We’ll Miss Eartha Kitt (1927 – 2008)
December 26, 2008 No Comments
The original PussyCat Doll has left us, y’all.
Eartha.
The name itself is a testament to the fleshly, the mother Earth.
Oh, she was something.
She was one of the kind: the wry smile, the triangular jawbone, the sensual purr.
Eartha Kitt was the Prince to Lena Horne’s Michael Jackson.
Individuality was her most outstanding trait. Eartha was different.
The singer-actress was born on a cotton farm in the Carolinas in 1927. Because the harvest was good that year, her father named her “Eartha.” Frail and poor, Kitt was of mixed racial parentage. She wasn’t discovered until she moved to Harlem and began performing at the urgings of her aunt.
Eartha, who died Christmas Day at the ripe age of 83, was a top performer of the 1950s. But another war broke out, this time one that proved unpopular at home. Eartha denounced the war in the company of the first lady Lady Bird Johnson and was blackballed in the industry.
“You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” she told the group of about 50 women. “They rebel in the street. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”
The comments were incendiary. National media went crazy with the story, branding her everything to unpatriotic to a Communist.
She had alot to lose, yet she risked it all to say what she felt. (Imagine if Beyonce came out with a strong statement against the war in Iraq at the height of its involvement.)
Everything she did she killed it. SHe was the embodiment of Catwoman (with apologies to Halle Berry).
A person with every reason to be all about race was never about it. Born to a mixed race family, Kitt was a keen supporter of black rights.
“It’s time that people of colour start to break into the area of being recognised for their work – not because of their colour,” she told a Washington Post online forum in 2005.
“It does encourage others of colour that we’re getting there, that we’re progressing,” she said of recent Oscar wins by black actors Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman.
“But,” Kitt said, “I don’t carry myself as a black person, but as a woman that belongs to everybody.”
We’ll miss Eartha Kitt.
