Life Beyond Measure (3 page)

“Oh yes, I had a good time. Being with you guys, I really, really had a good time.” And that was genuine. But again, just to myself, I added—
But after today I ain’t gonna be wearing none of that stuff
.

When we pull into the driveway at home and exit the car, before we can go inside and show me off to their mother, they say they have to check me out.

“Oh yeah, that’s cool,” says one. “You’re looking pretty good,” says the other. “Let me fix your collar there.” “Here, you should unbutton
your jacket.” And the two are fussing over me, admiring their handiwork and clothes selection, agreeing, “Oh yes, that’s so classy.”

So finally we go to the front door and I throw it open, ready to be done with this charade. And do you know what I see? At that very moment, I am greeted by the most amazing sight I have ever seen in my life—my entire family, which my wife had collected from around the world! There you were, Ayele, with your mother, Aisha (my granddaughter), your grandmother Beverly and three aunts Pamela, Sherri, and Gina (my other four daughters), your great-grandmother Juanita (my ex-wife), Mama Jean (a beloved member of our extended family), and my other grandchildren (Guylaine, Etienne, and Gabrielle), along with a couple of other people Joanna had invited. To keep me totally in the dark, she had arranged to put all of you out-of-towners up in a nearby hotel until her co-conspirators had gotten me out of the house to take me shopping. You played your part, too!

From surprising start to very late-night finish, the entire celebration was just an amazing experience.

This I can say even though all the grown-ups there must have looked at me and thought—
My God, what a ridiculous outfit he is standing there in!

And that was how I began my eighty-first year in life, which was fabulous. So I now had to cancel my plans for turning the tables on my two youngest daughters, who helped to make possible the best eightieth birthday a guy could have.

What makes this milestone even more appreciated is that when I think back to the circumstances of my birth eighty years ago, the chances of my making it to this extraordinary day—and as a great-grandfather, no less—were just about slim to none.

My next letter to you will help explain how various forces allowed me to beat those unfavorable odds.

C
ome with me, Ayele, as I tell you a story that occurred on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida, but that has its actual roots in one of those important, ancient questions of existence—who we are and how we arrived in our world.

By this I mean that we can begin to answer those questions by acknowledging that we are all members of the human family. We are the children of Africa, the fathers of America, and mothers of Europe. We are the sons of China, daughters of India, nephews of Central and South America, the nieces of Spain, cousins of Japan, Canada, and New Zealand, the uncles of Southeast Asia, and the aunts of Russia. We are the in-laws of Australia, wives of Alaska, husbands of the Caribbean.

We are all that and more. But if we narrow our search as to where we come from, you and I can trace a vital branch directly to two individuals I call my parents—your great-great-grandparents Reggie and Evelyn Poitier. Had it not been for a choice made by my mother during a trip to Miami that she and my father took by boat to sell the tomatoes they grew on Cat Island, we would never have been able to answer the question in the same way.

After negotiating with the owner of a local sailboat to transport them and their crates of tomatoes picked early in order to ripen to perfection after their arrival in Miami, the two of them set sail that February day without apprehension. At the time, with a household on its way to totaling nine kids, my mother was six and a half months pregnant with me. She and my father had lived through previous miscarriages and a child who had arrived stillborn, although, as far as I’ve been told, her latest pregnancy was progressing well. So there was no reason for her to miss the trip to Miami that figured so vitally in the family’s welfare.

Once Evelyn and Reggie arrived in Florida without incident, quickly delivering the tomatoes to regular buyers, they busied themselves with purchases that would allow them to return home and prepare the field for its next crop. Everything appeared to be going as smoothly as possible. But on their last night, February 20, before sailing back to Cat Island the following day, my mother’s water broke.

Getting her to a hospital was not an option. For one thing, in those years racism remained a pernicious institution in the form of Jim Crow laws—which meant that most hospitals refused to admit black patients. Second, as I understand it, there wasn’t time. Not only that, but my mother had, in fact, never been to a hospital. Instead, my father managed to locate a registered midwife, who delivered
me that evening, more than two months premature. The prospects of my survival at all of three pounds, without an incubator or any medical technology to help me along, were hardly encouraging.

As a realist, by morning Reggie had accepted the likelihood that I wasn’t going to make it and left the house where he and my mother were staying to make arrangements with a local undertaker for a proper burial.

Upon his return, a shoebox in his hand, my mother looked up from her bed and, without asking anything, said, “No, no, no.” She knew that he was only trying to lessen her pain by being realistic, but my mother had to stand against the inevitability of loss. She did so by rising up and getting out of bed, leaving instructions for my care with my father, putting on her clothes, and going out in search of guidance for options that were then hidden.

Where Evelyn Outten Poitier went that day, I don’t know. Later I heard parts of the story but was never told the details of how my mother looked at the remotest possibility of my survival as her call to go out and face the mysteries of the universe. I do know that she left early in the day and was gone until deep into the night, and only as a last resort, when she had nowhere else to turn for help, on her way home my mother visited a reader of palms, a diviner of tea leaves, the local soothsayer—such as could be found in the black community—whose methods of divining the future may have been brought from old African and Caribbean folk magic, mixed with spirituality.

My mother’s faith in God, which she had in a total way—so intrinsic to who she was—would have been enough to sustain her belief that I was meant to survive. But the actuality of the circumstances of that day, twenty-four hours into my life, a life that was holding on by so tenuous a thread—for that she chose to ask for
corroboration from the last and only person she could turn to, this soothsayer. She chose to ask for a sign. “Tell me, tell me,” my mother asked her.

What the soothsayer told my mother was what she came home and announced to my dad—after she told him first, “Remove the shoebox from the house.” Then she went on to say that the soothsayer had assured her that there was no need to worry about their new son, Sidney; that “He will survive and he will not be a sickly child. He will grow up and travel to most of the corners of the earth. He will walk with kings. He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world. You must not worry about that child.”

The soothsayer gave my mother a list of things that would happen to me in my life, and every one of them came true, every one.

Not for a minute did my father question the earthshaking power of my mother’s acceptance that this was going to be so. Mama had her faith and she knew what was to be. Whether or not she and the soothsayer turned out to be right because they actually foresaw my destiny, or whether they turned out to be right because circumstances happened to unfold that way, we will never know for sure.

We do know for sure that within a reasonable amount of time I was able to make the return trip to Cat Island, where my parents, siblings, and nature soon nurtured me into robust health. These influences were my primary teachers as I was growing up, save for a few years of school where I was taught not much more than how to sing “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!”—a catchy tune, I’ll admit, yet words that had little relevance to my life.

In time I would understand more about the history of the place where I came from and the influences that had shaped Reggie and Evelyn Poitier. Of African descent not too many generations
removed, my parents retained remnants of the ancient African culture from which they came.

We do not have definitive accounts to go by, but it can be safely assumed that both the Poitier and Outten forebears were introduced to the Caribbean and Bahamian areas as slaves, bought and owned in perpetuity by European plantation owners in Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean. I am of the opinion that their African culture was the one they lived by in slavery for the longest time, the one they brought with them.

But in time their culture was subdued, constrained, and starved until it finally withered into oblivion, precisely as slavery required it to do. They retained none of their original language and only bits from their unique culture. They were forcefully encouraged to disinfect themselves of where they came from, and to struggle to assume their new condition of slavery and assimilate to the society of the slave owners to whom they belonged.

All of that is to tell you that your ancestors in the Bahamas were still close enough to their original culture, and miraculously defied their bondage by storing roots to fundamental aspects of it. For as long as they could, they held on to their religion. But over time, generation by generation, their language, their religion, and bit by bit their culture faded into oblivion, and they were encouraged to convert to Roman and Anglican Catholicism. Some of the more defiant among the African slaves, like those in Haiti and other places in the Caribbean, resorted to combining their authentic African religion with occult religious practices.

That mix was an underpinning of the faith that resided in my mother, without question, who was the rock at the center of our family. Not a woman of many words, she was by nature terribly shy and not always able to articulate her thoughts and feelings. But even
if we didn’t talk all that much, the love we had for one another was as evident as the vast ocean that was a constant of island life—its pulse and power just steps away from our house, as present as the air needed to breathe.

Because of that proximity, my parents saw to it that I learned to swim before I could walk. At around ten months old or even younger, I followed family tradition by being more or less tossed into the water as the two of them stood close by, forcing me to literally sink or swim—rescuing me, of course, each time I became fully submerged, picking me up, and tossing me back in again. After a few lessons, they could confidently allow me to toddle around on my own without fear that I might fall into the water and drown.

My mother and father were more than husband and wife. They were lovers, best friends, and dedicated parents. They were a team. Though he was twelve years older than she, they were ideally suited for one another. They were soul mates. With my dad, and in most cases when we were together as a family, my mother’s shyness and inarticulateness seldom surfaced. In those settings, I was able to observe and get to know my parents and something of the inner lives that they kept protected most of the time.

Their take on mysteries was introduced to me in this way. Their inner lives were lampposts of sorts that helped light the path for questions that started in me as prematurely as my birth—mainly, at first, those questions having to do with how to understand “Up There.” My father didn’t have the same connections to that realm as my mother did. Not that this was a topic of family conversation, although every Sunday, the one day of the week we wore shoes and went to church, we heard sermons and sang songs and prayers about “Up There,” as generally associated with a place called heaven.

But for me, even as a small boy sitting beside his mother every Sunday morning in church, there was another, less ominous “Up There.” I thought of it as “the place above my head.”

This is where all the questions really started in me, where hours spent sitting on the rocks looking out over the waves toward the horizon, where sky and ocean meet, caused me to puzzle incessantly about how down here could intersect with “Up There,” and how far I would need to swim or sail to be at that point. And then after the sun went down, whenever I looked up on a clear, moonless night, there it was, bejeweled: the place above my head, reaching as far as one could see. Stars in every direction. Bright stars that twinkled. Faint stars in the far distance. Clusters of stars. Empty spaces where there were none. And nearby stars that appeared close enough to touch.

These not only were my studies in rudimentary astronomy but were also part of my quest to know more of my mother’s connections to “Up There,” and to the guardian angels among the stars that she believed in with all her being. These many decades later, whenever I look at the horizon or up at the night sky, with all that I’ve learned from taking my questions to the next levels, I still don’t completely discount the existence of guardian angels. Or, perhaps, I hedge my bets and figure that if they are real, and if one is watching over me as I sit here at this moment writing to you, Ayele, then hands-down it’s my mother, Evelyn Outten Poitier.

Aside from that mystery, I do believe absolutely that the reality of my mother’s life was that of a woman whose balance was always centered in faith. The reality of Reginald Poitier’s life was what kind of man he made of himself—what values were left attached to his name that would define him exactly as he would define himself.

My father, your great-great-grandfather, was born in 1884, lived seventy-seven years, and died in 1961. During his lifetime, the
colonial system that controlled huge portions of the world didn’t teach him much. It was not in that institution’s best interest to do so. After all, of what value would he have been to those controlling powers had he been taught to read and write beyond the all but meaningless levels imposed on former slaves and the sons of former slaves?

By the day he died, what he never had the opportunity to learn could have filled all the libraries of the world. He knew little about the continents, the oceans, the major civilizations that have sprung up and fallen over the course of written history, about the trade routes of the seas or the ruling nations where wealth has long been overwhelmingly concentrated. Nor could he pinpoint any of those nations on the maps, identify their systems of government, their natural resources, their industrial capacities, their varying form of legal systems—the laws of conduct designed to hold each citizen legally accountable for respectable adherence to all the laws that cover all the citizens of each such country.

The subtleties and nuances surrounding most of the above were beyond my father’s experiences. First of all, he didn’t have a country: someone else’s country had him. A statement of fact, Ayele—as some readers, closer in age to my generation, have always known.

But the essence of the man belonged to himself; to his one and only wife, Evelyn Outten Poitier; to his children, to his friends, his neighbors, and to the village of Arthur’s Town on Cat Island in the Bahamas—the place he called home, a village of roughly one hundred fifty, including children. He could read and write, but barely. Much of what he knew he learned from nature, and he passed on to me much of what nature had taught him. She had given him to understand that his existence was different from that of the eagle, for example; that he couldn’t fly away and leave his young in a matter
of weeks; that unlike the eagle, his young must walk the earth and he must show them how; that they must be taught survival do’s and don’ts; and that they grow slower than most creatures, and therefore each generation must be fully prepared to defend themselves and protect the generation coming after them until they in turn are able to protect themselves and the children coming after them.

That was my father. And those were the times in which he lived. His father and his father’s father, as far as the oral history of our family can tell, were cut from the same cloth.

That cloth, woven together with the threads of both my parents, is where you and I, at different folds of the tapestry, also come from.