Praise Song for the Day: In Praise of Cicely Tyson
Friday, January 29, 2021
What does yesterday’s loss of Cicely Tyson mean?
Throughout her seven decades-long career, which began in 1951, Cicely Tyson portrayed humanness in front of a backdrop of the brutality, joy, and triumph she created in every portrait she essayed. Couple that with the fact that Tyson was no ordinary actress. At a time in the Pre and Post Civil Rights era of America, Tyson gave us representations of the everydayness of African American women while upfronting their achievements, heroism, determination, brilliance, and humility.
Most importantly for me as an educator and actor, when I look at Cicely Tyson, I cannot help but see my own lineage. I see in her my grandmother Margaret Kirkpatrick and her sister Alberta Curry. Both women traveled up from Jackson, Mississippi to the Chicagoland Area to have a life that was different from where they came. I will not say better, because after all, they lived in a brutally segregated South as well as in an embittered and marginalizing North. In both instances, these incredibly strong, persistent, and resilient women fought for their voices and ownership of their own bodies while making a living and raising families.
In Cicely Tyson, what remains are a thousand images of women, even in the rise of the Vice President of the United States, who can wear their hair as they please, put on purple and yellow dresses to beat the band, and love whomever they want because it matters and affirms them.
Cicely Tyson is that mirrored image of an Every-Woman who survives and thrives in America in spite of what she is made to endure. This praise song is short, but my heart aches for her absence.
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Like a daily gratitude practice, Praise Song for the Day will be a way of appreciating what we know we know in a different and perhaps even profoundly deeper way. This column takes its name from a poem of the same title by Elizabeth Alexander called “Praise Song for the Day” delivered twelve years ago at the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. Clap back if you dig the piece.
