Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  But on the other side of the coin, there are those of us who feel that it was created. Now, how was it created? Was it by some force that had intelligence and said, “OK, this is going to be created; this is what I’m going to do,” and the force did it, and the universe began to grow from there?

  Or, was it accidental? Well, if it was totally accidental, then let’s go back to the universe that was always there. If it was always there, then you’re talking about the universe as God and all that God was and is. In which case, the universe would be a part of God. Or, God created the universe. (Carl Sagan has said, “To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”)

  As you go back, according to science, the creation of the universe happened at a point when nothing existed in terms of matter, other than something they call a singularity, and it was of a size less than a grain of sand. The naked eye would have had to be ever so sharp to make it out. And it exploded (this is the theory of learned people, Ayele) into the universe. And it took a given amount of time, because the ball of fire in the explosion was so humongous that it is still widening, still expanding: that became the universe.

  Now, was there a God who triggered it, who created it and made sure it was there and detonated it into an explosion? Yes, there could have been, and everyone has to presuppose that there could have been.

  However, a counterargument is also held by many people. That argument is: no, there was nothing there except that less than a grain of sand, and it exploded. Why, then, did it explode? you have to ask. I really don’t know, but I am not buying into anything until I can feel, in my own value system, how it was triggered.

  As a result, I come down on the side of there being a power that existed, and probably always existed, before the universe was triggered, however it was triggered, and it was that power that activated it. Now, as for that power source, we have no idea as to its components. Was it ever material, or was it always intangible and there was no material matter anywhere in the universe with the exception of the “grain of sand,” if indeed that is what it was?

  Well, if that’s the case, I edge a little closer to it as a possibility, because the universe is a quintessential example of that kind of intelligence, that kind of power—one so powerful that it cannot be described, that you cannot confine it to anything material. It has to be intangible, unembraceable—you can’t get your arms around it, or your mind—and you have to take it on faith.

  Millions finalize their understanding by taking it on faith. Thereafter, they cease their inquiry; they give up the search for an answer: that is the answer, that it’s so big, so large, so all encompassing that it can be embraced only if you accept it on faith.

  There are those, on the other end of the spectrum, whose faith has been lost or broken. They challenge the image of God as an all-knowing, ever-present watchful eye over the affairs of humans. They ask such questions as—where was God on the morning of September 11, 2001? They ask where was God during the two centuries that blacks were held as slaves in America, and during the holocaust in World War II? And where, they ask, was God when saint and sinner alike drowned in the New Orleans floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina?

  So if, they say, you insist on giving God credit for the creation of the universe, then God should also be held accountable when horrors beset us.

  Some go in another direction, expressing themselves as atheist, or “non-theist,” declaring nature as separated entirely from the idea of God. And in looking at the beauty of the universe, they find it possible that nature alone is responsible for the creation of humans, with their capacity for love, compassion, logic and reason. And using that logic and reason, they also question the Christian accounts of both the birth and death of Jesus and the miracles implied within.

  Well, that’s okay with me. I defend the right of everybody to believe as they wish. I honor their reverence however they express it and I share a reverence of my own kind.

  Dear Ayele, as you will learn in due time, there are many religions, many sects, many images of God. There are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Baha’is, Hinduists, Confucianists, you name it. Each culture has its images, while I have mine—which differs, in some measure, from images held by others. My image of God permits me to question it—and myself. Why else would we have been given a curiosity, an imagination, a network of instincts and perceptive capabilities? I believe these gifts were and are survival tools, without which we could not have survived as a species. Gifts given to us, I believe, by the image of the God that I embrace.

  That brings me again to my own position, which is: I believe there is an intelligence and it is limitless. It is alive, it is conscious, and this is just a part of what it is. I don’t think it’s interested in partialities. I don’t believe it is interested in one religion over another religion held by two different cultures.

  But I feel this about my life: I feel that I am constantly in the presence of God. By that I mean, I am constantly going about my life conscious that the universe is aware of me, and I am aware of it. I go about my life feeling that the all-encompassing God has a personal relationship with me, and I with It. I have to then accept, or rather insist on embracing, the God that I think looks after me. I couldn’t have survived as I have under my own direction, my determinations, or my own choices. I made all of my choices, and I stand by them all, even the ones that turned out, in one fashion or another, to have been incorrect, to have been unworthy of the me that I perceive myself to be. I don’t lay it all to the fact that I believe myself to be imperfect and finite, which I am. And it is our mistakes or fears or prejudices—our imperfections—that damage some of the people we care about, that damage our environment.

  So I come back to the belief that I am not here without Its concurrence. I may not want to believe that, but I do not know which of Its designs require me to function in a certain way, not independently as an entity, as I may think, but as a part of other things, as part of another kind of objective. I am interrelated as a coming together of all kinds of energies. And these energies come together in order to produce a result that is necessary for the functioning of the universe.

  There is more to say about the questions, answers, and mysteries related to God and the nature of the universe as I have contemplated them in my time. But before I arrive at those reflections, I want to return for a moment to the reunion with my mom and dad in Nassau, when that entity that delivered me safely back for a visit allowed me to put an envelope into my parents’ hands that contained the fruit of my labors from the first movie that I ever made. That had been the one thing holding me back, as I mentioned earlier, and now I was finally able to uphold the tradition that, as sons of the Caribbean, we are raised to go off, do well, and not forget where we came from. Again, because of my struggles up to that era, this had been the first opportunity to do the right thing, other than trying to get my army allotment sent back to my parents.

  Do you know, Ayele, I think that for your great-great-grandfather Reggie, his happiness was less about the money in the envelope—which was substantial enough to start the building of the home that would one day be the culmination of a dream for me to give my parents a house with electricity, indoor plumbing, and an expansive porch upon which to rest in their later years—or whatever else I was able to provide for my family in years to come; rather, it was more about the unlimited prospects of the life on which I was embarking—a life beyond measure, without barriers to where I could go and who I could become. For him, my return marked the fulfillment of his dream to have one of his kids go to college, even if it was a different kind of college that I was entering.

  There was nothing more that I could have asked that night than to see my mother’s eyes shining with joy and the look of my dad’s pride. And as we sat there late into the early hours of the morning, me trying to describe everything that I’d experienced, no one said it per se, but I know that deep down in the center of that joyous occasion we were all thinking the same thing: there i
s a God.

  eighth letter

  THE CHANNEL BETWEEN WANT AND NEED

  While I realize that what you can learn from me may not be easily applicable to your life when the time comes for you, Ayele, to navigate the challenges of your adolescence and make your way through the locks of the many decisions you face entering adulthood, I thought that I’d give you a bird’s-eye view of some of the adventures and misadventures that befell me in those eight years I was first away from home.

  Many of the toughest passages were those where I struggled in the channel between “want” and “need.” My account may provide you with some understanding of the challenges of money, and the need for caution.

  I didn’t know what money was when I was a kid on Cat Island. In Nassau, want became much more acute as a sense of my family’s poverty began to dawn on me. What I wanted most in those days was to go to the movies, which led to my first economic venture, one that I undertook with Yorrick Rolle—my friend who later had the misfortune of being sent to reform school. A tall kid for his age, with an easy smile and willing demeanor, Yorrick seldom had the sixpence—about a dime in American currency—that movie tickets cost. Nor did I. Together we devised a way to earn the money in an entrepreneurial fashion by buying raw peanuts, roasting them, and selling them outside the theater to get a penny here or a penny there. But often there weren’t enough pennies.

  This was the era when I had to stop school at age twelve and a half to go to work. It was a full day on a construction job. The few bucks I made went for the family to pay rent and buy food and stuff like that. You have to remember that my mother beat rocks into pebbles over months to earn what was the equivalent of two or three dollars for that much work.

  The scramble had begun, and in the years since, at various stages of life, I’ve had similar and other problems with money.

  When I got to Florida, I had to try to get a job as quickly as I could to help my brother, who was taking me in because my father wanted to save me from the dangerous life that could have been my fate in Nassau. But the reality that I learned was that since my brother already had seven or eight children of his own by then, it was a burden for him to have me under his roof. Yet he did it for our father. At fifteen, I understood that I needed to go to work to bring in some money to help my brother take care of me. Soon enough, I discovered that for all the perils that had threatened me back in Nassau, Miami had its own set of dangers for me, and before long I needed and wanted to leave—to get as far away from Florida as I could. With very little money in my pocket, I headed north, making it as far as the hills of Georgia, and from there, once I’d found work to put a few more dollars in my pocket for bus fare, not knowing even a single person among the 7 million people in New York City, I continued my trek, alone. At sixteen years of age.

  I arrived in New York by bus in the early afternoon, totally on my own, with approximately fifteen dollars to my name. I came without much understanding of how the game of life was played, especially the economic part, on which so much of the rest of the game is based. It would take me years to learn that the influence of economics was to be found lurking under, over, in, or around almost all the activities that make up the game, and would have a major bearing on how I fared. In my early days in America, I could have perished from that ignorance.

  When I got off the bus in New York on that late summer day in 1943, I headed for Harlem. I needed to go to Harlem, because that’s the place I had always heard about. But I couldn’t afford a hotel in Harlem, so I came back to the bus station, put my little bag of clothing in one of the lockers, and then went exploring.

  Not many blocks from the bus station, I spotted a sign in the window of a place at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway, a place called the Turf Club and Bar. The sign said Dishwasher Wanted. As I walked in, the guy behind the bar asked gruffly, “Can I help you?”

  I say, “Yes, the sign says Dishwasher Wanted.”

  He says, “OK, come on in.”

  With that, I went behind the bar and he pulled up a trapdoor. I walked down some steps, and the kitchen was there. They hired me, and I spent that very evening washing dishes. And they kept me there on a day-to-day basis for many days, paying me four dollars and change a night. It seemed to me a very good sign that I’d found a job my first day in the big city!

  But then came the first night in New York, when I sat in a pay toilet in the bus station at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue and slept. To enter that tiny stall, I had to have a nickel, and at least I had that. Now I knew what it meant to be on my own in New York.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t successful in maneuvering myself through the pending economic storm, and I wound up sleeping in more bus and railroad stations and other places like that. But I had to survive in New York. I was working, but how was I to manage the three, four, or occasionally five dollars I would get for a night’s work? I didn’t have a place to stay, and I couldn’t manage those bucks across that divide.

  So I started sleeping on the rooftop of one of the buildings in New York. Sleeping on the rooftop allowed me to accumulate a few bucks. Then I went to Harlem, and I prowled around looking for a place to stay. Eventually, I managed to get a room in someone’s apartment. It was a tiny room with a bed and a little set of dresser drawers. That was it. And it was five dollars a week. Nevertheless, I was still in the treacherous economic waters into which I had unexpectedly fallen. I had tumbled head over heels into what seemed at the time to be a narrow channel whose depth I couldn’t gauge. Nor was I able to estimate the swiftness of the current that was suddenly thrashing me about. I knew for sure only that the channel, with its churning waters surging constantly onward like a river out of control, was not altogether a stranger to me.

  There was always such a channel between “want” and “need.” Even while I was working as a dishwasher and receiving a modest pay envelope every week, I was still unable to reconcile the uncontrollable passions of “want” and the unmovable insistence of “need” as they battled relentlessly over possession of my meager resources, with “want” winning out over “need” far more frequently than it should have. The “need” to set aside sufficient money to rent a proper room that I could call home would be overwhelmed by the ever increasing demands of “want.” With hindsight, the results that followed would have been readily predictable.

  Then winter came with a force that was devastating, and I was crippled: I’d never been in weather that cold. My feeble defense was to wear all my clothes at once—but they were the little fad styles of summer: shirts of summer, trousers of summer. I had a light jacket, but that was it—no topcoat—and I was freezing. As a matter of fact, the only warmth I ever experienced was when I was dishwashing in some kitchen, or in the little five-dollar room I was renting.

  There was a self-defining moment that struck me in that period as I was standing on the platform of the elevated train at 125th Street one day in extremely cold weather, waiting for a downtown train. Chilled to the bone, I said to myself, Lord, one of these days—one of these days—I’m going to be able to stay in bed as long as I want to. I’m not going to have to get out of bed. I don’t care what I’ve got to do, I’m going to make out in this world.

  While waiting for that train, I stood on that platform dressed in my insufficient clothing, freezing my behind off, not to mention my toes, my ears, my lips, my nose, and my fingers. Everything was frozen. And by the time I got on that train and defrosted a little, it was time to get off and go out into the cold again.

  That’s when I decided, weeks before my seventeenth birthday, to hike my age up and join the army—because I knew that if they accepted me, I’d have a roof over my head and I would get three meals every day. I felt that would give me time enough to regroup and manage myself through New York’s swirling money waters, and to be able to send assistance to my parents as well. I stayed in the army one year and eleven days, and then I was back in Harlem—where I fell into the same situation as before.

  I would get a
job, but only as a dishwasher, and it seemed impossible to climb out of the economic paucity bin. I lost many places where I was living because I couldn’t pay the rent. Again, I found myself sleeping in large public places like railroad stations, fending off discouragement and doubt, and admitting that life was difficult.

  And then by accident, as I shall relate in more detail to you later on, I went to the American Negro Theatre, got thrown out, and decided to show them I could be what they just automatically thought I had no chance of being. I didn’t know that I could; it was a decision on my part based on no facts. And there was no real economic consideration.

  When my persistence to get a foothold at the American Negro Theatre landed me an understudy role, by a stroke of good luck I was able to go on during a run-through attended by a director who, even luckier for me, was instrumental in my being cast in a production of Lysistrata, a Greek drama, on Broadway. As exciting as this was, money was still an in-and-out situation. On my opening night, I made the mistake of peeking out at the audience from the wings and was overcome by such paralytic stage fright that I completely botched my lines—causing the other actors to scramble for other lines. Delighted by our unintentional antics, the audience settled in for a night of high comedy. The production closed soon after that, with generally disastrous reviews, but the write-ups for me were generous—some calling me a comedic talent to watch! Better still, on one of the last nights of the show, a Broadway producer named John Wildberg came backstage afterward and asked me to come in for a meeting—which resulted in my being cast in a production of Anna Lucasta that he was sending on the road.

  Off I went, understudying two parts in the play, at a salary of seventy-five dollars a week. I could have died and gone to heaven, thinking all the while—Oh, man, my Lord have mercy, seventy-five dollars a week! Whoa!