You know how folks will ask, “Do you remember where you were the day Elvis died?” or, “when John Lennon was killed outside his apartment building in New York?” The list is long now, right? Famous people are popping off the planet every week. I was writing this book on the day Queen Elizabeth II checked out at age ninety-six.
I don’t like to think about where I was the day my friend Robin Williams left us. I loved Robin, like millions of other people. I was lucky enough to have him as a close friend. My mother adored him, too. She loved to laugh, and not many made that happen better than Robin.
Probably the first “Do you remember . . . ?” for me was the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I can still hear the bing-bong-bing sound from the school intercom system when I was in second grade. The nun teaching us stopped talking, and we all looked up at the intercom box, like God’s face would be up there with an announcement. The principal came on to say that school was canceled for the rest of the day. The president of the United States had been shot.
We all quietly put on our coats, filed out of school, and started walking home. It was the first time I had ever seen that many adults crying. The teachers were weeping. The custodian was bawling. Everywhere, on the sidewalks, people were sobbing. The police officer who helped us cross the street had tears streaming down his face. I didn’t understand what it all meant.
The year before, my mother, Clyde, and I went to see Kennedy when he was campaigning around New York City. It was one of the hottest days of the whole summer. Ma, Clyde, and I were on one side of a crowded parking lot, and he was standing on a small wooden platform way on the other side. He looked about a half inch tall to me.
Everything he was saying floated over my seven-year-old head. I was pretty focused on my cherry snow cone. However, it did sink in that the words, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” meant that we were all Americans and that we needed to take care of the country.
I was too young to know that John F. Kennedy was part of the hope for the future of black folks in America. He was the first president who publicly got behind the civil rights movement, especially in the South. Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested for peaceful protests and resistance, and Kennedy, while he was still campaigning, made the phone calls to get him released from jail and the charges dropped. Word got around, and 70 percent of black people nationwide voted Kennedy into office when the election came around.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room balcony in 1968, I was a teenager and old enough to understand exactly what it meant. Between Kennedy’s and King’s deaths, I had begun to see what was going down in other parts of the country. At first, it confused me. My New York neighborhood was so diverse that I didn’t know there were other places where you couldn’t mix it up with other races without being run out, beaten, or arrested. I didn’t know about segregation until I saw it on TV. I had no idea people couldn’t move about freely and go where they wanted to go. I was never kept out of a place or any event.
I’d watch the news and then ask my mother, “What are they doing? Why are they using fire hoses on those folks?”
She would say, “People are trying to vote, and some other people don’t want that to happen.”
“Do they do that here?” I asked her.
“No. We can all vote here.”
It wasn’t all love, peace, and understanding in New York. Civil rights uprisings were happening in Harlem and in Brooklyn, but those locations were still worlds away for me when I was a little kid. I was also never told that certain stores and places of business were known for making black people feel unwelcome. Ma wouldn’t bother going into them. Plenty of others were happy to have her business.
I always knew I was black. Well, actually, I think I was considered colored when I was little, and then I think I became a negro, and when I listened to the governor of Mississippi, I heard him refer to what the niggers were trying to do in attempting to go to school with white people. Now you must remember I lived and grew up in New York City, and for the life of me, I could not understand what the problem was! I went to school with light-skinned Spanish kids and dark-skinned Puerto Rican kids, kids who had Japanese moms and white dads, and straight-up white kids. We half-ass learned that black people were enslaved in the olden days. I would question my mother about white people trying to stop black people in the South from trying to vote and attempt to wrap my head around the silliness of such a thing. Because of where I grew up, I understood that there were people really here in the USA who felt I was not as good as, and could never be as good as or as smart as, someone who was white. As a little kid, I knew that simply was not true.
I do remember watching the news and seeing people walking and holding signs and sometimes singing. Suddenly there would be a huge stream of water knocking them down like bowling pins, and the police would rush in and hit people with their wooden batons, hitting little children as well as adults. And here I lived among whites and blacks and Asians and Latino folks and the cops who escorted me across the big streets when I walked to school, who were everywhere when I was growing up. I did notice when I was little that in movies like Gone with the Wind, or any of the movies I had access to on The Late Show or The Early Show or Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9, black people were always the dancing servant or were chasing watermelon, with the exception of Our Gang, where there was a kind of equality among the kids. And any black person I saw on TV spoke in some strange kind of English—again, no one I knew looked or sounded like that.
I’d ask my mother, “How come all the black people were servants?”
“This is a movie,” she’d answer. “It’s not historical. We were a lot of different things, but this is the way some people want to tell their stories.” She went on to explain that there are many stories we have not heard about the scientists, the doctors, the botanists. “Maybe when you grow up and find those stories, you can tell them.”
My mother, like many black women of her generation, didn’t want to get bogged down in the history of slavery. She especially didn’t want Clyde and me to feel we were limited by what had happened in the past. She did explain that that’s why people were marching and why it’s important to know how to keep moving forward because that is how things change. She was the same way about her own personal history. She believed in perseverance and moving forward, not standing still. I know I asked her if these things had ever happened to her, and in her very Emma way, this is what she said:
“Listen, there are going to be terrible things that happen in the world. And there’s nothing you can do about them. They are what they are. But your decision is going to have to be, ‘Do I allow those bad things to stunt my growth as a human being? Am I just going to sit down and die over it? Or am I going to try to figure out how to be better?’ Which one do you think is a waste of time?”
My mother didn’t have time to waste time. She had to figure out how to get by and get us raised. And she never answered the question!
She found her next job outside our apartment door. The projects often had a children’s playground outside, and somehow the city decided to demolish ours and build a nursery school. Well, all the mothers protested—picket signs, the whole kit and caboodle—without success. Once the school was built, there were jobs to be had, and my mother applied for one of them and got hired! And don’t for a minute think I didn’t tease her . . . at arm’s length!
In the ’60s, a new preschool program was launched called Head Start. Many people felt if we could get to little kids early enough, we could possibly give them a stronger start in life, which turns out to be true. Just ask the folks at Sesame Street. My mother was hired as an assistant to the nursery school teachers. It turns out she was a pretty good teacher. Once the powers that be got to know her, they saw how effectively she worked with those open little minds. They felt that she had the makings of a great teacher. So they funded her college education at Hunter College, then at New York University to get a degree in early education.
She took the opportunity given and eventually went all the way through to getting her master’s degree. Clyde and I were older then, and she counted on us to stay out of trouble while she went to classes.
I remember her riding her electric bicycle off to her college graduation, her gown billowing out behind her. I don’t know why she didn’t want Clyde and me there, but that was how she was. She never wanted to interrupt anybody else’s day.
One time my mother and I were talking, and she laughed and shook her head, saying, “When they were going to build that preschool, I was one of the people out there on the street protesting it because it took away your playground. And here it became my way to get an advanced education and career. You never know what’s possible.”
My mother had been raised to be a decent person, the same way Arlene had been raised, but she always felt that kids should be heard as individuals and not grouped together. She was more interested in a child figuring out who they were instead of how they fit in. My mom preferred the honesty and open-mindedness of children to the company of other adults who had their opinions of everything set in permanent cement.
She was a really great teacher. Even now, I’ll get notes and emails from people in their forties telling me that my mother was their Head Start teacher and that they’ll never forget her because of how she influenced them as kids.
Probably some of the parents will never forget her either. She had a way of teaching naturally that was very progressive for the time. She showed these little kids through demonstration how life goes.
Every year, during the last week of October, she would help the kids carve up some pumpkins. She taught them how to make a pumpkin look like a face, and they all had a great time. On Halloween, she’d put candles in the pumpkins and turn out the lights so the children could see the full effect.
Halloween would come and go, and Ma would leave the pumpkins all set up on the window ledges in the room.
A week would go by, and some of the parents would ask, “Are you going to throw those pumpkins away now?”
And Ma would only answer, “Not yet.”
The parents would laugh uncomfortably and leave.
A week later, someone would ask her, “Are you really going to leave those pumpkins there?”
And she would say, “Yes. I am.”
They’d shake their heads and leave.
Finally, near Thanksgiving someone would say to her, “We would all like for you to get rid of these pumpkins now.”
Ma would stop what she was doing and ask, “What’s making you all so uncomfortable here?”
The parent would answer, “They’re rotting. Why leave them up?”
“I have a reason. I’m trying to show the kids that this happens to everything in life: pumpkins, plants, goldfish, birds, animals, and also people. As the pumpkins have been aging, I explain that even human beings, like grandmas and grandpas, come to a place where they are done. But it doesn’t have to be scary. It’s not anything to be afraid of.”
The parents were taken aback. It was such a simple way to help children understand that this happens to all living things on this planet, and there is no reason to be afraid. You can be sad . . . but you need not be afraid. They may have thought her a little different, but they understood that she didn’t want life to be a scary mystery to her students.
In retrospect, maybe her experiences made her a better teacher. She wanted the children she helped to reach their potential and face their destinies with a positive and smart attitude.
My mother was always okay with knowing that people will leap to conclusions, often out of ignorance about the big picture. She was amazingly forgiving that way.
When I was younger, people would say to me, “Why do you sound so white?”
And I’d say, “What do you mean? I sound like me. I sound like my family. I speak like my mother.”
“Well,” they would say, “she doesn’t sound black.” My mother had great diction and was a woman who championed the idea of having limitless ways of speaking and a vast vocabulary, but if you spoke to her over the phone, you could not detect color in her voice.
I’d ask, “What do you mean, ‘she doesn’t sound black?’ What does it mean to sound black?”
One time I asked my mother, “Why do you think people keep saying to me that we don’t sound black?”
My mother shrugged and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“They act like the way I talk is wrong.”
“Ah, well, it’s their problem, not your problem. It’s not my problem. It’s their problem.”
This is the other thing people would say as if it were some kind of miracle: “Oh, you’re so articulate.”
I finally took a page out of Emma’s book. I’d ask them a question instead of giving a response: “What do you mean? More articulate than who?”
They would stumble around for an explanation. “Well, you don’t talk like . . . you know . . . you don’t sound like . . . like . . .”
I’d say, “Who? I don’t sound like who?”
Finally, they’d choke out, “Well, you don’t sound black.”
Without being an asshole, I’d ask them, “So, you’re basically telling me that you don’t know any black people? Is that what you’re saying?”
I’d tell my mother about this, and she’d respond, “Be forgiving. They don’t know any better.”
I’d say, “They act surprised that you took us to hear music, see shows, museums, the movies, all of it.”
And my mother would tell me, “You have to understand. They don’t know anybody like you. They can’t imagine that you know about art, music, world history . . . anything. This is not your problem. This is a look inside what’s lacking in their world, not yours. The only people that they know who are like you either work for them or are people they only know in passing. They aren’t having conversations with those people.”
I would still feel annoyed that I had to deal with it.
“You have to try to be a little more understanding of their ignorance. You can spend the whole time being pissed off at their inabilities or just help them understand how it all works and why they shouldn’t talk to you in that manner.” My mother felt that getting angry was not going to help. She was right, it turns out.
I’ve met non-white people today who don’t know much about being underrepresented in television and film. Who didn’t know how easy it was for people to look through you or refuse to allow you in a hospital or a swimming pool. As I grew up, things on many fronts began to change slowly. There were moments in the movies that stood out dramatically in the history of race relations at the time.
I once sat in the RKO movie theater between my mother and Clyde to watch In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. Sidney plays a cop out of Chicago who ends up in a tiny southern town. Rod Steiger plays the typical white sheriff wanting to know why Sidney is there, why he’s so well dressed, and why he has so much money in his wallet. Sidney explains that he is a cop from Chicago, and he has so much money because he earned it. When asked what he is called, he says, “They call me MR. TIBBS.” Now it turns out there has been a murder of a white man. The sheriff discovers everything he has said is true, and Sidney reluctantly agrees to help find the killer. So they go to see another white man to gather information, and when Sidney P. addresses the man, he is so taken aback that he slaps Sidney in the face. Sidney looks at him as if to say, “Are you crazy?” and Sidney slaps him back. Baby, the whole audience gasped and then fell silent. It was called the “slap heard ’round the world.”
Clyde and I both knew how much my mother loved and respected Sidney Poitier, especially after one particular bus ride in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
We must have gone uptown for an event or performance, and we were riding the bus home. My mother was sitting by the bus window, I was in the middle, and my brother was on the aisle. Mom was always very well dressed if we went out, very put together. My brother was looking sharp in his Robert Hall suit and hat. And I was wearing my Kate Greenaway dress from Macy’s with my little white lace-trimmed socks and patent leather Mary Janes.
We were riding along when suddenly I saw the bottom of my mother’s yellow satin shoes because she was kneeling on the seat and leaning out of the bus window.
She screamed, “Oh, my God! Sidney! Mr. Poitier!” She was waving wildly toward the sidewalk.
I had never seen my mother do something like this in my whole childhood so far. I looked at my brother. He was astonished. He looked at me. I was astonished. We both looked over at her because as quickly as that happened, she turned around, sat down on the seat, and adjusted her skirt like nothing at all had happened.
I looked back over at Clyde like, Did Ma just scream out of a bus window? He gave me an eye signal to mean, Do not say or do anything. You’ll get us in trouble.
Clyde and I might have talked about it more between us later, but we never brought it up to our mother.
Years later, at an awards show, I had the chance to meet Sidney Poitier. As we talked, I told him the story of the three of us on the bus and my mother yelling out the window to him and what a shock it was to two kids who had never seen their mom lose her composure. He found the story charming and told me to bring her over to meet him if she was ever at an event.
About a year later, I was hosting a benefit evening that Sidney Poitier was kind enough to attend. My mother was with me.
I brought my mother over to meet him, saying, “Sidney, I’d like to introduce my mother. Ma, this is Sidney Poitier.”
My mother was the queen of elegance, extending her hand and saying, “So very honored to meet you, Mr. Poitier.”
Sidney said, “I love Whoopi. She’s such a great—Wait . . . Have we met?”
My mother said, “Oh, no, we haven’t. I certainly would have remembered.”
“Oh. You look so very familiar.”
“No,” Ma said. “I would have remembered meeting you.”
Sidney started to talk again and then said, “Wait. Were you on a city bus?”
My mother looked over at me, and I knew I had fucked up.
She stayed dignified and said, “Oh, I see. Caryn has told you that story. No. We have never met, but it’s been a pleasure to meet you now, Mr. Poitier. Will you please excuse me?”
She headed to the ladies’ room, and I said to Sidney, “I think I really messed up telling you that story.”
“Well, it was a wonderful story. I hope she didn’t think I was rude.”
“No. No. It was my fault. I think I embarrassed her. I’m going to go find out.”
Sidney wanted me to bring her back, but I knew that wouldn’t happen.
When I went into the ladies’ room, she wouldn’t look at me or speak to me. She simply said, “I’d like to go now.”
I said, “Yes, okay, I need to say good night.”
And without looking at me, she said, “I’ll wait in the car.”
It was a week before she would speak to me again. When she finally did, she asked me, “Why would you do that? You really embarrassed me in front of Mr. Poitier.”
“But, Ma. He loved the story and he loved meeting you.”
“Caryn, you must be careful and think through things before you tell stories about other people.”
I apologized, but she still had nothing else to say to me for another three weeks.
It was hard on me, too. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting my mother.
Years later, she admitted that she might have overreacted in the moment. She explained that it was still early in my career, things were happening for me, and she didn’t want anyone to see her as being a laughingstock.
I tried to assure her that Sidney thought she was charming and no one was laughing at her.
She said, “It doesn’t matter. That’s how I saw Mr. Poitier as seeing me.”
I could understand that. I promised to do better.
As much as my mother loved the movies, I think it meant a lot for her to see Sidney Poitier become one of the first black actors to have leading roles and become the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964. Barriers were starting to crumble, and Mr. Poitier was moving us into the future.
In the fall of 1966, when I was ten, I tuned in for the premiere of a new outer-space show on TV. I liked everything sci-fi, so I was sure to watch Star Trek. I jumped off the couch and ran to get Ma when I saw that a black actress, Nichelle Nichols, was playing the part of Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer on the Enterprise. I completely lost my mind over it. I had never seen any black people in any science fiction show, not even in the background walking down the street or driving by. She was the first black person I had seen in a show about the future. (The next black actress to play a professional woman didn’t happen again until 1968 when Diahann Carroll starred in Julia.)
I had the chance to be in the company of Nichelle Nichols a few times during my career. She was a gutsy and impressive advocate for black people to be in positions of authority in entertainment. I had to tell her, “To me, as a little kid, you let me know that black people would be around in the future. We’d have a place there, too.”
When Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original Star Trek, was in the process of creating Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late 1980s, I gave him a call. I told him I’d like to play a part in the new series and asked if he could see if there was a role for me.
He asked me why, and I said it matters to me that black people be seen in the future. I told him that you couldn’t find black people in science fiction of the past before Star Trek. He couldn’t believe that, so I challenged him to take a look for himself.
Two days later, he called my house and said, “I need you to come in and meet with me.”
I said, “Okay,” and I went.
Gene told me, “First of all, I’m going to build you a character for this new series. I’ve got her in my mind. But it turns out, you’re right. I couldn’t find black people in science fiction. I had no idea.”
He went on to explain that on the original Star Trek, he had created a world in which everyone was living. And he said, “I guess I didn’t understand so well that what I was doing had never been done before.”
This is why my mother told me to be forgiving of what people don’t know and help them understand instead of walking away mad. The thing is, when you’re looking at something like a television show and you always see someone who looks like you, then you don’t notice what else is missing. You only notice when what’s always missing is you.
In 2022, the world lost both Sidney Poitier and Nichelle Nichols. I’m going to guess that neither of them would want to be remembered for the day they died unless how they lived is included. A whole lot of change happened because of them before that day. Attention must be paid.