The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  I have a kind of respect—a worshipful attitude, even—for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons. I know it’s no accident that ancient people celebrated the solstice and the equinox. There’s something very powerful that happens, especially in the colder climates of the north, when instead of being a minute shorter every day, daylight lasts a minute longer. You feel it in your bones. You know it as you might know the presence of God. We’re halfway there! We may survive this winter after all!

  I don’t believe in a Moses laying down the law; I simply believe that there are natural harmonies, and that some things work better than others—and it so happens that most of those things that work better than others align pretty well with the Judeo-Christian ethics that most people in this country define as morality. They work better, within the system of life on this planet. They don’t violate the natural order.

  It’s like the lion in nature. This beast can be as magnificently dreadful a creature as any we could imagine. Come feeding time, lions go out on the plains, and they find food; and before there’s food, there’s death—the death of another creature—and that death is repeated over and over each day.

  And yet after the lion’s belly is full, it walks among prey with no harmful intent, and the prey knows it. Everything’s cool. The lion goes down to the water hole to drink, you know, and a prey creature approaches the water and sees the lion there drinking. The antelope and gazelles know damn full well they’re okay. Some instinct tells them, “Now listen, in the entire history of our species there hasn’t been one of these guys here drinking with us who then attacked us; it’s just not in the cards. So relax.”

  There’s simply a certain order in the nature of things, and the animals operate accordingly. The natural laws are there, and the animals respond unfailingly. There are times when humanity operates the same way, in harmony with natural laws—and it’s called true progress.

  How come we were smart enough, without education or training but entirely on the basis of instinct and experience, to find a way to domesticate agriculture? Instead of having to follow the rains or the herds all the time as we once did, some enterprising soul said, “Wait a minute. You know something? These nuts and these fruit seeds and these grains—hmmm. Let’s try this: let’s put them in the soil.” Then the tribe goes away and comes back nine months later and there’s a field of grain, or a stand of trees.

  The whole process of survival tells us that there’s a morality to these natural rhythms, and that this morality is woven into the fabric of nature. For humanity, part of that fabric is the higher consciousness I was speaking of earlier. I feel that to aspire to that higher consciousness is to align ourselves with the natural order—in essence, to let go of the self. When we do this, when we rid ourselves of the petty little ego-drives that get in our way, we find ourselves much more in tune with the natural harmony, and good things can happen.

  In the early sixties, director Ralph Nelson came upon a novel called Lilies of the Field, and he was so taken with it that he had an agent pursue the film rights. Then he found a screenwriter, and then he got in touch with me.

  United Artists was the studio he went to, because he’d had successful relations with them before, but they weren’t that enthusiastic about doing this small little picture about some nuns and a black handyman and faith and redemption. They were, however, interested in continuing their relationship with Ralph Nelson. The material was probably too soft for them, but in the interests of continuing their relationship, they offered him an outrageously small amount of money to make the film—240 thousand dollars.

  That wasn’t his salary. That was the entire budget for the film! All salaries, all production costs, everything.

  And Ralph Nelson said yes! He put up his house as collateral, meaning that if he’d run over budget, he might very well have lost the place. We had no money in the budget for rehearsal, so he said to the actors, “We can rehearse, but you have to do it at my house, and we have to do it kind of secretly.” This was because of the union rules and the fact that we weren’t getting paid but were acting on…well, faith.

  We rehearsed at his house in California for maybe a week, and then we flew to Arizona, checked into a motel, did the wardrobe thing, and started shooting the next day. Thirteen days later we were finished. Thirteen days later we had shot the entire film and were back in Los Angeles—from here to there and back again in two weeks.

  Well, our faith was amply rewarded. For me, it meant winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. For all of us, it meant being a part of something that continues to touch people now, almost forty years down the road.

  That picture had a lot to say about the kind of consciousness I aspire to, a consciousness that encompasses infinitely more than the world I see as I drive through Los Angeles at rush hour. But when the focus is entirely on the traffic, or on the appointment I’m rushing to, or on whatever else my petty problems may include, those manifestations of the ego are like the bright lights of a city that block out the stars. The stars are still there—I just can’t see them.

  But when I focus beyond the self, the interference drops away and suddenly I have access to a much grander form of awareness. It includes what I see and what I don’t see but know to exist—even what will far outlast me as a physical being. I can begin to sense the connection of it all, and my place within it all, but only by removing myself from the center. In the moment that I do so, I know that this is Los Angeles, and that Los Angeles is part of a state, and that this state is part of the country, and that this country is part of a hemisphere, and that this hemisphere is part of a globe, and that this globe is one of nine or eleven (depending on your point of view) planets that move around the sun, and that the sun is one star, and that one star sits in a galaxy of 200 billion stars, and that this galaxy of 200 billion stars sits in a complex of 200 billion galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. I can even postulate alternative universes we don’t know about yet. And all this is available to me when I sublimate the self—as is the full saga of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and human experience. When I cling to the self, I feel neurotic, alienated, insecure, It’s when I let the self go that I can begin to realize how fully a part of this grand scheme I am and will always remain.

  Which is another way of saying, “You are a child of the universe; you have a right to be here.” Carl Sagan’s first wife, Lynn Margulis, found another way to express the same idea through the concept of Gaia—the scientific view that our entire planet and all the ecosystems therein make up one organic whole, one living being that must be examined as such if we are to learn the way things truly are. “Mother Earth” is yet another, much older, and considerably less scientific way people have expressed the same thought.

  To which I would add one postscript. I’ve read of studies done with youngsters—not with children, but with chimps—that have profound implications for our species and our life on this planet. The scientists behind this research know what it takes to raise a healthy baby chimp with a real mother—all the nutrition and the calories and so on. So they create a wire mother with maybe a bit of fur, a perch like an arm across the chest, and nipples that project through the wicker-and-wire mannequin. The nipples, attached to a sort of baby bottle, supply all the nutrients a chimp is known to need—the same nutrients that would come from a real mother’s milk, maybe even more. But despite the fact that baby chimps can climb up on their “Wire Mothers” and be safe and get all the same nutrients, the same protein, the same basic protection from the elements they’d get from their real mothers, the chimps with the wire mothers wither and die.

  My fear is this: I fear that as we cover more of our planet with concrete and steel, as we wire our homes with more and more fiber-optic cables that take the place of more intimate interactions, as we give our children more and more stuff and less and less time, as we go further and further away from the kind of simplicity I knew as a child on Cat Island, our Earth—Gaia or not—will become
for us the Wire Mother, and our souls will wither and die as a result.

  Every Sunday on Cat Island we would walk to the little church in Arthur’s Town to attend mass. The service was Anglican Catholic, the Church of England. Then we would walk home, all the kids with our shoes slung over our shoulders by their laces—shoes not to be worn again for another week.

  When we moved to Nassau we attended the Catholic Church, but this was more a matter of convenience than theology. The fact is the real religion in our lives was grounded in the old culture, a belief that there were always unseen forces at play in our lives, unexplainable mysteries that determined our fate.

  All through my childhood, from my first understanding of words, I heard adults speaking of these unseen forces. I think my entire life has been in large part an effort to understand these “mysteries.” I remember my father coming into the house one day and picking up an enamel plate. As he put it behind his back, he said, “I’m going to show you something, and I’m going to show it to you only once. Are you ready?” And then he brought the plate from behind his back. On it were hundreds of tiny fishes. Then he moved the plate behind his back again, and they were gone. I was astounded! I begged him to do it again, but he never would. This strange transformation was magic to me, and I never forgot it. It was a mystery that I puzzled over for years.

  On leaving Cat Island, I began to encounter new concepts and values embedded in strange new words—words like commerce and material success. I had never heard of such things on Cat Island, but from Nassau and beyond they loomed large as matters of life and death. And yet the mysteries were no fewer in this modern, more commercial environment. What is physics but a repository of mysteries? And astronomy? My God! You talk about mysteries! The migration from culture to culture and through varying levels of technical sophistication doesn’t matter. The mysteries shift their shapes, but the mysteries remain. God is the ultimate mystery, and fear of his wrath the ultimate driving force that governs how we behave.

  When I was a kid in the Caribbean, there was a church on the next street from us. It was what was called a “Jumper church.” Now, a Jumper church was the kind of church where, at every session, the minister would whip the congregation into a kind of psychological frenzy, which included jumping up from their seats to prance about in a trance while speaking in tongues.

  Okay. I was witness to evenings like these. But being too young to really get a grasp on where these worshipers were coming from, I never understood the whole concept very well. But I felt that the worshipers were genuine. This “foreign tongue” I heard—which would be the equivalent of gibberish, I suppose—sounded genuine to me. It was like a long stutter. And never a word that sounded English.

  These folks were on their feet, jumping around in peculiar movements and rambling on ecstatically, in this unknown tongue. Many of them would become so overwhelmed by the possession of themselves that they’d slip into a kind of jerking, epileptic-like fit. Once in that state, they would be cared for and nurtured back to normal by other members of the congregation (some who themselves had just passed successfully through the same ritual moments before, and others who in due time would likewise be drawn into the trance). By the end of the evening everybody would be sitting prim and proper in their chairs again.

  At the end of the service people collected their fans—there was no air-conditioning in the church—and emptied out into the evening darkness, headed home. I remember observing their faces carefully as they were leaving, just as I had observed their behavior in their trance. Most of them I had known around the neighborhood, but I felt I didn’t know them here.

  Okay, now DISSOLVE. I’m a grown person now. Occasionally I travel back in my mind to such times. And still, to this day, I ask myself…unknown tongues? Were they, in fact, unknown tongues? If a recording were made at a service like that and the words spoken were stacked utterance for utterance against all the known languages of the world, what kind of similarities might appear? Or would the words turn out to be in a totally unknown tongue? Might the gibberish be found to be unique? And if it did turn out to be a totally unknown tongue, would it be a tongue unknown only to those of us who hear it? Could it be clear-as-a-bell communication in a place where it’s understood? Could it be understood by God? Could there be a God? Can you be objective enough to perceive of there being a God who hears and understands every word?

  “His eye is on the sparrow.”

  TEN

  THE NATURE OF OPPOSITES

  “WHO ARE YOU?” I once was asked when I was young. “I’m the me I chose to be,” was my quick response. “Where did you come from, and how did you get here?” Equally glib responses waited on the tip of my tongue.

  I’m no longer young now, and the season for summing up is descending upon me with steady insistence. So no further spin need be placed on answers to who I am or where I came from or how I got here. I am what I’ve become.

  I came from a place of purity. I got here with the help of my friends, and my family, and perhaps the benign and protective influence of forces I’ll never understand. I entered this world with the standard equipment of an average child, as was plain for all to see. Throughout my first ten years, my days were filled with the uneventful but traditional boychild developmental rituals of a semi-primitive society. Outside our island township the world at large didn’t exist, except in snippets infrequently picked up from adult conversations.

  In the next five years, the outside world introduced itself to me and instructed me as to where the lines were drawn: what the style of my behavior should be, where I should find a place to fit, and how I should rein in my expectations (never, ever reaching above the level approved for persons like me, if such meager dreams as I was allowed were to find accommodation).

  The reining in of expectations was the centerpiece of the outside world’s overall message, and it came through loud and clear. Limits had been defined, had been written into law and imposed on me long before I was even born. Therefore, I was forcefully advised to understand and accept that the burden would always be on me to see to it that my dreams were tailored to fit such width and breath as the limited expectations assigned me could comfortably entertain. While “expectations” meant “the sky’s the limit” for those favored, that interpretation should never be expected to apply in cases like mine. I listened intently until each point had been driven home. Then I said, “Fuck you.” in the nicest way I could.

  By the end of those five years, the outside world and I had settled on what each could expect from the other. That each would keep an eye on the other had been a foregone conclusion. The outside world was annoyed and irritated by what it saw in me, but it was in no way fearful. Rather, it assumed that somewhere further on I would undoubtedly self-destruct. And there’s the rub. In spite of the fact that we were ludicrously mismatched, I wasn’t so afraid as not to question the world’s power to determine what space I would be permitted to occupy. Nor would I allow it to impose a value of little consequence on my existence, or to reinforce its unyielding demand that its assessment of my value be my worth in the world at large. That power, which attempted to legislate how I should perceive myself in my own eyes, was unaware that, much earlier (long before I ever set sail for the outside world), roots sent down in a gentle place had taken hold. By the time the world and I took each other on, who and what I was had already been formed in my own eyes.

  The ground had been broken and the seeds for this self had been sown somewhere inside me in a place called imagination. This was a word that had first appeared in otherwise familiar dialogue while my mother was administering one of the many whippings I was regularly accused of having earned.

  “That imagination of yours [wham!] is going to get you in a bunch of trouble one of these days [wham! wham!] if you don’t start listening [wham! wham! wham!] to what I tell you [wham! wham! wham! wham!]. Now get it into that thick head of yours once and for all [wham! wham! wham! wham! wham!] and start behaving yourself.”

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nbsp; Imagination and whippings were two “blessings” always available to the young in that semi-primitive society, no less (I imagined) than in the larger world outside. In that beginning process the same imagination my mother feared would get me into trouble was also my host and guide on excursions into whatever my daydreams envisioned the world at large to be. Together, my imagination and my daydreams whetted my appetite for the wellspring of possibilities they had steadfastly promised would be there. Promises were all that was needed to get the process started in the child that I was, in the place where I lived, in the time of my boyhood. While reality and facts were not given to making promises, they were at the same time also disagreeable and dull and no match for the power of dreams.

  Daydreams were guaranteed to please. They had it all over facts and reality when it came to getting groundwork done and foundations laid. However, daydreams were burdened with what in years to come would be revealed as their major weakness. Every ounce of the hard, grueling, exhaustive work necessary in the conversion from promises made to dreams fulfilled was the sole responsibility of the dreamer.

  I have shown you, in broad strokes, who I was on Cat Island until I was ten and a half years old, and then in Nassau until fifteen, but contradictions abounded. The first time I lied, the first time I stole, the first time I cheated, my first blush of envy, flirtation with greed—not one of these vices was waiting at the docks in the new world to infect me upon my arrival there. I obviously had brought them with me from that gentle place I had left behind.

  But where exactly did they come from? Were they in the genes of generations before, who had passed them quietly down? Or were they socialized behavioral responses, inescapable in human relationships?

  I recall that as a youngster I was a killer of frogs and birds and a torturer of lizards. I recall that I fished for chickens with a straight pin bent into the shape of a hook. With a corn seed fixed on the tip as bait and the pinhook tied to a length of thread, I would cast among the chickens, then wait for one to pluck it up and swallow. I’ve killed fish and birds and discarded their bodies without having paid them the honor of eating their flesh. I can recall insects that, posing no threat, were squashed dead by a reflexive foot or hand of mine, long before and long after I had learned the meaning of the word remorse.