Life Beyond Measure (9 page)

Tralance Addy from Ghana officiating with interpreter Adwoa Mould-Mograbi at Ayele’s “Outdooring” ceremony

Raising Ayele up to the heavens at her “Outdooring” ceremony

Touching Ayele’s feet to mine, symbolizing that she will walk in the footsteps of her ancestors

In my expeditions, survival has been achieved by applying logic and reason to most situations. But when it comes to faith from my mother’s point of view, logic and reason had no influence with her in regard to what she felt. How did she come upon this feeling? She must have had a connectedness to things beyond my understanding or perhaps her ability to articulate.

Surely, while I was away all that time, my mother returned time and again to the prophesy of the soothsayer who had told her not to worry about me. Still, eight years is a long time. And she could not picture the soothsayer’s vision for me, because my mother had no idea what was meant when it was said: “He will travel to most of the corners of the earth.” She had no idea what a corner of the earth looked like, nor did I. But I have since been there. The soothsayer said, “He will walk with kings,” and, though my mom couldn’t see it and I couldn’t see it, I have walked with kings. She said, “He will take your name all over the world.” Our name is what I carry. I have been all over the world, and I have been recognized all over the world as Sidney Poitier. But who is Sidney Poitier? Sidney Poitier is the son of Evelyn Poitier and Reginald Poitier.

But I wasn’t biding my time waiting for the prediction to come true in all those years. And as I picture my mother, what is it she’s doing while waiting for the soothsayer’s words to come true? She is connected to something in which she has placed her faith. She clearly expected something to materialize down the road in my life. What she said to me was enough for me to hear, but not clearly understand. My mother couldn’t tell me that the world was round. She couldn’t tell me that there were so many oceans, or so many continents. So she had to have a connectedness to something in which she had rested her faith.

What was that? Well, she was a churchgoer, an Anglican Catholic, that religion having been brought to the region by the British slaveholders in the early days of the same slave trade that made its first appearance in the American colonies in the early 1600s. In Haiti, an uprising against the French colonists led to the abolition of slavery in 1804, while it was not fully outlawed in the Bahamas until 1833. That was thirty-two years before slavery was officially ended in the United States.

My mother didn’t know this history or that the church in which she was raised had been imported to the islands of the area by the British. And though she was devout in her faith, she wasn’t married to church doctrine, nor do I think that she actually recognized the fundamental differences between Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, and how the division came about. I don’t think she was aware that the king of England wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and the Roman Catholic Church would not give him permission to get rid of his wife to do that. So he set up his own Anglican Catholicism. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know because my mother was not that versed a person. In fact, that was history I wouldn’t know much about until many years later.

My mom had grown up in the Anglican Church and attended services every Sunday, where the priest talked about life through the vision of the church. But other influences informed my mother’s spiritual vision. After all, she was descended from a different background than the Bahamas. Her forefathers, four or five generations previously, were slaves who were brought into that region, primarily to Haiti, which was a fairly large island. Her forefathers probably got to the Bahamas as escapees, using handmade rafts. If that happened, there were no authorities in the Bahamas that would grab them and
ship them back to Haiti. My mother’s ancestors were able to retain a connection to those remnants of who they once were—in defiance of the institution of slavery, which set out to obliterate their original cultural and religious identity. And my mother inherited those older beliefs that were part of her faith as well. Now, we’re talking about voodoo or some mysterious something. A power, an influence and energy source. So for her, there were two religions now: Catholicism and the world of faith that came from her heritage—the world of the spirits.

That was the mix in her that put words into her mouth when she told my father to get rid of the shoebox that he’d brought home to bury me in. That was the mix that had been sustaining her as I peeked in through the window at her and my dad, talking together on that night eight years after my departure.

Without saying anything to them, I went to the back door, which was open, and walked in. They looked at me, and then looked at each other. Then they looked back at me, and with her face scrutinizing mine, my mother spoke her first words. “Kermit?” she said. My brother in Miami had several children, the oldest of which was Kermit.

I didn’t say anything, and they looked at each other again. Then it struck my mother, and she screamed like you can’t imagine. She jumped up. I was almost six feet away from her, standing in this old kitchen. And she ran over and jumped up on me.

For my mother, this was fate. Since she believed in the soothsayer, this was fated to happen.

She had no idea what I had done. I tried to tell them what I was now doing, and it was like going in one ear and out the other. I tried to explain as best I could, but neither of them asked me much about
it, because the ideas of acting and motion pictures were so foreign to them. I was back and I was their son, and my mother hung on to me like I was a little boy and wouldn’t let me go. I had to sit down with her hanging on to me.

My father said, “Leave the boy alone. Why don’t you go and make him some food.”

My mother reluctantly let me go, but if she could have hung on to me over to the stove, that would have been fine with her.

I continued to tell them about my experiences, and finally my mother said, “I asked God to tell me if you were dead. I prayed to God every night for him to tell me.” Although it must have appeared so, the idea that I had died was something she could not accept in her own thinking. She never got an answer until I showed up, and that was her answer.

When she told me this, I knew what she had endured for eight years. She couldn’t embrace the possibility of my not being alive, so she goes to her faith. And she appeals to God—whether it is a Catholic God or the spiritual God of her ancestors. She had to have it certified by God Himself and the faith that she held—and it was not. So when she saw me and leaped across the floor onto me like a football player coming at me, it was her saying, “I knew it!” She touched my head and my body all over, and she was having this experience of her faith being rewarded.

I see fate in that, because I see her in her faith. I don’t think she ever said, “OK, it’s been so long, and he’s probably not alive.” So she goes to God with her faith and her interconnectedness in whatever it is, and says, “You tell me.”

That’s who she was, and that is the faith that she had, the faith that the Book of Hebrews calls “the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.”

My father was along for the ride. He wasn’t coming from where my mom was coming from, but he was equally delighted with my being alive.

Am I the kid that my mother was told I would be? I’ve tried my best to be that kind of kid, even though I fought against it when I was a bad kid some of the time. But mostly I was a good kid. My mother saw a life for me that she put her faith in. She cracked rocks to feed me. She worked side by side with my dad in the worst kind of conditions in the tomato fields to feed me. They couldn’t give me much of an education because they didn’t have one themselves. But my mother did everything else for me, and she did it because she had placed her faith somewhere. I buy that, because I know it was really true for her.

For me, there is a difference between faith for her and faith for me. My faith is in other arenas—but my mother may have had the better of the deal. But the evolution of my faith didn’t come from my mother’s experiences; they were hers, not mine. I had just my understanding of her, the love of her, and the “mother-ness” of her nature. All of which made a connection between us that was substantive. Through that substance, I have had inklings about God.

For me, there was and still is more to know about God. There are millions upon millions of people—maybe billions of people—who believe God exists. There are other large numbers of people who are uncertain: agnostics. And there are those who have no faith: atheists. So you have three kinds of responses: the atheists saying, “No, there is no God”; the believers declaring, “Yes, there is a God, definitely”; and the agnostics saying, “Well, I don’t know; I just don’t know.”

As I write this letter in this winter of 2007, close to your second birthday, Ayele, hardly a day passes without something in the mainstream media catching our eye about the importance of faith. Or
something that challenges faith by suggesting that there is no God. And right next door to that attitude are any number of people who have had an experience that says, definitely, there is a God.

Therefore, I have to trust myself to do the evaluation for myself. I didn’t get much from the Catholic Church, Anglican or Roman. From the day I landed in Florida from Nassau, I didn’t go to churches as a matter of faith. I did go to one to get married, a Catholic church, but I never went there as a parishioner.

I certainly had been in churches—for marriages, celebrations, theatrical functions, and off-Broadway activities that took place in rented church basements. But for spiritual communion, I have never needed an institutional setting to search for the connections that my mother had to her higher power.

So what is my faith? My faith is that of a person who questions. And my questions today, at eighty years of age, haven’t changed much in all those years. Among them is this one: am I to believe, am I to accept, am I to embrace the articulation of a faith from other human beings who have no more understanding of it than I have?

The question of God, the existence or nonexistence, is a perennial question, because we don’t know. Is the universe the result of God, or was the universe always there? Was there originally an intelligence that has no beginning and no end, an intelligence that cannot be articulated in a fashion in which most of us perceive God?

A lot of people see Him as the image of a human being: white, on a cloud, with a beard, long hair, and a robe. I think it diminishes God for us to perceive Him in that way, because there is no way there could be a God on a cloud with long hair, a beard, and Caucasian. Could He not be a multicolored God? Could He not be an Asian or African or Hispanic God? Of course He could be.

I perceive God, in the event that He is there—and I have to constantly underscore the possibility that God does exist—as not in the form in which we have been encouraged to believe He exists. There are many people who are very satisfied with God on a cloud; they are satisfied with the imagery that Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam present. People by the billions are comfortable with those images. And they commit themselves to that perception. They live their lives embracing it—in most cases, never doubting it.

I find it difficult to believe some of the images of God. The closest I can come is a belief that there is an intelligence that does not manifest itself in a solid material or in a presence; it is much bigger than the universe itself, because if God is as omniscient as He is supposed to be, the universe itself is one of His creations. And if the universe is one of His creations, we are entitled to ask the question, How many more universes are there, or is this the one and only universe? We should be able to ask God, as I perceive Him or Her to be, and get total intelligence of everything. And God would be able to say, “Yes, this is one of my creations, and I do indeed have them everywhere, and I’m glad you are interested in questioning about that.”

So we come down to how I perceive this God, and my relationship to that perception. I think it is rather simple: I cannot have lived the life I have lived without reserving a limitless amount of respect for God. And my next point is that the images of God should also be limitless because my imagination tells me that God is bigger than one religion.

I don’t see a God who is concerned with the daily operation of the universe. In fact, the universe may be no more than a grain of sand compared with all the other universes. And if you put together the possibility of other universes, there could be as many as there are grains of sand in this universe.

Now, that may seem far-fetched, but it is not if you give God the due that He, I believe, would have, which is: there couldn’t be a territory over which God does not have full sway. Then, if God does have full sway in everything that exists, that God is all encompassing. And that all-encompassing God is not just for some of us; that God is for all of us. It is not a God for one culture, or one religion, or one planet.

Granted, the most scholarly among us are likely to have a far deeper understanding of various religions, faiths, and how their churches came about. Both history and science have, indeed, unearthed extensive and compelling evidence surrounding the birth and subsequent development of many major religions. And, in the wake of untold passages of time, clues were left pointing toward questions not yet posed, waiting to be found and challenged by philosophers, sages, theologians, historians, and scientists in their endless search for ultimate wisdom. But, however far back one traces a faith, it is to that precise degree that one further distances oneself from the wisdom one seeks.

Skepticism is healthy, Ayele, I assure you. We’re better off, I believe, by refusing to certify the legitimacy of everything we hear or read. For somewhere in the back of my mind is that old explanation that if you whisper a sentence in the ear of one person around a table of many—a short sentence such as “John slept close to a woman with whom he worked”—as those words go around the table, whispered to each person next to another, it might come out, less than a minute later, that John was a sleep-arounder, and he did it with every woman he knew; which meant he probably was gay, because he needed to give the impression of being a raging heterosexual.

Now, if that could happen in one minute, think of the long history of most faiths, which began before writing—in some cases, before language. We know from experience that some of what are spoken of as the specifics of how certain world religions came about couldn’t possibly have happened in the literal manner in which they are described. Nothing recorded, nothing written down, no eyewitnesses—only the possibility that one day the combined vision of modern science, which by definition is a relatively recent phenomenon, might bring answers.