The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  Things began to improve, and maybe even I began to improve—as an actor, that is. But when it was time to cast the first big production, in walked this new guy, another kid from the Caribbean with whom the director had worked before. After all my studies, busting my ass trying to learn to act (not to mention busting my ass sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace), she was going to cast him in the lead. Well, I had to admit he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a nice voice. He could even sing a little.

  I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me the understudy, but little did I know. On the night of the first major run-through, the one night a significant casting director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid they’d cast for the lead—a kid named Harry Belafonte—couldn’t make it. I had to go on for him, and son of a gun, the casting director liked what I did and called me.

  “I’m preparing a version of Lysistrata for Broadway. Would you be available?”

  Are you kidding?

  Next thing I knew I was staring out into a sea of white faces from a Broadway stage, scared shitless as I fumbled for my lines as Polydorus.

  The word bad cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was BAD. The stage fright had me so tightly in its grip that I was giving the wrong cues and jumbling the lines, and within a few moments the audience was rolling in the aisles.

  The moment the curtain came down it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.

  The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so god-awful they thought I was good. They said they admired my “fresh, comedic gift.”

  If you saw this scenario in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? I saw it in real life, and I certainly didn’t. In my world, effort and reward were expected to settle into a natural balance. By any reasonable measure, I knew that I’d fallen short that evening. That was my critical assessment. That assessment, taken at its worth, created a big fat contradiction inside me. Maybe I just wasn’t up to this acting thing. Maybe the man at the little theater in Harlem was right. Maybe I should “go out and get a job I could handle.”

  I couldn’t shake the sense that failure was lurking somewhere in the wings, waiting to pick my bones if my doubts should become reality. Still, in the face of all that, I had to stay in charge of my life no matter how it all played out. Regardless of whatever (or whoever) else might have been looking out for me, I needed to know, first and foremost, that I was looking out for myself. Even when the dread of being shot down by failure twisted my insides into knots.

  Did I misjudge this new culture? Should all the glitter that now seemed only inches beyond my reach have been taken with a grain of salt? Maybe natural balances weren’t that easily found amid so much concrete and steel. Amid so many machines pushing automobiles, lifting elevators, pulling trains. Or maybe, at the very bottom, I wasn’t yet ready to accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.

  The play ran only four days. But to my surprise, my “triumph” in Lysistrata led immediately to another acting job as an understudy in a road show of Anna Lucasta, a job that lasted intermittently for several weeks. Then, after a long, lean, and frustrating period, during which off-Broadway roles happened by just often enough to keep my meager skills alive, I found out quite by accident that 20th Century-Fox was casting for a movie called No Way Out, the film that would be the first that Reggie and Evelyn Poitier would ever see.

  My fingers touched the glitter with that first movie, and it was a mighty reach, I tell you. I knew full well how far I had come from those days in Nassau when I dreamed of being a “cowboy” in Hollywood.

  While I was completing that Fox picture in L.A., the film’s director, Joseph Mankiewicz, told me that when I got back to New York I should look up a producer named Zoltan Korda. I did, entering his office just as he was walking out. “No time to talk,” he said. “Can you come to London?”

  Next thing I knew I was on the Pan Am Clipper in a first-class compartment heading east across the Atlantic, bound for London and eventually South Africa, to play the part of the young priest in Cry, the Beloved Country.

  It was heady stuff, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that, not only was I one lucky youngster, but something more had to be at play here. I had grown up in a culture where unseen forces lurked just out of view, where people looked to “the mysteries” to explain both good fortune and bad. As I tried to absorb the changes in my new life, I butted up against the knowledge that this many accidents and lucky breaks just didn’t happen in the movie business, or anywhere else. They didn’t even happen in the movies themselves! I knew that things could be taken away just as easily as they now seemed to come. I rested uneasily on those black-and-white and scary uncertainties.

  After returning from London I at last went back to the Bahamas and came very much back down to earth. I saw my mother and my father for the first time in eight years. I had gone away a troubled boy of fifteen, and here I was, a man of twenty-three whom they could hardly recognize. It was a powerful moment when I returned to our little house in Nassau and saw them sitting together, alone, on a Saturday night. It was a moment of miraculous joy, but also a time of wrenching guilt for me, because during those eight years I had remained entirely silent.

  It’s an unwritten law in the Bahamas that when people who go to America to live write home, they put a little something in the envelope. I had been unable to contribute to my family for so long that the habit of silence had simply overtaken me. Or at least that’s how I had justified it to myself. I had to wait until I was in good shape, I had told myself. Still, I knew that Reggie was more of a man than to let eight years pass without a word.

  I made amends, but my guilt wasn’t canceled. My parents forgave me—they would have forgiven me anything—and I left with them almost all of the three thousand dollars I had made in my nascent career in the movies. But I knew that, forced to take my measure at that moment, even they would have found me wanting.

  So going back to New York was a valuable exercise in humility. After that initial burst of success—a couple of films and a couple of major theatrical productions—I was back in Harlem washing dishes. Perhaps I had a gift from Cat Island buried deep within me, because despite the setback, I still had faith in myself and faith in the future—enough of each to marry a beautiful young girl named Juanita and try to get on with my life. Then a buddy of mine had the bright idea of opening a rib place. We scraped together the money and opened a little joint, Ribs in the Ruff (at 127th Street and 7th Avenue), with seating for all of thirteen people.

  My wife was trying her hand at modeling, though that led by way of necessity to a job as a seamstress at a clothing factory. This life was tough, but we were up for it. Having lived with my mother and my father, having watched how they dealt with other people and with each other, I felt prepared for pretty much anything.

  Soon our first child was born, little Beverly, and then another was on her way, and I didn’t have any money. Our little barbecue place was a hole in the wall. Eighty cents for a meal, including side dishes. My partner and I did everything. We cooked the ribs, we made the potato salad, we made the coleslaw, we scrubbed out the place when we closed in the morning. Times were so tough that I used to take milk from the restaurant home for my kid.

  One day when my wife was pregnant with Pam, I was working in the rib joint. I was tapped out and feeling worried. That day, with nothing encouraging in sight, out of the blue a big agent named Marty Baum called me and said, “Would you come down? I have something I want to talk to you about.”

  He wasn’t my agent, of course. He was just helping out on a casting assignment. His office was on 5th Avenue, between 58th and 57th Streets.

  He said, “Go over to the
Savoy Plaza Hotel, suite such and such. There’s a gentleman who wants to see you about a part.”

  I went over. Two guys were there, the producer and the director. We had a very brief talk, they looked me over a bit, and one of them said, “We’d like you to read for us.”

  I said, “Certainly.”

  They gave me a script, asked me to turn to a particular page, and gave me a few moments to look over the scene. When I thought I was ready, I said, “Okay.” They had me read the scene with the producer while the director watched.

  I felt good about the reading, though they didn’t say much about it. They asked me things about my life and what I had done in the business, and I told them. They gave me a script to take with me and said they would talk to Marty Baum. They thanked me for coming as I left.

  I went back and said to Marty Baum, “They gave me a script.” He said, “Well, read it. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll work out something.”

  I went straight home—127th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue—and I read the script. I didn’t like it. The part they wanted me for was a man who was a janitor for a gambling casino in Phenix City, Alabama. He was a very nice man, but there had been some kind of murder at the casino, and it was thought that this janitor might have some information that could incriminate whoever was responsible. He received threats and warnings to keep his mouth shut, so he didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything. Then, to augment the threat, the bad guys killed his young daughter, throwing her body on his lawn. He was enraged. He was tormented. Still, he remained passive. He didn’t do shit. He left it to other people to fight his battles.

  So the next day I went back to Marty Baum’s office.

  “What do you think of the script?” he asked.

  “Well, I have to tell you, I’m not going to play it,” I said.

  Disbelief etched his face. “You’re not gonna play it?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t play it.”

  “What do you mean you can’t play it?” he asked, irritated.

  “I cannot play it,” I repeated.

  “It’s not a derogatory part,” he pointed out.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What happens to this guy isn’t a racial thing,” he said.

  “Not necessarily,” I agreed. “It could happen to any guy in that particular set of circumstances.”

  “So what is it?” he said. “I mean, is it…?” He paused, apparently trying to make sense of my response. “They don’t call you names, they don’t—” He went on to say they’re not doing this to you, they’re not doing that to you.

  I said, “Yeah, that’s all true.”

  “Then what is it?” he urged.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said, “but there’s something about it. I just don’t want to go into it.”

  So he said to me, “Well, listen, that’s the way it goes. But I still don’t understand.”

  I thanked him and left. Then I went over to 57th Street and Broadway, one flight up, to a place called Household Finance Company, and I borrowed seventy-five dollars on the furniture in our apartment, because I needed the money. The birth of our second daughter was fairly near, and I knew that Beth Israel Hospital was going to cost me seventy-five bucks, so I had to line up the money.

  Six months later I got a call. “Hello, Sidney Poitier?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “This is Marty Baum.”

  “Oh, yes, how are you, sir?” I said.

  “Fine. How are you? What are you doing?” he asked.

  I said, “I’m still in the restaurant, working.”

  He said, “You haven’t had any jobs as an actor?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said.

  He said, “Come down. I want to talk to you.”

  So I went down to the Baum and Newborn offices, across from the Plaza. They had two or three other agents, and three or four secretaries. I went into Marty Baum’s private office, and he sat me down.

  “I don’t have a job for you,” he said, “but I asked you to come down because I wanted to say something to you.” He stared at me in silence for a moment before continuing. “You know, I’ve never met anybody like you. That part was a pretty good part. It had no racial overtones to it, and you turned it down. You haven’t done anything since, and it would have been—well, it was paying 750 dollars a week. It would have been a nice piece of change.”

  He once again asked me to explain why I hadn’t taken the part, but all could say was. “Well, you know, it’s the way I am.”

  He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but anybody as crazy as you, I want to handle him.”

  I said, “Okay.” And that’s how I landed with a big agent, and that’s when my career got on solid footing.

  Now, I couldn’t tell him at the time, and maybe it’ll sound a little sanctimonious even now, after all these years, but I rejected that part because, in my view, the character simply didn’t measure up. He didn’t fight for what mattered to him most. He didn’t behave with dignity.

  My father, Reggie, was a certain kind of man, and he was a certain kind of dad. He was a poor man, for certain. He was a hard-working man, for sure. The only thing he knew how to do was tomato farming, but the soil in Nassau wasn’t good, and it was a tourist economy, and there was simply no room for him to plant. By this time he was fifty or fifty-five, and he was suffering severely from rheumatoid arthritis, among other things. He had worked in a bicycle shop in Nassau, but after some years he’d lost the job. The only way he could make a living now was to have my brother in Miami send him boxes of very cheap cigars. My father would then spend the day walking around town, going from one bar to another, selling the cigars. One to this person, two to another. That’s how poor he was. But he did what he had to do. And I wasn’t going to play any part that might dishonor his values.

  My mom, too, always measured up. She would go scouring the neighborhood and into the nearby woods, picking up rocks and stones—sometimes as much as twenty-pound stones or thirty-pound stones, even fifty-pound stones. When she had gathered upwards of two thousand pounds into a mound in the yard in front of our house, she would sit under an almond tree with a hammer in her hand and a big wide straw hat on her head, and from morning to night she would hammer those stones into pebbles and those pebbles into gravel.

  It would take her weeks to break a pile of stones that reached close to ceiling height in a pyramid fashion. That’s a hell of a lot of stones to break. And she didn’t work at it just for a few weeks; the weeks would sometimes run into months. When she had an impressive enough pyramid of crushed stones—mind you, other poor women were doing the same thing—a man would come by with his truck and his workers, and he would bargain with her for her pyramid of crushed stones, and he would pay her whatever she was able to negotiate—on average, ten shillings, twelve shillings, a pound and a half. Fifteen shillings would have been the equivalent of about six dollars. The man would pay her the six dollars, or whatever it was, and his workmen would shovel all the gravel into his truck, and they would go.

  Then, after some respite of a week or so, she would start gathering stones all over again.

  But what Reggie and Evelyn did for a living in no way articulated who they were as people. There was this whole race/class thing in the Bahamas, and among blacks the class thing was prevalent and vigorously administered. If you were really poor, you were without leverage and powerless, and that was the majority of the people. Also, there was a class of blacks who felt they were above you. They mimicked the colonial value system and saw themselves at the top of the black community. It was their hierarchical sort of thing. Well, my dad was so poor that he was dismissed by the black social structure, dismissed by every social structure. Dismissed by everyone, pretty much, except his friends. He had lots of friends.

  Now trust me, the man never complained. These are my complaints, not his. No complaints. He was there, life was as it was—that’s how he looked at it. He
knew what kind of a person he was. He knew what kind of a family he had. He knew what kind of a woman he was married to. He had no money; he had to squeeze a living out of the most unusual activities, but everything he undertook was honorable, because that was who he was.

  And Evelyn, of course, I never heard her complain—never, not once—though she would get a little pissed at me when I grumbled about the kind of clothes I had. I was simply too young to understand our situation, but she may have translated my complaints into an implication of failure on her part or Dad’s. In any case, she had answers for that, you know? And the answers were damn good ones, and they had no self-pity in them, and they had no self-incrimination in them. She would say the kinds of things that proud and honorable poor mothers have always said—things like, “As long as the clothes you have are clean, they’re fine.”

  But when I got to New York, and when I got to Hollywood, for whatever reason or by whatever stroke of luck, I was given the tremendous opportunity of doing work that could reflect who I was. And who I was had everything to do with Reggie and Evelyn and each cigar sold and each rock broken. That’s how I’ve always looked at it: that my work is who I am. I decided way back at the beginning, back when I was still washing dishes in a barbecue joint in Harlem, that the work I did would never bring dishonor to my father’s name.

  I do what I do for me and for my wife and children, of course. And I do it out of a certain professional ego-drive and ambition like anyone else. But everything I do, I also do for Reggie and for Evelyn.