The Measure of a Man Read online

  When childhood is aborted, it’s like aborted grief. In both cases, if you don’t go through all the stages, giving each its due, the job never gets completed. I felt that double thing: part of me said, “Yes—make the plans, do the decisions, take the responsibility, pull the load”; at the same time, I felt that there was a kid inside me who’d never got finished.

  The pain I felt most sharply was the loss of camaraderie, the sense of belonging. I grieved for the love, the trust, and the feel-good giggles that had once bubbled up and bound me to the friends of my childhood, most of whom are dead now, and bound those childhood friends to me. Not that my life was all that bad.

  Even these days the smile still comes when I think how we used to go to the movies in Nassau, then come back in the evening and act out all the parts. Then there was the time we stole a case of rum during a riot and climbed over the eight-foot wall of an old, run-down estate, settled in some bushes, and drank till we got pissed. Then found we couldn’t climb back over the wall! Every day, with testosterone kicking ass, we would search out something crazy to do.

  Whenever I could play games in those early days in Nassau…whenever I could run with buddies…go to a movie…hang with the fellas…do harmless but mischievous and, I suppose, childish things—that was my delight. I have great remembrances of long, long silences filled with the satisfaction, the pleasure of just being together doing nothing in particular. Or suddenly bursting into laughter from a remembered moment once shared. Laughing till I cried was a special kind of joy. Laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

  I didn’t have much of that for very long. All of it stopped before I could finish being a kid. But today the laughter of birds and the chatter of monkeys remind me that the source experiences that trigger delight in each of us are different. To each of us a certain kind, in each of us a certain amount. Nothing is transferable. One makes do with what one gets.

  Plunked down so suddenly in the middle of that new world, I had to struggle to get a fix on myself. I ended up getting a look at me by looking at that new world. As I looked at the goods it had available, I could see myself reflected in the glass window showcases of all the stores I passed on Bay Street. I had to get a fix on the folks, too. Now there were white people all over the place. A hell of a lot more than the two at Arthur’s Town, Cat Island.

  When I first went to school in Nassau I attended Eastern Senior, which was a long way off from where we lived—a good four-mile walk one way. And four miles back. On the convoluted route I liked, because it appeared to be a shortcut, I ran into a white kid who was about my age. His name was Carl, and I would see him almost every day on my way from school or on my way to school. He seemed to be friendly enough, so one day I stopped to talk with him. In a couple of weeks we had struck up a loose friendship, exchanging thoughts of interest to our age and gender. I would learn from him by asking questions; he would respond, and in turn ask questions of me. In time we arrived at the question of race. He wasn’t at all shy about letting me know that he was better off than I was, on the basis of his color. According to the gospel as he had learned it, I would never have the same opportunities, the same circumstance in life that he would.

  I waited for the punchline. None came. He was dead serious! When I recovered from the shock, what he had said rankled the shit out of me. I responded with all the things I suppose a young black kid would say. You know the sort of thing. “I can do anything you can do. I can climb a tree as quickly as you. I can run as fast as you. I can do anything you can do, quicker and better.”

  But the more I protested, the more my words seemed to reinforce his matter-of-fact smugness. His whole manner indicated that this wasn’t deluded opinion he was spouting; to him it was absolute truth. I kept pounding back until he got testy, and then we both pounded back some more. We went on like that for some time, shooting at each other the most hurtful things we could think of, only to wind up as eleven-year-old boys tend to wind up: pissed, exhausted, and off on their separate ways to other concerns—until they see each other again, and then it’s like nothing happened.

  Three years later, in another part of Nassau, I met a girl named Dorothy. She was very fair complected, but you could see that there was some color there. She lived out near the water in a mixed neighborhood with her mother and a brother. When I met her I had pleasant feelings like butterflies in my stomach, and it appeared that she had the same. We started making eyes at each other and some magic happened. Then I met her brother—who turned out to be Carl. They were from two different fathers, Carl and his sister. The mother was white. And the father of Dorothy was a person of color.

  So I suppose Carl was in a complicated situation emotionally. And I suppose that he felt better when his vanity could get a boost at the expense of mine. But his conflict was not unusual. In Nassau, race was still a slightly ambiguous issue.

  For some people, though, there was no ambiguity. One day on West Bay Street, when I was walking past the old fort near the waterfront, I saw ahead of me an older white guy coming on a bicycle. Had to have been between eighteen and twenty, I’d say. I was walking along toward the west. Just the two of us on the street, you know? No cars or anything at that particular time. He was moving east on the left-hand side of the street when I noticed him starting to turn toward me. I figured he was heading around the upcoming corner. He rode up, and as he got abreast of me he took his right hand off his handlebar and punched me right in the face.

  BOOM!

  I was stunned. It took me a few seconds to pull myself together, and when I did, I saw him tearing ass a mile a minute toward the center of town. I took off after him. But he was heading downtown, and downtown was owned by white people. Of course, at age fourteen that made no difference to me.

  He looked back and he saw me coming, running as hard and as fast as I could.

  He ducked around a corner and onto Bay Street, which was the main business thoroughfare. By the time I arrived at the foot of the street and looked east, he had disappeared. Not a bicycle in sight.

  I went into every store looking for him. I walked Bay Street, remembering what he looked like, remembering how he was dressed, and even now I can still see him. Clear as can be. He was dressed in bicycle gear, decked out as only a kid of some wealth could be.

  After a good hour looking, I still hadn’t found him.

  Which was lucky for me. In retrospect, maybe one of the luckiest occurrences of my life. Considering my state of mind, had I found him, chances are I would have gone right at him. But with the full power of the state inevitably on his side, the satisfaction I sought would have come at a very high price.

  Beyond these first tinges of racism, I also became aware of something else that I had never before come upon. Even though I had only the dimmest glimmer of an understanding of the concept of “class,” it came to me in the form of a warning: “Here, not everybody is the same.” I absorbed the message that there were ground rules I would be expected to observe. I saw quite quickly that the entire white population was an elite element when evaluated against the black population, but there was obviously an elite element even within the white population. And there was an elite element to the black population as well.

  The black upper class was a good thing to see, but to me, it smelled like a warning as well. There were black businessmen. There were black school principals, black policemen, black judges, and black lawyers. The majority of the blacks, of course, were workaday poor, very poor. Poor in Nassau was like poor on Cat Island, only tougher, because survival in Nassau was more heavily dependent on money. In Nassau even some black folks had electricity, but we still used a kerosene lamp. Some had a bathroom in the house, and glassware dishes, even an icebox. For the first time I began to see myself against that reality. There were haves and have-nots, and we definitely had very little. We had no money, no power. We lived in the requisite neighborhood for those people.

  I then knew what the pecking order in that part of the world was. Couldn’t miss it. Plus,
I knew where I was in it. For myself, it was okay, because my life was ahead of me. But I didn’t like where my dad was in it. My father, an honorable fellow trying awfully hard, was at the very bottom of the pole. I remember one occasion distinctly. He was sitting on the porch near the door of the last house we lived in, before I left Nassau. As I barreled past him on my way out to hook up with friends, he reached out and stopped me. He looked me up and down. He felt my arms. I must have appeared rather thin to him. He said, “You’re not eating regularly, are you, son?” I said, “I’m okay. I’m all right. I’m fine.” He didn’t say more. I felt terrible for him because I knew what was going on in his head that he couldn’t put in words. I loved him for it, you know?

  My mother used to buy flour sacks and make pants and shirts for my school clothes. Seemingly endless fun was made of me because I wore the emblem of the flour company on my bottom. But knowing that my mom and dad were doing the best they could gave me the strength to suck it up and move on. Especially when Mom said, “Look, this is where we are now. There’s no shame in what you wear as long as it’s clean. Your father and me, we put clothes on your back as best we can. You just remember there are other colored people who have a lot more. So it’s just a question of—well, maybe one day we’ll do better; maybe one day we’ll get there too. It’s not impossible, son. It’s not impossible.”

  But that environment didn’t make it easy. By the age of thirteen I had dropped out of school, a short tenure, given that my formal education began around the age of eleven. At the age for junior-high sock-hops I was doing hard labor around construction jobs. My best friend, Yorick Rolle, was caught stealing a bicycle—an adventure I don’t to this day know why I wasn’t a part of—and he was sent off for four tough years in the colonial prison system. My brother Cedric, two years older than I, was sent away because of a bizarre extortion scheme that was fueled by a combination of adolescent naïveté and too many caper movies, I’m sure. And even I, little Sidney Poitier, was jailed briefly for stealing corn. So it wasn’t a tough call for my father to say he had to get me out of there. I was sent off to live in Miami with my brother Cyril, more than ten years my senior.

  MIAMI SHARED A CLIMATE and lifestyle with the Caribbean, but its culture and mores were of the American South, 1940s Jim Crow style, and nothing had prepared me to surrender my pride and self-regard sufficiently to accept those humiliations. In fact, it was quite the opposite. My values and my sense of self were already fully constructed.

  Which is another way of saying that I was already a kid who wasn’t gonna take any bullshit—from anybody.

  While I was in no position to force society to accept me as I wanted to be accepted, I still had to let people know what my rules were. For a while I had a job as a delivery boy, and on one of my first assignments I was sent to a wealthy home in Miami Beach. I went to the front door and rang the bell, and a lady came to the door and said, “What do you want?”

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” I said. “I’ve come to deliver your package from the drugstore.”

  “Get around to the back door where you belong,” she snapped.

  “But I’m here. Here’s the package you ordered.” I extended the bag containing her items.

  She huffed and slammed the door in my face. I just couldn’t understand what her problem was. I set the package down on the step in front of the door and left. I didn’t think any more about it.

  A couple of nights later, when I came home my brother’s house was completely dark, and the family was lying on the floor, huddled together as if they were in a state of siege. It seems the Klan had been there looking for me, and everyone in the house was terrified. Everyone except me. Being new and from a different culture, I was wide-eyed with curiosity, mostly at the family’s reaction. I just couldn’t get used to this strange place and this strange way of behaving.

  In Nassau, while learning about myself, I had become conscious of being pigeonholed by others, and I had determined then to always aim myself toward a slot of my choosing. There were too many images of what I could be. Where I could go. Too many images of wonderful, accomplished, interesting black people around and about for me to feel bad about my color.

  In Miami, this strange new society started coming at me with point-blank force to hammer home its long-established, nonnegotiable position on the color of skin, which declared me unworthy of human consideration, then ordered me to embrace the notion of my unworthiness. My reply was, “Who, me? Are you fucking crazy? Me? You’re talking to me?”

  I was saying, “Hey, not only am I not that which you would make me. Here’s what I in fact am. First of all, I’m the son of a really terrific guy, Reginald James Poitier. And Evelyn Poitier, my mom, who’s a terrific woman. I have no evil designs; I’m a well-intentioned, meaningful person. I’m young, and I’m not particularly headstrong—though I can get pretty pissed. I’m a good person, and nothing you say can undo that. You can harp on that color crap as much as you want, but because of the way I was raised, I don’t have a receptor that’s gonna take in any of that.”

  Of course, over time, osmosis brings a lot of that sewage to you, and some of it does seep in, you know? But having arrived in America with a foundation that had had time to set, the Jim Crow way of life had trouble overwhelming me.

  Vanity, which the dictionary says is an excess of pride, was the only way I could brace myself against the onslaught of the culture’s merciless indictment of me. With no other means at my disposal to fight off society’s intent to restrict my range of motion, to smother and suffocate me, excess was engaged to speak on my behalf. I was saying, “Okay, listen, you think I’m so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value—to you I say, ‘I’m not talking about being as good as you. I hereby declare myself better than you.’”

  Later, I would carry that theme, detached from questions of color and race, all the way into the theater world, where it would become a personal standard, applicable to creative excellence and professional competitiveness. Marlon Brando was an idol of mine, a consummate artist and one of the good guys. I aimed to be better than even him.

  But I didn’t need anyone to torture me or deny me or coddle me or cajole me into having that kind of drive. I was born with an innate curiosity, and it took me to the damnedest places. When I was small the world was an Eden. I woke up in the morning saying, “I’m seven and I’m free! I can walk to the ocean and I can jump in. My brothers kick my ass now and then, but that’s okay. There’s all this newness! There’s life! There’s girls! There’s that damned ditch that nearly got me killed. It’s a whole world of fascinating challenges.”

  Natural threats laid the foundation, but there was always a who or a what or a condition challenging me to prove my value. Pushing, forcing, threatening me to be better. Always better. I was challenged to understand all the abuse in the world. When I got to Nassau, it was race and class and economics, a colonial system that was very hostile. So my motto was Never leave home without a fixed commitment. I couldn’t deal with those awesome odds either by waiting for society to someday have a change of heart or by saying, “I’m gonna be as good, one day, as you are.” My heart said, “I am already as good. In fact, I’m starting out with better material, and I am going to be better.” How do you like them apples?

  Young blacks coming up in America were frequently subjected to parental lectures, almost all of which carried the same message: “Face this reality. You’re gonna have to be twice as good as the white folks in order to get half as much.” That was drilled into them. Bahamian lectures had another ring. “Get that education. Get out there and work. Get out there and hustle. Take whatever opportunities there are, and use them as stepping-stones.”

  That’s what we were told. But when I got to the States, things changed. I had to choose to be better, because I didn’t feel anything like what was demanded of me to be. Couldn’t fit the slot.

  “Me?
Dog shit? Listen close. Not only am I not dog shit…watch me win this race. I’m dog shit? Yeah? Watch me win.”

  There was simply no slot for a kid like me in a place like Florida, so I was itching to go north, despite the fact that I had no idea just how big this country was. As a teenager who tended to run away, I had made it as far as Tampa a couple of times. But my brother had six children of his own and didn’t need the aggravation of having to go fetch me back in the middle of the night when I’d run out of money.

  Then a summer kitchen job in the mountains of Georgia put me within striking distance of breaking out and away before Miami could register more damage on my psyche. I worked through the vacation months, and at the end of the summer I found myself in the Atlanta bus station with thirty-nine dollars in my pocket. So I had to decide where I was going to go and what I was going to do.

  I knew that Miami wasn’t for me, because Miami designated me, by law and social custom, as being undeserving of human consideration. While waiting at that bus station, I decided to test the waters in Atlanta. I remember taking an excursion by streetcar, roaming around for hours with all my senses alert for resemblances to the Miami of my recent acquaintance. I covered both sides of the railroad tracks, but I saw nothing that would entice me to consider dropping anchor in Atlanta. Those two southern cities were too much the same in all matters that bore directly on my situation. There was simply no room for me to be me. I was still running from the nightmare of Miami, looking for signs of the dreams I had left behind in more congenial places. Dreams that were holding on to me as tightly as I was holding on to them.

  I soon found my way back to the bus station’s ticket window, with the inquiry, “Excuse me, please, but where’s the next bus going?”

  “Chattanooga,” said the agent, his voice rumbling through the caged window of the booth. “And it leaves in five minutes.”