Part 1

It wasn’t a dress. It was a burlap sack meant for potatoes.

That’s what I wore while the other children went to school. I didn’t have shoes. The soil in South Carolina is full of sharp stubble, and by noon, my feet would be bleeding into the dirt. I was five years old.

I wasn’t picking flowers. I was picking cotton.

The sun didn’t care that I was a child. The rows of cotton stretched on forever, white and blinding. If I stopped moving, the woman watching me would raise her hand. I learned very quickly that crying didn’t make the work stop. It just made you thirsty, and we weren’t allowed water until the bucket was full.

I remember looking at my hands. They were so small. They were already covered in calluses and cuts.

People see me now, in the gowns and the diamonds, and they think I was born this way. They think I have an attitude because I’m a diva.

I don’t have an attitude. I have a memory.

There’s a hunger that stays with you even when you’re full. It’s not in your stomach. It’s in your chest. It’s the feeling of standing on a porch, holding a small bag, watching your mother look at a man who says he doesn’t want you.

She didn’t fight for me. She didn’t scream. She just looked at my skin, which was too light for her world, and she made a choice.

I’m eighty years old now, and I can still feel the texture of that potato sack scratching my skin.

There is something I never told the newspapers when I became famous. Something about the day my mother died.

I don’t think it was an accident.

Part 2

New York City was not the promised land. It was just a colder, louder version of the hell I had left behind in South Carolina. The only difference was that the cotton fields were replaced by concrete, and the silence of the country was replaced by the screaming metal of the subway trains.

I arrived in Harlem with nothing but the address of a woman named Mamie Kitt. I was told she was my aunt. Sometimes, late at night, when the whiskey was heavy on her breath, she would look at me with a strange, watery gaze and I would wonder if she was actually my mother. The woman who had given me away. The woman who had watched me being dragged off to the cotton fields and said nothing. But we didn’t ask questions in Mamie’s house. Questions earned you a backhand across the mouth.

The abuse in New York was different from the abuse in the South. In the South, it was about work. You were beaten because you were slow, because you were hungry, because you existed. In Mamie’s house, the cruelty felt more personal. It was as if my face—that light, ambiguous skin that belonged to neither world—was a constant reminder of a sin she wanted to forget.

She sent me to work in a factory sewing military uniforms. I was fifteen years old. The needle on the machine moved so fast it was a blur of silver violence. If you weren’t careful, it would go right through your finger. I saw it happen to a girl next to me once. She didn’t scream. She just looked at the blood blooming on the khaki fabric like a red flower. I learned to keep my head down, keep my foot on the pedal, and disappear into the rhythm of the machine.

But the factory wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the nights.

One evening, Mamie’s boyfriend looked at me. It was the same look I had seen from the men in South Carolina. A look that made my skin crawl. When I told Mamie, she didn’t protect me. She blamed me. She told me I was “fast,” that I was “wicked,” just like my mother. She threw me out.

I stood on the sidewalk in Harlem. It was November. The wind cut through my thin coat like a knife. I had seventeen cents in my pocket.

That was the night I learned that a city of eight million people is the loneliest place on earth.

I went to the subway. It cost a nickel to get on. If you were smart, and if you were careful, you could ride the trains all night. The A train went all the way from Harlem to Far Rockaway and back. It took hours. It was warm. It was moving.

For three weeks, the subway was my bedroom.

I learned the rhythm of the track. I learned which cars were empty and which ones had conductors who would kick you out. I slept sitting up, my arms wrapped around my chest, clutching my small bag. I watched people get on and off—couples holding hands, men coming home from late shifts, drunk teenagers laughing. They all had somewhere to go. They all had a key in their pocket that opened a door.

I looked at the black glass of the window, seeing my own reflection staring back. Hollow eyes. High cheekbones that looked like they were carving their way out of my face.

*Who are you?* I would ask the reflection. *You are nobody’s child. You are trash. You are the dirt on the floor that people step over.*

But there was a voice inside me—a very small, very quiet voice—that disagreed. It was the voice that had kept me alive in the cotton fields. It said: *Not yet. We are not done yet.*

One morning, starved and delirious, I wandered into a building because I heard music. It was a rhythmic, pounding sound. Like a heartbeat. It was the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.

I didn’t have money for classes. I didn’t have dance shoes. I was wearing broken street shoes and a dress that smelled of the subway. I stood in the doorway, watching the dancers. They were beautiful. Strong. They moved with a power I had never seen before. They weren’t slumped over like the people in the factory. They took up space. They commanded the air around them.

A woman saw me. She didn’t chase me away. She asked me why I was staring.

“I can do that,” I said. The lie tasted like copper in my mouth. I couldn’t do that. I had never danced a day in my life. But I was starving, and desperation makes you a liar.

She told me to prove it.

I took off my shoes. The floor was cold wood. The drummer started a beat.

I didn’t know steps. I didn’t know technique. But I knew pain. I knew what it felt like to pick cotton until your fingers bled. I knew what it felt like to be rejected by your father. I knew what it felt like to sleep on a train while the world slept in beds.

I let it all out. I threw my body around that room like a weapon. I stomped the floor as if I was trying to break it. I spun until the room dissolved. I wasn’t dancing; I was exorcising a demon.

When I stopped, panting, sweat stinging my eyes, the room was silent.

Katherine Dunham looked at me. She didn’t ask about my family. She didn’t ask where I lived. She just handed me a leotard.

“Come back tomorrow,” she said.

That was the beginning. But salvation is never a straight line.

We toured Europe. For the first time, I saw a world where the color of my skin didn’t determine the quality of my life. In Paris, I wasn’t “colored.” I wasn’t a “bastard.” I was *l’artiste*. I was Eartha.

I stood on stages in London, Paris, Istanbul. I sang in seven languages because I wanted to be understood by everyone, everywhere. I wanted to prove that the girl from the cotton fields could speak the languages of kings.

But the trauma followed me. It traveled in my suitcase.

I remember a night in Paris. I was twenty years old. I had just performed for a sold-out crowd. Men were lining up outside the stage door with flowers, diamonds, invitations to dinners on yachts. I was the “toast of Paris.”

I went back to my hotel room. It was a suite, filled with silk and velvet. I sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing my stage makeup. The adoration of the crowd was still ringing in my ears. *Bravo! Magnifique!*

And I felt completely, utterly hollow.

I looked at the expensive food on the room service tray—fruits, cheeses, wine—and I couldn’t eat. My stomach clenched. I had a flashback, so vivid it made me gasp. I was back in the field. The sun was burning my neck. My stomach was cramping from hunger, and the overseer was drinking cool water from a ladle, letting it spill onto the ground while I watched.

I grabbed a pillow and screamed into it until my throat was raw.

I realized then that fame doesn’t cure you. Money doesn’t cure you. You can cover a scar with diamonds, but the skin underneath is still knotted.

I created a character to survive. “Eartha Kitt.” She was a creature of pure confidence. She growled. She purred. She was a sex symbol who didn’t need anyone. When I sang “I Want to Be Evil,” or “Santa Baby,” I was playing a role. The role of a woman who takes what she wants.

It was the exact opposite of Eartha Mae, the girl who had everything taken from her.

Men fell in love with the character. Orson Welles called me “the most exciting woman in the world.” He cast me as Helen of Troy. He looked at me with eyes full of desire.

But whenever a man got too close, whenever he tried to touch the real me—the scared, broken child inside—I pushed him away. I struck first. I left before they could leave me. I couldn’t survive being given away again.

By the mid-1960s, I was back in America. I was a star. I was Catwoman. I was on television. I had a mansion in Beverly Hills. I had a daughter, Kitt, the only person I had ever truly allowed myself to love, because she was part of me.

But America was burning.

The Civil Rights movement was in the streets. Dogs were attacking children in Birmingham. And in Vietnam, poor boys—black and white—were dying in a jungle for a war nobody understood.

I tried to keep my head down. I was an entertainer. My job was to make people smile, to make them forget.

But you can’t forget where you come from. I looked at the news, and I didn’t see politics. I saw the boys from my neighborhood in South Carolina. I saw the poverty I had clawed my way out of. I saw the government spending billions on bombs while children in American cities were eating out of garbage cans.

Then came the invitation.

January 1968. A heavy, cream-colored envelope with the seal of the President of the United States.

*The White House.*

Lady Bird Johnson was hosting a “Women’s Luncheon.” The topic was “crime in the streets.” They wanted famous, influential women to come and discuss why the youth of America were rebelling.

My publicist was thrilled. “This is it, Eartha,” he said. “The White House. You’ve made it.”

I looked at the invitation. I felt a cold knot in my stomach. They wanted me to come and sit in a pretty room and drink tea and talk about “juvenile delinquency.” They wanted the Catwoman. They wanted the purr.

They didn’t know they were inviting the girl from the cotton fields.

The morning of the luncheon, I dressed carefully. I didn’t wear a gown. I wore a simple, professional dress. I wasn’t going there to entertain. I was going there to listen.

The limousine ride to the White House was surreal. We passed the monuments, the white marble glowing in the winter sun. I thought about my mother. I thought about the potato sack. I thought about the nights on the subway. *How did I get here?*

We were ushered into the private dining room. It was yellow. Bright, sunny, cheerful yellow. There were about fifty women there. Wives of senators, wealthy donors, socialites. Their hair was sprayed into helmets of perfection. Their pearls were real.

Lady Bird Johnson sat at the head table. She looked kind, but tired.

The lunch began. The servers moved silently, placing china plates in front of us. The food was exquisite. I looked at the plate. I thought about the boys in Vietnam eating rations in the mud.

The conversation started. It was polite. It was safe.

One woman stood up. She was the wife of a governor. She started talking about how “delinquency” was caused by a lack of discipline. She talked about beautifying the highways with flowers so that people would feel better.

Another woman spoke about adding more lights to the streets.

They were talking about flowers. They were talking about streetlights.

My heart started to hammer against my ribs. It was a physical pain. *Don’t do it, Eartha,* I told myself. *Just sit here. Eat your salad. Smile. Don’t ruin this.*

But the voices in the room were so disconnected from reality. They were talking about “crime” as if it was a disease that fell from the sky, not something born of hunger and despair.

I raised my hand.

The room went quiet. The famous Eartha Kitt wanted to speak. They probably expected a joke. Or a song.

I stood up. My knees were shaking, but my voice—that voice I had trained for twenty years—was steady.

“You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” I said. I looked directly at the First Lady.

The air in the room seemed to vanish. The clinking of silverware stopped.

“No wonder the kids rebel and take pot,” I continued. The words were tumbling out now, fueled by forty years of suppressed rage. “They say, ‘I’m going to get drafted and go to Vietnam and die, so what’s the use of being a good boy? What’s the use of getting a diploma?’”

I wasn’t shouting. I was vibrating.

“The children of America are not rebelling for no reason,” I said. “They are not hippies. They are not rebels without a cause. They are terrified. And they are angry. And they have a right to be.”

I turned to the women in the room. “You sit here and talk about planting flowers. You are mothers. How can you not feel this? How can you not feel the pain of the mothers who are losing their sons?”

I looked back at Lady Bird Johnson. Her face had gone pale. Her eyes were filling with tears.

“I have lived in the gutters,” I told her. “I know what it is to be hungry. I know what it is to be hopeless. You cannot fix this with flowers.”

I sat down.

The silence that followed was louder than any applause I had ever heard. It was a heavy, suffocating silence.

Lady Bird Johnson’s voice trembled when she replied. “Because I have not lived the background that you have, I cannot speak as passionately as you,” she said.

The luncheon ended abruptly. The women wouldn’t look at me. They gathered their purses and their furs and hurried out, as if I had a contagious disease.

I walked out of the White House. The wind hit my face. I knew, with a terrible certainty, that I had just set a match to my life.

I was right.

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened in the quiet spaces.

The phone stopped ringing.

My agent called me a week later. “Eartha,” he said, his voice low. “The tour is canceled.”

“Which dates?” I asked.

“All of them.”

“What about the TV special?”

“Gone.”

“The nightclub in Miami?”

“They don’t want you.”

“Why?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“They’re saying you made the First Lady cry,” he said. “They’re saying you’re un-American.”

Un-American. Me. The girl who had pulled herself out of the dirt of South Carolina. The girl who had represented this country on stages all over the world.

I later found out that President Johnson had personally called the media networks. The CIA was ordered to produce a report on me. They tapped my phone. They followed my car. They interviewed people from my past, looking for dirt.

The dossier they compiled was ridiculous. They called me a “sadistic nymphomaniac.” They said I had a “vile tongue.” They couldn’t find any crimes, so they attacked my character. They attacked my womanhood.

I was blacklisted.

In the span of a month, I went from being a superstar to being untouchable. I couldn’t get a job in the United States. Not in a club, not in a theater, not on a TV show.

I was forty-one years old. I had a daughter to raise. And my own country had just evicted me.

I remember sitting in my house in Beverly Hills. The silence was deafening. I had worked so hard. I had danced until my feet bled. I had sung until my voice was raw. I had built a fortress around myself to keep the hurt out.

And with a few sentences of truth, I had torn it all down.

Fear crept in. The old fear. The fear of the potato sack. *Will I be hungry again? Will I be homeless again?*

I looked at my daughter, Kitt. She was playing on the floor, innocent and happy. She didn’t know her mother was a pariah.

I picked her up and held her tight. I realized then that I had a choice. I could apologize. I could beg for forgiveness. I could say I was wrong, that the war was great, that the flowers were beautiful. If I did that, maybe they would let me back in.

But I thought about Eartha Mae. I thought about the little girl standing in the cotton field. If I apologized for speaking the truth, I would be betraying her. I would be betraying every child who was currently suffering the way I had suffered.

“We are leaving,” I whispered to my daughter.

“Where are we going, Mama?”

“Somewhere they will let us sing.”

I packed our bags. We went to Europe.

It was an exile. There is no other word for it. I was a refugee from the country of my birth.

For ten years, I wandered. I performed in London, in Paris, in Stockholm. The audiences there still loved me. They didn’t care about the CIA or the White House. But my heart was broken. I missed my home. I missed the soil that had rejected me. It is a strange thing, to love a place that hates you.

I worked. I worked harder than ever. I refused to let them see me break. When I was on stage, I was fiercer, sharper, more dangerous. The “Catwoman” grew claws.

But at night, in the hotel rooms of Europe, the sadness would catch up with me.

I started writing. I wrote about my life. I wrote about the abuse. I wrote about the search for identity. I realized that my whole life had been a search for a father who wasn’t there and a mother who gave me away.

I was looking for validation in applause. I was looking for love in the eyes of strangers.

One night in London, I looked in the mirror. I saw the lines forming around my eyes. I wasn’t the young starlet anymore. I was a woman who had survived.

*You are Eartha,* I told the reflection. *You don’t need them to want you. You have yourself.*

It was a slow healing. A quiet revolution.

In 1978, the political winds in America changed. The blacklist began to crumble. A promoter in New York took a risk and invited me back to Broadway for a musical called *Timbuktu!*.

I was terrified. Would they remember me? Would they boo me?

Opening night. New York City. The same city where I had slept on the subway.

I stepped onto the stage. The lights hit me. I wore a costume of gold and feathers. I stood tall, my chin lifted, my eyes scanning the darkness of the theater.

For a second, there was silence. The same silence that had filled the White House dining room.

And then, the sound began.

It started as a rumble and turned into a roar. The audience stood up. They were cheering. They were screaming my name. They weren’t booing. They were welcoming me home.

I stood there, the tough, untouchable Eartha Kitt, and I felt tears running down my face. I didn’t wipe them away.

I had survived the cotton fields. I had survived the abuse. I had survived the starvation. I had survived the President of the United States trying to destroy me.

I opened my mouth to sing, and the purr was still there. But it was deeper now. It had the weight of ten years of exile in it. It had the texture of gravel and velvet.

I sang for the little girl in the potato sack. I sang for the teenager on the subway. I sang for the woman who spoke truth to power and paid the price.

I was back.

But the journey wasn’t over. The final battle wasn’t with the CIA or the critics. It was with the past.

Years later, when I was an old woman, I went back to South Carolina. I went back to the place where I was born.

I wanted to find out who my father was. I needed to know. The question had haunted me for seventy years. *Who made me? Why did he leave me?*

My daughter hired a researcher. We dug through old census records. We found birth certificates. We found the truth that had been hidden in whispers.

My father was the son of the white plantation owner where my mother had worked.

It was the oldest, ugliest story in the South. Power and violation.

I stared at the name on the paper. I thought about the man who had looked at my light skin and refused to raise me. I thought about the shame my mother must have carried.

I realized that my very existence was a crime in their eyes. I was living proof of something they wanted to hide. That’s why I was given away. That’s why I was abused. I was a secret that wouldn’t keep quiet.

I sat on the porch of a house near where I was born. The air smelled the same—pine needles and humid earth. The crickets were singing.

I closed my eyes. I let myself imagine Anna Mae. Not the mother who gave me away, but the girl she was before the world broke her. The sixteen-year-old girl who was scared and alone.

“I forgive you,” I whispered to the wind.

I didn’t know if I meant it. Forgiveness is a tricky thing. It doesn’t fix the past. It doesn’t heal the scars on your back. But it puts down the heavy bag you’ve been carrying.

I looked at my hands. They were old hands now. Spotted with age, veins prominent. But they were strong hands. Hands that had built a life out of nothing.

I wasn’t the child in the potato sack anymore. I was Eartha Kitt.

And for the first time in my life, that was enough.

I lived for another decade after that. I voiced villains in Disney movies. I won awards. I became a legend. People called me a diva, a queen, an icon.

But when the end came, on Christmas Day in 2008, I wasn’t thinking about the awards. I wasn’t thinking about Orson Welles or the White House or the applause.

I was at my home in Connecticut. My daughter was there. My grandchildren were there. The house was warm. There was food in the kitchen.

I looked out the window at the snow falling on the trees. It was beautiful and silent.

I remembered the subway. The cold metal. The fear.

I looked at my daughter holding my hand. Her grip was tight. She wasn’t going to let go. She wasn’t going to give me away.

I had broken the cycle.

The little girl who nobody wanted had created a family who refused to let her go.

I closed my eyes, and for the first time in eighty-one years, the hunger in my chest went quiet.

*I am loved,* I thought. *I am finally loved.*

And then, the silence took me.

— End of Story —