(ThySistas.com) Few performers arrive on screen already understood, but she is one of them. A single expression carries what other actors need a page of dialogue to establish. Across sitcoms and dramas and animated features alike, audiences learned to read her instantly as the one in charge of everybody’s business, the figure who would deliver the hard truth nobody else would say. For close to 40 years, that face on your television has very often belonged to Jenifer.
She mothered Tupac. Whitney Houston got that same fierce fuss in another film. Taraji came up under her wing in one story, a whole household under it in the next. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood handed her a title that stuck like honey: the Mother of Black Hollywood. Say it out loud and it feels like a hug. It is meant as one.
But sit with me a minute, because there is a splinter tucked inside that sweetness.
When a performer gets that good at cradling everyone else, a strange thing starts to happen. The public begins to see only the cradle. We forget the arms belong to a person carrying private hungers, private grief, and gifts nobody else could copy. Lewis was a Broadway force long before she turned into anybody’s screen mama. Carnegie Hall knew that voice. She racked up more than 200 concerts across a map running several continents deep, a touring life most folks would need two careers to match. Her memoir did not flinch. Bipolar disorder and sex addiction both get named straight out. So does the quiet toll of forever playing the strong one. Webster University, her alma mater, later handed her an honorary doctorate. None of that fits neatly on an apron.
Here is where the tale stops being only about the actress and starts being about a lot of us.
Ask around any family, any congregation, any office break room, and you will find her everywhere. Not the celebrity. The pattern. So many Black women spend their lives cast as the one who holds it down. We are the auntie with the guest room always made up. The church mother who counts the offering and counsels the crying. The coworker who trains every new hire and remembers each birthday. We get so skilled at nurturing that folks quietly decide nurturing is the whole of who we are. The praise sounds lovely. Underneath it sits a quiet demotion.
Sistas know this arithmetic without anyone teaching it. You give and give until giving becomes your name. People stop asking what you dream about, because they assume your dream is simply them. That flattening does not always come from cruelty. Often it arrives dressed as a compliment. So strong. Never complains. Takes care of everybody. Each of those little medals can be a cage with a bow on it.
Which is exactly why watching the diva from Kinloch, Missouri right now feels like scripture.
At 69, Jenifer is not fading into anybody’s rocking chair. This September finds her deep in the next act. Netflix has brought A Different World back with a sequel series, and there she is again as Professor Davenport for a fresh crowd of Hillman students. Production wrapped in Atlanta earlier this year, the first looks and trailer are already out, and the series premieres September 24. Coming too is a fearless one-woman show carrying her life story to the stage with comedy, honesty and hard-won peace braided into a single evening. This is not a farewell tour. The building continues.
On the wider world, her voice stays loud. When this year’s Met Gala rolled out its glitter with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as lead sponsors and honorary chairs, Lewis questioned why celebrities showed up amid economic and political controversies surrounding Bezos. Taraji P. Henson had separately raised similar concerns before the gala. Neither woman seemed interested in clapping politely while working people were hurting.
Barbados offered a quieter picture of the same woman. Late this summer the actress sat with young people during the island’s emancipation season celebrations and gave them something that lands harder the older you get. Chase what actually makes you smile, came the message. Do not measure your worth by applause or a paycheck. And the line that ought to hang on every weary mirror: each morning she asks herself how she means to take care of herself first, and how she can help someone else.
Read that again, sis. The Mother of an entire industry, the woman who spent decades tending everybody within reach, now opens the day by tending her own heart without forgetting what she can offer somebody else. Two years of stillness came first, of rest and reckoning, before that clarity arrived. Nobody granted permission. She took it.
This is the gift hiding inside her entire arc, and Sistas, it belongs to us.
Being somebody’s rock is beautiful. Feeding people, guiding them, showing up when everything is falling apart, that work is holy and I would never wave it off. The problem is never the caretaking itself. The problem comes when the caretaking swallows the caretaker until nothing is left over for her, until the person vanishes behind the service performed.
Black women were never meant to be reduced to what we hand out. We are not the place setting on somebody else’s table. We are the guest of honor too, with appetites and ambitions and afternoons that answer to nobody. One of us can run the whole church supper and still deserve a plate carried over, still deserve someone to ask, with no favor attached, how she is really doing.
So take the lesson from a queen teaching it out loud in her seventh decade. Sistas, put your own name somewhere on your list, and never at the very bottom in pencil. The role of everybody’s mama can be a joy you choose. It should never be the only room you are allowed to live in. The most loving thing many of us could do this season is exactly what this queen is modeling. Rest. Create something that is only yours. Speak up when the world turns ugly. Then wake up tomorrow and ask that same holy question.
How do I take care of me?
Answer it like your one wild and precious life depends on it. Because, sis, it always did.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.