The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  Still, there’s something called “poverty syndrome.” You can’t have been subject to poverty at one time and ever live free of it again. It hunkers down in your head and latches on to your very being. It can be subdued; it can be varnished over; it can even in some cases be neutralized. But boy, external circumstances can bring it right out of its dormant state again.

  After all these years I’m still very careful how I spend money, very careful, because there’s a fear somewhere deep down inside myself—I don’t let it rise to the surface, but I know where it’s resting—that one day I’ll wake up and everything will all be gone! I’ll be back to the poverty level, where just surviving from morning to night is a real challenge. We live in the most litigious society in the world, and we all know that all kinds of unexpected things can happen.

  I never spend with abandon or disregard for what money represents. And just what is that? Well, what it represents isn’t what I am, though I worked hard and I earned this money, and it’s mine. No, what it represents is good fortune, because I’m a lucky son of a gun. Most people aren’t that fortunate, materially speaking. So first of all, I need to accept and be joyous about the fact that I’ve been so lucky. And then, since I have been so lucky (and others haven’t). I have to remember the corollary: with luck come some responsibilities—one of which is “Don’t piss on it.”

  We live in a world in which all things are relative. Being rich means one thing for someone of my background and experience, and it has quite a different meaning for someone else. Not that a person’s definition of wealth necessarily remains static. As circumstances change, so does that definition.

  With the sensibilities of a kid off a primitive island in the Caribbean, I felt rich each time I got paid anything during those early years. I can remember a time when, if I could have been guaranteed the income of fifty bucks a week for the rest of my life, I would have perceived myself as not just rich but superrich. Then came a time when I thought that the accumulation of a hundred thousand dollars would be an overwhelming experience; and to have that and then also maybe have a job paying fifty bucks a week—I mean, what else could someone wish for? But now, much later in life, my perceptions are different. I have friends who are billionaires, and I have friends who are struggling to pay four hundred dollars in rent every thirty days—and I can see it all from a much broader perspective.

  By the standards of Cat Island, even the standards of Nassau, I’m wildly rich today, but the really profound changes I’ve experienced are much more subtle. As your life unfolds and you become better off, you become accustomed to a room in a motel that’s clean and comfortable, and there’s this wonderfully clean bathroom, and there’s a television set and a telephone. That, at one stage in your life, is heaven right there. At another stage heaven becomes the Plaza Hotel, a two-bedroom suite, where the bathroom is all marble, and there are dressing gowns in the closet. After a while, if you reach that level and stay there for a bit, that degree of luxury, too, becomes pedestrian. But the one constant is that you can’t go back. Well, you might be able to manage if you were forced to, but you won’t ever elect to go back.

  My father, in his days, was never so fortunate in a material way. Eventually, poverty simply wore him down—but I will say. to his credit, that it took seventy-seven hard years. Despite all the strength and forbearance that kept him going through every other form of hardship, arthritic crippling was at last too much for him, and he simply chose to let go. He called in a young lawyer one day, ostensibly to talk about land claims, and while they were at it he dictated a simple two-page will. Then, beginning the next day, he refused to eat. Not blatantly, so as to call attention to himself. But subtly. He received the meals my mother brought to him on the porch; then, as she turned away to resume her chores, he gave the food to the neighborhood’s scavenger dogs. It was five days before my mother got wise to what he was doing, but by then the doctors at Princess Margaret Hospital couldn’t save him. Especially since he was so determined that he had lived enough.

  Let me assure you, my father was a man of will and determination. I remember one time when we were living in Nassau. My sister Teddy, a grown woman at this point, was having trouble with the men in her life and wanted to come home. She was separated from her husband and had been living with a wild fellow named Blood, who was trouble. My father told her, “Okay, you can come home for a while. But once you’re home, you don’t belong to him—you become a part of our family once again. We’re going to put the protection of this family around you. Therefore, you have a responsibility to this family not to see him without my permission. You’re not to go back to his house, agreed?”

  Well, she agreed to those terms, but before long she was seeing Blood again, and then my father found out.

  “Is it true what I heard?” he asked her. When she just hung her head without answering, he said to her, “Go out there to that tamarind tree and bring me a switch.”

  I knew from personal experience that the tamarind switch was the worst thing to get a whipping with because it had thornlike knots and jagged edges. But he took it, and even though Teddy was a woman maybe twenty-four years old, with two children of her own, he beat the daylights out of her, As he did he said to her, “If I tell you that this house is my home, and if I tell you that under this roof you have to do what I tell you—you have to respect this house and respect me—you listen and you do it. Under my roof you never get so old or so big that you’re outside the jurisdiction of my parenting.”

  Reggie Poitier knew what his legacy would be. He knew and believed in the importance of his role as a father, and he knew that it extended well beyond his capacity as a breadwinner. He believed in the responsibility and the dignity of his task as a bearer of standards, and as an enforcer of standards, and he wouldn’t let his relative position in the economic hierarchy of a crazy tourist economy in any way belittle that tribal role. God knows economic forces had done everything they could to bend him. He had been driven off the land as a tomato farmer, reduced to selling cigars here and there in Nassau watering holes, but when discipline was needed, he still had the where withal to say, “Go get me the tamarind switch.”

  The fact is you can’t do that kind of parenting if your values aren’t clear to you in terms of your own life. You can’t be passing on to your kids a strong foundation if you don’t have one yourself—because whatever foundation you do or don’t have, that’s what you’re going to pass on. And when we pass on something that doesn’t serve our children, we have to be responsible for that.

  In my generation we did a lot of pleasure-chasing—we, the generation responsible for today’s twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and forty-year-olds. Before they came into our lives, we were on a pleasure binge, and the need for immediate gratification passed through us to our children.

  When I got out of the Army in 1944, the guys who were being discharged with me were mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty. We came home to a country that was in great shape in terms of industrial capacity. As the victors, we decided to spread that good fortune around, and we did all kinds of wonderful things—but it wasn’t out of selfless idealism, let me assure you. Take the Marshall Plan, which we implemented at that time. It rebuilt Europe, yes, but it also enabled those war-ruined countries to buy from us. The incredible, explosive economic prosperity that resulted just went wild. It was during that period that the pleasure principle started feeding on itself.

  One generation later it was the sixties, and those twenty-eight-year-old guys from World War II were forty-eight. They had kids twenty years old, kids who had been so indulged for two decades that it caused a huge, first-time-in-history distortion in the curve of values. And, boy, did that curve bend and bend and bend.

  These postwar parents thought they were in nirvana if they had a color TV and two cars and could buy a Winnebago and a house at the lake. But the children they had raised on that pleasure principle of material goods were by then bored to death. They had overdosed on
all that stuff. So that was the generation who decided, “Hey, guess where the real action is? Forget the Winnebago. Give me sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Incredible mind-blowing experiences, head-banging, screw-your-brains-out experiences in service to immediate and transitory pleasures.

  But the one kind of gratification is simply an outgrowth of the other, a more extreme form of the same hedonism, the same need to indulge and consume. Some of those same sixties kids are now themselves forty-eight. Whatever genuine idealism they carried through those love-in days got swept up in the great yuppie gold rush of the eighties and the stock market nirvana of the nineties—and I’m afraid we are still miles away from the higher ground we seek.

  For most of human history, most people were only slightly above the starvation level. (In many countries, most people still are.) Families needed every one of their six or nine kids to toe the line. Otherwise, as everyone knew at every moment, the whole family wouldn’t make it. The new postwar prosperity meant that you could laugh at the old duffers who had grown up in the Great Depression and kept crying caution. The great god Necessity was turned aside by, “Well, shit. Who cares? Everyone we know is prosperous, everything’s prosperous, and I’m bored.”

  When my mother sent me for water, which had to be drawn a long way from the house, it was because she needed to cook with it and to wash our pots with it. If I had said, “Nah, I don’t feel like it,” I know what the result would have been. If my mother hadn’t kicked my ass, my brother would have kicked my ass. My brother would have said, “Are you crazy? Grab that pot over there and get that water!” That was the ritual. That was the way it worked.

  I hope that doesn’t put me in the category of old duffers. I don’t mean to be like some old guy from the olden days who says, “I walked thirty miles to school every morning, so you kids should too.” That’s a statement born of envy and resentment. What I’m saying is something quite different. What I’m saying is that by having very little, I had it good. Children need a sense of pulling their own weight, of contributing to the family in some way, and some sense of the family’s interdependence. They take pride in knowing that they’re contributing. They learn responsibility and discipline through meaningful work. The values developed within a family that operates on those principles then extend to the society at large. By not being quite so indulged and “protected” from reality by overflowing abundance, children see the bonds that connect them to others.

  Dirt poor and wearing a gunnysack for pants, I inherited such a legacy, and I pity the kids today who are being raised in such a way that they’ll be hard-pressed to enjoy the simple things, to endure the long commitments, and to find true meaning in their lives.

  Poverty didn’t kill my soul. Poverty can destroy a person, yes, but I’ve seen prosperity kill many a soul as well. After so much ease and comfort and mindless consumption of commodities, how do we even know that anything resembling a soul is there anymore? One way is to look to people who are still making enduring commitments. That’s where heroes like Nelson Mandela come in. That man broke rocks for thirteen years! You don’t go to prison for twenty-seven years for your beliefs if what you believe in is unbridled pleasure. To make that kind of sacrifice, you have to believe that there’s something more to it all than “he who dies with the most toys wins.” But who among us today is going to take that kind of stand? Who among us believes that strongly in any ideal or ideology?

  The laws of economics don’t promote idealism or higher consciousness. The logic of profit and loss in a market-driven culture reduces the grandeur of the human species down to one role, that of “consumers.” And all along, the pleasure principle is saying, “I have products I can sell you to take care of all that. You can get it online. Come, come. I have even more thrills to show you.”

  We’re not nearly as strong as our mothers and fathers were. I mean, to endure—to just simply stand up under the strain for a lifetime of what someone like my mother had to put up with. But she endured because she found comfort in her commitments. She stoked the fire and she tended the farm and she washed the clothes and she baked the bread, but she found a satisfaction in that. The physical demands of that load would have been enough to smother and overwhelm many people, but they didn’t her, because she wasn’t infected by the pleasure principle. She didn’t flick a switch and have the lights go on and electrical power rush to her command to wash the clothes, to heat the oven. She couldn’t just turn on the water and let it run out of a tap. What she had instead—commitment—was even better.

  What a life for a woman: getting up before the sun and working until darkness fell, washing her dishes and scrubbing out her pots by candlelight—and that’s if she was lucky enough (or, to use the proper word, rich enough) to own a candle. Even the small convenience of a candle was a gift. You can’t imagine what a gift that was in my mother’s time. If she had half a dozen candles in the house, she would light only one per night and let it burn maybe just so much and then put it out. She would tend to it with such care—savor it, conserve it.

  Now the kids of her children and her grandchildren—they’re so accustomed to convenience that they can’t find any pleasure in such small delight.

  A little hardship is a good thing, then. But how much? It’s a difficult trade-off—especially when we’re talking about our children.

  As I’ve mentioned, a large part of my father’s legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, “The measure of a man is how well he provides his children.”

  That teaching weighed heavily on me when my first wife and I separated. That breakup was a long, painful, scarring period for all concerned. Juanita, my wife, had no interest in dismantling the family. She knew that there was great dissatisfaction on my part, but she was a good Catholic girl, and with that background you stay the course, you take the good with the bad. You accept inconvenience and painful readjustments, and sometimes you just absorb the painful elements in the marriage that can’t be excised.

  Of course, too, I was in love with another woman, and the guilt of that was something that eleven years of psychotherapy couldn’t “cure.” There was a time when the pain was so intense that I cast blame in all directions. “My wife doesn’t understand me enough,” I would say in clichéd fashion. And then I would say that the “other woman” had her own agenda.

  It was all a pretty miserable situation. Especially knowing that my mother and my father had done so much better. My brothers Reginald and Cedric had done so much better. And then came Sidney, who simply wasn’t measuring up. In fact, I was giving up.

  All I knew was that I had to get to the other side. And in the midst of all this pain, there were my kids. I had to tell them that it wasn’t their mother’s fault, it wasn’t the “other woman’s” fault, it was my fault.

  My good friend Harry Belafonte had gone through the heartache of a divorce a few years ahead of me. Harry saw me in great pain, and I asked him if he knew someone I could talk to. He recommended a psychiatrist, and then he said to me, from his own experience, “Always be there for your children, no matter what. If they’re supposed to come visit you and they don’t want to, they’ve got to come,” he said. “If they don’t want to talk to you, they don’t have to talk to you; but they have to be there. You can put the food on the table, but they don’t have to eat. They can spend the whole weekend in their rooms, but they’re going to know that you cared enough to have them with you. And you take them back on Sunday evening, and you don’t get them again till two weekends later, or whatever the situation is.”

  He spoke with the fervor of a preacher by this point. “And you pick them up again the next time, faithfully, and you bring them to your place. If they want to go to a movie, you drop them off and then go back and pick them up, and then you take them home and you help them to get ready for bed and you do for them whatever they need. And if they don’t say one word to you for the whole weekend, you just live with it. When the time comes for them to return to t
heir mom, you get together and you help them get dressed and packed, and you take them back home.”

  Well, it was some of the best advice I was ever given. It echoed my father’s teaching, because I knew that when Reggie talked about providing, he wasn’t talking just about material things. I got the same encouragement from my psychoanalyst, with whom I would sit down four or five times a week to face my guilt. And my guilt would stare back at me with no expression. Did it change me? Yes. Did it make me a better person? I don’t know. As self-serving as it may sound, it certainly made me a better father.

  I found it in myself to face up to the conflicts I had created. I didn’t walk away from my children. I took an apartment in New York, but every day I went back up to the suburbs where they lived to be there when they got home from school or when they gathered for their dinner. Years later, they began, in their own words, to let me know that it was good for them to know that I was there for them. And I was there for them, even when I traveled far from home for work. Wherever I went in the world, I would leave in their care a phone number. And I now have one hell of a relationship with my children.

  But it wasn’t always so. There were rough passages, to be sure. In my experience with my kids, I would come to a point where the silence would commingle with my guilt, and then I would have to talk. And yet, as I discovered one day with my older children, the more I talked, the more they pulled back.

  “Oh, come on, tell me about it. You must be having trouble in school. You must be having trouble with…”—name your conundrum.

  Their silent response was, “Go away. Get out of my face.”