For Uzo Aduba, shaping an identity as a daughter of Nigerian immigrants was fuel for a creative fire. The Emmy-award winning star of “Orange is the New Black” is Heifer International’s ambassador to Africa as well as an ambassador for Stand Up to Cancer. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss growing up in a mostly white suburb, the importance of keeping her native language alive, and how her role as unofficial family historian has shaped her career. Her memoir is “The Road is Good: How a Mother’s Strength Became a Daughter’s Purpose.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] When the actress Uzo Aduba was in college, she realized she’d lost some of her facility with Igbo. It was the language she’d grown up speaking at home. But as in a lot of immigrant families, over time, more English crept into those family conversations until Aduba realized she needed to use it or lose it. So she decided she’d call her mom every single day for a bit of language practice. The habit lasted many years and the lessons went far beyond grammar and vocabulary. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Little by little, Aduba’s mother shared her life story with her curious daughter, who would go on to win Emmy Awards for her roles as Suzanne Crazy Eyes. Warren in Orange is the New Black and Shirley Chisholm in Mrs. America. Perhaps not coincidentally, Aduba believes the foundation of good acting is good listening. And while her memoir covers her career, it’s clear that her development as an artist can’t be separated from her development as a proud Nigerian-American daughter who spent a lifetime paying attention to those around her in service of both code switching and creativity. Uzo Aduba is Heifer International’s ambassador to Africa and an ambassador for Stand Up to Cancer. Her book is called “The Road is Good: How a Mother’s Strength Became a Daughter’s Purpose.” Uzo, welcome to Think.
Uzo Aduba [00:01:18] Thank you so much for having me here.
Krys Boyd [00:01:21] You write that like many black women in America, you came into your power. And I love that phrase in a world of white male gatekeepers. This was something your mother couldn’t protect you from, but she could prepare you for it. She was a fearless resister of the ways that you and your siblings were mistreated based on the color of your skin.
Uzo Aduba [00:01:42] Absolutely. She you know, my mother grew up in Nigeria and did not know that the degree, frankly, of how black people were treated here in America. She obviously knew that discrimination and Jim Crow and racial bias were happening in America. But she said herself, she said when she moved here, I didn’t I didn’t know there was anything wrong with being black. So I moved to America. And upon making that discovery, I think it became incredibly important for her to ensure that her children never felt that they were any less than that idea of there being something wrong with us because of the color of our skin was something that we ever adopted as a belief.
Krys Boyd [00:02:37] It’s hard to get your head around what that must have felt like coming from a place where skin color didn’t matter in the way that it seems to matter in the United States.
Uzo Aduba [00:02:47] Definitely. You know, she would go on to say when she would say that statement, she would say, you know, the poorest person in my street is black. The richest person is black. My doctor is black, my teacher is black. The janitor is black. The president is black. You can do anything. I have never had this idea that because I’m black, there’s something that I cannot do or have incapable of doing at the same time in the same degree as someone else. And that foundational understanding of truth about who we are as a people, as black people, was something that she wanted to make sure that her children knew the tradition she was interested in maintaining as far as who we are as a race and also in terms of our heritage. I think that was also true for her because she didn’t want us to consider the fact that we’re Nigerian to be thought of as being any less than from any Western ideals or culture that apply to beauty standard. You know, my mother looked at my gap and me wanting to close it-
Krys Boyd [00:04:10] The gap in your teeth?
Uzo Aduba [00:04:11] Yes, the gap in my front teeth. You know, she saw that as something that was a nonproof. The idea that having perfectly straight teeth is the standard, that that’s the beauty standard, that that’s the sophistication standard. I wanted braces so badly. And she would say, don’t you see you have the Nonyem Aduba gap. That’s her maiden name. And she would say to me, she said, All of my family have done that for me. I don’t have gap. She said, Don’t you know that a gap is a sign of ima mma in Nigeria? But a gap is a sign of beauty. And I would say, well, we live in Boston, Massachusetts. I don’t know what you all know, but I’m so thankful for it because her putting those ideas inside of me, and my gap is fine, that my nose is fine that the richness of my skin is fine, that all the coarsey texture of my hair is fine. All of it is worthy, and as valuable as anything else is what makes me walk line long in my spine today.
Krys Boyd [00:05:33] Your mom’s father was unusual in many ways for a Nigerian father of his own time in that he assumed his daughters deserved as much education as the sons he sacrificed to make sure they had it. May do with a bicycle ride instead of buying a car like his neighbors?
Uzo Aduba [00:05:51] Absolutely. He was my father. My grandfather was a pretty progressive man. You know, you think about it. We’re talking about the 1950s 60s and education for girls, which in Nigeria was not a common practice, higher education going to college. That wasn’t even, I don’t think, a practice necessarily that was the norm in the Western world. And my grandfather didn’t subscribe to that. He didn’t think that that was the way that things should how they should operate. He would say and my mother would repeat any one of my daughters who has the desire and the ability to go to college. And she’d go. And they should pursue whatever it is that they want to pursue. And if it hadn’t been for my grandfather giving that I don’t even know if permission is the right word. But really normalizing that idea that that was something that his daughters could attain. My mother would have not gone on to go to college at UNN Nsukka, the University in Nigeria. She wouldn’t have come to the United States and then gotten two master’s degrees. And from that, be able to pour into me my own limitless dreaming. And that comes from my grandfather.
Krys Boyd [00:07:20] When your mother talked about the American dream, she would always say you people, meaning you and your siblings. It was about the family she was raising.
Uzo Aduba [00:07:29] Yeah. She called us all you people. You get the general lumping and you have five kids. She says you people. My dream, my American dream is for you people to live your dream. And what she meant by that was to seize every opportunity that we could, that the dream for her wasn’t necessarily that we had to hold to do one thing in particular, it’s that this country provides so many different opportunities, it would be for us to find what that opportunity and dream was for ourselves and to live it fully. That would have been success to her. And by God’s grace to achieve.
Krys Boyd [00:08:22] She was officially a social worker for the state of Massachusetts, but she did all these side gigs to make ends meet and help pay for extracurricular activities, of which there were many. You were good at a lot of things and you did a lot of things as a kid.
Uzo Aduba [00:08:37] Oh my gosh, we did everything. I didn’t know that part of also that American dream would be able to do all the things that don’t exist in Nigeria, like ice skating. You know, I did ice skating, and here we are, my little Nigerian family, where in this cold ice skating rink in the Natick Skating Club, freezing, underdressed and dying but loving it, She was so excited that there were these sort of exposures for her children, music, sports, all of it. She was so happy that she could provide the opportunity for us to try these different things and fall in love with different ways of expressing. And I think it served her. I think it made her incredibly happy. And it certainly being in some of these things where a lot of times we were the only in some of these activities, it gave the opportunity for me to dream outside of what perhaps society might say is possible for us.
Krys Boyd [00:09:52] Yeah. So there you are growing up in this loving Nigerian family in the very white city of Medfield, Massachusetts. You spoke Igbo at home along with kind of a colonially influenced British English. Everybody in your family was top notch at code switching. What forms did that take?
Uzo Aduba [00:10:12] That takes the form of, oh man, that takes the form of leaving your traditional clothes at home and wearing your suits and ties rather than your wrappa or dalia, as it’s called, and instead wearing a three piece suit, two piece suit to work. That take the form of going to lunch at school in the third grade and everybody is eating their peanut butter and jelly and you pull out your jollof rice with stock fish and everybody’s asking you what that. And its jollof rice and it’s delicious. Its those experiences of flipping back and forth and sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. Into different world. It. Yeah.
Krys Boyd [00:11:25] Looking back, was there anything about that early code switching that primed you to be an actor?
Uzo Aduba [00:11:37] I think everything in an actor’s life, every experience that they have in part of what they do in some way as an artist. I think code switching definitely has enabled me to consider things from multiple perspectives. Being that I lived in and then immersed in so many different worlds and cultures. So I can see points of view from a more rounded P.O.V., perhaps. I think a benefit would be that I have a maybe a flexibility, a dexterity and a different perspective to bring to some of the characters that I play.
Krys Boyd [00:12:39] Is there also something about code switching that makes you hyper vigilant?
Uzo Aduba [00:12:45] Hyper vigilant. Yeah. I would say I would say so. What do you mean by that?
Krys Boyd [00:12:54] Sort of always gauging the reaction to whatever you have to say in a way that other people might not.
Uzo Aduba [00:13:02] Yes, I would say yes. There is an awareness. Absolutely. You know, there’s absolutely an awareness of how things are being received responded to, whether what you’re saying is connecting and in the way in which this specific group or individual might understand it.
Krys Boyd [00:13:24] Uzo how did your parents ensure you stayed connected to your Nigerian heritage beyond whatever they could teach you at home?
Uzo Aduba [00:13:32] They made sure that we attended the Igbo meeting that happened in Boston. We would leave our little white suburb in Medfield and drive in to Boston and go to School of Mass Art, where they would have Igbo meeting. It would be full of Nigerians all over the state, perhaps even a farther. We would have classes where the kids would be, where we would learn different things, whether that’s the Pledge of Allegiance, the Nigerian national anthem. We would learn the language, we would learn the songs, and the parents would be in another separate room discussing all the goings on back home and what we can do, doing fundraisers, events and such. Sometimes we’d be learning dances. I think what my parents were doing, both of us for themselves and for us, was to keep us plugged in to the community and to familiarize ourselves with other children who are Nigerian in the area, so that when we go to weddings, which we would, we’d see some of these kids and we became friends with and would come up with and grow up with and know. We would hopefully establish our own connection to the culture and heritage.
Krys Boyd [00:15:11] I love it. For your high school graduation, where you were going to speak. You asked your family to come in Nigeria clothes.
Uzo Aduba [00:15:20] Yeah. You know, so often I had seen my parents and my relatives come to events in traditional Western fare, which is unique because in Nigeria there was no elevation of one type of clothing wear over another. If you were wearing traditional Nigerian clothes, that was not thought to be any less than wearing any Western clothes. But that wasn’t the case necessarily here. So my parents, in order to sort of fit in, would keep their traditional clothes for traditional events. When it came time for my graduation, I wanted them to populate the audience the traditional clothes. My mom was so proud and wanted to know the why of it all. I said, because I want people to know where I come from. That’s also part of why this book is important to me. I want people to know where I come from, who I come from. Those are the things that I truly believe are the why of why I’m here when my work is what it is, why my work ethic is what it is. Why, the foundation on which it was built. It comes from my mom and it comes from the culture. That I had poured into me.
Krys Boyd [00:16:54] Your mom set the example for you of keeping a journal, which you’ve done, I guess, almost since you could write. When you went to Nigeria for the first time, met your maternal grandmother for the first and only time, you had this realization that your journal could be a way of sharing that experience with your mother, who was not on that trip.
Uzo Aduba [00:17:16] Yeah. I had taken it with me to capture our time there, I think the whole event was going to be this really wonderful, fun, adventure. And it was all of those things and that thing that I’m sure I thought I would just sort of tuck into a drawer and misplace at some point in my life. And instead it ended up becoming this piece that my mom really held on to because it was the last physical account anyway, of her mother and my grandmother. That experience of going there and being able to capture that for her unexpectedly meant a lot to me. And I know it meant a lot to her.
Krys Boyd [00:18:08] I was a kid who really wanted to be able to sing and had to be convinced that I really couldn’t. How did you realize that not only did you love singing, but that you were really, really good at it?
Uzo Aduba [00:18:23] My sixth grade music teacher made me sing in a school recital after hearing me sing. I remember I sang I Will Always Love You by Dolly Parton. The Whitney Houston version. That is.
Krys Boyd [00:18:42] That is not an easy song.
Uzo Aduba [00:18:45] Not at all. I ended up singing it. And I remember when I finished, everybody stood up and applauded. And I was standing at the front of the room looking out at the audience with the microphone in my hand, perplexed. I thought to myself, I think I can sing.
Krys Boyd [00:19:08] At the time, did you think that would mean anything more than what it was?
Uzo Aduba [00:19:14] Definitely not. I didn’t know. This is where you see the gap between being an immigrant family and having exposure, early exposure to the full possibilities that exist here in America. I had no idea that you could even go to school for something like the arts until a teacher told me. My parents didn’t have any idea either, but this was a pursuit that people could take. It was just so far removed from their experiences. But yeah, I am so glad that that teacher stepped into my life because I’ve definitely changed it.
Krys Boyd [00:20:07] So in the meantime and we’ll get back to your career. But you also, like you were just a super well-rounded kid. You ran track. You were good at that, too. And and there are things there are lessons from running that sound like they’re still applicable in your life.
Uzo Aduba [00:20:25] Yeah, most definitely. I had a college coach who taught me about the meaning of running your own race, which stays with me now, even in my professional life. He said to me, you have to focus on your own race. You know how many seconds you lose looking to your left or your right? It was one tenth of a second. One tenth of a second doesn’t sound like a lot of time in the general world. But I’m running the 100m at this point in my career. He’s saying one tenth of a second isn’t a lot of time in life, but it is a lot of time in track and field and into a lot of time in the 100. It’s the difference between forget about first and second, It’s the difference between first and last. That you can spend so much of your time looking at what someone else is doing. And it’s not doing anything but distracting you from your own race. That became a thought for me and for the rest of my life to just barrel down and focus on the finish line. Nothing else. You’re running you against the clock. That’s all that matters because you can’t control whatever happening in the room. What is happening in those other lanes and that impacts what’s happening in your lane. So focus on your own lane. Keep moving forward. And cross that line.
Krys Boyd [00:22:03] Singing led you to musical theater in college. You took your first acting classes from the first black professor you’d ever had, and this is a person who made it clear that, like James Baldwin and August Wilson mattered as much as Tennessee Williams.
Uzo Aduba [00:22:20] That’s exactly right. He was Jim Spowl. He was an amazing influence on my life my sophomore year of college. He was just so cool. Everybody loved him. The whole school, not just the theater department. Music, visual arts, everybody just thought we was the coolest guy. He was so smart and had so many great ideas and thoughts on the world. And he opened my mind and my artistic heart to the range with which stories could be told and who could tell them.
Krys Boyd [00:22:54] When you say in the book that he taught you to act by teaching you to listen, what does that mean?
Uzo Aduba [00:23:03] It means I was doing a scene once for his class. And we finish the scene, my scene partner and I. And he said, You’re not listening. You have to do this, whatever he asked. I couldn’t get it. You know, the first couple of times that he kept saying you’re not listening. Finally, at one point when he said it, I understood that I am not supposed to just be saying my lines when the space of silence enters where my character speak. I’m supposed to be receiving taking it in, what’s been happening all around in this room right now. Everything. Not just the words. Everything. I’m not alive. I need to be alive. And that is going to affect me into saying my line. It was really pretty powerful because it played into my music and played into my acting and played into everything.
Krys Boyd [00:24:21] Does that just happen for you automatically now when you approach a new piece of work. Or is there some way that you sort of ground yourself to remind yourself to get there and listen in a scene?
Uzo Aduba [00:24:34] I think it can happen faster now. But grounding work before you go out into the set or on stage is definitely important. Just to relax your body and your mind to not be thinking and whizzing on so many unimportant, insignificant things other than outside of the scene tself. I am able to drop into it more easily now just because of experience than when I was a student.
Krys Boyd [00:25:07] I wonder also if the discipline from having played competitive sports for so long is useful to you? Like, are there things that you picked up from being an athlete that inform the way you approach work?
Uzo Aduba [00:25:23] Absolutely. There’s a wide variety. There’s a really long laundry list of things and sport approaching work. My self-talk is something that’s coming to me right now that is strong. I can self motivate playing in two individual sports figure skating and track and field. I can self motivate pretty well. I think that the team aspect of a sport also, you know even though there individual sports, there’s still team parts in the sport that it’s not just you and you alone out here telling a story. It’s all of the things that come together that make the story successful are things that I got definitely from sport.
Krys Boyd [00:26:17] I hate to gloss over this. I know it felt like a long, uphill climb at the time, but you had a great deal of success in the New York theater scene. Why did it feel risky to move across the country to try for a film and TV career?
Uzo Aduba [00:26:34] Because in the theater there seemed like the space is wider, somewhat wider than it was as a film and television space for people like me. I hadn’t really seen a lot of people in a very, very small number of actors who I thought I could look at and say, yeah, I see me in here. That list wasn’t a long one. And so it felt very risky to give up the comfort and humble living of being a theater actor for something that I hadn’t. I’d seen so little return on for other.
Krys Boyd [00:27:14] A lot of casting directors didn’t really see you. They saw what you looked like and then tried to kind of push you into roles that didn’t make any sense for who you are as a human. Can you talk about the sorts of roles they imagined for you and what told you those weren’t necessarily right?
Uzo Aduba [00:27:34] Yeah. You know, I went to school for classical voice in the soprano, but because of my look, because of my energy, you know, foundation, it seemed so difficult for. People to consider me for the things that I was locally right for. I remember going out for an audition for a legit musical and singing My Fair Lady I Could Have Danced All Night, which was appropriate for the show that I was auditioning for at the time and being asked if I had anything from Dream Girl.
Krys Boyd [00:28:12] Did you comply?
Uzo Aduba [00:28:14] No, not initially. And then? Then you get to a place where you want to work. You know you want to work. And so I had to start learning how to manipulate my sound into something that the industry had an appetite for.
Krys Boyd [00:28:33] Yeah, it seems like an extraordinary feat to not lose yourself trying to gain traction in a business that makes it so hard to do the thing you want. Like you can’t really be an actor if somebody doesn’t cast you.
Uzo Aduba [00:28:48] The only difference separating certain groups is opportunity. Can’t be cast in something. You can’t win something if the role isn’t there.
Krys Boyd [00:28:57] Did you consider quitting?
Uzo Aduba [00:28:59] Yes, I did. Only one time. Well, I should say I considered quitting once. I didn’t consider. I questioned a lot. I doubted a lot. I worried a lot. And I would call my mother with all of those things a lot. And she would prop me up and hold me up in those moments. But I did consider quitting when I took a lead to try and pursue film and television exclusively and was being shot down with a lot of nos. Which was very scary. And I thought, maybe this isn’t for me. You know, I thought. I think the industry at large is trying to tell me that I’m not meant for this place and there’s not any room that can be found for me here. September 14th. Friday, 5:43 p.m.. I quit that day at 5:43 p.m. and then I found out that I got the biggest job that would change my life.
Krys Boyd [00:30:06] So you were just saying at 5:43, you remember, like to the minutes when you got this call that changed your life. Tell us about that memory.
Uzo Aduba [00:30:15] My gosh. It was a wild day. I had countless audition for film and TV shows all surrounding to nos. I was watching my bank account just drift away, disappear by the second. And I had an audition for a TV show called Blue Bloods, and I had been sent, unfortunately, the wrong direction to the audition. So I wound up when I got the right direction, ending up there 20 minutes late. And I remember thinking I had done a good job on the audition. I remember being really happy with it, but I walked out of there and I said, You’re not going to get that job because you were 20 minutes late and this is the universe trying to tell you that you’re not meant to be doing this and you’re trying to do something that’s not for you. And I just started crying. I was crying, crying, crying, crying, crying all the way home. And I decided to quit. That was the day. And first of all, only day that I decided to quit acting. And I said, I’m going to go home. I’m going to order some sushi and wine. I’m going to call my sister to come over, I’m going to tell her, and on Monday, I’m going to tell my agent and manager that I quit. This is enough for me. Now, mind you, I had gone on an audition for Orange is the New Black about three weeks prior to that. Two weeks prior to that. So when I got home that Friday, I was sitting on the couch and I decided to watch an episode of Oprah’s Master Class with Lorne Michaels. Who’s the founder of SNL. And he’s talking about the pilot and founding the show and he talking something about this B sketch that he had. And that’s how the show was panned widely by critics. Just terrible, terrible reviews. And he’s sitting in his confessional chair and he says, you know, I decided to give it another go. And I thought, if I can just keep the faith and the screen dissolved and turns into this country time lemonade commercial and look like, you know, to me it suddenly looks like a country time lemonade. And I see the words keep the faith, scroll across the screen. And I said to myself in my head, I really like that. You know, when this is over, I’m going to rewind back to this part of the TV and take a picture of it. And before I finished thinking the next thought after it. The phone on the coffee table rang at 5:43 p.m. and it was my agent and my manager calling me to say that I did not get the role that I had auditioned for Orange is the New Black but that the show would like to offer me another part.
Krys Boyd [00:33:21] And this was the character that most people remember as Crazy Eyes.
Uzo Aduba [00:33:26] Yeah, that’s right.
Krys Boyd [00:33:28] When you accepted one of the Emmys for that role, I remember you talking about how meaningful it was to work with people who let you be you. And I’m so glad that I’m able to talk to you about this because that character was not at all like you on the surface. So what did you mean by that?
Uzo Aduba [00:33:51] Yeah, I bet the freedom to explore, to try things, do things boldly, to do things that felt a little bit maybe out of the box or nontraditional to how maybe you might hear the line. You know I think about. We’re shooting that first early parts of Orange. The director, our director, Jodie Foster, and our writer Shawn Hatter. They were just so inviting of ideas, my idea and welcoming of those while also layering it with encouragement to lean into their ideas. And it was it was just an amazing and amazing experience that things that you want to try and an openness to and allowing you to thrive, giving you the room to try and see if that idea work. That was very, very satisfying and helpful for me as an actor, and I appreciated that from that experience. Jenji the same, you know, we would be filming, she would be interesting to hear, not just for me, but for the entire cast. You know, she was interested in, okay, what else we can pepper in there that might feel right and if it felt right, then we would do those things. She just created a very, very free, open environment in which we could work.
Krys Boyd [00:35:21] Did she realize at the time this was your first big television role? Did you realize how that that would be rare elsewhere?
Uzo Aduba [00:35:31] Yes. No. Now I do. I say yes. No, I did not at the time because I really didn’t know what I didn’t know. I signed on for two, maybe three episodes. So my approach to the entirety of that season was with that in mind that I was. I’m so happy and so grateful to be there. I didn’t. I didn’t even know to think beyond just the day that I was showing up for work.
Krys Boyd [00:36:03] Like you were just going to bank some money and then move on when the job ended. And then they kept you on the series the entire time?
Uzo Aduba [00:36:09] Yeah, that’s exactly right. I when I when I finished the second episode, I remember a producer walking me to my dressing room and saying, okay, great, you don’t have a great day. We’ll see you on the next one. I thought. I thought she meant. I would get to do the third episode. I was like, when I get to be out of the episode, it never even crossed my mind that a conversation meant we’re going to see you throughout the season.
Krys Boyd [00:36:36] It has to be remarkable to grow a character when you’ve originated that character and you don’t necessarily know what the writers have planned for you.
Uzo Aduba [00:36:47] Yes, it’s exciting. I think we all were so new. We may not have even known to know the difference. To some degree, I was I was just so happy to collaborate with my fellow actors and discuss the scripts and learn where this world was going that I didn’t even think about. I really didn’t. I really didn’t think about anything else other than that I was so excited to be on the job.
Krys Boyd [00:37:24] Your mom had heroes was everyone’s mom does, and one of them was the woman she always referred to as My fighting Shirley Chisholm. And then you were offered the opportunity to play Shirley Chisholm at a very challenging time?
Uzo Aduba [00:37:39] Yes. I got the opportunity to play. I’m supposed to go to work on that show. I would say about a week, about a week after my mother was diagnosed. And I had been in preparation for it. Prior to that week, it was meant to start. And it was such a tough thing, you know, in terms of I felt so excited to be able to be telling this story and holding space for a woman that I knew my mother loved and also know simultaneously that the hardest chapter of my life was upon me. That I would be in this season of my life learning how to say goodbye to someone.
Krys Boyd [00:38:28] We should say your mom had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at that time.
Uzo Aduba [00:38:33] Yeah, my mom had been a week before I went to go work on Mrs. America. My mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And I was managing caregiving for her with my sisters. With that of that and also managing working on that project at the same time.
Krys Boyd [00:38:58] People cared about you meant well when they kept telling you how strong you were. But you remind us that that compliment can be a burden, especially for black women faced with more than anybody expected to handle. Have you learned to try not to do everything without help?
Uzo Aduba [00:39:22] I say that I’m learning. I’m a work in progress.
Krys Boyd [00:39:28] But your mother also told you you were strong. And she said you are strong like I’m strong. I wonder if it meant something different coming from her.
Uzo Aduba [00:39:37] Yeah, she definitely meant that I had the ability to not just take on a bunch of things, but how to get through this thing when the difficult promise to you that I could, could and knew how to manage my way through them. And she wasn’t wrong.
Krys Boyd [00:40:04] Did you get to watch her watching you play Shirley Chisholm?
Uzo Aduba [00:40:08] Yeah. Well, yeah. With one eye closed. Yeah. She loved Mrs. America so much. And she was so proud to see me play that part. Just so proud. And she would watch it more than once. Thankfully, the producers of our show were so wonderful in getting an advance copy. And we got to watch it multiple times. And my mom just absolutely loved it.
Krys Boyd [00:40:48] You spoke to her every single day for more than 20 years of your adult life, which is something you can’t do anymore. But you do have her journals. How have you picked them up? Put them down. Pick them back up again. How have you used them since she died?
Uzo Aduba [00:41:05] They are the best way to communicate with her now. I can’t talk to her and the living, flesh and spirit in the way that I used to. So I thought until I found these journals. I was given these journal of hers and I will read an entry, a half, an entry, and I can just feel her come racing back to life so quickly, coming down from heaven where she lives now back to where I live. And I can hear her voice. I can hear the way she’s saying it. I can hear. I feel like I’m in conversation with her again. And I read them slowly because. One it hard, but two, I want to savor them. I want I hope that they stretch the length of my life.
Krys Boyd [00:42:01] Do you think do you have a sense that she wrote them for you and for your siblings?
Uzo Aduba [00:42:06] I don’t think so. I think she wrote them for herself. I think that I think she wrote them entirely for herself. But what I do know is that they are a road map now for not only my siblings and I, but for our children to know the way back to her.
Krys Boyd [00:42:29] It’s not obvious to anybody who doesn’t speak Igbo, but this book is actually named after you, right?
Uzo Aduba [00:42:36] Yes. This book is called The Road is Good, which is what my name means in English, which has a slightly more nuanced touch to it. My full name with which is the female version of my father’s fathers name, which is why my dad liked it. But my mother liked it and took it a step further to mean the road is good. That despite how difficult the journey, that it’s worth it. And because my mom has lived a thousand chapters of a thousand lives before I was born, some up downhill, all of it. Some of those experiences, though hard, they were worth it because now she was here with me.
Krys Boyd [00:43:31] So the expression the road is good doesn’t mean I had an easy time getting here.
Uzo Aduba [00:43:35] No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It means, you know, you are coming to my house, and we’re meant to meet at 3:00. And now, my gosh, you step out and it’s raining and my goodness, the freeway is backed up, bumper to bumper. And now you have a flat tire and have to get it fixed. And can you believe it? It’s already 4:30 and I’m still not there. And oh my gosh, you know, and you forgot to bring your keys and are going to be locked out of the house when you go back. And you show up and it’s 4:45 and I say to you came over and you say it was a challenge, but it’s worth it because I’m here now.
Krys Boyd [00:44:16] Uzo Aduba is an actress and writer. She is Heifer International’s ambassador to Africa and an ambassador for Stand Up to Cancer. Her memoir is called “The Road is Good” How a Mother’s Strength Became a Daughter’s Purpose.” Uzo, thank you for this conversation.
Uzo Aduba [00:44:31] Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This was beautiful.
Krys Boyd [00:44:35] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and wherever you get podcasts, just search for KERA Think or go to think.kera.org to find out about upcoming shows and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
