The Measure of a Man Read online

  On Cat Island I was stimulated, but I wasn’t bombarded. I knew how I was going to get through the day, and how Mom and Dad were going to get through the day, and how we were all going to sit on the porch at the end of the day, together, fanning the smoke from the pot of burning green leaves to shoo away the mosquitoes and the sand flies.

  THERE WASN’T A PAVED road on Cat Island. There wasn’t a telephone on Cat Island. There were no stores except for a few petty shops, so my clothes were made out of the cloth of grain sacks. But Cat Island had plenty of paths. You walked pathways—trails that were there just because people had chosen a particular route as the quickest way for them to get from point A to point B. But most pathways were no more than maybe three or four feet wide. On either side of the three or four feet things grew wild. There were weeds, yes, and bushes and trees, but flowers were almost everywhere, and they bloomed like crazy. There were summer flowers, and flowers that responded to the weather, to the temperature, and many, like the sapodilla, that were in the habit of blooming several times a year.

  So for the first ten years of my life, the years before tomato farming failed and we moved to Nassau, I had the responsibility, to a large extent, of taking care of myself. Things like being stung by wasps unexpectedly even when I thought I was smart enough to dodge them or get to the fruit without disturbing the nest—and I was wrong many times!—helped me to figure out some things about survival. Now, I’m talking about six, seven years old. When I got to a place where there was danger of one kind or another, I had to make a choice. Once I knew, or sensed, that there was danger of one kind or another, I had to determine, What’s the wisdom of proceeding? Do I withdraw, do I try to go around?

  There were times when I went near rock formations at the edge of the ocean where there were high cliffs along a road on the front part of the island, and I wasn’t told, but I knew by just figuring it out, that if I fell over there, there was no way to climb back, and so how would I manage? I was smart enough by then to know that I would have to swim, but where could I swim to? Where could I manage to climb up? When I walked past this place where the rocks were high, this place where I would have no chance of recovering if I jumped in or fell in the water, I knew how far I would have to swim, and I knew damn well that I couldn’t make that much distance swimming. So what did I do?

  I chose to stay as far away from that edge as I could. I didn’t need instructions or rules for that. I had a highly sharpened instinct for survival, refined by thousands of interactions with my environment.

  On the other hand, I had an irresistible boyhood fascination with the dark mysteries hidden behind the things I didn’t understand. In the village of Arthur’s Town on Cat Island, there was a ditch one hundred feet long, six feet deep, dug from the sea to an inland salt pond. When a hand-hewn wooden trap was lifted, ocean water rushed through this ditch into the inland lake, where it evaporated into salt for the use of the island’s inhabitants. Since it had been dug across the roadway that ran parallel with the waterfront, the ditch was covered over with wood. Six feet deep, at the most two feet wide, the awesome, dark, claustrophobic aspect of this ditch was enough to scare away most of the children on the island. We were all regaled with stories about its properties as a death trap. But I found this ditch just up my alley, so to speak. It was my Mount Everest, and I planned to conquer it.

  One afternoon I entered this tunnel at the salt pond end and was swallowed up by darkness as I moved toward the trap door that kept the ocean out. About twenty-five feet in, as I was beginning to get deliciously scared, I discovered that the walls were narrowing, inch by inch, and that the water was getting deeper. A little farther on and I realized that I couldn’t turn around. If I had to retreat, I would have to back out. But how fast could I move backward if the trap door gave way and sent the ocean rushing at me at fifty miles an hour?

  With the images of moray eels, sea urchins, and other spiny creatures flooding my mind, I edged toward the trap door. At sixty feet in, the water was too deep for me to continue crawling, so I stood up and began to wade the rest of the way. At ninety feet in, the darkness was complete. The water was up to my neck, and I was scared shitless! Too scared to back up, I was also too petrified to press on.

  Then I heard someone walking overhead across the wooden covering. I started to call for help but changed my mind when I thought about the whipping in store for me if my father learned about this adventure.

  A moment later, whoever had been up there was gone, moved out of hearing range. While I stood there, passionately regretting having undertaken this incredibly dumb thing. I became aware of the sound of the water hissing through cracks in the trap door, and I realized that I was fairly close. Another ten feet and I would be home. Or another ten feet and I would be finished, depending on whether the tide was high enough to come rushing in or low enough to allow me to swim through to the rocks beyond. One way or another, I would know as soon as I reached that trap door and sprang it open.

  I inched along on tiptoes as the water grew deeper, and finally I arrived at the door and the moment of truth. I reached up with both hands and yanked on the wooden trip-latch. Nothing happened. That “oh shit” feeling grabbed hold of me, and I yanked again and again and again—and nothing. I didn’t have the strength. I was simply too small to put enough pressure on the lever to trip the latch and open the door.

  This was as scared as I had ever been in my life up to that time. I started to cry and call for Mama. Dear Mama, she certainly would save me. I hollered for Mama—and I hollered and I hollered and I hollered. But to no avail. The only choice left open to me was to slowly retrace my steps. Too afraid even to try turning around. I began to inch my way backward the entire hundred feet out of the ditch.

  That journey back was worse than the one before—nightmarish, terrifying—but I made it and quickly scurried out and up across the main road and down to the water’s edge to check the tide. It was high—meaning that if I’d been able to open that trap door, my little ass would have been done for, swept at fifty miles an hour into the salt pond and buried there.

  I was scared so badly by that experience, it was a week before I tried it again. But this time I checked on the tide, to make sure it wouldn’t be running against me.

  By the age of ten and a half, when I got to Nassau—which is the capital of the Bahamas and a real city—I had done much such flirting with risk, and much thinking for myself. Sometimes I was right; sometimes I was wrong—and every time I was right it strengthened something in me. By the time I reached Miami, Florida, at fifteen, entering the modern world as an immigrant teenager, I was still a kid, and I was still thinking like a kid, but I had something inside that was looking out for me. I had an inner eye that watched the terrain and watched the circumstances, especially when I was in hostile territory. This was my education, my Cat Island curriculum.

  This watchful way extended to human nature—words, motivations, actions, and consequences. The quiet and simple atmosphere of my childhood enabled me to focus down to the level of the subtle body language that came at me from my parents and my siblings. On that tiny island I had gotten to know these signals really, really well. I had learned to read them just as I had learned to read the cliffs and the tides. I didn’t understand them all, but over time I could use them as a reference point in trying to understand what others were saying, what they were doing, why they were behaving toward me as they were. I think that this is the basis for what has come to be called “emotional intelligence.” It’s a capacity that’s nurtured by silence and by intimacy, and by the freedom to roam.

  My mother, Evelyn, was a creature of silence. She was so inarticulate that she could hardly talk to anyone except my father. She couldn’t speak to me much, though she communicated very eloquently in the way that she cared for me, the way her spirit hovers over me to this day, her presence always around me, guiding me in ways I’m still trying to understand.

  My mother used to take me with her into the woods, to pon
ds where she would do her washing. These were the days before such things as washing machines, and we had no running water in the house, no electricity in the house. So when she washed clothing—and she washed the clothing for everyone in the family—she used to take it all in a big bundle into the woods, where rainwater settled into ponds. The ponds were like part of the marsh, but it would be fresh water—water you could wash clothing in. There used to be a soap called Octagon that came in an eight-sided bar, and she used to use that to get to the dirt in the clothing. Some people who had a few bucks, they had a scrub board, but she didn’t. She would just beat the clothing on the rock until the dirt would sort of dissolve and float out. This water wasn’t hot, mind you; it was cold water. And then she would wring the water out of each item and spread the clothes out on low trees to dry in the sun. We would be gone most of the day on those days when she washed, and when the clothes were almost dry, she would bundle them up and we would go back home.

  These were the times when she would try to talk to me, and I never gave it a thought. She was just a mother. But the question arose later in my life and has persisted with me to this day. Who was this person?

  Even up to the day I left her to go to Florida at age fifteen, I didn’t really understand who she was, and here the dark side of me entered in. Shortly before I left, I said to her that when I got to America I wasn’t going to write to her or send her any money. That was the most hurtful thing I could say, because by long tradition in the Bahamas, that’s simply what you did when you went to America. You always sent back money. But hurting her is what I had set out to do, getting a little bit of revenge for something that she had done—what, I don’t now recall. And separating, as teenage boys need to do.

  But as I was leaving Nassau for good she did a fabulous thing. My older brother, who was in Florida, was working for some white people in Miami Beach. Occasionally he would get clothing handed down to him, and he would put it in a box and send it all to Nassau—you know, to the family. And once, in just such a box, came a shirt that my mother had set aside for me. It was a shirt that I wore infrequently because it was such a nice shirt. She thought it would be wonderful, since I was leaving, if she put new buttons on it. She put on these new buttons, and she buttoned my shirt and prepared to send me off.

  I had never seen Mama as she was that day. In fact, she refused to go to the boat with me. She turned me over to my father, and we walked—I guess it was a good two and a half miles—to the dock, along the street on which I had spent so many of my young days. I felt such love as we walked, my love for the place and the people, and their love for me. People I knew, my friends, were all along the way, and we exchanged greetings. One particular friend was sitting on the fence of his parents’ house, and my father stopped with me and gave me a few moments to spend with my friend. We said our goodbyes, and then I continued on with my dad to the dock. As I got on the boat, he said, “Take care of yourself, son,” and that was that. He sent me off to Florida, and I wouldn’t see my mother or my father again for eight years.

  I believe that my mother was a very special human being, and I think that much that has happened to me is the continuance of her soul and her spirit and her gift. All that she was, all that she could never articulate, that she could never say to people…well, she felt far more than she could speak, and she lived, and she had children, and somehow the best of her found its way beyond her, beyond the bounds of her own life. I feel that whatever is good in me is that energy that she was. She put it into her last child. Does that make any sense to you?

  I’ve always felt that my mother was this very pure and deserving entity, but on the level of my understanding as a youngster, she was just a mom, and she was; she was guilty of doing mom things—setting out restrictions and making demands and preventing me from making certain turns, life turns, I suppose. So when she talked to me on that level, she was a mom, from my point of view, talking to her son. Especially during some of the whippings she gave me—and there were quite a few, and they were all different from the whippings I got from my dad. My mother’s discipline was emotional. When she would get to whipping on me, it was as if she could beat into me some wisdom that she knew would be essential for my survival.

  I’ve told the story before, but I think it bears repeating here: the story of her concern at the time of my birth, and her going to the soothsayer. She was rightly concerned because I was a very premature baby, born unexpectedly while my parents were traveling to Miami to sell a hundred boxes of tomatoes at the Produce Exchange. When I arrived weighing in at less than three pounds, the question was, Is there enough there to take hold? My father, who had lost several children already to disease and stillbirth, was somewhat stoical about the situation. He went to a local undertaker in the “colored” section of Miami to prepare for my burial, coming home with a shoebox that could serve as a miniature casket.

  My mother, however, felt that I could be saved. One afternoon she left the house where they were staying to visit the local palm-reader and diviner of tea leaves. After some intense gazing back and forth, and much silence, the soothsayer closed her eyes and took my mother’s hand. There was more silence, an uncomfortably long silence, and then the soothsayer’s face began to twitch. Her eyes rolled back and forth behind their lids. Strange sounds began to gurgle up from her throat. Then all at once her eyes flew open again and she said, “Don’t worry about your son. He will survive and he will not be a sickly child. He will grow up to be…he will travel to most of the corners of the earth. He will walk with kings. He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world. You must not worry about that child.”

  So for fifty cents, my mother found the support she needed for backing a long shot. She came home and ordered my father to remove the shoebox of a casket from the house—there would be no need for it. And so it followed, for reasons that my mother and I believed were better left unquestioned, that I pulled through.

  I wasn’t a spoiled child. As soon as I was big enough to lift a bucket, I carried water for my mother. I went into the woods to gather bramble to make our cooking fire. Even as a toddler I had my jobs, my purpose, and I knew that I had to contribute to the thin margin of our survival. But I was a child bathed in love and attention.

  My mother wasn’t my only guardian angel. One day my sister Teddy said to me, “What are you going to do? What would you like to do when you grow up?” And I remember—at that time I was about twelve—I told my sister that I would like to go to Hollywood and become a cowboy.

  I had just seen my first movie—it was a cowboy movie, of course—and I thought it was the most amazing thing. I had no idea that Hollywood meant the movie business. I thought Hollywood was where they raised cows, and where they used horses to keep the cows corralled, and where the cowboys were the good guys, and they were always fighting the bad guys, who were trying to either steal the cows or do something to the people who owned the cows, and I wanted to do that kind of work.

  Teddy laughed, but the laughter wasn’t at me; she laughed with me. She was somebody who really loved me a lot, like my mom. She was more than ten years older, and she laughed. I’m sure she must have thought it was so wonderful that I was having this terrific dream, but she didn’t correct me, she didn’t say, “That’s such a way-out fantasy.” She didn’t say, “Who do you think you are? Man, you better get your feet on the ground. Boy, you got a long way to go.” No, she obviously had dreams too.

  About ten years later the family was able to gather in a theater in Nassau to see the first picture I ever made, something called No Way Out. This was in 1950, and it was the first time my parents had ever seen a movie. It must have been something like a fantasy for them, a dream. I’m not entirely sure how much they grasped of the concept.

  My mother was sitting there, a woman who really didn’t know anything about movies. My father was sitting there, a guy who really didn’t know anything about movies. The movie played, and they were absolutely enthralled with what t
hey saw, letting go with “That’s my kid!” and all that. But near the end of the movie Richard Widmark pistol-whips me in the basement of some house. He’s hitting me with this pistol, the butt of this pistol. He’s beating the crap out of me with this pistol, and my mother jumps up in the theater and yells, “Hit him back, Sidney! Hit him back! You never did nothing to him!” In front of everybody. My brothers and sisters are squirming and laughing, saying, “Mama, sit down, sit down.” But she’s not joking. She’s for real, completely in the moment. “Hit him back, Sidney! Hit him back!”

  That was my mother.

  THERE ARE THINGS that pass through us along the bloodline that don’t surface in our children, or in our grandchildren. They may not even surface in our great-great-great-grandchildren, but eventually they will surface, you know?

  If you walk down the street and someone is with you, he’ll adjust to your pace or you to his, and you’ll never be aware of it. There’s no effort. It simply happens. And the same thing can happen with the rhythm of your life.

  We’re connected with everything. We’re connected with the primal instincts. And whatever is primal in us goes to the beginning of the species and back even beyond that. You follow?

  We carry a sensitivity panel, a panel of connected sensitivity remembrances all passed along through the blood, because if we’re standing or sitting or lying somewhere alive at this moment, then we’re living proof that our bloodline is unbroken from the beginning of time.

  Now, a great prodigy like Mozart, when he can barely walk, finds a piano, and he goes over to this instrument, curious, looks it over, tinkers with it, hears some sounds, and in no time is able to begin to make sense of the notes that respond to his touch, and by the age of three he’s writing symphonies. The music and the instrument simply speak to him. At an organic level he understands the harmonies and the chord structures. Even before he can read he’s primed for what he’s going to do in his life.