Life Beyond Measure (22 page)

P
icking up where I left off in my last letter to you, dear Ayele, I hope that you will one day value, as much as I do, the problem-solving mechanisms that helped me, for instance, to establish the concept of the neutral zone.

Those mechanisms I’m talking about are the overlapping processes of logic and reason—which form a system that is inherent in me, as it is in all people, although the level of it varies. My hunch is that in our gene pool, given what I observed in my parents and
grandparents, you and I descend from excellent stock when it comes to inherent levels of logic and reason.

The best story to give you as an example takes us back to the early days of my dad’s work as a tomato farmer. With his natural instinct for logic and reason, early on in his efforts to grow tomatoes in the traditional manner, Reggie Poitier made a startling discovery that in and around the caves on Cat Island, the bat dung provided topnotch fertilizer for whatever happened to be growing in the earth around where it collected. Using logic and applying reason, he tried out his theory in small test cases, and sure enough, tomatoes grown in dirt enriched by the dung of bats from the caves were more delicious, more nutritious, more robust, and more plentiful than those grown in unfertilized soil.

But to get an adequate supply of the bat dung from the cave to the tomato fields was a huge problem, since he had no drays—what we called wagons. But in a methodical, reasonable manner, my father found a way. He saved his money, bought a donkey, and eventually bought a horse. He would take croker sacks that he picked up from some store or found on the island and fill them with the bat dung, throw them across the back of his horse or donkey, sometimes on both, and truck them into the forest where he was raising tomatoes. Undaunted by the challenges, my father is a prime illustration of someone who was able to call on whatever level of logic there was in him. And his whole life proceeded in that manner.

Both of my parents exhibited a reasonable way of dealing with life and with other people, which was inherent and developed from their experiences, since neither had much schooling. My mother didn’t have an education; she could barely read and write. I know that my father, who had more of an education than my mother, himself could barely read and write. They didn’t know about the
world as I know about the world. They didn’t learn in the schools that they attended—for a very short time, obviously—that there was a world outside the primitive island upon which they lived. They heard there was an England, because we were the subjects of a colonial possession of the English, but we knew little of England, except for that song that they, like me, were taught in school to sing:

That was pounded into us.

Logic and reason grow out of the experience of interacting with the world, with daily life, out of the instinct for the recognition of logic and reason in oneself, and out of the feeling that logic and reason need to and should be applied in one’s best interest. In the part of the world where I came from, most people without an education didn’t know what the word
logic
meant.
Reason
is another such word. The majority of people on Cat Island couldn’t give you a definition of either. The two words, and all that sits behind those two words, were totally unknown to so many people in my life.

Nonetheless, survival requires the use of logic and reason. Reginald Poitier proves that. My dad had a difficult life, and I suspect that it was his lot to have a tough life. But a tough life did not mean that he didn’t have a requisite amount of logic in his system, in his sense of how he looked at the world and dealt with it. He was just destined to have a difficult life. Physically it was difficult; economically it was difficult, that struggle to do the difficult things that he needed to do to feed his family. But his was a remarkable life in spite of, perhaps because of, the fact that it was a difficult life.

Difficulty surely has nothing to do with one’s ability to make fairly good use of such logic as one has in one’s system. Now, ultimately that sense of logic, that sense of reason, came through the bloodline. But the fact is, things that pass through the bloodline don’t necessarily surface in the following generation. (This is my own reasoning, by the way.) It doesn’t follow that the members of every generation are going to have this wonderful quality of logic and wonderful understanding of reason instinctively even though they don’t know what the words mean and they won’t learn about them until later in life, if they ever do.

As a result of these qualities not being passed from generation to generation, like eye color and other things, they travel through the blood unexpressed, remaining intact, and suddenly surface in an individual in the second or third or fourth generation, regardless of that individual’s external circumstances, regardless of the society in which he or she lives, regardless of economic disposition, regardless of the educational process that is available, regardless of what the parents had no knowledge of.

Up comes this person, and logic and reason flower in them, and they are able to extrapolate in ways that most people don’t. Something tells them when something is not quite right. They’ll say, “No, I don’t know if that’s right.” What tells them that? They know that if you take this fact and that fact and marry them with something else, the result will be a reasonable outcome. Many people don’t get that passed on to them, that “reasonable outcome” instinct.

I think that some of what was passed on to me by my parents actually surfaced in them. It didn’t change their lives; they still had a very tough life. But what passed on to me through them will I hope find fertile ground in the onward journey of my children, their children, and my great-grandchildren—among whom you are the first.

What made me destined or fortunate to be the recipient, I don’t know. What was passed on has been enhanced by the life that I’ve lived, although that was just the polishing of it, or the nurturing of it. But as to its origins, my theory is, applying logic and reason, that there is this force—you’ve heard me speak of it, Ayele, as you’ve read my letters to you so far—of such extraordinary disposition that it created the world, the universe, or it influences and controls it. Yet it is not something that you could describe by saying, “Oh, here is a piece of that,” or “Here is what it looks like. Here is a physical manifestation of a portion of that force.” No, it’s intangible. It is all unto itself; you cannot hold it, push it, or turn it or twist it or pull it: you are subject to it. The force has that influence over your life, and it might have a need for you and your life in its own existence. Its existence might very well say, “I need this kid. This kid is important for us, and this is what he will do for us.” You’re destined right there.

We don’t know that this doesn’t happen, and because we have no proof that it doesn’t happen, I am inclined to say: give me a good reason why it doesn’t exist.

Many people die before they are ten years old, and maybe that force was very much in that person who died before age ten. But that person was destined to die at ten. He or she wouldn’t live to be sixty or seventy. But because the child will die at ten doesn’t mean that the child isn’t carrying a wonderful amount of that force. But the force isn’t concerned about the age of the child. That force doesn’t have the same concern for what we term “the sanctity of life.” The “sanctity of life” for us grows out of fear, the fear that maybe we won’t live a long life. Most people in the old days died in their twenties or thirties or forties. And fifty was old age. Longevity, as we know it, is an evolutionary thing.

There are a large number of people who have no concept of logic and reason, and because they don’t, it will elude them forever. You can’t teach it to them because of the balancing of very delicate elements of which we are not even aware. The proper balances are not there, and if the balances are not there—there’s a reason for everything—the concept of logic and reason wasn’t placed there to be nurtured.

For some people who do not use the power of logic and reason, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t in them, but it’s not for this trip, not for this person. It is passed through them because they are not eligible in so many other areas. Now, we can’t be the judge as to what those areas are, but the force can be the judge. So it goes right through them, and two generations later—in their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren—will come a kid of whom we suddenly say when they reach the age of twenty: “What happened? You know what he was like at fifteen: he was the roughest, toughest kid in the whole place. He’s now a congressman, for Christ’s sake.” People who have logic and reason in them have it in them, and there are huge, magical powers in nature itself.

Logic and reason can be taught in school—as they have been—and to very, very bright kids. But the kids become lawyers and don’t practice logic and reason; they get to be Wall Street moguls and don’t practice them; they get to be highly educated people and don’t practice them. Yet these are people who should be able to say, logically and reasonably, that certain things are ridiculous; who should be able to say that the response to the loss of life and the obliteration of parts of the city of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina were ridiculous; that going to war in Iraq made no sense at all, and here are the reasons and the logic for it not making sense.

Using logic and reason, some people figure it that way. And there are people on the other side who say, no, the response happened
because of this and that; no, the invasion had to be done because of this and that. How you use logic and reason is determined by how you are gifted with it; ultimately, your education isn’t going to affect it. I know, or know of, too many educated people who were Nazis, who killed in genocidal fashion, and those who deny children food so they will die of starvation. If they had any logic and reason, they would not have done such despicable things. Logic and reason would have said that any way you slice it, it’s going to come out as wrong.

For example: slavery. There was a time in these United States when slavery existed, even while we were very adept at calling ourselves a “democracy.” There were rules and regulations laid out by the founding fathers as to what democracy meant. These rules and regulations would cover every American, and being American meant being someone who was born here and lived here under this Constitution. If you say that to someone who is really logical and reasonable, that person is going to ask: “What about the Indians? What about the blacks? What about the Mexican Americans?”

What, then, would come from those people who were using the Constitution as a cover for what democracy should be? They would have to say, as they did for far too long, “Well, you see, they are not full human beings.” As a chief justice of the United States once said, blacks were three-fifths of a human, and only a full human being should have rights, the implication being that three-fifths of a human being was something fit to function only as a beast of burden.

Well, that is a distortion exposing the enemies of logic and reason, and among them are mass hysteria, hate, prejudice, and ignorance.

With courage, by standing our ground and not forgetting who we are and where we come from, we can and must, Ayele, take on those enemies.

A
yele, my dear, now that you have heard many stories from the world that first raised me, a place in time that was void of all technology, you can probably appreciate my sense of the wonders that have sprung from technological advances in the course of my life—which have been at the least eye-catching, at the most mind-boggling. You may not think so when you are twenty-one, but nonetheless, the explosion of creativity out of scientific advancement across my eighty-one years was impressive enough to raise, over time, questions of comparison between what my eight decades have produced and what your first forty years will witness.

For instance, will the continual bombardment of television’s invasive sounds and images further degrade the hearing mechanism of
human beings and overwork their visual apparatus, causing prolonged stress on both senses, which in turn will induce the brain to engage in excessive processing of what is fundamentally useless information?

Perhaps the essential question to be raised here is one of the relationship between science and society: friends or enemies? And why does one progress at a more accelerated rate than the other? The whole of science, as I’m referring to it, encompasses the study, knowledge, and development of the technology and tools used for the advancement of civilization. The breadth of society, as I’m referring to it, takes in all of humanity, not just in a given time but across the millennia.

Let me start this exploration by telling you of my earliest introduction to instruments of science, ancient inventions so mundane now that your schoolbooks may have made little mention of them.

Science
was a word I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it meant, and I doubt if I ever heard it on Cat Island. The first scientific development to which I was exposed was electricity. That was when we arrived in Nassau and I went into a store where there was a lightbulb. Imagine how that altered my worldview. To my knowledge, there was no place on Cat Island that had electricity. Instead, to light our home at night we used kerosene lamps indoors and kerosene lanterns so that we could see outside—especially on those pitch-black moonless nights.

As for the lack of indoor plumbing, for bathing purposes we brought in brackish water in buckets from a community well, and poured it into a tin tub at home. All other toilet functions were accommodated in the “Great Outdoors,” at an appropriately hygienic distance from our house—a particular spot next to which grew a tall plant with leaves as velvety soft as toilet paper, and simi
larly as useful. As for laundry, my mother often took me with her when making her regular treks into the forest to wash our clothing in the freshwater ponds and streams, where she beat the dirt out of the clothing with a force more powerful than that of any detergent or modern washing machine. But of all these practices, not many of them were in the realm of the workings of science or technology.

Not surprisingly, when we moved away from Cat Island, I had no frame of reference at first to process the reality of science. For example, even though I had heard about cars before, when we arrived in Nassau and I saw my first car on a hill up from the water as we approached the harbor, it looked like a huge beetle making its way down to the dock. My mother couldn’t explain to me that a car was the scientific result of finding ways to create wheels out of rubber and metal—stuff taken out of the ground and converted into tin and steel.

As we entered the harbor, there was this whole incredible panorama: huge ships, motorized boats, and then, lining up past the dock, more cars and trucks, all of which compounded my amazement as I tried to understand how they moved and turned, with people inside of them doing the turning.

As you can see, in this awakening I had total future shock as instantly I was hit by science; it was there in my face, and I had to figure it out. An electric light: what makes it glow? A car: what makes it move? Who’s talking to the car and telling it what to do? I was being whammed by science everywhere I looked.

Suffice it to say, my coming to any knowledge of any aspect of science occurred at a much later age than it did for most kids in the world outside my early Bahamian upbringing.

And then there came the day soon after the move to Nassau when a couple of the guys in my new group of friends suggested that they take me to a matinee.

“Oh, sure, I’ll go,” I agreed. I didn’t know what a matinee was, but I didn’t want to show my ignorance.

They led the way and we went to the theater and sat in the seats—waiting for what, I had no idea. Then, when the lights went down, I watched this big screen light up, and the first thing I saw on it was writing and I thought,
My God, those are big letters.
Then the movie started, and I saw people on the screen, and I thought,
What’s going on here?
And then I saw horses and cows and people dressed with feathers in their hair and animal skins strapped to their bodies—Indians, and I had never even heard of Indians. It was a truly shocking, but exhilarating, experience.

After we got outside the theater and the guys started walking away, I told them to go on, saying, “I want to stop off for a bit. See you later.” As soon as they were out of eyeshot, I dashed around behind the building to see if the cows and horses and people I had seen inside were going to come out of the back of it. I sat there and waited and waited, but of course, nothing came out.

So I was by now acquainted with three scientific inventions: the car, electricity in its several uses, and what I would later know as celluloid, from which movies were projected onto a screen. (Again, I had no idea that was where my future lay.)

Another discovery for me in Nassau was radio. Most people still didn’t have it, so my real exposure to it came a little later, in Miami. Contrast that box of sound with nights spent on Cat Island, listening to the conversations of my parents, the lapping of the waves just outside the house, the wind, and all of the music created by nature and her inhabitants.

Indeed, at the end of the first ten years of my life, I had acquired very little knowledge beyond the joys and limits of Cat Island. But as my travels continued, I began to become accustomed to
electricity, to glass windows, to motion pictures on the screen, and every day I would feast on new and unbelievable sights. And the day would come when I would actually learn to control that wondrous invention that first caught my eye: the car. But that control would be slow in evolving.

It started in Miami when I went to look for a job, having promised my brother that I would try to earn some money to contribute to my keep. My first job was as a pharmacy delivery boy, with the disaster of my leaving an order on a front step in Miami Beach when a woman refused to accept it from me at the front door. But after that, I passed a parking lot where men were parking cars. I lingered around, inching closer and closer to see what the guys did when they slid behind the wheel of a newly arrived car—how they turned a key to start the ignition if it wasn’t left running, how they shifted the gears and guided the car around. I also began to watch the drivers on the buses.

Eventually, I said to myself,
I can do it,
never having actually been behind the wheel of a car in my life. So I went to a lot and said I was looking for a job. It was wartime, and people were always looking for employees. The man asked a few questions about where I lived and so forth, and he wanted to know if I had a driver’s license. I said, “Oh, sure, I have a driver’s license.” Then he told me to go to a car that was sitting nearby, and take it to a certain spot.

Getting behind the wheel for the first time in my life, I was able to get it started without a hitch, but then I was confused about the order in which to shift the gears, and when I got to the parking spot, I almost hit another car. That was the immediate end of me there.

Undaunted, I watched other parking-lot attendants at other places until I thought I understood the driving process better, and then made a second attempt at getting such a job, without much better results.
Through trial and error, however, I eventually learned to drive a car, but I was still not that good at it, so I couldn’t hold a job as a parking-lot attendant.

At sixteen years of age, I had my first experience with a telephone. I went into a phone booth with my nickel, and I stood there wondering how to go about using it, and who I would call. I looked in the telephone book and saw that behind the names were a number of digits. So I picked a number at random and dialed it. When a person answered, I hung up real quick. I did that a couple of times until I had guts enough to say, “Hello.” And the person said, “Who is this?” and I hung up again. That’s how I learned to use the telephone.

By the time I was in New York for a while, the true magic of electricity in all its uses burst into my awareness and kept showing itself to me in countless ways. Eventually, I became somewhat conversant on such scientific objects as electricity, combustion engines, phones, motion pictures, and other things. The early forties were wartime, with films and pictures of airplanes, tanks, and cannons that appeared in newsreels and in the newspapers—which was my main tool for trying to learn to read.

The more I tried reading, the more I came upon the word
science,
and how it was associated with objects and inventions. Slowly I came to know what it meant, and it had an enormous circumference. What it encompassed was extraordinary, even for me then. The more I read, slow going though it was, the greater my thirst for understanding and learning, fueled by curiosity and imagination, and they collectively brought me across a great divide—to a point where I could learn to seek information; to a place where I became almost entranced with trying to figure out things, like trying to understand the car. It took me years to comprehend that there was combustion, a contained explosion, going on inside the motor. That discovery was mind-blowing.

Meanwhile, scientific inventions and discoveries continued to arrive upon the scene. Television, which now even in my day blares incessantly yet largely unnoticed in several rooms of a house, was so wondrous an instrument in its infancy that entire families would gather around to spend the evening in fascination at the moving pictures brought into their homes. In many cases, neighbors who for whatever reason had not yet acquired a TV set would join them.

Being there on the scene when television came into its own was an education unto itself, one that coincided with my interest in learning even more about what came before—including the earliest discoveries upon which civilization propelled its advancement.

Ever since the years when I became a proficient and then an avid reader, I have never been able to get my fill of scientific explanations from as many sources as possible. But as you probably have noticed by now, my zealous quest for explanations started when I was very young. The precise moment of being bitten by that bug may well have occurred when I was six and a half years old or so, and my father came home one day and said he had something to show me. Both of his hands were behind his back as he said, “Do you want to see what I have here?”

I nodded yes, but before I could answer, my dad said, “Now, I’m just going to show it to you once, all right?”

“Yes, yes, what is it?” I asked impatiently.

“I’m not going to explain it to you,” he warned. “I’m only going to show it to you this once.”

Again, I nodded yes, my curiosity rising.

From behind his back, he produced a dish that couldn’t have been plastic, I’m sure of it, but which was full of water with little fish of different colors swimming in it this way and that.

I looked at the bowl and the fish, charmed by how they swam to and fro in the water. But before I could gaze at them much longer, my father took the dish away and put it behind his back again.

A moment later, he showed me the dish once more—only this time, the water and the fish had completely vanished!

Then, as he had promised from the start, he removed the dish from sight, never to be looked at by me again. And true to his word, he never explained how the little fish and water had gotten into the dish the first time and disappeared the next time.

It remained a mystery that made me seek out answers scientific and otherwise for a lifetime to come. Somehow, I coupled that experience with a suggestion for making dreams come true that I later overheard my father telling someone about. Apparently, if you filled a tub with water and put it on top of the house with a two-shilling piece in the center of the tub, and then placed it directly over where you slept at night, under a full moon, and you went to sleep thinking fervently of your heartfelt quests, your most desired dreams would be realized.

Well, I never found out if that worked, either. But from then on I remained fascinated by the intricate workings of human inventions.

Fire, for example, which provided early man with warmth, protection, and new ways to prepare food, was undoubtedly borrowed from its natural occurrence in nature, and later reproduced by artificial means so long ago that its birth is unrecorded in human history. The wheel, invented somewhere in Mesopotamia thirty-two hundred years before the birth of Christ, lifted heavy burdens from man and animals, and remains a constant companion in our universe. The building of the Great Pyramid in Egypt around 2500
B.C
. gave civilization a marvel of architecture that has stood for centuries as one of the seven great wonders of the world.

Now, with all the places I’ve lived and all the experiences I’ve had in my eighty-one years, I have seen marvels from electricity to planes to television, to computers, to iPhones and all kinds of wonders in between. Science, therefore, has moved at such a pace that it outstripped me a long way back. Though I do my best to stay current and work on my laptop, search around the Internet, download photos and music, I’m still a novice. I don’t really know how to type; I have only a general knowledge of science, of anthropology, of paleontology, and of a few other useful branches of research.