Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  My time in Nassau was only a few years, and my time in Florida even shorter—but not as short as it might have been had the Klan found me. They came looking on the night after I had left a delivery package at the front door of a woman who refused to accept it there and ordered me around to the back. I was new to the segregationist ways of Florida then, and had questioned her stance. “But I’m standing here with the package now,” I said, just before she slammed the door in my face. My perceived impudence resulted in a group of Klansmen showing up at my brother’s house, where I was staying. They apparently found out who I was and where I lived from people at Burdine’s Department Store, where I was briefly employed. Luckily, I was not at home, and when I did arrive later, the family spirited me away to live with other relatives in another neighborhood.

  You no doubt will recall earlier letters describing the circumstances that led to my joining the army in the hopes of escaping the chokehold of New York City in the winter and my impoverished circumstances.

  It is hard to imagine a more life-altering event than what might have happened had my bizarre plot to get out of the army gone bad many months later. Instead of returning to New York and an eventual career as an actor, I could have been stuck for twenty years in a prison. In brief, I will summarize this close call by saying that after several months of working as a qualified physiotherapist in a GI rehabilitation ward at Mason General Hospital at Northport, Long Island, I decided to give the appearance of having gone nuts. To begin with, I tossed a heavy chair at the head of the man in charge of the hospital, missing him by inches, and sending it crashing through a bay window. Locked up and still being questioned for that infraction, I soon upped the ante by pushing over a mobile steam table laden with food while it was making its rounds through the room where I was being held with other inmates. Many weeks of psychiatric sessions and much penitence for choices I came to regret later, I got my discharge.

  But as you can conclude from the descriptions already given, being out of the army upon my discharge in 1945 and back in New York did not exactly put me out of harm’s way. Living very much close to the edge, I was back to dishwashing downtown while staying in a room of someone’s apartment at 127th Street between Lenox and Sixth avenues, for which I paid five dollars a week.

  One night I came up out of the subway at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and had the shock of my life: there was bedlam everywhere. There were buildings afire, people on the street going absolutely crazy, and cops shooting. A full-blown riot had broken out earlier, and because I had been working downtown and didn’t have a radio, I knew nothing about it.

  I would learn later that the riot had been triggered by the behavioral pattern of the police in the area. Beyond a systematic profiling and scapegoating of black residents, they had done something that was so egregious—whatever it was, whether it was beating up or killing an unarmed suspect, or whether it had to do with corruption related to payoffs—that when individuals in the community witnessed it, one thing led to another.

  I didn’t have any background on how the police were doing what their job required, which was to keep the community contained as a separate section of New York, almost as if it were detached. People there could go downtown to work, go shopping, or go strolling on Broadway, but few of them would look for housing in areas other than their own. There was a fundamental awareness on the part of downtown New York, Harlem, and all the boroughs as to the relationship between races.

  So the accumulated resentment exploded while I was washing dishes downtown. Emerging into the middle of the pandemonium, I saw people breaking into places and looting. I suddenly found myself inside a large grocery store. I don’t even know how I got there, but I was not there to steal anything. What was I going to steal, some canned goods off the shelf, some cookies or rice? No, I was drawn to the sense of danger. There were many people in the store, and I was reaching for nothing, but just being there in the presence of the chaos all around.

  Suddenly cops came rushing into the store with guns drawn. I hightailed it to the rear of the store, presupposing there had to be a back-door exit. But every door I found was locked, and there seemed to be no way out. The cops were steadily moving through the store, and I heard gunshots. There was one last door, and I ran for it and it opened. I crashed in, shut the door, and looked around, but there was no exit; it was a storeroom. There was no light in the room, so I could see the searchlights of the police as they were approaching. When the light reached the door and it started to open, I collapsed onto some bags on the floor and played dead. My face was looking up and my eyes were closed, and I was holding my breath. I could see the light through my eyelids as the flashlight rested on me. Then, apparently being taken for dead as I had hoped, I remained frozen as the flashlight moved around the room until I finally heard the door close, and it was dark again.

  At that point, I started breathing again, gasping for air—as quietly as I could. When I was breathing easily again, I cracked the door open, and there was nobody in the store. The cops had cleared everybody out. I slipped outside and walked thirty or forty steps when suddenly there were shots and I started to run in the direction of where I lived. Then I felt something at the bottom of my lower right leg, but I didn’t stop. When I got to my room, I found I was bleeding from a spot near my Achilles tendon. It must have been a bullet wound, because nothing else had hit me there. In my room, I tied whatever I could find around it. When the bleeding stopped, I still stayed in my room for a couple of days, and then I went out and found some medicine to put on my leg. A couple of more days passed, and I went back to work: my job was still there.

  Fade out on Harlem of the later 1940s. Fade in on the smoggy skyline of Los Angeles, circa the mid-1950s. I was out on the town one evening with David Susskind, a sharp, creative producer with whom I had worked. We had gotten to know each other when I starred in his television show A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, which he later converted into the movie Edge of the City, in which I appeared with John Cassavetes. Good friends, David and I had gone out that evening to take a couple of young women to dinner. I was driving us back to where the girls lived when, as we came to an intersection, a speeding bus, ignoring our right-of-way as we made a left turn, smashed into us dead-on. The impact hurled our car across a center divide and into a service station. The four of us, all thrown from the wreckage and knocked unconscious, began to come around only after the police arrived. Miraculously, we were all without further injury.

  When I returned the next day to the rental agency from which I had obtained the automobile, the ruined car had been towed in. No one at the agency believed it possible that anyone could have survived such a crash.

  While I was lucky to escape injury in the auto accident, I may have been even luckier the year in Acapulco when I was swimming with my friend and agent, Marty Baum. A sudden, powerful undercurrent had seized us while we swam happily in the blue waters, and pulled us under, our savior being the thundering wall of water of an incoming wave that washed us up onto the edge of the beach. But we were not carried so far that the strong receding waters did not suck us back into the ocean, where the undercurrent grabbed us again. We were dragged under four times, coughing, sputtering, and finally too utterly exhausted to fight against what seemed to be our unalterable fate. It was only then that a lifeguard, finally alerted by our screams for help, arrived to help pull us far enough onto the beach to avoid being snatched back.

  Sitting there on the sand, as Marty and I regained composure, still both heaving air and relief into our lungs, I could at last appreciate the irony that, while I had begun my life on an island surrounded by unpredictable tides, swimming on my own since infancy, these many years later I had almost ended my life in what should have been familiar straits. Then again, I thought of the closest call of my existence—my premature birth, which my mother’s boat trip to Miami had probably precipitated.

  All of these incidents confirmed my belief that there was a force watching over me. So, too, did a couple o
f other events that followed. One of these took place after a call I received from my good friend Harry Belafonte, who had called to say, “I want you to go with me to Mississippi.”

  I said, “What’s up?”

  He explained: “We have to take some money down for the civil rights movement.” The group in that particular area was desperately short of funds and needed the relief. I agreed to go, and he said, “I’m going to call the U. S. attorney general, Robert Kennedy, and let him know we’re going. We’ll take a commercial plane down, and then a private plane to deliver the money. I’ll give him our itinerary, and ask him to have his guys keep an eye on us.”

  Several people who went South to involve themselves in the civil rights struggle had been killed, and the killers had acted with ignorance or complete disregard as to who their victims were. Harry and I did not feel that celebrity status offered us any protection.

  When we arrived, it was night by the time the two of us boarded the small charter plane, and when we landed at our destination, it was pitch black. But there were our guys—leaders and organizers of the movement the likes of Stokely Carmichael and James Foreman—waiting for us with three cars. As we were getting into the cars, somebody said, “There they are!” He pointed off to the far end of the airport, and we saw the headlights of two trucks. They started moving in our direction, but Harry and I were told not to worry about it and to get into the middle car of the three. The men in the front car had guns, as did the men in the third car.

  We moved out, and as the trucks tried to catch up, the third car would move over to block an attempt to pass. If the second truck moved up behind the middle car while this was going on, our car would move up ahead of the first car. It was choreographed much like a ballet, though a nerve-racking one, as we maneuvered our way into town.

  Harry and I spent a restless night under guard in the home of one of the town residents, and left the next morning.

  A similar incident had happened when I was in South Africa in 1950 when Canada Lee and I were making the film Cry, the Beloved Country. I was there eleven weeks, and South Africa under apartheid was an awful experience. We worked in Johannesburg in a studio, and there were separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. The one for blacks was in the most horrendous condition you could imagine. I asked the whereabouts of the other bathroom, and it was pointed out to me by someone who said, “But you can’t go in there.”

  I went nevertheless, and after I was in a stall, I discovered there was no toilet paper. A white kid had come in, and I asked if he would pass me a roll of paper from the stack that I could see outside.

  Photographic Insert 2

  With my family at the American Film Institute’s “Salute to Sidney Poitier” in 1992

  With my family and President and Mrs. Clinton at the White House for the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995

  The loves of my life, Joanna and Juanita, together

  With grandson and granddaughters: Aisha above and Gabrielle, Etienne, and Guylaine below

  With my late granddaughter, Kamaria

  Ayele and our recently born Kai; my two great-granddaughters

  Surprised at my eightieth birthday party

  With Juanita, Beverly, Aisha, and Ayele at my eightieth birthday party

  With James Baldwin at the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights

  With Harry Belafonte at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights

  With Thurgood Marshall, a man I greatly admired, whom I had the honor to portray in the 1991 movie Separate But Equal

  With Nelson Mandela, a “person of courage” whom I had the honor to portray in the 1997 movie Mandela and De Klerk

  My great-granddaughter Ayele in her flower sunglasses

  He demanded, “What are you doing in here?”

  I thought it was obvious since I needed paper, and I asked him again.

  He said, “You get out of here,” and he turned and walked out.

  After I left the bathroom, I went directly to the office of the studio manager. I said, “Look, I’m not a troublemaker, and I know the conditions under which I am here: I am here as an indentured laborer because that’s the only means under which we could be brought into the country to work. But I want you to know what just happened in the bathroom.” I told him I didn’t want him to fire the kid, but I wanted him to call the kid in and explain to him that if he saw me in the “white” bathroom again—because I was not going back to the other one—it would be best for him not to say anything to me and I would say nothing to him.

  The studio manager said not to worry about it; he would take care of it.

  During the next six or seven weeks I used the “white” bathroom and I had no problem. About two weeks before I finished work, I came into the studio, and sitting on a wall at the front entrance was this same kid, and he was making nice. He said, “Hello, how are you?”

  I said hello, but I was a little skittish about him, because I knew what he was. He said, “You’re leaving next week, I hear.”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  I later told my driver, Dickie Niaka, about my dubious conversation with the kid, and Dickie, immediately suspicious, said, “I’ll take care of that. I’m going to take you to the airport.”

  I, along with several of the other black actors, was staying at a farmhouse twenty-six miles outside the city, in accordance with apartheid law. When Dickie came to pick me up, there were two other cars with him. Dickie put me in his car, explained he would drive between the two other cars, and handed me a gun and gave instructions on how to use it.

  I asked, “What’s up?”

  He said, “Just in case.”

  So we headed out to the airport, a forty-five-minute drive. Soon after we hit the main highway, a car came out of each side of a crossroad. Dickie floored the gas pedal, and the two cars now following us sped up. Dickie, an experienced driver who knew the countryside, did everything to outmaneuver them, running through cornfields and down narrow, unpaved pathways. Suddenly, we were back on the motorway with Dickie driving ninety miles an hour and the chase cars right behind us, but being effectively blocked off by our other two cars.

  We finally arrived at the airport safely, and I offered the gun back to Dickie, but he told me to keep it.

  There were British and Jewish families living in South Africa, and although it was against apartheid law for them to interact with us socially in their homes, some of them nevertheless invited Canada Lee and me for dinner. Often, they would suggest that our driver come in to join us, but Dickie politely refused, saying he would rather stay outside and rest. The truth was that he wanted nothing to do with those he saw as, no matter how liberal they appeared to be, part of South Africa’s apartheid system.

  What might have happened had either the South African or Mississippi chase cars caught up with us? Certainly nothing good.

  I have had one more experience, Ayele, that I must deem a close call, though one of quite a different nature. Many years ago I received a call from Florida. It was my eldest brother, Cyril, calling to tell me that cancer had been found in his prostate. I told him that I knew of a wonderful doctor, and I advised Cyril to get on a plane and come to California, where I would make arrangements for the doctor to see him.

  My brother came, and my doctor sent him to a highly respected prostate cancer expert, who found that Cyril did indeed have the disease, and the only thing he could recommend was to shave it; that is, cut away whatever was on the outside of the prostate that needed to be removed. In fact, the cancer was too far gone for much to be done. The specialist did the best he could. My brother went back to Miami and lived a couple of years longer, and then the prostate cancer took him away. He was eighty-one years old at that time. By then, I had come to terms with the mortality of loved ones, having lost parents and friends, some to old age, others much too early to bear. But Cyril’s passing was tough. He was the firstborn of my siblings, my big brother who kept me anchored to my past and where I came fro
m.

  A few years after Cyril died, my doctor told me he noticed from my blood work that the level of my PSA—my prostate-specific antigen, a marker for possible prostate cancer—had snuck up from four to six. Not to worry, he said, but it needed to be watched. Then, a few months later, he found it up to seven or eight, at which point he said, “We have to do something about it.” He sent me to another urology specialist, who ordered a biopsy, the result of which showed no cancer.

  Then the PSA went up another notch, and they said, “Well, we’ll do another biopsy.” To make a long story short, they did four biopsies. Four.

  Lo and behold, on the fourth one they found it, and it was embedded.

  They wanted to know what I wanted to do about it, and I asked, “What are my options?” If I chose to radiate it, and if that wasn’t successful, it would be too late, they told me, for surgery. My question was: “Why don’t you just remove it?” The doctors agreed that would probably be the best approach. So I said, “Fine, let’s remove it.”

  I speak of it casually now, but I was concerned then because Joanna and I have two children, and I didn’t want her to bear the burden of having to bury me. I was not afraid for myself, I really was not, and I was happy to not be afraid, because I have dealt with fear, I have lived with fear, I have been seduced by fear, and I have overcome many of my fears (although certainly not all). So when I realized my concern was primarily for my wife and six children, I was comfortable with whatever the outcome was going to be. I kept telling that to my wife, and she was terrific, she really was terrific. We had to tell Anika and Sydney and their four older sisters, and they all understood after it was explained to them that the cancer was encapsulated and exactly what that meant. Once we had talked with the children, Joanna was at ease with it as much as she could be, knowing the kids had been told the truth.