By Hilton Als
I was lying in bed—otherwise known as my office—just now, listening to WBLS, when one of the commentators announced that Ruby Dee had died, at the age of ninety-one. I had such a rush of feelings about this, because Dee had been present during a much cherished time in my life. A time that, when I look back at it, resembles a long stream filled with all sorts of details and a kind of light that I shall never forget, nor would want to.
It was the late nineteen-seventies; I was not out of my teens. In those days, Dee and her husband, the actor, writer, and director Ossie Davis, were friends with my mentor, the theatre director and poet Owen Dodson. That fabled couple—the Lunt and Fontanne of Harlem—had known Owen since the nineteen-forties, when he was making a big name for himself, at Howard University, as a dramatist, teacher, and director who, for instance, took his all-black student company to Norway to do Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck.”
Meanwhile, Dee and Davis, who married in 1948, and whose marriage lasted until Davis’s death, in 2005, had become, together and separately, stars in a world that didn’t exactly welcome actors of color or handle them with anything approaching sensitivity. Dee was born in Ohio, in 1922; she moved with her family to Harlem while still a young girl, and it was there that she became immersed in theatre, her great love. With the support of black-run theatre companies formed by the likes of Frank Silvera, Dee was able to work and hone her craft. Being in the majority always gives you confidence, and for many years her world was the black stage and, eventually, black film.
By 1950, Ruby Dee was appearing in “Negro” movies, like “The Jackie Robinson Story,” in which she played the wife. Dee was small, with large, liquid eyes that looked as though they were being lit from within. It was not difficult to imagine what the Georgia-born Davis saw in his co-star when they appeared together on Broadway in “Jeb,” in 1946: not just a woman who could match his will to succeed in non-stereotypical roles but an artist who would not be defined solely as a performer. After the couple married—Dee had divorced her previous husband, a blues singer, some years before—they wrote a number of plays and memoirs, including one in which they disclosed the fact that they had an open marriage, a decision that they later changed their minds about. (They were artists, after all.) They were also, along with their friend James Baldwin, forceful members of the civil-rights movement—indefatigable because they never lost the ability to dream.
Dreams are energizing; they feed the imagination. Dee and Davis shared many things, including two of the most beautiful voices we’ve ever heard in film or onstage. Davis’s was round and deep; it vibrated you the way it seemed to vibrate his chest. Dee on the other hand always sounded, especially if she was laughing, as though she had just finished crying—and the laughter was her relief over being sad. She took in great draughts of air as laughter, tears, and the joy of being rippled through her small body.
In 1961, Dee reprised her role as Ruth Younger in the film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” It’s a performance that I can barely take; everything Dee does is so on the surface—so thin-skinned and real—that it never fails to remind me of my mother. Who were these women who worked in other people’s kitchens, but who looked so much more elegant than their employers, especially when they put on their white gloves and gave a Sunday air to the day’s proceedings in the company of their children, who were their everything?
I could barely look at Dee when I would see her at Owen’s, in that penthouse on West Fifty-first Street, where his parties were legion. There, one saw one beauty after another: Josephine Premice, Derek Walcott, Mary Mon Toy—a whole colored world of mutual support. And sometimes, there, in that dream of Manhattan sophistication, I would stare at Dee in my mind while trying not to stare at her, recalling how the performances of hers that I loved best had less to do with her public self and her righteous indomitability than with the wizardry she could spin as an artist, when she could use all the things she was.
In addition to Ruth, there was Dee’s hugely imaginative work as Thief in the 1963 film version of Jean Genet’s “The Balcony,” and as Julia Augustine in Joseph Papp’s 1974 television version of Alice Childress’s “Wedding Band.” Indeed, it was Dee’s portrayal of the lovesick Augustine, struggling to make it with a white lover in a segregated world, that inspired me to stage the play this past winter at Harvard under the aegis of the American Repertory Theatre. While the unsurpassable Khandi Alexander owned the role in our production, Dee was our impetus—profound and true and, again, so stripped bare in the part that you wondered how she was able to get through it. But that’s the secret, and the gift, of a performer who is perfectly aware of her technique and how to use it—especially when it comes to exploring and showing human weakness and weirdness.
The magic of Dee’s work in those roles was such that she became a different person altogether—I did not understand how, but she did—beautifully suited and a little flirtatious and always serious about what someone else had to say. Despite my pathetic attempts not to stare at the legend as she made her way to the door, I couldn’t look away when she would bend down to kiss Owen goodnight in that blaze of glamour, calling her old friend “darling,” for what felt like a long time, before she took the candle that was herself into the starry night.
Above: Ruby Dee, January 15, 1966. Photograph courtesy FremantleMedia Ltd/REX USA.
