Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  Now I had to adapt to a society of my peers, still as an outsider. That was when I discovered that a loner is most often referred to as a shy person. And for that matter, shyness makes up a large part of my personality, a trait that I inherited undoubtedly from the shyest person I knew: my mother.

  This has all been to reveal to you, my dearest great-granddaughter, that in our travels to become who we are and who we were meant to be in the grand scheme of things—whether we see ourselves as outsiders or loners, or as shy or private, or as outgoing, gregarious extraverts—what really counts above all is that we do see ourselves. By seeing and knowing ourselves, we are given dominion over our lives—the capacity to steer our own ships, for better and for worse.

  Though I was shy, an outsider, and a loner, I made friends easily in Nassau and was able to be at home as well in my environment. The earlier music of Cat Island, played by nature and sung by parents, siblings, and neighbors to the homemade melodies and rhythms of hand clapping and foot tapping, had changed in Nassau to a livelier beat—the soundtrack of cars and trucks, the jokes and dares of kids hanging out on street corners, the banter of commerce, live music of rake and scrape mixing with radios in the stores and the movie theaters sounding the popular tunes of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

  During the nearly five years when I came of age on Nassau, the adventure of that music called me. This was true when I attended my first school, Eastern Senior, which required me to walk as many as four miles each way—so far, in fact, that I later transferred to a second school, Western Senior. But before that transfer, while going to and from Eastern, I explored different shortcuts. On such an expedition, I met a boy by the name of Carl—who happened to be white—apparently out in front of where he lived in a neighborhood as poor as mine. We often spoke when I passed by, and we struck up a friendship of sorts. It didn’t take me long to recognize that in spite of the fact that we were both from poor households, Carl exhibited a definite racist streak by claiming his superiority to me—because he was white and I was black. This was another experience that reinforced my outsider status, such that at the time and from then on, whenever I smelled that in a person, I would address it and try to disarm it.

  Later I better understood Carl in the context of the social hierarchy installed in the Bahamas by the colonial system, which was still intact to a large extent. He was looking for anything to lift him higher than the very low rung on which his circumstances of birth had placed him.

  After I quit school at the age of twelve and a half in order to go to work to help support my family, I met a pretty girl named Dorothy—whose coloring was chocolate brown and who appeared to be of African descent—who turned out to be a half-sister of Carl’s. This made me wonder about issues of class and race, but I kept those questions to myself.

  In the meantime, other friendships weren’t always conducive to my staying out of mischief and even some trouble, with enough close calls to cause my parents serious concerns.

  I was never privy to any discussions they may have had, but I imagine they were able to look past some of the more typical teenage behavior that I was involved in—daredevil antics, street fights, and so on. That was, until my friend Yorrick Rolle was caught after stealing a bicycle and then sentenced to a long stint in reform school. To this day, I don’t remember how it was that I happened not to be along for that ride. But I do remember well another incident involving my regular group of guys when I was in tow.

  It was on that particularly dark, moonless night that my friends and I planned and successfully pulled off a major raid of a sizable cornfield—just outside of town. So successful was the raid that we imagined ourselves to possess critical-thinking capacities well above the levels of the twelve-and thirteen-year-olds that we were. And, might I add, that collective assessment of ourselves remains solid proof that we were also the dumbest kids that anyone, anywhere, had ever heard of. And here’s why: on that very same dark, moonless night, we took the bags of corn we had only just stolen and built a bonfire, over which we started roasting the corn—right there in that same cornfield!

  We had barely begun to enjoy our feast when the farmer—who lived all of a quarter mile away—apparently glanced out of his window, spotted the huge glow rising out of the middle of his cornfields, and promptly called both the police and the fire brigade. We were all arrested. My co-conspirators each had parents who were able to manage the seven dollars of bail money. Mine couldn’t. That meant I spent the night in jail.

  The next morning, my dad arrived after borrowing the money for my bail and after paying an additional seven bucks to the farmer to keep me from more jail time. On the way home from the courthouse, my father and I walked along at a pace necessary to keep his rheumatoid arthritis in check. When he did speak, because I knew the measured person that he was, I wasn’t at all surprised that his disappointment wasn’t reflected in his remarks. But I could hear it in his voice. I had let him down.

  Even so, his focus was on the future. “Sidney,” he said finally, “you’re my last born.” He paused and then continued, “You’re growing up. I can’t run after you or look out for you, Son. Not like I used to.”

  I said nothing, but nodded in recognition.

  “You need a stronger hand,” my father went on, and then took a different tack, reminding me, “You were born in America. The time has come for your mother and me to send you back.”

  Thus the wheels were set in motion for me to be sent to live with my brother Cyril in Miami, a departure that finally took place some time later. At that point I was fifteen years old and completely unsophisticated in the ways of the world, other than what I’d learned pretty much on the streets of Nassau. But in his wisdom my father knew that my survival depended on getting me off that island.

  Even though I wasn’t happy at being sent away, in retrospect, my sense is that my dad also recognized that the environment I was living in had little to offer me, and he wanted more for me. Certainly, he must have been hoping that my hardworking brother and his family would be good influences on me. But I have to also believe that Reggie Poitier wanted me, his youngest child, to have a shot at going further than where he had landed after circumstances outside of his control had toppled the only business he knew. Maybe this was his way of tossing me into the ocean, hoping that I could teach myself to swim in a way that he didn’t even know how to do. In any case, he made the call that it was time for me to leave home. It was one of the best decisions he ever made on my behalf.

  Ahead of me were experiences and places that were, once again, so radically different from Cat Island or Nassau, but would only reinforce the outsider in me. There would be, in Florida, the searing shock of racism, segregation, and the mistreatment of people on the basis of color alone—unprecedented in my awareness. My time in Miami would last not much more than a few months before I would be forced to get away, surrounded there as I would be by energies incompatible with my internal self. In my attempt to adapt to the atmosphere there, I was unable to hold to the beat, sped up and erratic as it was. By the time I wound up in New York City, beyond the mind-boggling millions of people and the mad pace of life in the midst of gargantuan buildings and the cacophony of sounds, there would be this blood-freezing, bone-numbing experience that I could never have anticipated: winter.

  Ironically, my survival was to depend on my comfort in being a loner. How does a shy, private person who is suddenly plunged into that environment make it any other way? I would live internally, spending my time going to lots of movies, looking around and trying to figure out how things worked, paying attention to conversations as a listener, as I always had. Somehow, I eventually grasped a sense of the music of that city. I would go to bars and sit in a corner—I wasn’t a drinking person at that point—and just watch people who came in, and listen to what they said to each other and hear their laughter. Too shy to even make any kind of eye contact, I was silently very connected to them by watching their gestures and sensing their moods. On street c
orners, waiting for the light to change, I’d pick up on a conversation next to me and follow it, waiting to hear where it would go, how this story or that anecdote worked out, only to have to lose the ending when the individuals talking turned right and I turned left, leaving me to let my imagination fill in the blanks and, soon enough, join in on another conversation down the block.

  Being as vulnerable as I was, unable to read very well, not really knowing the city, the weather, and having to work to pay my way—all of that brought me to the point where I was a bona fide adult person who would remain a legitimately shy person. I would ultimately make friends in New York, but I was fine on my own, knowing that even when I was being introduced to a new set of people, my shyness would be there still. Even in social settings where I knew people, I would do more listening, watching, and imagining than participating. But as others have observed, being a great listener often makes you an even better learner.

  That didn’t always lessen the burden of being a shy guy. As you’ll hear later on, my shyness with girls was awful. My shyness in making new relationships with guys wasn’t easy, either. My shyness was even intensified just from trying to communicate at first with a group of people whose speech pattern was different from mine. It wasn’t simply that I had this singsong, Caribbean accent; I didn’t speak well: my vocabulary was sparse, and since I couldn’t read sophisticated sentences, I had no written models to follow. Rather than embarrass myself, I followed my natural inclination to withdraw to maintain some space. And the maintenance of space included participating in conversations on a minimal level, making me that much more of an outsider. So, in New York, all of these crosscurrents combined with my loner quotient and the shy outsider nature in me, and the deal was done. It was finished. It was sealed. Who I was was who I was.

  That was the case, really, from the moment I arrived, including when the option arose to go into the army to escape the brutal winter: my identity as Sidney Poitier, the private person, was set and nailed down. Throughout all the events that followed, no matter how much of a public life I went on to have, I never shed that first skin. I never became a social person in New York or in California. I was not a social person at all when I decided to become an actor. You’ll hear more about that subject eventually, although I will say now what I’ve always said—that other than once having claimed the desire to work with cows in Hollywood, if anyone had ever asked me to think about being an actor, I would have said, “Get out of here. Are you crazy? Me? Nooooo!” But fortunately, on that score, fate was to intervene and push me in that direction.

  So I sit comfortable after all these years, and I am very protective of my aloneness. I am very protective of my shyness; it never triggers any displeasure in me, any resentment of itself. It’s a part of me.

  That much I knew about myself at the age of fifteen when my dad walked with me down to the dock in Nassau to send me off into a completely undefined future. My mother stayed at home and chose not to accompany my father in seeing me off. Why exactly she didn’t come I don’t really know. At times I thought it was my fault, because I had told her once when I was upset that I was being made to leave that I wasn’t going to America like everyone else from a poor Caribbean family just to work myself to the bone to send money back home. But over the years it has occurred to me that Evelyn Poitier knew her son better than that and she would have known that only to lessen the hurt of saying good-bye would I have said so foolish a thing. Of course, burning deep within was the desire to make something substantial of myself and to give my parents the comfortable life they had never known. That’s who I really was.

  I have also come to the conclusion that it would have been unbearable for her to watch me sail away, her last-born child, who, had it not been for her strong will and her indomitable faith, might not have lived. Instead, my mother wished me a fond, shy farewell as she stood in the doorway—watching me go with a look of acceptance on her face, as if she had known and had been preparing for this moment to come.

  After I could no longer crane my neck over my shoulder to look back and see her standing there, I imagined that she turned and went to sit on the bench in the living room, alone, where she allowed herself to shed private tears at my leaving.

  As we walked along, me and my dad, we said little, but important understandings passed between us even so. I thought of the visit that I had paid to Yorrick at the reform school where he had been sent—a sobering experience, to say the least, that had helped make better sense of the decision to send me to America. And then we approached the home of another friend of mine, Harry Johnson. There he was, sitting on a wall, waiting for me to pass by, knowing that we might never see each other again. My father walked slowly past Harry as he sat on the wall, and left us the privacy to exchange good-byes.

  At the dock before I boarded the passenger boat, my father reviewed the particulars of where I would be staying in Miami with my brother and his family. After a final, short lecture about remembering the values of respect and discipline that I’d been taught, he patted me on the shoulder and pressed three dollar bills into my hand.

  “Take care of yourself, Son,” he said, leaving me with nothing to do but turn from him and board the boat.

  He didn’t need to give me any other parting advice, because all that he was—a person of decency, integrity, and substance—had already provided me with everything that I needed to know.

  Certainly, my father may have said something about looking forward to hearing from me and to seeing me very soon. With that, I left behind the people that I loved most and the world that had raised me, and sailed off, alone. Due to the events that I’ll describe to you over the next few letters, my dear Ayele, it would be eight long years before I was able to return or even to be heard from again.

  Part II

  EXPEDITIONS

  seventh letter

  ME AND GOD

  I will tell you, dearest Ayele, that I have lived to enjoy some of life’s sweetest moments and most exalted experiences. One that I hold among the most precious was the first sighting of my parents, Evelyn Outten Poitier and Reginald Poitier, eight years after I left home.

  At age twenty-three, I had begun the slow climb toward an acting career and had made my first movie, No Way Out, for which I’d earned $750 a week for four weeks. Knowing that I had booked a second movie, Cry, the Beloved Country, I had just enough of a break in my schedule and enough money to be able to go home for the first time in all those years.

  I flew in to Nassau, took a cab to the house, and, though it was nighttime, found it very much the same as I had left it at age fifteen. The house was dark, except for a thin light in one room. Rather than knocking on the front door, I walked around to a window and peeped in. There on the bench was my mom—unchanged, it seemed, from when I had left her eight years earlier—talking to my father, who was seated next to her on a chair. The sight of my parents, engaged so intimately in conversation with each other, was how I had preserved them in my memory. I’ve never known any couple more compatible than my mother and dad; they loved being with each other.

  For all those years that I was gone, my mother had kept a light on, so to speak, waiting for my return. Throughout the time that I was away, I had not forgotten for an instant the unwritten code of honor: that no self-respecting son or daughter would go away to America and not send a little something home in an envelope—for food, for basic needs. The amount didn’t matter; what did was the symbolic nature of the gesture—not to mention the fact that the five dollars I paid for weekly rooming could have kept my family for a month.

  That had been easier intended than done. From the moment that I arrived in the United States, I had fallen into the worst of times in terms of making a living. But instead of sending a letter home to explain my circumstances, I kept telling myself that a better day would come and I would have the extra dollars to enclose for my loved ones. With every passing week and no such ability to do so, it became increasingly harder to write any letter whatsoev
er. When I entered the army to escape the cold, I arranged for a monthly allotment offered to parents or spouses to be mailed to Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Poitier. It had been a relief to be able to do that, although not enough to encourage me to write home as well to describe my various ordeals. What I didn’t yet know was that for reasons never to be ascertained, those thirteen or so payments never arrived. Once I was out of the army, back into similarly tenuous financial straits, I still couldn’t bring myself to write to my parents to tell them of my struggles. Ultimately, the shame of not having written earlier had snowballed to the point where it was too much to bear. The only way that I could bridge the chasm of the years of silence was to return home in person as I now was, bearing the long-postponed envelope, the contents of which represented the truth that I hadn’t stopped thinking of my folks at any stage of my absence.

  Nor had I stopped considering how my silence must have tested my mother. Even though I could have and might have and almost did meet my demise in all that time, without a word or rumor as to my whereabouts and status, my mom unquestionably stood her ground and relied on her faith and prayers to protect me in my absence. That was who she was.

  For a moment, before I announced myself that night, I considered how that had sustained her—thoughts that I’ll share with you now. Your great-great-grandmother, as you have read previously, was a religious person. Her connection to the more ancient spirituality of the occult probably came from her mother, Mama Gina—your great-great-great-grandmother—who seemed to be conversant with the spirit world, as I recall. Though I have never had any interest in that world, it provides insights into the role that religion played in early mankind’s monumental struggle against the forces of nature, on which the condition of our survival rested—with the outcome, so far, still in question.