2011/06/24
by Chanel
Actress Joy Bryant finds her true green hero in the grandmother who raised her on nothing but love
“I was born a poor black child.” That’s a line from The Jerk that’s always resonated with me, mostly because I was born a poor black child. And I hated being poor. I’m sure my grandmother Lorraine (aka Nana) did too, but she was good at making do with what she had. She raised me in the South Bronx on food stamps, government cheese, and an immense amount of love. I owe everything to her.
Some of the things she taught me growing up clicked immediately: the importance of an education, of being a self-reliant woman, of believing that you can achieve anything you put your mind to.
Those lessons served me well. I got a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster boarding school in Connecticut. I went on to Yale. And then yada, yada, yada, here I am, at 35, a successful working actress with a great husband, a sweet California mid-century ranch house in Glendale (with trees, my own trees, two Avatar-size 100-year-old oaks), and a cute rescue pit mix. I’ve managed to have some influence in the development of Jasmine, whom I play on NBC’s Parenthood, to help create a black female character not based on stereotypes (rarer than we’d like to think). Good thing I wasn’t too hardheaded to heed my grandmother. Don’t even want to think about where I would be if I hadn’t. But some lessons took longer to penetrate through my wax-filled ears. With all this talk of Going Green, Buying Green, Living Green, and Green being the new whatever, I’ve come to realize that, although we had no green, my grandmother was actually the “greenest” person I’ve ever known.
Nana never spoke about protecting the environment or energy independence. She never brought up pollution or deforestation or toxic waste dumps. Instead, she harangued us to “waste not, want not,” which is basically the original version of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” the three R’s that have since been hammered into all of our heads. For Nana, it wasn’t about saving the planet—it was about saving money.
