Life Beyond Measure (6 page)

As to my sisters, there were four—Ruby, Teddy, Delores, and Maude. Lor and Maudy, as we called them, were half-sisters born to my father from earlier relationships in his life. My sisters are all gone except Maude, who is well into her eighties, with a number of children and grandchildren. Still, she remains a chipper, energetic, loving personality who brightens the space she occupies. Because my older sisters Ruby and Delores were not in the household for much of the time when I was growing up, few memories exist of them for me today. Not so when it comes to my sister Teddy, who doted on me from the time my parents brought me home to Cat Island as a tiny, premature infant once not expected to survive.

What it was about me that Teddy liked so much I never knew, but for some reason I made her laugh all the time. Sometimes she laughed at me, but in such a loving way that I would join her in laughing at myself. And together we would just laugh and laugh until our bellies started to hurt. She would end up hugging me and asking, “Everything all right with you?”

“Yes,” I would assure her. Then she would hug me again and we would find some interesting games to play.

Ayele, there is one story in particular that may give you a sense of why I thought my sister Teddy was such a remarkable person. It occurred during the first year after we moved from Cat Island to Nassau, when I was closing in on twelve years old. In the neighborhood where we lived—near E Street and Ross Corner, one of the intersecting corners—I’d started making lots of friends, and we used to hang out there on a daily basis, doing all of the things that twelve-and thirteen-year-old guys would do. We were not a gang by any contemporary stretch, but we did run in packs and looked to do mischievous things, and we did accomplish a goodly number of them.

One of the guys in our group was a bit older—fifteen or sixteen—and was looked upon as having leadership qualities, but with criminal intent. He was larger than the rest of us, and had a tendency to order us about. This guy was always treading close to danger—picking fights, coming on to women with double entendres that would be lost on their more genteel ears but would cause the males in the bunch to laugh uproariously.

Funny though he could be, he was mean-spirited, and it could never be predicted who he might turn on next. One day, for reasons unknown, he challenged me. Probably he decided to take me on because he knew there was no way for him to lose. Here he was, one of the big muckety-mucks in the group, and I had nobody who
would dare come to my aid. So he picked me and provoked me. Holding my ground, or so I thought, I tried to provoke him back just to let it be that kind of thing. Those were the unwritten rules of the game. At the least, I had to speak back to this guy and not let him intimidate me. Well, he hauled off and whacked me across my face—
Pow!
—and I hit the ground: out cold.

One of the guys, rightfully concerned because I was lying there unconscious, ran to the house—which was the second door off the corner. At home, Teddy heard the news that I was on the ground and raced to my side, where she was told what had happened and the fact that the perpetrator had gone over to a nearby shop.

Teddy picked me up and walked with me in her arms back to the house, where she was able to revive me. Then she went back out to the corner to let the other fellows know that I was no longer unconscious. As it was later told to me, just as she asked if anyone had seen the guy who knocked me out, the guy came out of the shop and started walking back to the group. Teddy met him halfway, walked right up and took a pop at him, and he squared off like he wanted to fight. And my sister whipped his butt to the ground.

Her last words to him as he hobbled away were: “The next time you mess with my brother, I’m going to come out and kill you.”

Well, the guy didn’t show up again for several days, but he had no place else to go, so he made whatever excuses he had to make and stayed in the pack. He never apologized to me, but he knew, and the guys would say, “Don’t you mess with Sidney, boy, ’cause his sister will whip your butt.” Until we moved to another neighborhood in a lower-income area, I enjoyed the reputation of being a guy “you shouldn’t mess with.”

Teddy’s fiercely protective side was surpassed only by an independent, adventurous streak that couldn’t be stilled. After marrying very
young and having two children, she and her husband broke up, and she moved in with my folks. Then, during the war, Florida began importing day laborers from the Bahamas—mostly men, but also a few women—so Teddy applied and went to work in the fields there. The work was backbreaking, with long hours and very little pay, but she did it and sent money back to Nassau for her kids.

Upon her return to the Bahamas, Teddy took up with a man, aptly nicknamed Blood, who worked in a slaughterhouse. Violent and controlling, he was a very bad person, but my sister found him exciting, I suppose. In time, their all-consuming, addictive relationship turned to dust. Along the way, he almost broke her spirit—something I hesitate to tell you about, Ayele, but I do so in the hope that when in doubt as you approach relationships in your adulthood, you will know that you can rely on the family members who love you and who ultimately want what is in your best interests.

So it was when Teddy left her abuser one last time and turned to our parents. My father, already brokenhearted from the toll Blood had taken on her, laid down the law. Teddy was always welcome in his home with her kids—provided it was over between her and her slaughterhouse boyfriend and that she would never see him again. My sister swore that she was finished with Blood and returned to the home of Reggie and Evelyn Poitier.

All went smoothly for a time. But Teddy’s demons were such that she couldn’t break free of the hold this man had on her, and she took up with him again secretly. As long as I live, I will never forget the look of sadness on my father’s face when he called Teddy into our yard and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that he had found out.

Pointing to a certain branch of a tamarind tree, our dad gave her instructions to climb up, break it off, and bring it down to
him. After she did as he asked, he wrapped his left hand tightly around that branch. Then, using his right hand, he pulled the branch through his tight grip, shedding all the leaves from it—leaving a perfect weapon for administering a never-to-be-forgotten whipping to any one of his children who warranted it. Ayele, that day my sister Teddy, as much as I loved her, certainly warranted it, and she knew it. And although his tough form of discipline seems extreme by our modern standards, I can attest to the fact that he loved his daughter unconditionally and simply couldn’t bear the punishment she was giving herself and others.

This was proven sometime afterward, after Teddy had been living on her own for a time. At that juncture, Teddy took sick, and the doctors at the hospital in Nassau couldn’t determine what was wrong with her. She was so ill, had lost so much weight and become so frail and feeble, that the doctors called my father to take her home, because they felt there was nothing they could do to save her.

My father not only brought her home at once but adamantly refused to accept that Teddy couldn’t be saved. Like our mother, who put stock in some of the older occult and voodoo practices, our dad had his own connections to such healing arts. And when he got word that a medicine man was coming to Nassau from one of the other islands to treat someone, my father made arrangements to meet with him—whereupon the medicine man agreed to come see Teddy. After the examination, he told my parents little except that he would be back the next day. He returned with roots and leaves from the forest, and he had my father bake and crush them until they looked like tea leaves. Indeed, they were used to make tea, and my father and mother fed Teddy the tea three to four times a day. Slowly, she started improving, tended by love, faith, and nature’s powers. In time she was back on her feet, and soon after that she
found a job in a hotel and returned to work full-time. While there, some visiting tourists from Syracuse, New York, took such a liking to Teddy that she was told employment was waiting for her—if she ever came to Syracuse.

Here again, Teddy’s adventurous spirit took hold and she subsequently went to Syracuse and worked there, proudly returning home on vacations to tell of her experiences in a world far away from where she had begun, laughing and musing about possibilities for her future.

Many years after I’d left home and was just beginning my career in movies in Hollywood, I received a call from someone in Syracuse telling me that my sister Teddy had fallen ill and was in the hospital. Within days, she died.

My sister Teddy was an adventurous soul, born in a time that didn’t allow her room to rise. She was one of nature’s children, kept alive in my memories by the echoes of her laughter and love.

As I search my recollections of all the members of the Family Poitier—those who are still here, and those long gone—I can’t say that anyone in the family had a preoccupation anything like mine for delving into life’s most elusive mysteries. Was asking those questions the job that was assigned to me at birth? Was it a mantle that I accidentally came across and put on while roaming the island of my youth? More questions looking for answers!

Here are other variations: how did I end up in the family that I did? How do any of us get here?

Well, some say by design: faith and the will of God. Others say by random happenstance: trial and error. Modern science, on the other hand, speaking with its customary caution, points to the unfolding of evolutionary processes over billions of years—that when studied in depth will yield proven scenarios that soon will leave no doubt as
to how we got here. Meanwhile—ifs, ands, and buts notwithstanding—how we got here remains an unanswered question.

For sure, some unanswered questions will meet up with answers that fit like a glove; some will not. Some will linger long, have no luck, and wither on the vine. Maybe, for some, there are no answers. Maybe some questions are eternal by nature, and we are never meant to find an answer. Or so it sometimes seems.

At odd times, it appears at first glance that unanswered questions and unfinished lives share—at the same time—a mutual attraction and an unbearable incompatibility. And yet the search goes on—with explanations as to how and why coming up later on.

A
yele, I think by now you have a sense of who I am. And I hope that sense coincides with who I feel myself to be as I write this letter. But it is who I’ve been in the life I’ve lived up to this moment—5:17 a.m. on this seventh morning of November 2007—that should reveal more about the whys and hows of where my adventures took me.

Vivid in my mind is the memory of the day sixty-five years ago in Nassau when I was fifteen years old and came to a turn in the road when it was time to leave home for good. If that seems young to you, I would have to agree that I was ill prepared to face the challenges that awaited me in America—yet again an environment radically different from the one to which I’d become accustomed in
Nassau. One of my few advantages in weathering the storms ahead was that even by age fifteen I had a core of knowledge that was going to travel with me—a sense of who I was, regardless of what the world chose to say to me.

That sense of myself has been described by others as someone who is a loner, an outsider, a private person, and one driven to walk on the edges of life. Those descriptions are fairly apt. Whether I was pulled or pushed to those edges has varied, and depended at times on survival needs. Walking the edge doesn’t mean that I’ve been reckless, at least for the most part. In fact, I have looked at options through reasonably cautious eyes. As a loner, I have needed to pay attention, to ask for explanations and read between the lines for hidden purpose, and, first and foremost, to rule out danger or assess the levels of such dangers that might be present. Misjudgments sometimes exact unpleasant penalties that will sit in memory as warning signals to protect against future misjudgments.

Caution has been well earned, especially because there was a time when I was a most impulsive risk taker—which I eventually outgrew, or have almost outgrown. But it is due to the nature of who I was long ago on Cat Island—even then a loner, an outsider, a private person—that I am still inclined to walk on the edge—of course, not nearly as much as I once did. Well, as you know, I’m eighty years old and have learned to adapt my risks appropriately. In those rare moments still when I flirt with the dangers of the abyss, it is the memory of my mother’s whap-whap form of discipline, sternly administered in my earliest days when I was behaving foolishly, and the echo of her voice that intervene. “Sidney,” she would say, “that thick skull of yours, what’s up there? Not one thimbleful of common sense that I can see!” And then would
come the two or three whap-whaps. That always pulled me back from the edge—and still does.

Being a loner can be lonely, my dearest Ayele, but there are rewards, too, to having a rich internal sense of self—a mechanism for making order out of life experiences and for owning the internal terrain, even when it is a terribly private place. For many years it was just me there inside it, alone; having feelings I couldn’t put into words, and not having anyone with whom I might dare to share them even if I had the words—except for Teddy sometimes. In hindsight, I might have opened up more to my mother, which might have made the mother-child separation less painful when the time came.

Instead, I chose not to be alone as a loner by being at home in nature—in the daily outdoorings of my childhood and youth, where the world buzzed and sang with life that reverberated in my inner world. Walking on the beach or sitting on rocks, my eyes on the horizon, aroused curiosity, stirring joy, all the while allowing me to make connections to the externals: the sounds and sights of birds, some of them large ones flying from other islands over Cat Island; the lapping of the waves; the clouds coming over and obscuring the sun; lizards scrambling about; and the hum of crickets.

In my earliest days of childhood, I learned to converse with the environment that spoke to my own inner landscape, that tapped my curiosity and goaded my imagination into cooking up the most spectacular daydreams. The more accustomed I became to listening to what was being said, the more secure I became not only in the world outside of me but in my own self. There was much to hear: variations of sounds made by the changing winds; the booming battle of sturdy, raucous waves racing in to confront the rocky shoreline, which stands its ground and repulses one mighty charge after
another until the rage of an angry ocean finally subsides, restoring calm to the waters of the Bahamas. Conversing with those sounds gave me an anchor, a sense of place and location, made possible whenever I tried to figure out the direction each sound was coming from. Was it coming from the trees? From the bushes? From distant places?

In this process, I came to know and identify the various musicians creating the orchestration of sounds that were the vibrant voices of Cat Island. All those creatures and entities became my friends, my familiars: the birds and the land crabs, the crickets—all the forces of nature that had so much to say to me.

Sometimes I feel like I was born with the seed of a loner buried deep inside of me; and my external life was tailor-made, by nature, to nurture that seed in ways that were beyond my understanding. This schooling probably began even when I was a toddler and my mother, before setting off to work her long hours, dropped me off to stay with my grandfather and grandmother, Pa Tim and Mama Gina, her parents, your great-great-great-grandparents. She was able to leave me with my elders, who didn’t say much to me and weren’t able to scurry after me, because I was already being raised to be self-sufficient. Later, in the short period when I attended school, I would go home at the end of the school day directly to Pa Tim and Mama Gina, check in, have a bite to eat, and begin my wanderings.

Some days I headed into the swamps to look for berries, picking cocoa plums and outsmarting the wasps by shaking sapodilla trees and causing the ripest fruit to fall. As long as my eyes were sharp and I caught the fruit at the flood, I could feast on it as well. But I also learned that there are few tastes as terrible as biting into an unripe sapodilla.

These solo pursuits further tuned my logistic skills, especially when it came to the trial and error of getting past the wasps without being stung about the eyes, both painful and disabling. To that end, I had to study the growth patterns of the fruit trees, how cocoa plums grew wherever they could on branches in haphazard patterns and how the sapodillas congregated higher up, guarded by the wasps, yet hanging heavy enough on their branches that shaking the trees could cause them to fall without my having to climb up and get stung.

Thus it was that I became a logician in my own terms, developing instincts for survival needs and for responding to threats real and perceived—like those of the two main graveyards on Cat Island that I was forced to pass by on my way to wherever I wanted to go.

The passing of a graveyard alone was never, ever without impact, because, frankly, the imagination gets to running away with itself. You see the headstones—not modern, chiseled headstones, but rather a rock, with a little planted post at the head of the grave bearing the name of the person in the earth below. In one of the graveyards there were relatives from Poitier and Outten lines, while in the other lay the bones of strangers. Neither location seemed safer than the other. So the closer I drew to the graveyards, the more my internal self was awake and alert, tuned in to suspicious activity of any kind, particularly any motion that might reveal the presence of the bogeyman.

Now, I don’t want to scare you, my dear, not the way that I was scared as a child when my older siblings and other children planted frightening images of the bogeyman in my consciousness. But that was a part of the culture, and so the bogeyman took root in my imagination very early on—a force that had an impact on me during the day as well as at night. Whatever the cause for fear, no matter
where I was, I perceived the bogeyman to be involved somehow, and my imagination ran wild with all variety of images of his size, shape, and supernatural, terrifying powers.

But there was an upside to this kind of thinking, which was that I learned, in my solitary way, to be familiar with fear, to walk carefully past graveyards, and to investigate before kowtowing to alleged bogeymen. And those lessons served me well in the long run, as an outsider and a loner.

So there I was, this private person living comfortably in the confines of his internal self and simultaneously maintaining a robust relationship with the external, real world, which was unfolding day by day. And then, suddenly, we moved to Nassau—where the environment, which had been my virtual schoolhouse, radically changed.

Now I had to adapt to a society of my peers, still as an outsider. That was when I discovered that a loner is most often referred to as a shy person. And for that matter, shyness makes up a large part of my personality, a trait that I inherited undoubtedly from the shyest person I knew: my mother.

This has all been to reveal to you, my dearest great-granddaughter, that in our travels to become who we are and who we were meant to be in the grand scheme of things—whether we see ourselves as outsiders or loners, or as shy or private, or as outgoing, gregarious extraverts—what really counts above all is that we do see ourselves. By seeing and knowing ourselves, we are given dominion over our lives—the capacity to steer our own ships, for better and for worse.

Though I was shy, an outsider, and a loner, I made friends easily in Nassau and was able to be at home as well in my environment. The earlier music of Cat Island, played by nature and sung by parents, siblings, and neighbors to the homemade melodies and rhythms of hand clapping and foot tapping, had changed in Nas
sau to a livelier beat—the soundtrack of cars and trucks, the jokes and dares of kids hanging out on street corners, the banter of commerce, live music of rake and scrape mixing with radios in the stores and the movie theaters sounding the popular tunes of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

During the nearly five years when I came of age on Nassau, the adventure of that music called me. This was true when I attended my first school, Eastern Senior, which required me to walk as many as four miles each way—so far, in fact, that I later transferred to a second school, Western Senior. But before that transfer, while going to and from Eastern, I explored different shortcuts. On such an expedition, I met a boy by the name of Carl—who happened to be white—apparently out in front of where he lived in a neighborhood as poor as mine. We often spoke when I passed by, and we struck up a friendship of sorts. It didn’t take me long to recognize that in spite of the fact that we were both from poor households, Carl exhibited a definite racist streak by claiming his superiority to me—because he was white and I was black. This was another experience that reinforced my outsider status, such that at the time and from then on, whenever I smelled that in a person, I would address it and try to disarm it.

Later I better understood Carl in the context of the social hierarchy installed in the Bahamas by the colonial system, which was still intact to a large extent. He was looking for anything to lift him higher than the very low rung on which his circumstances of birth had placed him.

After I quit school at the age of twelve and a half in order to go to work to help support my family, I met a pretty girl named Dorothy—whose coloring was chocolate brown and who appeared to be of African descent—who turned out to be a half-sister of
Carl’s. This made me wonder about issues of class and race, but I kept those questions to myself.

In the meantime, other friendships weren’t always conducive to my staying out of mischief and even some trouble, with enough close calls to cause my parents serious concerns.

I was never privy to any discussions they may have had, but I imagine they were able to look past some of the more typical teenage behavior that I was involved in—daredevil antics, street fights, and so on. That was, until my friend Yorrick Rolle was caught after stealing a bicycle and then sentenced to a long stint in reform school. To this day, I don’t remember how it was that I happened not to be along for that ride. But I do remember well another incident involving my regular group of guys when I was in tow.

It was on that particularly dark, moonless night that my friends and I planned and successfully pulled off a major raid of a sizable cornfield—just outside of town. So successful was the raid that we imagined ourselves to possess critical-thinking capacities well above the levels of the twelve-and thirteen-year-olds that we were. And, might I add, that collective assessment of ourselves remains solid proof that we were also the dumbest kids that anyone, anywhere, had
ever
heard of. And here’s why: on that very same dark, moonless night, we took the bags of corn we had only just stolen and built a bonfire, over which we started roasting the corn—right there in that same cornfield!

We had barely begun to enjoy our feast when the farmer—who lived all of a quarter mile away—apparently glanced out of his window, spotted the huge glow rising out of the middle of his cornfields, and promptly called both the police and the fire brigade. We were all arrested. My co-conspirators each had parents who were able to manage the seven dollars of bail money. Mine couldn’t. That meant I spent the night in jail.

The next morning, my dad arrived after borrowing the money for my bail and after paying an additional seven bucks to the farmer to keep me from more jail time. On the way home from the courthouse, my father and I walked along at a pace necessary to keep his rheumatoid arthritis in check. When he did speak, because I knew the measured person that he was, I wasn’t at all surprised that his disappointment wasn’t reflected in his remarks. But I could hear it in his voice. I had let him down.

Even so, his focus was on the future. “Sidney,” he said finally, “you’re my last born.” He paused and then continued, “You’re growing up. I can’t run after you or look out for you, Son. Not like I used to.”

I said nothing, but nodded in recognition.

“You need a stronger hand,” my father went on, and then took a different tack, reminding me, “You were born in America. The time has come for your mother and me to send you back.”