Cicely Tyson
“The book is beautiful from beginning to end. . . . She was a pioneer in her field of acting, modeling, and portraying her people in a positive light.”
Cicely Tyson is a big, beautiful book. The colors are bold, the art is bright and sometimes three dimensional, with bits of fabric as embellishments. The book has 28 named unrhyming poems, explaining how a girl from Harlem, her parents from a Caribbean island, could grow up to be a movie star. Cicely was the first girl in her family of five. She was a bright light in the family, born “in the 1920s,” the name of the first poem.
“Take care of that baby,” the stranger said. She’s going to make you very proud one day. Cicely’s momma held onto those words. Tucked them in her heart for safekeeping. Her baby girl was destined to impact the world.”
Some of the poems end with lyrics from a church song, including “This Little Light of Mine” and “Down by the River.”
At the West Indian outdoor market in New York City, her mom gossiped with the other mothers. They thought that Cicely “was so shy, surely she would not grow up to do big, big things. But Cicely knew she wasn’t shy. She was quiet.”
One Sunday in church Cicely sang a song as a young girl, and everybody loved it. The poems are loosely ordered to follow a timeline, but sometimes they veer off track a bit. From singing in church we go to the prejudices against blacks in the 1930s to the 1950s. Then, in the next poem, Cicely is nine years old (which would be 1933), the year her parents separated. Then her mom takes her to a movie theater for the first time when she’s 11, She takes piano lessons when she is 12, playing the organ by 15. She learns how to do her hair and her friends’ hair. The poem “Purpose” is a good one, as Cicely and her mom think of all the things she is good at, and what she could do with her life. A stranger suggests she should be a model, and Cicely tries that out. Then a movie director meets her in a department store and asks her to be in a movie.
Cicley moved out of her mom’s house since her mother didn’t approve of her becoming an actress. But Cicely preformed two years later in Harlem and her mother came and raved about it. The next poem, “1960s–1980s” is another poem about being Black. “Black is Motown records spinning and spinning, rejoicing and mourning, mourning and rejoicing.”
Then Cicely is in a TV show where she wears her hair natural instead of like the white women. She had a barber cut it short, short, short. She only accepted roles that “showed the dignity and humanity of Black people. She refused to portray negative Black characters.”
Cicely won lots of awards (shown on the Timeline in the back of the book). One double-page spread shows Obama tying on her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The book is beautiful from beginning to end, but most children don’t have a clue who Cicely Tyson was, and some parents won’t, either. She was a pioneer in her field of acting, modeling, and portraying her people in a positive light. Every school classroom would benefit from having a copy on its bookshelf.