Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  Now the resentment surfaced in response to old fears, the kind that accumulates in us from childhood—residuals from my life as an outsider, old false stories of being dismissed and told that I was valueless to society. I was not valueless to myself; I had a sense of myself. But society back then had judged me next to zero.

  That was the gloomy low point to which I’d fallen, even after my exciting launch. The reality was that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were hardly any film roles for black actors and actresses, and of those that there were, many notoriously reinforced racial stereotypes that, even at my hungriest, I couldn’t bring myself to take on. Ayele, this isn’t said for me to claim any heroic choice to suffer rather than allow myself to be exploited. The truth is that I just couldn’t bear to admit to being so fearful, doubtful, or desperate as to do something that demeaned a person of color, and myself in the process.

  In this period, just as we awaited the arrival of our second-born daughter, Pamela, I went in to meet with producers and read for the film role of a father who witnesses a crime in the casino where he works—an acting job that initially seemed like an answered prayer. From the short scene that I read for them, the producers and the powers that be were interested in my doing the role and gave me the full script to read before a final decision was made. But as soon as I read it, I contacted the agent, Marty Baum, who had submitted me (though he didn’t represent me at the time), to explain that I couldn’t do the role.

  Marty asked whether it was because the role was racially insensitive.

  “No, not really.”

  “Is it insulting to you?”

  Not wanting to elaborate at the time, I simply said, “I just can’t play it.”

  Marty didn’t understand my reasoning, but he must have sensed that there was something of import underneath my decision not to take work that he knew I desperately needed. Some time later I got around to telling him what it was about the story and the role that bothered me. In the script, the father who witnesses the crime is threatened by the bad guys, who kill his daughter and throw her body onto his lawn—as a warning. But he does nothing in response. I couldn’t play that role. I had a daughter, and another one was about to be born at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. My first thought, in fact, when I read the script was that I didn’t want my father to see me playing the part of someone who allows hurt to be done to his children without fighting back.

  Marty Baum decided that I was crazy for turning down the role, so crazy that he wanted to be my agent—and has been ever since.

  But having stood my ground and faced down my fear, I had to face another challenge—how to find the money to pay the $150 that the hospital delivery of my second child was to cost. The only option that I could see was to borrow the cash from Household Finance against my furniture. And that’s what I did.

  But my choices to turn down certain parts didn’t make me heroic.

  By this same token, when controversial roles were later offered to me, I didn’t feel noble for taking them on. Rather, I felt fortunate to be given a shot to play parts in movies that challenged prejudices, took on oppressive regimes, or involved interracial relationships, for example, and whose story lines dared to show a black man as powerful, articulate, and important at a time when that wasn’t acceptable to many. And I should add that during the volatile years when some of the films that I did were banned in the South and when death threats were made against many of us involved, fear was no stranger, either.

  As you know, my dear Ayele, in a short enough time that lean period ended, thankfully, and my fortunes soon began to change in hopeful ways. Without question, each time I came out of doing battle with fear for the survival of myself and my family, I came out stronger. The possibility continued to be there that another wave of fear could return at any time, given my circumstances. But it did make me strong enough to be as ready as I could for the next wave, and the wave after that.

  And I suppose at the core of me was the lesson that we can all learn in order to safely navigate the shoals—which for me was that my salvation was in my own hands; my fears were to be worked through; my fears were to be overcome, subdued, wrestled with in the hope of taming them enough to get to the high ground—to never come out of the struggle weaker, because the strength you lose in an effort to come out of it is never recoverable. However, the strength is multiplied if you subdue the fear: you don’t have to thrash it into extinction, but you have to overcome it. You have to put it behind you, and once it’s behind you, there is a victory of sorts—a strengthening of your own view of yourself.

  You may be wondering if we ever get to the point in our lives where our fear stops visiting us for good in our daily lives. My answer is no, although its intensity and influence often diminish and its form alters, depending on the constant flow of activities in your daily life. There are some days when you get up and most of it is terrific and maybe a small part of it may be problematic and can cause fear or stress. And you have a night where you go to sleep and rebound the next morning with pretty much the same difficulties facing you as you had the day before. You work your way through some of them, you duck some of them, you climb over some of them, and you turn your back on some of them.

  Then there are those causes of fear you can’t turn your back on, that you can’t step away from, and that you have to surrender to or fight. If you surrender, that’s it. If you don’t wish to surrender, if you cannot surrender, you fight. You fight by standing in fear’s face and saying, “You may have me, but you’re going to have to take me. I am going to give you as much hell as I can give you, because I don’t want to go with you, I don’t want to be subjected to you, and I don’t want you to be pulling my strings.” Some of those fights, even, are won.

  How have I been left as a result of my confrontations with fear, doubt, and desperation over the years? I have been left wounded in some measure, in delicate ways. I’ve been made suspicious to some degree; I’ve been made reluctant to engage in some things, particularly in some areas where I have been the loser.

  But those are experiences that we generally try to avoid, although we are not always successful. And there are other kinds of experiences that come toward us, and traveling in that force is a requisite amount of doubt, a requisite amount of fear, a requisite amount of desperation.

  We are vulnerable. If you strike our skin hard enough, not only does it hurt, but it destroys a part of us. If you are thrashed about in your self-perception by forces that you are not able to defend against, they overwhelm you and leave you weakened in so many ways.

  Doubt itself is one of the most difficult responses to fight. Doubt is inside you—and it isn’t something that accidentally finds itself inside you. It is there because the component elements of it are there; and they congeal in a way, triggered by external forces, by social mores, by economic conditions, by family responsibilities, or by accidental occurrences. And once they congeal, you’re looking at self-doubt. You don’t have to look far to know that it’s you that you’re doubting: “Do I have what it takes? Why did I fail there? How come I haven’t been able to get this job?”

  Yes, fear, doubt, and desperation are very real forces. And there is nothing you can do about them except to stand up to them. And if they push you to your knees and you can’t fight back enough to stand up, they’ve got you, at least for the moment. But you will mark that and learn from it. And when you escape, when you fight back, when you subdue or overwhelm them, that’s a mark for you, and that mark strengthens.

  Would I love to tell you that I have vanquished fear from life? Yes, as much as I would love to keep you far from it. Unfortunately, it’s a battle, and mine has left me with checkered results. You see, Ayele, it is in facing the smallest fears, the fears that are somewhat short of self-destruction, that we make most of our compromises. Because if it is less important, we make a compromise rather than saying, “It’s OK to resist. I shouldn’t compromise on the basis of it not being that important. I shoul
d face it, because it is the correct thing to do.”

  Now, as to you, Ayele, and the reality of your life, which I pray will be long, productive, and useful, with an appreciable amount of joy and pleasure—I don’t expect that you will escape battling fear, doubt, and desperation any more than I have. You will prevail, however, I am doubly certain, because you come from a long line of individuals—like Reggie and Evelyn Poitier—who have stood against their fears in the worst of deluges and triumphed over them. You will be strong; that I predict.

  Remember that the more times fear wins, the more vulnerable you will be. The big difference will be up to your judgment as to when and where, and on which issue, you choose to stand your ground against each fear.

  Standing your ground will have to be done many times. Sometimes you will win, and sometimes you won’t. The outcome all depends upon the nature of it—the fear—and the nature of you, the individual.

  I’m closing for now. When I write again, I’ll have more stories to relate about different responses to fear and other instigators of our closest calls—some that worked, and those that didn’t.

  twelfth letter

  BATTLING THE DEMONS

  In my early years, Ayele, I had no knowledge of the horrendous extremes that give the word addiction its terrifying meanings.

  But I am writing to you now to recall the various ways I saw it in action before I knew its name. There it was, every day, repeating itself, deepening its ties with those already in its grasp; and seducing any and all observers who seemed most likely to believe that a smoker is simply a smoker, no more, no less; a gambler, a gambler; a drinker, a drinker. That each person, in his or her own way, is searching for pleasures of a harmless nature—pleasures that suit his or her particular needs.

  In that era, long before words like addiction and science had reached my ear, addiction was under scientific scrutiny. Even to this very day, in late 2007, medical experts, through science, are looking inside the human brain to see how and why both chemical and nonchemical addiction alter the perceptions and behavior of human beings.

  Confronted with similar problems long ago, I had to deal with them on my own. Mama Gina, my grandmother on my mother’s side, smoked a white clay pipe. I had no reason to wonder why. My auntie ’Gusta, my mother’s sister, smoked a pipe as well. Later, as a teenager I, incorrectly, assumed that such an activity was a habitual carryover from the African culture of their forefathers long before the slave traders arrived with their schemes of evil. Still, my mother never smoked. My father and our village elders had a taste for rum, but never in excess.

  I smoked my first cigarette when I was seventeen and in the army, having hiked my age, as I have said, to get in. I saw my fellow soldiers smoking, all of them eighteen or older, and I thought it would be a cool way to give the impression that I was one of the guys. I didn’t take to it well at first, but after a while smoking became such an addiction that I arrived at two packs a day, then tried to back off but couldn’t kick it.

  After I began smoking, I started drinking casually, socially—but drinking nevertheless. For a shy guy like me, that eased the tension in social gatherings whenever I would have otherwise been more comfortable in the corner, just observing. A drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other—well, it was part of the environment, the ambience of the clubs and parties of the Harlem social world that I was trying to fit into. Soon enough, drinking snuck up on me as well, and turned into a habit. And habits, as we all now know, can slip, unnoticed, into addictions.

  Gambling was my last acquired addiction. Such an activity was unimaginable in my youth. First, I never had money with which to gamble. I had never heard of dice or cards or Las Vegas. As a kid, the only thing I saw relative to gambling was grown men playing dominoes and checkers. I had no interest in either one. But years later in New York City, I somehow developed an interest in cards, dice, and horse racing. Gradually, over time, while still a young man I became addicted.

  It started with me playing pinochle with a few friends I had gotten to know. From pinochle, I gravitated to poker, and from poker to blackjack. And then I got started playing the numbers. Gambling, you see, was a huge activity in New York City.

  I later added horse racing to my list of dangerous indulgences. By the time I started earning money as a young actor, I was already a veteran gambler.

  Early on, I could have gotten into substantial trouble had it not been for a notable Harlem figure named Bumpy Johnson. He was very well known, and had considerable influence. He was a numbers guy and was perceived as an underworld character in Harlem, having recently returned from prison, where he had spent several years for challenging (it was rumored) the Mafia’s dominance in the region’s underworld activities.

  When he came out of prison, Bumpy went into business, creating heavy detergents for cleaning and scrubbing and selling them to local business establishments. At the time, my acting career was starting to move and I was out of the leaner stretches, but work was still intermittent enough that to supplement my income, I had partnered with a friend, Johnny Newton, in a restaurant called Ribs in the Ruff. That was the context in which I got to know Bumpy—when we started buying products from him. He would pop by now and then, and was always kind, personable, and interested in the success of our place.

  From time to time, we’d also run into Bumpy at the Theresa Hotel, where my partner Johnny was once manager of the hotel’s bar—which was then among Harlem’s most popular watering holes. There was a familiar crowd there who knew me and knew that whenever I was flush from an acting job, I’d be looking to play some poker. I happened to be at the bar one afternoon, talking to Johnny, when I noticed that Bumpy was there as well, holding court with a group of his cronies. I’d planned on going over to say hello, but before I could, Bumpy rose from his chair and made his way toward the exit, nodding in my direction and explaining that he had to meet someone at Small’s Paradise, another of Harlem’s chic establishments, located about ten blocks away.

  Fifteen minutes later, while I was still talking to Johnny, a phone call came in for me. When I picked up the receiver, I recognized the voice of Bumpy Johnson as he asked me to take a cab over to where he was, because, as he put it, “I want to talk to you.”

  He was sitting alone when I arrived at Small’s Paradise. “Have a seat,” he said in a friendly enough manner. He studied me carefully as I took a seat across from him. Then Bumpy began slowly, saying, “I hear you’ve been playing poker.”

  “Yes, I play some poker,” I answered.

  “I hear you’ve been losing pretty good.”

  “Yeah, I haven’t been winning a lot.”

  Bumpy didn’t smile at that. Instead, catching me by surprise, he gave me a serious look and said, “I want you to stop playing poker.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know the people you’ve been playing with, and you can’t win there.”

  I understood instantly what he meant. A silence fell between us. He stared at me to see if what he had just said had gotten through. Satisfied, he continued, “Listen, I like you. If you want to gamble, go to the Rhythm Club.” He was referring to the most famous among Harlem’s many gambling houses. He went on, “It’s clean, aboveboard, and nobody’s going to cheat you. If you’re lucky, you’ll win, and if you’re unlucky, you’ll lose. But I don’t want you playing with the guys you’ve been playing with anymore, and don’t mention this to anybody.”

  I agreed, and afterward whenever he saw me, he was very friendly, very gracious, and I guess he saw me as the kind of good kid he wanted me to be. He was much older than I, and he didn’t want us to hang out together. He just wanted me to stay on the straight and narrow.

  Looking back, I realize what a godsend Bumpy Johnson was in my life at that time. From then on, I was more careful as to who was running the game. Another sensible choice that I made in regard to gambling was to set limits on how much money I was willing to lose. Whatever I was earning on a weekly basis, I couldn’t gamble it awa
y. First I had to cover rent, food, subway fare, business and career expenses, and so on. After those basic needs were met, I would put away a certain amount of money with which to gamble. Again, here was the balancing act between want and need.

  As my responsibilities increased as a homeowner, in my marriage, and with kids continuing to come, I still gambled, but again with a sense of caution. I was not risking everything: a portion was put aside solely for gambling purposes.

  In time, the more money I made, the higher the stakes I was willing to risk. If I made ten thousand dollars, I would put aside a thousand dollars for gambling purposes; if I made twenty-five thousand dollars, I would put aside twenty-five hundred.

  When I first went to Las Vegas, I found it to be every bit the seducer it promised to its customers through its risqué advertisements. It sells itself with every means of seduction that it can and makes no bones about it. What one sees is what one gets. In due course, I went there several times, but always limiting my losses by a predetermined percentage.

  I kept it that way for a long time, but in the aggregate I was losing enough money to have been able to do something much more productive and useful than just gambling it away.

  After I attained a goodly amount of success in my career, I was able to return periodically to Nassau. There on Paradise Island, I used to join in poker games in the offices of a guy named Jack, who managed a large hotel in that resort area. He was a nice man, quite pleasant, with a friendly personality, and he loved to gamble. Poker was his game.