about segregation
by drinking from a whites-only water fountain,
it was watched by 50 million Americans.
As research, Tyson visited retirement
homes, meeting women whose mothers
were slaves. “One lady told me that she had
a wonderful life, working for a family that had
two children,” says Tyson. “She was seven
years old, and she was taking care of these
two babies! But to her, after how her own
mother lived, that was a wonderful life.”
It was a serious performance that won her
two Emmys. But the Seventies saw the birth
of blaxploitation, an exciting new wave of
African-American cinema. Yet Tyson saw
its hyperviolent, sexualised stories involving
drugs and guns as “committing a narrative
assassination of ourselves” and turned down
lucrative roles if they undermined the dignity
of black lives.
“I never worked for money,” she says. “I
didn’t care what they offered me. Because
I felt there were enough actresses who would
take those jobs and would be happy doing
them. That was not my mission. I wanted
to make the world know that yes, we have
prostitutes and thieves, like every other
race of people. But I did not want the world
to say, ‘This is what black people are all
about.’ I want it to know we’re doctors,
lawyers, all types.
“I was offered an unmarried woman with
five children, each by a different man, and
I passed on it. The president of 20th Century
Fox said, ‘Why did you do that? You’d get
nominated for awards.’ I realised later the
writer was doing her maid’s life, making a
living out of it.”Instead, when Arthur Haley’s black family
saga Roots was brought to TV in 1977, Tyson
played the mother of Kunta Kinte, an enslaved
African brought to America. Roots was
watched by half the US population and
for many white people was the first time
they’d confronted the shame and oppression
upon which their nation was built.
Yet when I ask Cicely Tyson about Black
Lives Matter, she gets angry. “What do they
mean, ‘Black lives matter’?” she cries. “Nobody
has been able to answer that question. Black.
Lives. All lives matter.” Perhaps, after almost
a century of personal struggle, she feels
no need of slogans. But she is delighted
that while she was paid a pittance for Sounder
and Miss Pittman, actresses like Viola Davis
are now better rewarded. Although, she
writes, black stars still find it harder, given
the paucity of roles, to build up a body of
work like Meryl Streep’s.
Tyson was at the zenith of her fame
when Miles Davis was found in a gutter by a
dealer, in a deep drug coma. When he gained
consciousness, still desperately ill with his
kidneys failing, he called Cicely begging for her
help in getting clean. Her every instinct, she
says, told her to hang up. Instead, she moved
into Davis’s apartment, took him to her Chinese
herbalist, made him eat healthily – that she
has eaten little but raw organic vegetables
since the Seventies perhaps explains herlongevity – and, after six months, saw Davis
raise his trumpet for the first time in years.
In gratitude he begged her constantly to
marry him, but she kept saying no. (Unusually
among her generation, she wasn’t really the
marrying kind: “I’m too independent.”) But
finally Davis wore her down and in 1981 they
held their wedding at the home of their friend
Bill Cosby. (Tyson says she never saw any
evidence of the many sexual assaults for
which he was jailed.) For Miles Davis, she
was “the Trusted One”, his healer, the person
he truly needed. But the healthier he became,
the more he slipped back into old ways.
His violence towards his previous
two wives is well documented, but Tyson
says although he flew into jealous rages- believing once she was having an affair with
Marlon Brando – or paranoid drug episodes,
he hit her “only once”. She’d accidentally
dropped a knife just before a dinner party
but he believed she’d thrown it down in
temper and punched her in the chest. She
even tolerated his one-night stands until it was
clear he was having sex in their marital bed
with a woman who lived in their apartment
building while she was away filming. Tyson
confronted this neighbour and shoved her to
the ground. But of Davis she writes, “How can
you be angry with a man so broken, so intent
on destroying himself.”
Finally, he asked to meet in a restaurant
where he announced he wanted to stay
married but no longer have sex. For years
she’d heard rumours he was having a gay
affair with his long-standing hairdresser and
had contracted HIV. She reflects now he was
trying to protect her from infection, but a
sexless marriage was untenable. Just as her
mother kept a stash of escape money, Tyson
always maintained her own apartment. So she
walked out of the restaurant and never saw
Davis again. He died of respiratory failure
two years later, in 1991. Did she wonder if she
could have done more to save him? “That was
beyond me. It’s an act of God, my dear,” she
says. “And I always recognise when I have
done the best I can.”
Men have come and gone, but Cicely
Tyson has maintained her career, one that
has enjoyed a late bloom with parts in movies
such as The Help and in the TV hit How to
Get Away with Murder, playing Viola Davis’s
mother. Does she wonder at the changes since
her Harlem girlhood, with a black woman,
Kamala Harris, now vice-president? “It’s long
overdue,” she says. “It has taken so long for
people to recognise the talent in women,
simply because of the colour of our skin.” n
‘SAVING MILES WAS BEYOND ME. AND I ALWAYS
RECOGNISE WHEN I HAVE DONE THE BEST I CAN’
Speaking at Aretha Franklin’s funeral in Detroit, 2018GETTY IMAGES