Cicely Tyson was my inspiration to become an actor.
When you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality. It’s not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we don’t have the resources to mask them. We’ve been stripped clean of social protocol.
And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.
We are after all observers of life. We are after all a conduit, a channeler of people. What you haven’t resolved in your life can absolutely become an obstacle in the work that you do.
There was an expectation of perfectionism without the knowledge of emotional well-being.
I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people – the way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve, and their silence – in a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom.
I could create my own family and I could create it intentionally with what I had learned.
For a whole generation of Black people we were the dream. We were their hope. We were the baton they were passing as they were sinking into the quicksand of racism, poverty, Jim Crow, segregation, injustice, family trauma, and dysfunction.
The TV and film business is saturated with people who think they’re writing something human when it’s really a gimmick.
Being with that group of women who so easily gave up their vanity and just went for it was a huge learning curve for me.
I am a dark-skinned woman. Culturally, there is a spoken and unspoken narrative rooted in Jim Crow. It tells us that dark-skinned women are simply not desirable. All the attributes that are attached to being a woman-desireable, vulnerable, needing to be rescued-don’t apply to us. In the past we’ve been used as chattel, fodder for inhumane experimentation, and it has evolved into invisibility.
I answered the call to adventure...
It is a powerful memory because it was the first time my spirit and heart were broken.
We were “po.” That’s a level lower than poor. I’ve heard some of my friends say, “We were poor, too, but I just didn’t know it until I got older.” We were poor and we knew it.
Luck is an elusive monster who chooses when to come out of its cave to strike and who will be its recipient. It’s a business of deprivation.
For every one actor who makes it to fame there are fifty thousand more who did exactly the same things, yet didn’t make it.
Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise.
They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.
Success pales in comparison to healing.
If I created a fable of my life, a fantasy, I see myself finally meeting God, gushing, crying, thanking the Almighty for the accolades, a fabulous husband, beautiful daughter, my journey from nothing to Hollywood, awards, travel. I can clearly see the Lord’s face, staring at me, taking me in and saying, ‘You never thanked me for creating you as YOU.
Courage is the cure.