Living Monologues | Cecily for Cinda
Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash
This monologue is pure fiction and part of my ongoing Living Monologues Series that explores who we are beneath our words.
She wasn’t “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.” Just the one. Whatever wind was blowing toward dance. If there was a day when my mother didn’t dance, I can’t remember it. She was always lighting up her home studio or somebody’s stage, whether the sun was high or the moon. She was always headed to the next audition with my brother and me in tow. And she sang and danced her way into the heart of whoever was doing the hiring that day. After a while they just called for her to come take the part, no audition required.
She auditioned anyway.
Because she loved it. She said she loved “making them know that they knew that they knew” that she was the best woman for the job. Man, could she move. I mean… y’all know.
She never found it reductive when directors would spend more time discussing her body than anything else. She said her body included her brain and her guts and they all had work to do… together. A holy trinity that empowered a dance that could save a life or at least offer an hour or so of relief. She was a beautiful body. She said that a lot.
She made friends with receptionists who let CJ and me sit behind their desks with chips or lollipops or whatever would keep us entertained. I remember she taught us bits of her routine while we waited for the bus to take us wherever we were going. She, in her bodysuit and Daisy Dukes with two little kids giggling and two-stepping or pirouetting. It was easy to mistake the three of us for siblings. She held youth in the palm of her hand, not for vanity’s sake but for joy’s. She taught us how to too. She gave us a whole other kind of freedom that a lot of people didn’t think was possible back then. That was our mother.
People tried calling her a lot of different names.
Lu. Lula. Lucy. Lucinda. Some tried to call her a diva. But no-counts who don’t want to come up any higher will always find fault with the impeccable.
No. She may have been born Lucinda Louise Blackmon but Cinda was her chosen name and boy, was she marvelous. Cinda sparkled. She was gorgeous with her button nose and frizzy black hair that reached high and wide, feeling for its symmetry and conversing with the sun. Her skin was the color of coffee. Her eyes were brown and bright. They glowed like no one else’s when the sun caught them at the right angle. I’m serious. People would stop my mama on the street to tell her her eyes were beautiful. Remember, CJ? And she always wore a flower in her hair. It didn’t matter what kind of flower. It didn’t matter where she found them either. She once picked a lily right off of a funeral wreath one sunny Saturday. She tucked it behind her ear and kept on moving down the line.
Cinda had two rules in her house. Don’t wake her before ten and you better not even think about touching any of the instruments lining the far left wall of her sprawling sitting room unless you came to play. Music and every single thing that made it were to be respected, including the human body. She didn’t abide us kids drinking soda or running around in the cold without proper coats. We were barely ever sick and could hold a note good and long enough to be well-paid backup singers for as long as we wanted.
She was the first woman in the neighborhood to get a divorce, to ask for it herself, and to wear her skirts a little shorter and walk a little taller once she got it. And nothing anyone said to her (or behind her back) could ever make her feel terribly about it.
My mother said to me once, “You know how to keep the good in and the bad out?”
I was only eleven then but she’d made me whip smart, living the way she did. “You build fences, not walls.” I smiled up at her. I’d heard her say it enough times to her dance students and her voice students and her good friends or the delivery boy into whose hand she always found some extra cash to slip.
Cinda, my mother, was the true illustration of a free spirit. Nothing could close her off from the world or other people. Nothing could hem her in. Nothing could tie her down.
We went from Atlanta to Houston to Los Angeles. Each move bringing Cinda Blackmon another thrill, another challenge as a quadruple threat singer, dancer, actress, and poet. She wrote, directed, and starred in her own production of Molly’s Diamond Ring for a 4-month stint in Atlanta. When the show was over our house was filled with roses and lilies and violets and chrysanthemums and gardenias for a month straight. Would-be suitors and agents and producers doing the kind of courting she loved. Fed her flower-in-the-hair habit too.
You all know her accomplishments. You saw her on Broadway and TV. You loved her one-woman plays and her variety show guest appearances. You saw her get her first, second, and third Tonys. You heard her albums. You experienced the universe she was. You knew what she was capable of when nothing could muster the courage to stand in her way.
Some of you know what Cinda was capable of when obstacles threatened to back her into a corner. She was no punk. She was nobody’s pushover. She was nobody’s fool.
But CJ and I know what she was capable of growing and igniting in us as her children. She lived a simple yet powerful revolution. I didn’t know what I was witnessing then, as a child. But I do now. In simply choosing to exist as freely and unapologetically as she did, our mother was thumbing her nose at empty traditions. She was deflating the notion that women must box and bury their aspirations because they birthed babies. She did not give up her life for us. She taught us how to thrive in the world she was creating. And that world was big and heavy and light and ready for us to make our own worlds inside of it.
We weren’t a burden to her. We were precious gems entrusted to her, she’d always say. And she was going to do her best to teach us how to stay shiny no matter where we found ourselves. She taught us by staying shiny herself. She didn’t give up the world for us, she was taking the world by storm before we ever came into it. And once we did, she took us with her on the adventure she was creating stage by stage, shimmy by shimmy, song by song.
We lacked little and we respected everything worthy of respect. That’s the legacy of Cinda Blackmon. Every single thing she ever put her hand to flourished because she chose a life of unequivocal exploration, excellence, and fun.
And what I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, if there’s a celestial Target in heaven, she’s up there organizing a Tony-worthy musical flash mob right now. She was and will always be a revolution. All by herself.