The lessons of an epic life
Guy Fortt has taken on many roles — Greenwich’s second Black firefighter, actor in films with Meryl Streep, Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman, and current head of the Stamford NAACP — but his best part is starring in his own life story.
I reached out to Fortt to ask what it’s like to take the NAACP post just in time to face what he calls “two pandemics” — the COVID-19 crisis and rising calls to address social injustice.
But while inquiring about basic details of his life, I’m drawn into “The Guy Fortt Story.” It plays out like a vintage radio drama given the limits of a phone conversation. In the theater of the mind, Fortt is able to play the title role at all ages.
He reviews his 56 years with poise, in the timbre of a seasoned actor. Much of his story is a drama, with tragedy, despair, epic backdrops and relentless demands on his considerable resiliency.
But it does have a happy ending.
Scene I, the 1970s: While Doshia, a single mother of six, raises Guy in Southfield Village on Stamford’s West Side, she sends him to St. Cecelia’s and St. Gabriel’s. At the predominantly white Catholic schools he is occasionally addressed with “the N word.” When returning home in his uniform of ivory turtleneck and navy slacks, he is called “White Boy” by neighborhood kids.
“That right there gave me a sense of self-identification, I needed to begin to reel in who and what I am” he says.
Later, he joins a Muslim organization to study Black heritage, and learns Arabic. He also hears a muse while his mother manages the Soul Musicians, a local R&B group that rehearses in the basement of their Richmond Hill Avenue apartment. When the room is clear, he grabs the microphone, the first verse of future gigs as a singer.
Scene II, Christmas Eve, 1983: Guy, now 20, is with his girlfriend, Cynthia Johnson, as Christmas nears. Her ex-boyfriend, Jonathan Mosely, stops by “to say hello,” so Guy gives them space.
He hears Mosely strike her.
“I try to run to her and she intercepts me. She’s gurgling. She was spewing blood. As I laid her down I saw she’d been punctured in the neck. She died in my arms.”
Fortt realizes Mosely stabbed himself the same way. Mosely survives, serves about half of his 12-year sentence on a manslaughter charge and is shot dead by three Bridgeport police officers in 2004 after trying to break into another ex-girlfriend’s apartment with a baseball bat.
Scene III: The Aftermath: Fortt spirals into depression. He moves to Canada, grows “a really long beard,” and lives on benches.
It eventually kicks in that he needs to return to help his mother (“my soul”). He also pledges to learn what to do if ever faced with a similar crisis. So he becomes a firefighter.
“Being a firefighter is the greatest job in the world,” he says, “and it saved my life.”
He joins the Greenwich department in 1985, six months after the town’s first Black firefighter, Ron Thomas. It is another test of his resolve, as he is “not always welcomed by some of the citizens.”
Scene IV, early 1990s: While Guy’s wife, Tabitha, attends Georgetown School of Medicine 290 miles away, he raises their first two children.
“Men, you don’t understand. Raising a child is a full-time job. Now I know what my mother went through,” he says. “I get it.”
Scene V, late 2001: Of all possible places and times, Fortt’s fortunes take another positive turn in the rubble of America’s defining modern tragedy.
He is volunteering at Ground Zero when CNN reporter Ashleigh Banfield asks him to describe what he saw. He compares “The Pile” to Moses parting a Red Sea of metal and wood.
Bizarrely, the interview catches the eye of a casting director who gets him a job in a Johnson & Johnson commercial. This leads to bit parts in “The Devil Wears Prada,” “The Sopranos” and, eventually, to his Broadway debut in “The Color Purple” in 2007.
If being a large Black man has gotten him reliable work playing security guards in films, it has also drawn unwarranted attention from police. He has a collection of anecdotes illustrating harassment by cops in Greenwich, Stamford and Bridgeport for no reason other than being Black. Each time, he says he was spared by his firefighter’s ID. Even that doesn’t always work. One night he drives from Hartford to Greenwich for a dawn shift with the fire department when a state trooper pulls him over in Wallingford. He’s ordered to get on the ground. Other troopers arrive, with dogs that sniff him and his car and find nothing. But he is cuffed and put in a holding pen. The firefighter uniform he wears is dismissed (“you could have stolen it”) and he is only freed when Greenwich Fire Chief John Titsworth intervenes.
This is the kind of treatment a NAACP president never forgets.
Today: After a few months as head of the Stamford chapter, Fortt speaks with pride about how he and his colleagues have collaborated with others in the city to target COVID testing in the Black community and deliver 28,000 masks to residents. He compares it with his work at Ground Zero and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
“We have to have compassion for everybody. If you don’t help them they are going to suffer.”
If his life were a film, these scenes would be just the trailer. There’s plenty more, including a trip to the Obama White House.
Fortt’s upbeat personality belies the traumas he has endured. That’s where the happy ending comes in.
I don’t have to ask Fortt to name his favorite role. It’s clear when I request photos and he responds with images and details of his wife and their four children. Jafar was an MAA fighter, Khairi an NFL linebacker, Anisa is pursuing a master’s degree at Georgetown. Their youngest son, Omar, is a senior linebacker for the University of Connecticut football team.
“If I leave here tomorrow I’ve had a wonderful life,” he says.
Then he assesses the considerable work the NAACP has done in the last three months, and makes another vow.
“This is just the beginning.”
“Being a firefighter is the greatest job in the world,” he says, “and it saved my life.”