Angela Bassett, Queen of the Universe

Recently, Bassett and Vance visited with Jones. She was delighted to be able to tell him, “You started all this.”

The stage—which Jones dominated—still calls her up. “I would very much love to go back, and I had some opportunities to do that again, but COVID hit.”

Bassett was last onstage in 2011 as Camae in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop opposite Samuel L. Jackson as Martin Luther King Jr. It was before her children went to school and the role of mother became real life and permanent with no off time. “My history is the stage where you gotta hit that back wall, you gotta be heard, you gotta be seen, you gotta use your body, and more is better,” she says. “That takes some muscle and some oxygen.”

But a return to the stage requires the right timing and enough time, and Broadway is still across the country. “I have to consider these young people,” she says. “This is such a critical and crucial time in their maturation. They need they Mama influence and that Mama love. They need Mama in the morning.” I know she is right. But having recently had my own child cross the threshold into legal adulthood, I feel the ground and sky are about to rupture for Bassett.

I ask her what she imagines for these coming years, with children getting grown, more and different opportunities presenting themselves.

I can’t help myself, so I also say, “You know we gon’ be coming back around when you in your 80s, when you in your Cicely Tyson phase, oiling somebody’s scalp on ABC.”

But Tyson is already on her mind. “I would love to continue as Ma,” Bassett says, referencing the name she called Tyson. “Ms. Cicely, Ms. Ruby, Ms. Mary Alice, Ms. Gloria Foster,” she says, listing the names of her forebears with a sweet reverence. “Women who I’ve gotten to meet and know and love and of course appreciate from afar and up close, and I just hope I can pass the baton and keep going.”

This is Angela Bassett, after all, so she grabs a prop—a gold cylinder that she passes toward the camera, baton-like. It’s a gift as much as it is a command: that if we are fortunate enough to receive the strength and the support of mothers and mentors, of collaborators and communities of angels, we too must pass it on.

Zandria F. Robinson is a writer, cultural critic, and African American studies professor. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Oxford American, and The New York Times Magazine.

Photographed by Lauren Dukoff; stylist: Zerina Akers; hair: Randy Stodghill; makeup: D'Andre Michael; production: Avenue B.