![]() When she was 21, she landed an audition at the pioneering African-American dance company of Katherine Dunham and got in, catalyzing her career in entertainment. (According to Kitt, this was more out of “Christian duty” than actual familial affection.) She worked through her adolescence in a sewing machine factory, and constantly ran away from home, sleeping in subway cars. When Kitt was about eight, her biological aunt took her in, and the pair lived in a cramped apartment in Harlem. ![]() Kitt’s mother, who was black and Cherokee, gave her up for adoption when she was five, and Kitt’s adoptive family raised her in abusive conditions, forcing her to pick cotton to “earn her keep.” Her adoptive siblings would beat and abuse her, she said, because she was biracial: “Not black enough to belong to the blacks, and not white enough to belong to the whites,” as she put it. ![]() Kitt, who was born on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, never really knew who her father was - though later she said he was the son of a plantation owner, and that she was the product of rape.
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