Life Beyond Measure (17 page)

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 of 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.

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