Life Beyond Measure Page 4

  By that point in time, however, I’d been away from Cat Island for almost six years, light-years away from our village—first in Nassau, then Miami, then the mountains of Georgia, and eventually New York City, in places where cameras were no big deal. Neither were electricity, running water, cars, trains, telephones, radios, skyscrapers, or movies. All were goods and services—no more, no less—and, like the camera, all manifestations of technology that had been destined to materialize in the aftermath of the volatile beginning of the universe.

  Later, the topic of how these tools of civilization developed, through trial and error, would become a source of infinite fascination to me, possibly because of how I was raised without them. There were many early versions of the camera, for example, but for a long time none turned out to be a slam dunk. Many tries, many failures.

  That was until a Frenchman, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, after many misses, successfully managed to capture light in a box. By 1839, after collaboration with others and further trial and error, he produced the first-ever working camera to surface in the commercial marketplace.

  By the time that I was born, in the year 1927, my father was forty-three years old and my mother was thirty-one. In the eighty-eight years that the camera had been known to the outside world, not even the wisest of our village elders had reason to believe that photographic images were on their way to being capable of capturing and holding priceless moments of our earliest years. For all of us in Arthur’s Town, it was as hard to conceive of printed images of childhood that would be readily available for recall, reflection, and reminiscence as it was for people growing up in the early nineteenth century and earlier in other places of the world. The introduction into our lives of mysterious instruments like cameras was not to take place until many years after my childhood had long since passed.

  Suffice it to say that, as to the details of my early years, I am the last witness. To add challenge to the absence of cameras, for those first ten and a half years on Cat Island there were no mirrors or glass panes in which I ever had the chance to see my own reflection. Not once was I able to see what my face looked like.

  Of course, I could easily see what the faces of other children looked like. I also knew well what the faces of family members, village elders, and people from other settlements looked like, simply from having seen them in the routine of their daily lives. But I had no way of looking at my own.

  This wasn’t, by the way, an issue of great concern for me at first. Besides, I wasn’t alone in this regard. And I could see that I had arms and legs like the other children. We weren’t very different from one other, I figured. Some were taller, others shorter, while our skin color was roughly the same. Making do with logic, reason, and imagination, I fashioned for myself a mental image of my face that was acceptable to the little boy that I was at the time.

  Somewhere inside of me that little boy is still alive, and shows up unexpectedly with one or another irresistible memory from the past—such as the discovery I made one day while playing by myself at the edge of a quiet pond.

  Since I had only one real friend, Fritz—who lived a mile away and whose family’s work didn’t always allow him to join me in my explorations—spending long hours alone wasn’t out of the ordinary for me. What was unusual on this day was how the sunlight at my back had thrown a shadow on the surface of the water. Instantly that shadow took the shape of a boy who appeared to be my age, who began mirroring every move I made. Was the shadow boy mocking me? Very well. Assuming it was, I responded with a flurry of nonsensical gestures executed as swiftly as my hands could fly, gestures bearing no logical connection one to the other, gestures I fully expected to prove far too swift and much too complex for any shadow on any pond anywhere to imitate. I was wrong. With not even a fraction of time lapse between its motions and my own, the shadow again mirrored, synchronized, and, yes, one could also say imitated my every movement to the letter.

  OK, if it wasn’t making fun of me, then what? As if on cue, the sun slipped behind a cloud and the shadow on the water disappeared. While waiting for the cloud to pass, I found myself having second thoughts about the shadow and myself. Had I misread its intentions? Might it not have been expressing its own playful nature or an innocent desire to engage me at play? Might it have been trying, through playful, childlike imitations, to invite my attention to join with it as a companion?

  Soon after the cloud dispersed, the sun returned, and I consciously made the decision to accept this new and unusual friendship. With that, the rest of that day was well spent by us—a little boy and his shadow companion—as were countless days that followed.

  We often raced each other along lonely stretches of deserted beaches toward finish lines where the winner was, of course, determined by the position of the sun. Together we could stroll, jump, laugh, and play all the day, every day, as long as the sun was shining.

  In recalling those distant times of boundless pleasures, I am also reminded of how much I resented cloudy days and how my mood grew darker as the threat of rain increased. Even now, I am of the opinion that my shadowy companion and I shared the same sentiment.

  We were similar in temperament and personality, both shadows and both little boys who had not yet learned how to successfully hide whatever little boys and their shadows might be feeling inside. But we were different, too. This was proven when we were out and about one day and I was startled to see that my shadow was longer than I was tall. Sure enough, it was stretched out in front of me, leading the way, with me following in its footprints.

  We were both fond of dancing, and did so together many times, always without music. We were like a set of Siamese twins, each with two left feet and awful footwork. Of course, we were careful and tried dancing only when we were totally alone, since anyone watching, even from a distance, would think it strange: a young boy, all by himself, behaving in an erratic, wildly disjointed manner, as if possessed by demons of one kind or another. “Yes! There he was,” they would say, “Reggie and Evelyn’s little boy Sidney, without one whit of embarrassment, wiggling and squiggling and throwing himself this way and that. What could be going on with that poor child?”

  But my shadow and I knew of places where villagers never went, places where we could have been seen only by birds flying overhead, and we always surveyed the landscape to make doubly sure we were alone and not being watched from a distance by anyone. Secure in our privacy, we could let go with abandon—even with our somewhat pornographic choreography, based on conversations I’d overheard from older boys while they were boasting, or outright lying, about amorous encounters with this beauty or that one from our village.

  There was an exciting danger in the possibility of being caught, along with the drama of having to take responsibility for instigating the dirty dancing. That was only right, of course, since it would be unfair to blame my shadow—who was, after all, only playing along.

  Eventually, the novelty of our friendship did wear off to a certain extent, although we have remained close all my life. In the meantime, at around the age of eight and then nine, as my interest in the opposite sex heated up, I became more and more intent on having a sense of what my face really did look like.

  My efforts were to no avail. Even in the absence of the slightest breeze, the shimmering outline of my reflection on pond water was never clear enough to decipher. No matter how much I squinted for sharper focus, how often I twisted my head from side to side in unsuccessful attempts to steady the quivering water, only the same hazy, undefined image would show up. Oh, occasionally I could catch a glimpse of a distorted reflection elsewhere, like in pieces of broken bottles or in the blades of timeworn machetes and other surfaces off which the unfocused image of an unknown little boy might have flashed. Lacking a mirror, which was certainly not among our family’s possessions anywhere in our thatched-roof, sparsely furnished wooden home, I felt doomed never to be able to recognize my face even if I passed myself on the road.

  To this day, I can’t say wh
at my smile was like in my boyhood days. Was it my father’s open grin after a taste of rum among friends? Was it my mother’s shy, modest smile as she saw her root remedies curing whatever ailed us? Might mine have been a smile that caused my eyes to sparkle or brought dimples to my cheeks? I’ll never know, just as I had no idea until later that a space existed where my two front teeth had been before my second set of teeth came in. At the least I can imagine how my little-boy face could have registered feelings and thoughts I vividly recall—crinkled with laughter, stung by embarrassment, frozen in shyness, darkened by disappointment, anger, or fear, lit by wonder and innocence, or mesmerized by the spell of the daydreams to which I surrendered so often during those years.

  Ten and a half years without the opportunity to see myself in a mirror came to an abrupt halt in the latter part of 1937 when the state of Florida unexpectedly placed an embargo on the importation of tomatoes from the Bahamas—which caused the sudden collapse of our family’s tomato-farming business and our livelihood. In the hopes of finding work in Nassau, my father decided to move us there. At the age of fifty-three, Reggie Poitier was to learn that the pursuit of a new profession was to be a job in itself. But he had no other choice than to do what had to be done to provide for us. Undertaking the many tasks connected to pulling up stakes, he decided to send my mother and me to Nassau first, as the family’s advance team. Our job? To find a rental house at a reasonable price. With that accomplished, the rest of the family would follow, and Nassau would become our new home.

  The day we left Cat Island, not for a second did I pause to consider all that we would be leaving behind or even the possibility that I would come to sorely miss the world that had raised me and all the inhabitants of it. Once we’d set sail and headed into open waters, I never even looked back.

  None of the amazing accounts I’d heard from others or imagined in my most far-flung fantasies about where we were headed could have begun to measure up to what I witnessed the day we sailed into Nassau’s huge harbor. As we approached land, I spotted something that was akin to a massive beetle, the size of a small house, as it crawled menacingly down the hillside.

  I pointed at it in alarm, asking my mother, “What is that?”

  “That,” she said knowingly, “is a car.”

  I had heard about cars but was nonetheless stunned at seeing one for the first time. And there in the harbor were boats of every description, from dinghies to motorboats of every conceivable size and shape, as well as gigantic cruise ships that unloaded thousands of tourists per week at the massive dock, officially named Prince George’s Wharf. It was located one block from Bay Street, along which was the main shopping district, the seat of the government, and the financial district—each of which was a driving force in the overall economy of the islands of the Bahamas.

  Overflowing with excitement, I leaped from the native sailboat that had delivered us safely to Nassau onto one of the smaller docks, and then waited as my mother got her bearings and then directed us toward Bay Street. As I walked along, my brain hummed with anticipation and my eyes scanned the terrain of the new world. There was so much to see, so much to learn, so much to know.

  Never before had I seen paved roads like those in Nassau, with no rocky bumps sticking up everywhere like giant pimples, no wild bushes growing along the sides of Bay Street like along the roads on Cat Island. Here the main thoroughfares were smooth, I could see, so that wheels and feet could move faster along them. But who made the roads smooth? How was it done? More mysteries to investigate, more unprecedented discoveries to make.

  The first significant discovery of the day was set in motion by my mother, who stopped at the window of a tiny shop and bought two orders of a food item I had never seen or heard of before, one of which she passed to me. I looked at it, not knowing what to do with it. As we resumed wending our way along Bay Street, toting such luggage as we had, she referred to her purchase by a foreign-sounding name, something about “ice cream cones.” She started licking at hers with her tongue, and gestured for me to do the same. Having been given the green light, instead of licking it with my tongue as she had indicated, I took a big bite out of the ice cream still sitting on top of the cone in my hand.

  The shock that the frozen treat sent through my nervous system can still be recalled these seventy years later. I panicked, big-time!

  In my ten and a half years of life I had never experienced anything so cold. On Cat Island, nothing was cold. The island had no electricity; hence, no ice, no refrigerators, no ice cream, no cold drinks. Temperatures, winter and summer, ranged between seventy and ninety degrees, with humidity levels often going through the roof.

  My mother, who had first tasted ice cream on trips with my father to Miami, was preoccupied that morning with the fragile state of our finances, which threatened to thwart her efforts in arranging affordable housing for us, not to mention the multitude of other concerns that needed to be addressed for our family to make the challenging transition to the new, sophisticated environment ahead of us.

  Meanwhile, my teeth had frozen, so had my tongue, and my lips were starting to go numb—sensations that provoked a guttural cry that I couldn’t contain. It was as if there were fire in my mouth, burning up everything inside it. My verbal and physical reactions were enough to draw my mother’s attention and, apparently, her realization that she had not properly introduced me to this totally foreign food. She then gently walked me through the paces of ice-cream eating. Lick by lick I got the hang of it. And for the next fifty years, I was an ice-cream devotee—until lactose intolerance came between us. But I’m OK with that; we had a good run. And, as you and I both know, Ayele, nothing lasts forever.

  Well, let me tell you, ice cream was not the only astonishing discovery I made on that first day in Nassau. More was in store, just moments ahead, as we maneuvered our way through the swirling traffic of local residents and tourists moving in both directions along the crowded sidewalk of Bay Street. My mother and I paused occasionally to peer through plate-glass windows at shops filled with things I had never seen nor could begin to identify—articles of clothing and shoes for children and adults, toys, furniture, strange containers of items for eating and household use, objects made of materials of unknown origin. Unbelievably, there were electric lights that lit up the interior of the stores, making the inside as bright as the sun was making the outside. No one had told me anything about that! Sure, I knew what petty shops on Cat Island were like, but I had never dreamed of anything like the stores on Bay Street.

  All the while, behind and beside us, traffic spun in all directions: people in cars, in carriages, on bicycles, on horse-drawn drays laden with wholesale products destined for local retail merchants. There were barefoot men struggling with backbreaking loads on their shoulders, delivering something somewhere nearby to a seller or a buyer, or from one warehouse to another, or from the hold of a cargo ship to the government’s customs shed, or to the nearby Straw Market—where vendors with colorful, indigenous hand-crafted items hanging from their arms raced alongside tourists, aggressively trying to coax them into purchasing souvenirs that would guarantee memories of the pleasurable vacation cruise they once took.

  As my mother and I moved along with the bustling sidewalk crowd, continuing to glance into display windows as we passed, stopping at times for a closer look when something captured our attention, I was aware of the discreet happiness on her face as she observed me in the throes of amazement—my eyes, no doubt, full of wonder and surprise as I gawked unabashedly at every item on display, every character in this unfolding new drama.

  And though my mother had seen these sights before on selling trips with my father, even though she had much to accomplish in a limited amount of time, she chose not to rush us but to slow her pace and allow me the incredible gift of drinking in this wonderland experience. Everything was sumptuous, glorious, out of this world—no one aspect more important or compelling than the other. That is, until suddenly I came upon the treasure I�
�d been seeking for years! A major find! A stunning discovery!

  Yes, maybe you’ve guessed already. It was a full-length mirror that hung just beyond where I could see, right inside a store we were passing! I knew that it had to be a mirror because I could see a lady standing in front of it, preening herself, and as I peered closer into the store window, I could see her reflection in it. My heart raced! At once I knew that it would be in this complex, intimidating new place called Nassau that finally I would see my face in a mirror for the very first time.

  My mother immediately sensed my fascination and intent. Pausing as though to consider stepping inside so that I could investigate further, she then took another look at the lady in the store meticulously checking out her image in the full-length mirror. If I knew anything about Evelyn Poitier, I understood that she would have given the world for me to have something that appeared to be of the utmost importance. But a dynamic of entitlement that I didn’t yet understand stood in our way. Lessons would come later about rights and privileges of those who can buy and those who can’t, and there were to be many more store windows that I’d need to press my nose against before I could enter freely. Instead of disrupting the lady customer’s hold on that mirror, my mother chose to teach me that sometimes gratification has to be delayed. Gently placing an arm around my shoulders, she led me along to the next display window. We didn’t exchange one word, but both of us recognized that I would be back again at my earliest opportunity to put myself in front of a mirror that I now knew existed.

  In the meantime, there were other distractions to behold as we made our way to the home of friends who had migrated from Cat Island to Nassau a few years earlier and with whom we had arranged to stay. Their house was as modest as the one they had built for themselves back home. Nevertheless, they received us with open hearts and provided space for us in their tidy, now-overcrowded dwelling. Before we went to sleep that night—no easy undertaking for me with all the excitement—my mother announced that she would be leaving early the next morning to comb through the lower-income sections of the island for affordable housing. My job, as she repeated to me the next day when she left me to wait for her at the house, came with a typical Cat Island warning: “Stay from underfoot and don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?”