The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  And I said to him, I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s the practice here; it’s the law.”

  I looked into his eyes, and I could see that he was pained by having to do this. I could tell it; I could smell it. For him, another black man, to be saying, “We do have this table, but we’ll have to put a screen around you”—it must have hurt.

  So I said, “Well, no thank you,” and I walked away feeling for the man. Not feeling for myself, because I was getting out of there. But I was also somewhat impervious, because that wasn’t me. The me they saw and wanted to put a screen around didn’t exist to me.

  But did I feel some outrage? Of course. Did I feel angry? Yes, but I took it in stride—because this moment of absurdity was, in fact, so totally unremarkable. To African-Americans in 1955 this kind of insult was old hat. So I digested it, and I went on with my life to fight other battles, as I had to. But I never accommodated it.

  In 1955, if the nation had cared to take an honest look, it would have seen the approaching civil rights storm kicking up dust on the horizon, coming, perhaps, to seek out the young, quiet preacher of the gospel, destined to lead the way across the difficult and painful years ahead. In fact, before 1955 had passed into history, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, appearance on the national scene seemed to have no end in sight.

  FIVE

  A PATCH OF BLUE

  BRENT STAPLES DID a piece in the New York Times not long ago saying that when white kids run amok, it’s time for soul-searching in America, time to figure out our ills. But the problems of black kids always remain “other” and somehow apart.

  When we did Blackboard Jungle there were forces in the country, Clare Booth Luce among them, that described the film as un-American. They thought it was a misrepresentation of American high school education. Well, it certainly wasn’t the kind of school that Ms. Luce’s kids would have attended. There were a couple of Hispanic kids, some black kids, and all the kids were lower-income. It was a vocational school in New York City, a school for the incorrigibles and the kids who weren’t doing too well. The message coming loud and clear from these critics of our film was, “This isn’t ‘us.’” But Richard Brooks, the film’s director, had a different message: “Yes it is. This is ‘us’ too.”

  The film’s theme had to do with courage and belonging. Those issues were presented within the context of how an ethnically and racially mixed class of hard-knocks kids moved and changed over time. The individuals in that classroom came to certain realizations having to do with self-perception, courage, and the abuse of power. All of these elements were very creatively orchestrated.

  Further animating this already lively mix, the producer added rock and roll to the soundtrack! Let me tell you, in the mid-fifties, with my character’s alienated and uncooperative presence in that classroom challenging the authority of the teacher (but winding up an ally of his on some level), and with Bill Haley and the Comets singing “Rock Around the Clock”—well, the result was an electric jolt.

  Blackboard Jungle was made in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, but that court decision notwithstanding, black schools at that time were invisible to white America. This was the era of the Andrews Sisters and Perry Como in terms of popular entertainment. Your Hit Parade was the big show on television, and the big cultural barometer. The sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t begin for quite a few years. In 1954 the issue of race was still damn near unchanged from when I got off the boat in Florida in 1943. Back then I couldn’t go into certain stores and try on a pair of shoes. If I wanted something from a restaurant outside the community in which I was confined, I had to go to a back door. If I rode the bus, I was in the back of the bus. If I wanted to take a train, I was in the Jim Crow car. Thurgood Marshall was running around the country bringing suits at various places, but America wasn’t ready for change yet. Most folks didn’t want to hear the news.

  I made 750 dollars a week for Blackboard Jungle, and I was overjoyed. That was a monumental amount for me, but still I knew it wasn’t going to change my life. I went back to New York, back to Riverside Drive at 147th Street, back to my restaurant empire, which had grown to three establishments, only one of which was profitable. We were on a slide, and before long the whole thing fell apart. When my partner and I dissolved our relationship, he took the one decent location, and I was left with the other two—which also left me at my wits’ end. Here I was, a well-known face in the movies, with my only form of consistent income a business that wasn’t working, with three children to support and no money.

  My father-in-law was a master bricklayer. After a bit of soul-searching I went to him and asked if he could teach me how to lay bricks. My brother-in-law was designated as the teacher. He took me up to 126th Street, to a two-family house with a backyard owned by a friend of his, and he set me up with a stack of bricks and some cement. It was a tight space, actually, and they got me going with the plumb line and the white string to keep the rows straight. I tried and tried, but I evidently didn’t have the knack.

  When I got home I told my wife, “Don’t worry. I’ll get a job.” And I meant it. I’d been a carpenter’s helper once before. I’d even once had a job stacking barrels of nails. I’d spent a whole day going around to the entrance of the building to get the barrels, then dragging those babies around back to a crawl space under the floor and stacking them in. That was a backbreaker.

  Of all my father’s teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain. I didn’t know where I was going next, but I knew that failure wasn’t an option.

  The restaurant was once and for all finito. I went next door to the little newsstand and tobacco shop. I gave the owner all the food that was left over and whatever fixtures he could use, and I closed the doors. I owed back rent, so I had to leave the rest of the equipment. And then I just walked away.

  That’s when I got the call from Richard Brooks to make Something of Value in Kenya. And from there my career really took off.

  This was still 1950s America, however, an America in which a career like this had never even been dreamed of for an outsider of color; it had never happened before in the history of the movie business—a black leading man. I was in the midst of a revolutionary process with this institution I was so at odds with. But my eye was still on “the nature of things,” not the career. I was only doing what seemed natural to me, but I knew in the larger scheme of things that it was far from “natural,” and that it didn’t obviate what was going on in everyday America. There was still gross unfairness in jobs all around me, in living space, in the manner in which black Americans were received.

  I saw the truth clear as could be. The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience. Men like Darryl Zanuck, Joe Mankiewicz, Stanley Kramer, the Mirisch brothers, Ralph Nelson, Mike Frankowitch, David Susskind—men who, in their careers, felt called to address some of the issues of their day.

  With my earnings from Something of Value I was able to buy a two-family house in Mt. Vernon, New York, for twenty-seven thousand dollars. We lived in the ground-floor apartment with three kids (and a fourth on the way) in what was a mixed, but mostly black, community. Among our neighbors—an extraordinary bunch—were Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. It was a middle-class neighborhood made up of people with either solid professions or secure jobs. Ossie, Ruby, and I knew we represented a slight departure from the norm. Black actors earning as much as a middle-class living amounted to less than one percent of all black actors in the profession. The handful of those lucky enough to have employment had to be constantly mindful of the uncertainties attendant to such fragile statistics and keep an eye out in case the winds of fortune should shift unnoticed and blow them back beyond the poverty line. Through training passed down from all the earlier generations who had to be careful where they walked on
the sidewalk, we had the radar to pick up vibrations—good and bad—moving in our direction. Especially when threatening situations arose, all judgment calls required clearance by intuition as a court of last resort. Only then would a course of action be determined.

  In 1958 I did another picture. The Defiant Ones, that took some heat. Here a good portion of the controversy came from my friends in the black community. It was a Stanley Kramer film written by some very intense and committed progressives, based on their own convictions about race in America. The story was about two fugitives from a chain gang, one white and one black, literally bound together—at least at the beginning—who could never maneuver their way safely through the system. Each misunderstood the other, but they also misunderstood their own individual limitations; so they scapegoated each other.

  They weren’t able to clearly define what class was, what race was. They experienced poverty, but they couldn’t objectively characterize it over and above the fact that they didn’t have any money in their pockets. They were simply poor, and that pissed them off, and each used the other to justify his anger—until each discovered that the real difficulty was within himself.

  Stanley Kramer’s message in the film was that all people are fundamentally the same. Our differences are, for the most part, cosmetic. The character played by Tony Curtis demonstrated that the society we’d constructed wasn’t too kind to a goodly number of people who weren’t black, who weren’t Hispanic, who weren’t Asian, who weren’t Native American. Some of the people being given a tough time were Irish, and some were Italians, and some were French, and some were Spanish, and some were eastern European. Modern society wasn’t too terrific to many of them—at times, to most of them.

  Greed and cruelty are pretty widely distributed throughout humanity, as are their victims. You can have oppression of one sort or another all across the board culturally speaking, and all across the board racially speaking, and all across the board religiously speaking. The down-and-out characters played by Tony Curtis and me in The Defiant Ones weren’t willing to give any credence to this commonality until their experience thrust it right up in their faces and they could no longer ignore it. That’s why, at the end, they wound up on that railroad trestle, one guy holding the other guy, struggling to survive, hanging on, but singing a song, a song of hope.

  They’re interchangeable, these two guys. The slight difference—very slight difference—of one being white and one being black obscures all the other issues about the nature of society. To lay all of society’s ills on racial differences is simplistic.

  Nonetheless, there was criticism of The Defiant Ones. A small but highly vocal subset of viewers loved the film but took exception to the ending. They were saying, essentially, “We aren’t ready for oneness.” Only this time the sentiment was from the black perspective.

  Certain of my friends in the Hollywood community wanted more of a sense of satisfaction from the ending—a payback satisfaction, you follow? The moment that sets up the final scene is when Tony Curtis was unable to run as fast as I had to catch the moving freight train that had become our last chance for escape. He had tried with all his might to reach my outstretched hand and hold on. At one point, in fact, our hands almost clasped—another inch was all he needed—but then his fingers began to slip away from mine. It was at that moment that I tumbled off the train too, following after him. So what my friends were questioning was whether I should have stayed on the train and said, “Screw that guy.” I explained that the scene in question had been clearly designed by the writers and the director to demonstrate that something had happened in the arc of both characters, something powerful enough that my character felt compelled to make that sacrifice, for a friend. My adjustment as an actor for playing the scene as written was the thought that maybe we’ll get to the bottom of the hill and be able to take off, or the posse might assume we’re still on the train. Nevertheless, from the point of view of those friends my character’s tumbling off the train added an unsatisfactory note to the tag of the film. People who saw it that way would have let Tony Curtis go to suffer his fate, whatever that was, and they would have stayed on the train. Now, if I’d been in my character’s shoes, in real life, what would I have done? Truth is I’m not altogether sure where I would have come down. But as a professional actor my job was to create the character with the sensibility to conduct himself in the way he behaved at the end, and that’s exactly how I played him. The movie’s point of view was Stanley Kramer’s. And I’m very happy to say, now, in retrospect, that it was a good choice on his part, and on the writer’s part. And indeed on my part for playing the character as it was written. It was a message of tolerance that has stood up pretty well, given that the picture was made over forty years ago.

  By the end of the movie the two characters had each made peace with that part of the self that they’d come to terms with in the other. Tony’s character was lying there in my arms in bad shape, but making jokes about our situation, and he pulled the whole thing together by saying, in effect, “There’s much about you that is me, and there’s much about me that is you, and I’m comfortable with that.” The movie ended before viewers could question how long this comfort would last or where it would lead or how profound it was. But it seems to me that the kind of realization Tony’s character came to doesn’t fade. You may ignore it—you may find that it becomes advantageous politically or socially to ignore it later in life—but you can’t erase it, because it’s an experience that takes root down at the deepest level of commonality—down where all of us were molded out of the same clay.

  For myself, I rarely have the desire to stick it to people. It’s enough for me to know that I’ve held myself in good standing with me, you see. It’s enough for me to be able to look at the film and say. “That represents me well. That’s how I would like people to see me. I would like them to see me as a person who has some value unto himself, and there it is.”

  But when I’m done wrong by someone, I’m not above putting that person on the rack in my mind, you know? I rage against the misdeed by devising all kinds of responses and reactions that would dissipate my anger, but it’s all in imaginary form. Then I become sorry for the thoughts and contemplate forgiveness.

  In this life of mine I can’t recall any situation in which forgiveness hasn’t ultimately been the settlement. However, getting to forgiveness hasn’t necessarily been a rapid transition. Still, I level out with most such relationships at least cleansed of the rancor, if not intact. And I live better with the situation even if a relationship is altered irreparably in some ways.

  Governor Wallace, before his death, said he was sorry for what he had done, and he spoke of the harm and the pain his views and actions had caused. Jesse Jackson went to see him, and I think a form of absolution took place. When you genuinely and sincerely apologize for harm and pain, it’s a sign that your life has taken you to another place from where you were when you caused the harm and pain and had no apologies to make. But the process is never simple, and words can never undo lives destroyed.

  We’ve been at this game of human history for a long time, and yet in just the past few years we’ve witnessed hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, and elsewhere tortured and killed in the name of ethnic differences. We have a history whose centuries are replete with genocide and attempted genocide.

  What humanity has perpetrated goes by different names at different times. What began in Central and South America in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella culminated at the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. We called it “exploring the New World,” but it caused millions of deaths and the absolute elimination of cultures.

  Today, maybe the majority of countries aren’t involved in such cruelties, but the majority of countries rarely have been. It’s generally one country, and then another, and then maybe a war between three or four countries. So here we are at the dawn of a new millennium, and how much closer are we to the enlightenment that would take us beyond such b
ehavior?

  It might very well be that all we’re going to get is an opportunity to rail against the darkness, and to hope and dream and imagine and expect that one day our species—in the form of our children, or our grandchildren, or some progeny in generations to come—will arrive at that place.

  In 1964 I was awarded the Oscar for best actor for my performance in Lilies of the Field, the first African-American so honored. Did I say to myself, “This country is waking up and beginning to recognize that certain changes are inevitable”? No, I did not. I knew that we hadn’t “overcome,” because I was still the only one. My career was unique in all of Hollywood. I knew that I was a one-man show, and it simply shouldn’t be that way. And yet in a way I found the accolade itself quite natural. I wasn’t surprised that such good things were happening to me, because I’d never seen myself as less than I am. When I realized that I could be a better than utilitarian actor, I realized that I had the responsibility, not as a black man, but as an artist, to exercise tremendous discipline. I knew the public would take my measure, and that was constantly in my calculations.

  By this time my family had moved to a seven-acre estate in Pleasantville, New York, a huge place in a very upscale community where we were treated very well. I remember the ladies who came as a welcoming committee, all white, and told us about the community. Our kids played with their kids, and our kids had no difficulties in the public schools.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, I stayed at many of New York City’s finest hotels. Always without incident. Treated with respect on every occasion. Likewise in restaurants, stores, theaters, and, of course, all public-supported venues. None of which should be taken to mean that racism wasn’t painfully evident in other ways, in other forms. Still, while that great city was no racial paradise, she was, without question, seductive as hell. She was, in addition, a clear-cut improvement over Mississippi.