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Ruby Dee: Solving Problems Like a Gentle Tigress"You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, 'Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there - school, marriage, babies, career.' The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness." What did the actress / producer / activist / wife / mom / writer mean when she said that? 
My personal interpretation? Plunge into the water and figure out later what to do about the jellyfish. Born in 1924 in Cleveland, her family moved to New York City where Ruby grew up. She was a stage actress in high school and then at Hunter College, and made her acting debut at the age of 19 in South Pacific, and her Broadway debut at 22 in Philip Yordan's play Anna Lucasta, during which she and actor Ossie Davis fell in love. She never waited for what she wanted - she went out and got it. And what fueled her energy; her dreams-that-were-to-come-true? Perhaps it was fearlessness. Perhaps it was selflessness. Ms. Dee's career and legacy are so extraordinary that she cut a clear but always loving path through the haze of bigotry. Despite personal challenges, including breast cancer, and more recently the death of her husband, she continues to help the world understand grace in action. Like a tigress, only gentle. And she didn't leave us wondering what to do, once we saw this bigotry more clearly - she instructed us, through her films, writings, and personal choices, how to turn fear into understanding. So I guess I'd have to add teacher (patient, loving teacher) to her list of careers. "The greatest gift is not being afraid to question," she once said. continued below |
Among hundreds of films, Ruby worked in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and Do the Right Thing (1988). She wrote the book My One Good Nerve in 1998. And in With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together in 2000, she and her soul-mate wrote a brilliant and complete description of the 20th century African-American journey - an experience they call The Struggle. She was a Goodwill Ambassador to Nigeria, and she helped people understand the true Malcolm X - not the media Malcolm X. 
A true national treasure, Dee won the National Medal of Arts, along with husband Ossie Davis, in 1995. The two are in the NAACP Hall of Fame and the Theatre Hall of Fame. This petite lady appealed to the intelligent side of humans. And when I picture her in my mind, I see her smiling. Compassion and confidence fueled by a desire to see a loving world, from a global view right down to the love between a man and a woman. And everything in between. "Paradise is to be the ultimate instrument, fulfilling God's desperate intent that we love each other." Ruby said that. And she makes her life choices based on that ideal. 
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