The Measure of a Man (17 page)

As I’ve mentioned, a large part of my father’s legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, “The measure of a man is how well he provides his children.”

That teaching weighed heavily on me when my first wife and I separated. That breakup was a long, painful, scarring period for all concerned. Juanita, my wife, had no interest in dismantling the family. She knew that there was great dissatisfaction on my part, but she was a good Catholic girl, and with that background you stay the course, you take the good with the bad. You accept inconvenience and painful readjustments, and sometimes you just absorb the painful elements in the marriage that can’t be excised.

Of course, too, I was in love with another woman, and the guilt of that was something that eleven years of psychotherapy couldn’t “cure.” There was a time when the pain was so intense that I cast blame in all directions. “My wife doesn’t understand me enough,” I would say in clichéd fashion. And then I would say that the “other woman” had her own agenda.

It was all a pretty miserable situation. Especially knowing that my mother and my father had done so much better. My brothers Reginald and Cedric had done so much better. And then came Sidney, who simply wasn’t measuring up. In fact, I was
giving
up.

All I knew was that I had to get to the other side. And in the midst of all this pain, there were my kids. I had to tell them that it wasn’t their mother’s fault, it wasn’t the “other woman’s” fault, it was
my
fault.

My good friend Harry Belafonte had gone through the heartache of a divorce a few years ahead of me. Harry saw me in great pain, and I asked him if he knew someone I could talk to. He recommended a psychiatrist, and then he said to me, from his own experience, “Always be there for your children, no matter what. If they’re supposed to come visit you and they don’t want to, they’ve
got
to come,” he said. “If they don’t want to talk to you, they don’t have to talk to you; but they have to be there. You can put the food on the table, but they don’t have to eat. They can spend the whole weekend in their rooms, but they’re going to know that you cared enough to have them with you. And you take them back on Sunday evening, and you don’t get them again till two weekends later, or whatever the situation is.”

He spoke with the fervor of a preacher by this point. “And you pick them up again the next time, faithfully, and you bring them to your place. If they want to go to a movie, you drop them off and then go back and pick them up, and then you take them home and you help them to get ready for bed and you do
for them whatever they need. And if they don’t say one word to you for the whole weekend, you just live with it. When the time comes for them to return to their mom, you get together and you help them get dressed and packed, and you take them back home.”

Well, it was some of the best advice I was ever given. It echoed my father’s teaching, because I knew that when Reggie talked about providing, he wasn’t talking just about material things. I got the same encouragement from my psychoanalyst, with whom I would sit down four or five times a week to face my guilt. And my guilt would stare back at me with no expression. Did it change me? Yes. Did it make me a better person? I don’t know. As self-serving as it may sound, it certainly made me a better father.

I found it in myself to face up to the conflicts I had created. I didn’t walk away from my children. I took an apartment in New York, but every day I went back up to the suburbs where they lived to be there when they got home from school or when they gathered for their dinner. Years later, they began, in their own words, to let me know that it was good for them to know that I was there for them. And I
was
there for them, even when I traveled far from home for work. Wherever I went in the world, I would leave in their care a phone number. And I now have one hell of a relationship with my children.

But it wasn’t always so. There were rough passages, to be sure. In my experience with my kids, I would come to a point where the silence would commingle with my guilt, and then I
would have to talk. And yet, as I discovered one day with my older children, the more I talked, the more they pulled back.

“Oh, come on, tell me about it. You must be having trouble in school. You must be having trouble with…”—name your conundrum.

Their silent response was, “Go away. Get out of my face.”

But when I was just present and available and waited for it to happen, the good stuff could start with the most innocuous question.

“How far is it now?”

“Oh, it’s not too far.”

“Well, what are we going to do when we get there?”

They would begin to wonder about something, and somehow they would open up a little bit, you know? It’s really crazy.

My daughter Sydney came home from school one day and sat at the table writing. I said, “What are you doing there? What are you writing?”

She said with great earnestness, “I’m going to write a novel.” She said, a “no-vel I’m going to write,” and I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“I’m going to write a no-vel, and I’m working on it now,” she repeated.

And like a fool I got it in my head to encourage her. But parents don’t know how much weight a simple word can carry. I started encouraging her, and she started pulling back, and within a year she had given up the whole idea. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was write a no-vel.

With my daughter Beverly, communication was sometimes even harder. She was the oldest, only thirteen or so when Juanita and I separated. The daughter of an outsider and a maverick, she hungered for the insider’s state of being, yet I was tearing her world apart.

Once she said to me, “Why do I have to do well in school?”

I said, “Because it’s essential to your adult life.”

And she said, “Well, I don’t want to be a standout. I don’t want to be better than anybody else. Why do I have to be better?”

“A good education is a necessity for whatever lifestyle you decide to create for yourself,” I replied.

“Well, why can’t I be like everybody else? I’d like to be like my friends.
I don’t want to be different
!” she screamed, hardening her protest against the list of unpleasant circumstances threatening her sense of safety. Even before the unraveling of her parents’ marriage, the social status that my success had brought to the family had begun to be a difficult issue for her with friends at school. She didn’t want the responsibility of having to negotiate a compromise between friends, self, and family for fear of forcing all her troubles into open view. For her, being looked upon as different, as not belonging, would be disastrous. She feared being an awkward, self-conscious misfit among regulars, an outsider where she had always found harmony and comfort.

Mainstream society, meanwhile, was sending her negative signals loaded with racial and class overtones, causing her to question her identity and her worth. She, and many like her,
faced a worldview so pervasive, so subtly demeaning, so blithely insensitive that even those who were able to evade it would forever carry scars of one kind or another. A few hid their scars in shame; others wore them as merit badges (or so it’s hoped).

The net effect on Beverly of my leaving her mother was huge. She stopped speaking to me for two years, dropped out of school, got married at too early an age, and moved to Africa.

One could more than double the number of disappointments and regrets I would be reasonably expected to haul around under the circumstances. The truth of the matter is Beverly’s reluctance to finish her education had the most disastrous effect on me. Next to that was the silent treatment she laid on me during the two years of estrangement. While I was always pressing to reestablish and maintain a relationship, she was pressing to have it minimized to a punishing extent. (Alas! Parents, too, must be brought to judgment for their sins.)

By the time she was in her mid-twenties we had made a few encouraging steps toward reconciliation and were doing rather well, as a matter of fact, given the circumstances. Then one day my phone rang. It was Beverly. She said to me, “I looked for a job for months. The only one I found for which I had matching skills was making sandwiches in a delicatessen. I’ve now been at that job for two weeks. I’m a grown, married lady with two children, and my husband’s job doesn’t cover the nut. I’ve had to reexamine my whole life. The reason I’m calling is this: I wondered if you would be willing to give me a little financial help to go back to school?” I said, “Of course.” She went back
to school, obtained a degree from Southern Methodist University, and is today a writer making a living at her craft.

Looking back on how it must have been for her, I’ve come to the realization that being an insider among friends must have seemed like a heaven-sent guarantee of comfort and support at what was, for her, the most critical of times, When she was terrified, at thirteen or fourteen years of age, that her family was about to be dismantled by her wayward father—precisely when other pillars underneath her life were showing signs of disintegration—she turned away from me and let her instincts for survival lead her toward the familiar. Comfort and support embraced her, delaying for a time those hard, lonely, personal, but necessary survival struggles through which she would, one day, arrive at being her own person.

WHEN I WAS a boy there was a schoolhouse, and it was one room. Sometimes we went and sometimes we didn’t, because we were in the fields most of the time.

I got to Nassau at ten and a half, and I quit school at twelve, so what I picked up between Cat Island and Nassau was just enough to read the basics.

But I had a great teacher in Nassau. His name was Mr. Fox, William Fox. We called him Bill, Mr. Bill Fox, and he was magical. I learned more from him than virtually anyone. I drew heavily on him as a model for my character in
To Sir, with Love
.

That was a film that touched many lives. It told of a teacher in a rough-and-tumble section of London, a teacher who
stepped into a situation where there was depravity, where there was lack of opportunity, where there was lack of stability, where there was lack of family cohesion, and where there were too many other anxieties and frustrations for kids to be able to learn; and that teacher showed his students other, more meaningful, values and suggested what those values could mean in their lives.

He taught manners to kids who hadn’t understood what manners were. In their distorted view, they had considered
good
manners hoity-toity, an affected way of being for people who walked around with their noses in the air. But this teacher taught them otherwise. He also taught about self-respect, dignity, integrity, and honesty, using their own lives as examples.

By the end of the film he had transformed his class into a group of interesting people, most of whom were thinking about going further in education, most of whom were feeling much, much better about themselves and were willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt, who were able to offer respect and to receive respect quite openly. He did all this for them, but he also showed them that they were still the same people that they had been—only better. You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.

He also taught them integrity, largely by
showing
them integrity. He offered himself as a friend, and until they were able to understand the offer and accept it, he endured an awful lot. He was driven to anger. He was humiliated. He was threatened with bodily harm. He was dismissed and persecuted.

In the end, though, he succeeded in helping his students to see themselves in this new life as valuable, useful human beings with impressive potential. Just as this transformation came about, a new opportunity opened up for him. He had been applying for engineering jobs throughout the year—in fact, engineering, not teaching, was really his field—and finally a job opened up for him. By now, though, he had developed such a connection to these troubled kids, and to this idea of helping them and transmitting these values, that he decided to stay on. He said no to the dream he had hoped for and stayed to help the next class of disadvantaged students.

I see that decision as showing great courage and great integrity—the kind of courage and integrity that my father had, and that enabled him to say, in effect, “This house may be a shack with no toilet, but in my house these are the rules.” The greatest part of that legacy from my father is the knowledge that in discipline and commitment lies hope.

It takes great courage for anyone to raise children properly, and I’m full of respect for those who do it well. When I arrived in Miami at the age of fifteen, my brother Cyril was holding down three jobs to support his family. The man used to get up at four o’clock in the morning and didn’t get home until ten o’clock at night. That wasn’t for a
season
; that was
all the time
. My brother wasn’t an educated person. His primary job was at the airport, where he was a porter; and my sister-in-law was a nurse’s aide. He was making maybe fifty dollars a week, and she was probably making thirty-five. So that’s eighty-five dollars for two people, black, in Miami, Florida, in
1942. Eighty-five dollars a week. And guess what they did? They put nine kids through college and they bought a house. On eighty-five dollars a week! And it was a nice house. It had electricity. It had two toilets, one and a half baths. It had a kitchen. It had a backyard.

They could do it because they had made a commitment to each other, to those children, and to a certain set of values, and they stayed the course. I admire them tremendously for what they were and what they did.

But can we expect others to do the same thing? Despite all the hardships my brother and sister-in-law endured, and all the racial indignities of Florida at the time, they still had a community and a culture that sustained their hope for something better in days to come—if not for themselves, then for their kids. But what of the poorly skilled and not well educated workers of today? What of the one-fifth of the American public for whom the problem isn’t abundance and instant gratification but
no
gratification, and consequently no hope?