The Measure of a Man Read online

  But where did that come from? Could it not have come from ten generations before him, when a child was born with this unbelievable gift but nobody knew it? It was just there, because nature doesn’t place either a prize or a price on such gifts. It simply deposits them, and they can stay dormant in the bloodline for centuries. They don’t necessarily have to be passed from father to son, you know?

  So the primal thing is a very real part of our existence. How do I know that there wasn’t a gift for theater or a gift for storytelling in my background two hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, seven hundred years ago? Maybe it lay dormant or was momentarily activated and returned to dormancy as it traveled along the bloodline generation after generation. And one day, bingo! It’s in a child who walks into a certain place, and certain circumstances, and suddenly it comes to life.

  Now, that could go for musicians, it could go for scientists, it could go for the griots in the old days in Africa or the bards in Europe. That’s the way it goes, because it’s a single human family. The apparatus is the same.

  All those experiences were registered, because there was a consciousness that was taking all that stuff in, even if it couldn’t articulate it or define it. It was just taking that stuff in and responding. There was a response to it, just a nervous response, an instinctive response, and that was passed on, and the next generation got it in some form or other and the next generation after that in some form or other and all the way across history.

  AS A MATTER OF FACT, it’s hard to tell where I came from. Poitier obviously is a French name. Given that we were in an English colonial possession, and that Poitier in the Bahamas is associated only with black people, there’s the strong implication that the bearers of that name came from Haiti, the nearest French colonial possession to the Bahamas. We have to assume that my ancestors escaped, because there’s no record of a Poitier family of whites having gone to the Bahamas. So my people left on their own. The other French colonial possessions are way, way, way deep in the Caribbean, and to my mind it’s unlikely that any black people would have migrated all the way across the Caribbean from Martinique, or St. Martin, or Guadeloupe into the Bahamas.

  The speculation is that the family originated in Haiti and moved by escape routes to the Bahamas, settling eventually on Cat Island. Now mind you, the French in Haiti supported slavery, as did the British colonies, so at the time of my family’s migration to the Bahamas, they weren’t coming from a slave state to a free state. But Cat Island was such an isolated place that they probably had no difficulty in finding, if not a family to work for, then at least land that they could sharecrop and live on.

  Cat Island had enormous land area relative to its population. I mean, it was forty-six miles long, with a population of maybe one or two hundred white families, you know? And maybe three or four hundred slaves. So we assume that my ancestors simply started farming, and if anybody bothered to say, “By the way, what are you doing on my land?” they would have said, in French or whatever, “We’re just here,” and then the owners would have said, “Okay, well, you know, this is my land, and you have to give me some of what you produce.”

  My grandfather, March Poitier, wasn’t a farmer, though. He was very skilled at building. He would be contracted by the state, by the government, to go to other islands and build a schoolhouse or a government building or some other public structure. That required, first of all, having a boat, which in those days he would have had to build himself. It doesn’t appear, according to the oral history of the family, to have been an enormous boat. Rather, it was probably one that took a sail stitched together from the sturdiest canvas cloth he could afford. He most likely made a mast out of a tree chopped down in the forest, skinned of bark and fastened in the bow. His rigging rope was either store-bought or handmade. If handmade, it was plaited from sisal, an inhospitable plant with thornlike edges running along the sides of its leaves and culminating at its end in a point as sharp as a needle. Put in water, the tough skin of the sisal leaf dissolves after some weeks, leaving a strong, stringy, threadlike material that’s widely used by those in the rope-making business.

  My later experience with boats as a young man leads me to say that his boat probably was a fifteen-footer. It couldn’t have been more than an eighteen-footer. He made a sail because motors were out of the question. You didn’t even talk about motors in those days, though he would probably have had a couple of oars.

  In the Caribbean they row from the stern. He would have had a couple of oars, and he would have had a bailing bucket so that if he ran into difficult weather he could bail the water out of the boat.

  Now, crucial to getting a fix on what his character might have been—the places he went to build these houses for the government, they weren’t just around the corner. He would have had to sail great distances in open water. For instance, to go from Cat Island to the Exumas by motorboat doing ten, eleven knots an hour is a four-hour run. So if he was using sail or the oars, you’re talking about at least an overnight run. In fact, you’re talking about twenty to twenty-five hours or so, in open seas by himself!

  It’s my understanding that his job was to collect local people on-site that he would hire to do the job. He was a builder on Cat Island as well, but he was often gone, sometimes for months at a time. On one such trip he was bitten by a black widow spider and took sick on the return trip. By the time he arrived home, he was in very bad shape, and he died.

  But March Poitier had a lot of sons and daughters. He had been married before he married my grandmother, with whom he had three children—David, Caroline, and Reggie.

  Both grandparents on my father’s side were dead before I was born. But on my mother’s side I knew Pa Tim and Mama Gina. I knew them because they lived close to us on Cat Island, and they were wonderful but very old people who were still very much in the old culture.

  My grandfather Pa Tim was a farmer, an extremely tall man who said few words but was very close to my grandmother. I remember her better. She smoked a pipe and cooked in a thatch hut, and her hair was always tied up with a cloth, like a handkerchief, as I recall, and she was very close to her children. She had five daughters: my mother, Evelyn, Eunice, Aida, Ya-Ya, and Augusta.

  My grandmother lived just across the pond from our family. I remember my Aunt Ya-Ya, who died after I left for Florida, and I remember very well my Aunt Augusta, who also smoked a pipe—that same kind of white-clay pipe from the olden days.

  There was something special in the women of that family. My mother had it, which made my father a very fortunate fellow. Ya-Ya I recall having had it too, but Auntie Gusta—it seems to me I saw most of it in Auntie Gusta.

  Auntie Gusta left her husband, Zack, because he was abusive. He drank, and whenever he was able to scrounge up enough bucks he would shell it out on rum. He was a hard-working man, but he spent such monies as he could manage on rum (or he bartered goods, farm products, for rum), and he was an abuser. She only had the courage to leave him once the children were grown. She got on a boat and she went to Nassau and tried to find a new life for herself. Boy, you don’t know how much courage that took. But that was my mother’s family.

  My mother had a marriage that was unbelievable, and I think it had to do simply with a compatibility that was native to the two personalities. They got along so well. I never heard a cross word. My mother could talk only to my dad—really talk—but they would talk and talk and talk, I mean, they were friends and they were buddies and they worked side by side. She respected him, and he—I think he might have been guilty of a few infractions here and there—was devoted to her and would never hurt her. Never, never. You see, he was some years older than Evelyn. Evelyn was thirteen when they got married. Reggie, then not quite twenty-six, was the only man she ever knew.

  In 1936 the state of Florida imposed an embargo against tomatoes grown in the Bahamas. That turn of events would require thirty-two years to break down Reggie Poitier, and several more to wrestle the life out of him, but the stru
ggle was set in motion mid-morning of a warm, sunny day in 1937, when my mother and I stepped on board a native sailboat.

  Around us, my father, my older brothers and sisters, and my grandparents on my mother’s side all stood or squatted on the jagged coral outcroppings that made the waterfront of Arthur’s Town, Cat Island. Behind them, high on a bluff adjacent to the main road, a chorus of cousins, once or twice removed, milled about in a modest crowd of neighbors, friends, and assorted well-wishers. All had come to offer a prayer for our safe passage and wave us goodbye.

  This was the first step in my father’s plan to resettle the family. My mother and I were to travel to Nassau as an advance party “to take a look at the lay of the land,” search out housing we could afford, and gather such additional information as would be relevant to our survival in an unfamiliar place. The second step, depending on a favorable report, would require the rest of the family to follow in the weeks to come. But on that morning I was a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy whose thoughts were far from the pressing realities of family survival. While I was old enough to pick up ever so slight changes in my father’s face and something unspoken in his eyes, I was still far too young to read or even recognize concerns of obligation when written on a face. Instead, my thoughts roamed freely in a fantasy arena.

  Weeks before departure time, my imagination had begun running wild with anticipation. When the moment to step on board finally arrived, I was almost too excited, too anxious, too filled with curiosity and wonder about what kind of world I would find beyond the horizon. From rumors, hearsay, and snatches of adult conversations never meant for my ears, I had concluded that whatever world I would find waiting for me must surely be like no place I had ever seen or dreamed of.

  I had heard that there were real electric lights there, not kerosene lamps like the ones everybody on Cat Island used. Running water inside houses. Coming in through pipes from under the ground. With the twist of a little handle, water would come when you wanted. As much as you wanted, as little as you wanted. I had heard that sworn to as a fact. Yet how could that be? And more wild than that, “cars,” they said, were a sight to behold. They said some people somewhere in that world beyond the horizon had made something called a car that would run faster than a horse—which was the fastest thing I knew of. Having never seen a car, I wondered how on earth they managed to make such a thing. And shoes. How about people who had shoes and wore them all the time? Not just on Sundays. Even toilets, they said, were found inside some rich people’s houses. Couldn’t imagine how that would work.

  As those on shore waved and shouted their goodbyes, the anchor was hoisted, the sail was set, and our vessel eased out to sea.

  First the waterfront of Arthur’s Town grew smaller and smaller; then Cat Island itself became a dot on which I focused intently until it disappeared from sight. Looking back now, in my mind’s eye, I remember it as a place where a simple people, three hundred families strong, managed their survival through an improvised, communal existence. Until the embargo, tomato farming was the closest thing to an industry that we had. On an island that consisted mostly of coral rock, each family could still find a plot of ground big enough to call a family farm, and fertile enough to meet a family’s needs. Some who didn’t work a farm built boats. Some built houses. Others were fishermen or well-diggers or shopkeepers.

  At some time in the distant past a marriage had taken place between a barter system and a cash economy, and that marriage had endured into a benign tradition. Competition was kept as close to neighborly levels as was possible. The person who built houses would probably have to take some goat or fish meat in addition to some money for his services. For those who didn’t have cash, an exchange of their labor served as a viable currency just as well. That way everything leveled out. Thatched-roof houses without plumbing were built largely from materials found around the island. Taxes? There were none. Therefore, a family could function from year to year having only the slightest amount of cash. No money was needed to build a rock oven for baking; the rocks were there in abundance. A family would build a lime kiln from freshly cut trees that were still green and burn them over many weeks until the green wood became an ash with a consistency resembling cement. It wasn’t actually cement, but it had a texture that ultimately hardened like cement, allowing them to build the walls of a house. They could build a door out of wood and nails if they had those things. If not, they used twine to secure pieces of wood together to form a door. Protein came in the form of pigs, goats, chickens, and fish.

  I was just a child when we left, and none of us were particularly given to introspection back then. But nearly sixty years later, a dear friend asked a very telling question. “On Cat Island,” he asked me, “when you looked in the mirror, what did you think about the color of your skin?”

  The question opened doors that helped me to understand that special place. I told him, first of all, that I had no recollection of having seen myself in a mirror at that time. I couldn’t remember having ever seen a looking glass in our house, or any other kind of glass anywhere on the island (except maybe rum bottles on the shelf of Damite Farrah’s shop). No glass windows, no glass doors, no stores with glass fronts. Our family didn’t drink from glassware; we drank from enamel cups. Reflections, of course, from pond water, baking pans, various other kinds of metals. That’s what I had. That’s all I had. Occasional glimpses from reflections. Never was I able to recall having seen myself in a mirror. So I never got a fix on my color. No reason to. With no frame of reference to evidence its necessity, the issue never arose. There was one guy in Arthur’s Town, a doctor, who was white, and Damite Farrah, the shopkeeper, who was white. These guys were different-looking, yes. But neither represented power. Therefore, I never translated their color into that. Or control…or hostility…or oppression…or anything of that nature. They were just there, and I never wondered why they were white and the rest of the people were black.

  So in answer to my friend’s question, I didn’t think about the color of my skin. Not any more than I would have bothered to wonder why the sand was white or the sky was blue.

  But outside the island of my early years, a world was waiting that would focus on my color to the exclusion of all else, never caring to go beyond that superficial characteristic to see what else I might have to offer. As I entered this world, I would leave behind the nurturing of my family and my home, but in another sense I would take their protection with me. The lessons I had learned, the feelings of groundedness and belonging that had been woven into my character there, would be my companions on the journey. But so too would those intimations of the dark side I had first glimpsed in myself, even in the idyllic setting of my childhood, that I didn’t yet understand. As I moved on to live my life, fidelity and faithlessness, great good fortune and barely skirted annihilation, would flicker in and out of the script of my life. Always, lurking behind the objects and experiences of the everyday world, there were the mysteries. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why have I survived, even prospered? Is it all purely random and meaningless, or is there something more to be revealed?

  TWO

  DEPARTURES

  WHEN I WENT BACK to the Bahamas to live in the seventies, I had a small boat, about a twenty-footer, that I used just for solitude. I would go cruising by myself quite a ways out from the eastern end of Nassau. One day, while fishing a few miles from a cluster of small, uninhabited islands, I got a big strike that felt like a good-size fish. I stood up in the boat to set the hook, and as I furiously started reeling the fish in, something happened—and it was gone.

  I don’t know whether the fish just got loose or a barracuda took it, but suddenly there I was, floundering, sulking over the loss of my fish, and the line was loose, drifting down into the water.

  Because I was slow to react, the line sank to the bottom, and because I was over coral, which was maybe forty feet down, the hook got stuck. Still standing up in the boat, I figured I’d start the motor and back over the spot
where my hook was wedged in and then pull it the other way. So I started the motor and was moving around, and as I was fussing with the line, trying to get it unhooked, the boat swaying this way and that, I suddenly realized that if I fell off that boat with the motor going, and going just fast enough so that there was no way I could catch it by swimming behind it—well, not to put too fine a point on it, if I fell out of that boat, I’d be done for. Bye-bye. All over.

  I was maybe two and a half miles from the nearest island, in forty feet of open water. I could float, mind you. I could get on my back and float, but the tide would have to be ideal not to move me away, pull me out in the direction of the Gulf Stream even if I were paddling like the whole U.S. Olympic swim team rolled into one.

  Once again I had yielded to the seduction of risk, only to recoil from the awful sense of vulnerability. No beautiful wife, no film credits, no lovely friends and dinner invitations, no money in the bank was going to save me if I fell into the drink. After that realization I never, ever moved around in the boat unless I was anchored, and I never, ever started the motor unless I was seated at the console. But it was hardly the last time I would dance close to the edge.

  Nassau was my first exposure to the myriad risks that lay outside the natural world. Urban life was infinitely more than I had expected, and it came at me with breakneck speed. Forming. Shaping. Molding. Seasoning a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy to bring him rapidly up to speed in a town where everything moved ten times faster than in the place he had left behind. Everything was new. Friends, values, social imprinting, transfer of allegiance from the old family of blood to the new family of friends.

  At the age of ten and a half, I ran smack into Urban. Modern. Cars. Movies. Hotels. Restaurants. Night clubs. Bars. Dance halls. And that transition from childhood idyll to Urban launched me straight into manhood. By the age of fourteen I was no longer a child.