Eartha Mae Kitt
Eartha Mae Kitt “I don’t think I ever felt I belonged anywhere,” she once said, in a 2000 interview, “because I was . . . conditioned from the time when I was a child that I didn’t belong. So I sort of followed my own path.” She never found out who her father was, and she only discovered the date of her birth at the age of 71. According to her daughter, when she found out, she cried. She believed her birth date was January 26, 1926. Her actual birth date was January 17, 1927. She was born on a cotton plantation in a small town in South Carolina. According to various biographies online, she was born of rape, her father a white man whose identity she would never find out, hidden from her supposedly because of his status. She and her mother, ["a black Cherokee sharecropper" according to the New York Times], were so poor that the young girl would remember going house to house, looking for shelter and something to eat. She even had to stay in a crawl space under the house with the