Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  Jack had put together a group of guys, lawyers and other professionals, whose income levels were well above average. We would meet in Jack’s office, he would order food, and we would go until two or three o’clock in the morning.

  One night, as I was crossing the bridge on my way home from one such poker game, there wasn’t a soul anywhere you looked. No living creature north, east, west, or south. The moon was the biggest I had ever seen it, and it was way off over the other islands, sitting at that far elusive point where the sea and sky meet. With that white orb hanging there for me, my thoughts zeroed in on my addiction to gambling.

  I turned around and looked in the opposite direction, which was in the general direction of where I grew up on Cat Island, and then over to the dock where I had arrived when I first came to Nassau with my mother. Turning in a different direction, I cast my gaze deeper into the neighborhoods of Nassau, where some of my family was still living: brothers, cousins, and aunts. And among all the individuals in our family groupings, there were children.

  Now, in the poker game that night I had lost ten thousand dollars. How many of those young people, I asked myself, could I have put through college? At that time, college in the West Indies would have been three thousand dollars for one person. Or, I could have sent a couple of kids to school in the United States or Canada.

  I turned back to look at the moon, looked around myself once more, and I decided, on that bridge, never to gamble again, because it was a wanton waste of a resource that could be put to better use.

  The test came shortly thereafter when I left Nassau and went to Las Vegas, where the comedian Alan King had invited me to participate in a fund-raising celebrity pro-am tennis tournament. Typically at such events, celebrity amateurs play the first day and then the rest of the time are encouraged to gamble or take in the shows and sights of Las Vegas. Now, I get there and remind myself that I am not a gambler anymore, but I have to prove it to myself.

  Fine. My first day there I went to the casino cashier’s window and asked for three thousand dollars against a line of credit I had. Yes! That’s correct. Then I took the chips and put them in the handkerchief pocket of my suit jacket, and I walked in and out of that casino for eight days or more, and I didn’t gamble once. I would intentionally stop at the craps table, the baccarat table, or the roulette table—just to test my will. At the end of my stay, I returned the chips to the cashier and left. I returned to Las Vegas several times subsequently, and never gambled.

  But there were the other addictions yet to be dealt with: smoking and drinking.

  As to smoking, having begun at the age of seventeen, I was now several years into it. Then on a hot, hot day in Nigeria, where I was making a picture, The Mark of the Hawk, with Eartha Kitt, my nose suddenly started to bleed. It was just flowing, and for the longest time I couldn’t stop it. It scared the daylights out of me. I somehow made a connection between the nosebleed and smoking, for I had eventually gone from two packs a day to three. I decided then and there to stop.

  We worked in Nigeria for a couple of weeks more, and then went to London to finish the movie. There, I said to myself, I haven’t touched a cigarette in three weeks: I am in the clear. To prove I am in the clear, I am going to smoke one cigarette, put it out, and not have another one, and then I will know I’ve got it licked.

  I smoked that first cigarette, and before two days had passed, I was back on three packs a day.

  This continued when I later made the picture Porgy and Bess with Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll, and Brock Peters. When it was finished, I went home to Mt. Vernon, New York, where I was living with my first wife and kids; but by then there were stresses in my marriage, which only increased my smoking.

  It was in Mt. Vernon that I was able to fully see the hold the demon had on me on one particular night when, to my horror, I couldn’t find even a cigarette butt in the house. I went into the garage and, in near panic, emptied the trash can out onto the floor, looking. There were some butts there, but they were soggy from the garbage.

  So I went back into the house, got out of my pajamas, put on my clothes—including snow boots and an overcoat—got my car keys, and drove from Mt. Vernon into the Bronx, looking for a store still open where I could buy a pack of cigarettes. This was how bad the addiction had become.

  Having quit once and then fallen back, I felt I was never going to be able to stick to my determination because I didn’t have a reason strong enough. I thought about it then, and I created a reason. It was the kind of reason that represented everything and everyone that mattered to me, and I made a secret agreement with myself that I, absolutely, could not break; and I have not smoked a cigarette since. And the promise remains a secret.

  There yet remained the drinking problem. Granted, I was not an alcoholic or even near being what some people would consider a heavy drinker. In the beginning, I would have, on a given day, one drink. Then it became two drinks. Sometimes I would have a can of beer or two; sometimes I would have one or more drinks of rum or scotch.

  Not long after meeting Joanna Shimkus—who, as you have heard, eventually became my wife and is your great-grandmother by marriage—my drinking habits began to change. In those early days, we would often go to a favorite restaurant in New York and have a bottle of wine with dinner. We did that for about a month or so, and then one day I noticed that around four o’clock each afternoon, I began looking anxiously forward to the dinner hour. Not because of the dinner, but because of the wine. Aha, I realized, this has the earmarks of an addiction. Having learned from other arenas, I decided that I was not going to be subject to it. And I stopped drinking cold turkey. That was some forty years ago.

  Joanna, however, was still smoking at the time, and continued to do so until she became pregnant with our first child, Anika. I was on her to quit because of the pregnancy, and she promised she would. Not too long after making that vow, Joanna was having lunch with a good friend of ours named Caroline, when I happened to walk into the restaurant. There the two of them were, under a cloud of smoke, puffing away.

  Caroline sees me, and panics, then quickly tries to cover for Joanna by taking the lit cigarette from Joanna’s hand. And there sat Caroline, unaware that she had a cigarette in each hand, as she said, “Hi, Sidney.”

  It was a ridiculously funny sight. After that, Joanna never smoked another cigarette. And not long thereafter, Caroline also quit.

  Ayele, my dear, we are all human, all subject to be drawn to pleasures and pursuits that give us a sense of excitement, well-being, even altered states. But if my experience provides insights, it feels incumbent upon me to emphasize how easily habits segue into addictions. Not always, but very often, a first try seals the deal. One is trapped, no options available. The dye is cast. One step taken. One indulgence. One line crossed. Crossing back might require the struggle of a lifetime.

  And remember always that one lifetime is all one has.

  thirteenth letter

  BRAVERY AND COWARDICE

  Hello, Ayele, my dear. I hope that you’ll continue with me as I recall scenes from my life that you have heard before, but perhaps might shed light on subjects of our ongoing conversation about the ways we may live in this world bravely—in spite of our fears, in spite of our demons.

  Let me say at the top that there were moments in my young life when cowardice called the shots more often than self-respect should have allowed. Apparently the forces of nature had deemed me too young to be trusted with knowledge they believed was far beyond my years. In their view, I had not yet learned all there was to know about a masterfully cunning, unseen culprit we’ve been discussing, named fear, who quietly roams the landscape far and wide in search of the vulnerable to terrorize and plunder.

  Bravery, meanwhile, repeatedly presented itself to me in the form of key survival responses: the endurance of courage under stress; one’s capacity to mark one’s territory, and then to hold one’s ground as best one can—doing so whenever fear and its si
dekicks come stampeding into one’s life without permission. All of which eventually focused my thoughts and set me to wondering whether bravery, courage, and heroism would have meaning in the total absence of cowardice, timidity, fear, doubt, and desperation. How significant is the existence of one in the absence of the other? Might they not all be threads of differing energies, differing colors, intricately and, it seems, mysteriously woven into the fabric of life by nature herself? Threads whose collective presence is viewed as having provided immeasurable resilience and unfathomable complexities to the ongoing process of human existence. Threads on which, some believe, life, death, survival, and extinction hinge.

  So potent is this push and pull in us that though younger brazen acts fade into memory, even in recent days I still find myself high up on a building rooftop, fraught with the fear of heights, stepping compulsively toward the edge, where, for primal reasons, I dare myself to put my nose far out to where I can look down and see the street far below, all the while bending and holding my haunches counterbalanced at a safe distance from peril. Yes, even at eighty years old, I am compelled to that drama. It definitely gets the heart pumping!

  Not understanding this drive in my younger life, I couldn’t put my actions into the greater context of a survival struggle that is constantly under way. It’s a search for balance between soaring high and falling low, between good and evil—hope and despair—a win and a loss. I hadn’t yet learned that all the accompanying thrills—even vanity, ego, and self-aggrandizement—have a value, and are therefore entitled to reasonable space in which to express their right to exist. Who knows? Maybe a single thread will be all one needs to hold on to one’s self-worth, one’s knowledge of being purely and simply alive.

  In specific terms, there were foolish things that I did as a kid that were later described as bravery but that, in fact, had all the earmarks of compulsions. Having risked my life many times and lived to relate the circumstances surrounding each action, I can now look back and clearly see that the driving forces behind each such action were compulsions of many stripes. But the question for you and me is whether they were compulsions to act in a brave way. Were they compulsions that were driving me to live at the edge of destruction? Or were they compulsions that were born out of a need to exemplify bravery as a part of my own self-perception? Or to be perceived as brave in a given set of circumstances? If, in fact, one has such a need, then the truth would follow that ego was the operating force at work.

  Ayele, my dear, I’m talking to you now of thoughts and actions I have long held closely guarded, and how I have come to view them now. They include the misdeeds of my youth, some of which have placed burdens upon me, some of which have lifted burdens from me.

  I referred to some of these in an earlier letter to you about how I came to leave home as a teenager, but they merit a frank accounting in connection with the discussion at hand.

  I’ll start with the incident that took place when I was between twelve and thirteen years of age, living then in Nassau, on a day when I stole a pair of roller skates from a hardware store. Later, in searching for the real reason as to why I had designed and executed such an operation, I wondered how that act was different from the other thrill-seeking opportunities I pursued. In those times I believed that I was acting out of an enormously dangerous feeling deep inside of me that I did not yet know by name. It was a powerful feeling that would lie dormant for long periods and then unexpectedly stir, raise its head, and I would be off again in search of all that was promised. Daunting challenges they were—ventures of the most hazardous sorts that invite only the courageous and beckon only the brave.

  I was not able to put a name to most of those feelings, but eventually I began hearing them being referred to as compulsions and that they could manifest themselves in many ways.

  I wasn’t caught after stealing that item. Soon the compulsion went back into its neutral place and just cooled it. There were only four times in my whole life that I have stolen something. All were in my youthful years. The hardware store and the skates were the first. There were between five and seven employees present in the store that day. All of my maneuvers were premeditated; I had obviously scouted and planned it. I walked into the store and went upstairs—and picked up the box of skates and came breezing back down the stairs, where I would ordinarily go to someone and say, “I would like to have this,” and they, in turn, would send me to the cashier. But the people who worked there were just standing around and paying me no attention, and I walked right out the front door, scared to death that I was going to be apprehended and taken to the cops—who had a station house just around the corner!

  I made it outside. Still, I knew I was not out of it. I was thinking, They’re letting me get clear of the building to make sure they catch me and make a clear-cut case for shoplifting. So I walked to the nearest corner and made a right turn, walked about half a block and made a left turn into a very small street, and from there made it onto a thoroughfare and walked along until I felt it was safe to turn and head for the district in which I lived.

  The long and short of it was that I was successful.

  The second act of thievery involved stealing corn, as you know—an impulsive act that I was caught and jailed for. Again, that was the point at which my dad made the decision that it was time for me to leave Nassau and go to Miami to live with my brother. My dad probably knew me better than I knew myself and understood that though I was basically a good kid, I needed an environment that didn’t encourage my compulsions.

  But before my departure, I stole again. This incident arose from my fascination with comic books. Ironically, as you know, I could read only barely. But because the words in the comic books were short ones, by and large I could read the stories they were telling in connection to the drawings and was dying to immerse myself in them, but as usual I had no money to allow me to buy them for myself. So one day I walked into a bookshop located just a few yards from the police station—around the corner from the hardware store where I did the roller-skate job—browsed for a minute, and when conditions were right, I stole several different issues of comic books. Again, I had predetermined how that theft would unfold. This time I wasn’t caught, but after the heightened sensations of excitement, fear, and relief wore off, I took no victory in my spoils.

  My final act of thievery occurred in New York City. What I took was something that I thought I needed and that justified the stealing of it. But I quickly realized that it was only something that I wanted. Compared with earlier acts, the risk level was no less electrifying—and by electrifying I don’t mean exhilarating; I mean scary, really scary—and again I was successful. What it was that I took wasn’t consequential, and that made me the most ashamed. And out of that shame, I decided never to steal again. I was sixteen years old by then, and that was the last time I stole anything.

  Ayele, I’m telling you this not to make you and your fellow readers play a guessing game or tantalize you by not revealing more details. I’m telling you this so that if you ever are in the position of carrying a secret about something that you have done that makes you ashamed you will make the choice to confront yourself. It will take guts to admit that you have behaved in a way that prevents you from being your better self, and then choose to act differently.

  It would be easy for me to say that the things I stole weren’t such a big deal, but that wasn’t who I was. As time went on, I tried to reconcile my former acts with the person I was trying to become and understand what had been behind those choices. With a look back it was possible to spot a behavioral difference between the theft in New York and the others in the Bahamas. The compulsion manifested itself most forcefully when I had changed societal environments.

  On Cat Island, I was in a more unforgiving environment, one where the values by which I had lived, and those by which my parents and family had lived, offered no chance for seduction by the impact of materialism. For me, there was nothing to steal. I knew there were fruits on trees in the fores
ts, and I could go and climb those trees. Fish I could go and catch at the waterfront. The level of materialism was similar for all the people. Though poor, they had a code of conduct for themselves and expected the same from their fellow citizens and their children. That’s where I was when I was a kid, and I would never have stolen in that environment.

  But in moving to Nassau, then Miami, and soon to New York, I was exposed to sudden impacts unlike anything I had ever experienced. In each new place there were levels of glitter, staggering ranges of materialism, lots of money, and lots of seemingly important things like cars, trucks, movies, radios, and stuff of that sort, with potent imagery that escalated exponentially at every leg of the journey.

  I believe that the eventual turning of my back on that compulsion was an act of faithfulness. My mother was not a thief; neither was my father. And I knew that they would have been devastated, as my father was when he realized I had been arrested, along with my friends, for stealing from a farmer’s cornfield. The influence of friends may have fed my compulsion, but, that aside, it was wholly unbecoming of me to have put my parents’ decency at risk. It was all the more uncomfortable for them because my behavior rubbed against so many values. The degree of discomfort made it necessary for me to step away, and never go back to it: never. Well, yes, but never is a demon seducer, too, and when I did steal again, once more, when I went to New York City, it was as though I’d been stricken with a case of amnesia.

  As minor as some have suggested the thefts to have been, I live with a lingering sense that I was disrespectful to myself, and more than that, I was disrespectful to my parents. My mother would never have done that; my dad would never have done that. So standing like a bulwark against any compulsion to repeat those earlier misdeeds remained the memory of Evelyn and Reggie—your great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather, my mom and my dad.

  As time went on, they were foremost in my thoughts in my efforts to put into proper perspective both compulsion and myself. At the heart of the issue was a matter of self-perception. What were my responsibilities to myself? To become the best me that I possibly could, temptations and compulsion to the contrary. I was not a thief, after all, although for sure I had been one in my earlier years. And, however strong compulsion glowed, I would never allow it to make of me a perpetual one.