The Measure of a Man (7 page)

Six months later I got a call. “Hello, Sidney Poitier?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“This is Marty Baum.”

“Oh, yes, how are you, sir?” I said.

“Fine. How are you? What are you doing?” he asked.

I said, “I’m still in the restaurant, working.”

He said, “You haven’t had any jobs as an actor?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

He said, “Come down. I want to talk to you.”

So I went down to the Baum and Newborn offices, across from the Plaza. They had two or three other agents, and three or four secretaries. I went into Marty Baum’s private office, and he sat me down.

“I don’t have a job for you,” he said, “but I asked you to come down because I wanted to say something to you.” He stared at me in silence for a moment before continuing. “You know, I’ve never met anybody like you. That part was a pretty good part. It had no racial overtones to it, and you turned it down. You haven’t done anything since, and it would have been—well, it was paying 750 dollars a week. It would have been a nice piece of change.”

He once again asked me to explain why I hadn’t taken the part, but all could say was. “Well, you know, it’s the way I am.”

He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but anybody as crazy as you, I want to handle him.”

I said, “Okay.” And that’s how I landed with a big agent, and that’s when my career got on solid footing.

Now, I couldn’t tell him at the time, and maybe it’ll sound a little sanctimonious even now, after all these years, but I rejected that part because, in my view, the character simply
didn’t measure up. He didn’t fight for what mattered to him most. He didn’t behave with dignity.

My father, Reggie, was a certain kind of man, and he was a certain kind of dad. He was a poor man, for certain. He was a hard-working man, for sure. The only thing he knew how to do was tomato farming, but the soil in Nassau wasn’t good, and it was a tourist economy, and there was simply no room for him to plant. By this time he was fifty or fifty-five, and he was suffering severely from rheumatoid arthritis, among other things. He had worked in a bicycle shop in Nassau, but after some years he’d lost the job. The only way he could make a living now was to have my brother in Miami send him boxes of very cheap cigars. My father would then spend the day walking around town, going from one bar to another, selling the cigars. One to this person, two to another. That’s how poor he was. But he did what he had to do. And I wasn’t going to play any part that might dishonor his values.

My mom, too, always measured up. She would go scouring the neighborhood and into the nearby woods, picking up rocks and stones—sometimes as much as twenty-pound stones or thirty-pound stones, even fifty-pound stones. When she had gathered upwards of two thousand pounds into a mound in the yard in front of our house, she would sit under an almond tree with a hammer in her hand and a big wide straw hat on her head, and from morning to night she would hammer those stones into pebbles and those pebbles into gravel.

It would take her weeks to break a pile of stones that reached close to ceiling height in a pyramid fashion. That’s a hell of a lot of
stones to break. And she didn’t work at it just for a few weeks; the weeks would sometimes run into months. When she had an impressive enough pyramid of crushed stones—mind you, other poor women were doing the same thing—a man would come by with his truck and his workers, and he would bargain with her for her pyramid of crushed stones, and he would pay her whatever she was able to negotiate—on average, ten shillings, twelve shillings, a pound and a half. Fifteen shillings would have been the equivalent of about six dollars. The man would pay her the six dollars, or whatever it was, and his workmen would shovel all the gravel into his truck, and they would go.

Then, after some respite of a week or so, she would start gathering stones all over again.

But what Reggie and Evelyn did for a living in no way articulated who they were as people. There was this whole race/class thing in the Bahamas, and among blacks the class thing was prevalent and vigorously administered. If you were really poor, you were without leverage and powerless, and that was the majority of the people. Also, there was a class of blacks who felt they were above you. They mimicked the colonial value system and saw themselves at the top of the black community. It was their hierarchical sort of thing. Well, my dad was so poor that he was dismissed by the black social structure, dismissed by
every
social structure. Dismissed by everyone, pretty much, except his friends. He had lots of friends.

Now trust me, the man never complained. These are
my
complaints, not
his
. No complaints. He was there, life was as it was—that’s how he looked at it. He knew what kind of a person he was.
He knew what kind of a family he had. He knew what kind of a woman he was married to. He had no money; he had to squeeze a living out of the most unusual activities, but everything he undertook was honorable, because that was who he was.

And Evelyn, of course, I never heard her complain—never, not once—though she
would
get a little pissed at me when I grumbled about the kind of clothes I had. I was simply too young to understand our situation, but she may have translated my complaints into an implication of failure on her part or Dad’s. In any case, she had answers for that, you know? And the answers were damn good ones, and they had no self-pity in them, and they had no self-incrimination in them. She would say the kinds of things that proud and honorable poor mothers have always said—things like, “As long as the clothes you have are clean, they’re fine.”

But when I got to New York, and when I got to Hollywood, for whatever reason or by whatever stroke of luck, I was given the tremendous opportunity of doing work that could reflect who I was. And who I was had everything to do with Reggie and Evelyn and each cigar sold and each rock broken. That’s how I’ve always looked at it: that my work is who I am. I decided way back at the beginning, back when I was still washing dishes in a barbecue joint in Harlem, that the work I did would never bring dishonor to my father’s name.

I do what I do for me and for my wife and children, of course. And I do it out of a certain professional ego-drive and ambition like anyone else. But everything I do, I also do for Reggie and for Evelyn.

MY HAPHAZARD political education got underway in 1943. The school in which that education occurred was that district north of Central Park known as Harlem, New York.

Now, the school of hard knocks provided no classes in political science, but long before I arrived, Harlem residents knew full well that politics was a deck stacked against them—an invisible force of exclusion expertly woven into the fabric of everyday life. In the school of hard knocks, politics was a name for the way white folks arranged things to their own advantage.

Harlem residents had figured a good many things out. (1) They knew that for practical, economic reasons, there never
was a time when downtown politics didn’t embrace Harlem as a cheap and handy labor pool. (2) In cultural terms, they knew of downtown politics’ insistence on a requisite distance being kept once the day’s work was done. (3) They knew that in matters of race, downtown politics had set in place rules and ways to enforce those rules, to ensure that all residents from Harlem were respectful of the “civilized traditions” that had been erected between themselves and the larger community over the preceding two hundred years. (4) They also knew that when need required, downtown politics would bombard Harlem with promises Harlem’s residents knew, from experience, would never materialize.

The Harlem that I knew for fourteen years was an amazing place—a fabled destination well known in African-American communities throughout the country. Its dazzling power drew visitors of many races from many places to experience by taste, by smell, by touch its bewitching energies, its mysterious vibrations, and its signature rhythms, each of which was said to be in the very air a visitor breathed. And all of Harlem’s visitors were encouraged to believe that each breath they took would also contain spiritual blessings that came flowing out of the soul of its loving people through the gateways of their hearts.

Harlem’s attractions beckoned with a wink and a smile. Jazz at Minton’s. Vaudeville at the Apollo. Floor shows at Smalls’ Paradise. Comedians and torch singers at the Baby Grand. Jitterbuggers at the Savoy and the Renaissance Casino. Soul food at Jennylou’s. Elegant late-night dining at Wells. The Palm. Frank’s. Sugar Ray Robinson’s. The Shalamar. Joe’s
Barbecue. And after midnight, when the legitimate bars closed, the speakeasies would open. There was gambling at the Rhythm Club twenty-four hours a day. There were pleasure houses offering high-quality interludes at prices that guaranteed satisfaction. And then there was the Theresa Hotel—a symbol of community pride and joy—where visitors of big-time status would hold court. Dignitaries from the Caribbean, Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Showbiz heavyweights like the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie. Jimmie Lunceford. Louis Jordan. Billy Eckstine. Dinah Washington. Sarah Vaughan. Ruth Brown. And countless others. But the most memorable characters of all appeared suddenly out of another life, and just as suddenly disappeared again.

Baron Smith, for example, was a tall, large-framed, brown-skinned man of some three hundred or more pounds who never failed to cut a most imposing figure when he entered or exited the lobby of the Theresa Hotel. Perhaps he would be impeccably done up in a white doeskin double-breasted suit, with a boutonniere in his lapel, a Panama hat sitting slightly forward on his head, two-toned black-and-white shoes on his feet, and an emerald-and-diamond ring on his left-hand pinkie finger—an ensemble that, taken together, served as perfect background for an elegant, black, custom-made shirt and the Savile Row necktie that completed the picture. Next day, perhaps an off-white linen suit, with equally arresting accessories. The following day, an entirely new look yet again.

Each summer, this man of substance would return to be eagerly received by the hotel’s management and staff, as well as
other establishments in Harlem, including certain ladies of the evening who had been graced by his presence and his wallet on previous visits.

But Baron Smith’s image and presence were a tailor-made fabrication. A performance mounted for a week’s run on the stage of Harlem’s hot spots, with annual revivals scheduled for as many summers as the traffic would bear.

The real life of the real Baron Smith was set in Nassau, Bahamas. There he was a barkeeper who sold rum to the locals. His barroom was of modest size, and so were his sales. His profit margin had to ignore other obligations in order to cover his seven-day pilgrimage to Harlem each summer. But dream-chasers and sacrifices are never strangers for long. My father used to make daily stops at Baron Smith’s barroom to sell cigars to the Baron’s customers. Life in Nassau was pretty routine and uneventful for Mr. Smith. It didn’t boogie. He yearned for a wild-side excitement, but all he could manage was a week of living on the edge in the ideal manner, in the perfect setting, in the flawless background of his dreams. Harlem, New York.

I knew Mr. Smith quite well. When I was twelve or thereabouts, I used to sneak into the local movie house through a small ventilation window at the rear of the theater, behind the screen. The window was too high for me to reach from the outside, so an accomplice was necessary. I would stand on the shoulders of my friend Yorick, and once safely through the window, I would reach back, grab Yorick’s wrists, and haul him up and in. We then would slither under a thick curtain hanging over an entranceway that separated the backstage area
from the theater itself, slither on under the first few rows of seats, and pop up innocently in the fourth or fifth row. There we would sit, doing our best to look like regular, paying customers. After roughly a dozen or so successes, one day we popped up, took our seats, and—guess what? Standing over us was Mr. Baron Smith. He was the manager of the movie house in those earlier days.

He grabbed us by the back of our collars, lifted us to our feet, and marched us to his office as pictures of reform school flashed through our heads. We knew that if he called the cops, an example would be made of us as a warning to all young males of similar age and reckless persuasion. That would mean six years in the slammer for each of us.

He sat us down in the privacy of his office. “I know your father,” he said to me. “What do you think he would say if he knew what you’ve been doing?”

Yorick and I knew that the question wasn’t meant to be answered, so we sat quietly. The lecture was short, but it found its mark.

“Now, get out of here,” he said, after letting us stew a few minutes. “If you try something like this again, you’ll regret it the rest of your lives. What you did is as bad as stealing. You don’t want to grow up to be thieves, do you? Thieves wind up in jail; remember that. Honesty really is the best policy.”

We weren’t going to
wind up
as thieves. We
were
thieves already. But we weren’t going to compound our problems by being honest enough to divulge
that
information. Mr. Smith escorted us out to the street and let us fly away. Free as birds.

Sixty years have passed since Mr. Smith let Yorick and me walk, but the generosity he displayed was a great lesson for me. Likewise, I learned much from Harlem’s generosity in welcoming Baron Smith with his image as a man of importance, wealth, generosity, and presence (all fashioned with
clothing and pretense
) and its generosity in keeping such dreams alive for Baron Smith and dreamers like him from all over the world.

For Baron Smith the dreamer, Harlem was a stage-setting reflecting mere images of reality; but the fact is we the people of Harlem were real. Consequently, Harlem nourished another kind of dreamer to speak to our concerns. As a young man I began to ask myself, Who is speaking for me, and who is speaking to me? And as the saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

From the pages of newspapers, from the radio, from newsreels in the movie houses, and from poems and sermons, teachers—men of vision and courage from all walks of life—began to appear. One by one they spoke to me, and they spoke
for
me. Paul Robeson, Dr. Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Mary McCloud Bethune, Walter White, Whitney Young, Langston Hughes. And others. And in the course of time the voices of newfound friends from my generation, including William Garfield Greaves, Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, Philip and Doris Rose, William Branch, William Marshall, Julian Mayfield, and others, would be added. Like me, they were young. Unlike me, they were not political greenhorns. These intelligent young people—Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, and Philip and Doris Rose most especially—would become and remain invalu
able contributors to my political education. By their example and my own intense effort at reading the newspapers, I picked up useful bits of basic information every day.

In 1945, at eighteen years of age and fresh out of the Army, I was unaware, for instance, what it meant to be a “Democrat,” a “Republican,” a “progressive,” a “socialist,” a “communist,” an “anarchist,” a “northern liberal,” a “southern conservative.” Nor had I a clue as to how people who earned those labels differed from one another. It took some time before I came to understand who among the spokespeople for these various positions were genuine allies of those who spoke for the men and women of Harlem, and for the youngsters of my generation. But by the age of twenty-one, I had grown familiar with the landscape and had acquired a general understanding of what was driving each major player philosophically.

My teachers came in a wide variety of forms and in a great variety of locales. Louise, for example, lived in Brooklyn, and the trip from the American Negro Theatre on 127th Street in Harlem to her doorstep was a long ride. I offered to see her home one night after a late rehearsal at the theater, and I would wind up making that trip time after time.

Saintly, volatile, edgy, raucous, bitchy, introspective, sensuous, a talented and daring taker of risks—that was Louise. In acting classes she was a riveting, hypnotic presence. As a nineteen-year-old black girl, she was often mistaken for Arabic, or Asian, or Native American. She was, in fact, a mixed-race person of African-American and white descent, but she claimed only her African-American heritage.

Talking with her was a pleasure, mainly because I wasn’t interested as much in getting into her pants as getting into her mind. She seemed to know a little bit about everything, and I knew she could help me fill in the blanks in my own general knowledge. Her words touched familiar chords I had often heard inside myself, her voice lodging complaints we both held against the state.

Her language, too, inspired me. For instance, the phrases “rhetorical bullshit” and “disingenuous motherfucker.” “Bullshit” and “motherfucker” I had heard before, of course, but what kind of bullshit gets to be “rhetorical,” and what need a motherfucker do to be considered a “disingenuous motherfucker”? “Bourgeoisie Negroes” was another. We got locked in a conversation once, I remember, about who she was and who I was, as individuals, in America. “How we see ourselves, how we see each other,” she said, “should be determined by us and not by people who generally don’t like us; people who pass laws certifying us as less than human. Too many of us see each other as ‘they’ see us,” she continued. “Time for that shit to stop. We’re going to have to decide for ourselves what we are and what we’re not. Create our own image of ourselves. And nurture it and feed it till it can stand on its own.”

She looked through the plate-glass window of a coffee shop at snow falling on the Brooklyn street near where she lived. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she added. “If I have anything to say about it, by the time my grandchildren get here, this hypocrisy democracy is gonna do some changing.”

More than a few times I asked myself if she was just regurgitating stuff she had heard at home from a father who was up on such things, or a mother who was book-smart, or some school she had attended. But then I would feel the passion behind her words and know that she spoke from conviction.

“Things that get sandwiched in between ‘differing opinions,’ ‘opposite positions,’ ‘opposing views’—these are issues,” she explained. “All things social, political, religious, financial, personal or impersonal, objective or subjective, over which debates are held, fights are triggered, and wars are fought—these are issues.”

Louise taught me much, not the least of which was to appreciate how much a greater command of the language can enrich one’s life.

But our time was short. I soon was off to Broadway, then on the road for several years with the play
Anna Lucasta
, then off to Hollywood for three decades. I lost track of Louise. All my attempts to reconnect proved fruitless. If she survived, and if she had children, it’s not farfetched to imagine them as having been among those young African-Americans of the sixties who sat in at southern lunch counters. Who braved “Bull” Connor’s dogs. Who put themselves on the line to end segregation. Who worked at taking the “hypocrisy out of democracy,” as she was so fond of saying. If Louise is still here, she knows that the times have changed. If she’s not, then I’m here to witness for us both that the times indeed have changed.

WHEN I WAS COMFORTABLE on Cat Island, I was pulled out and placed in Nassau. When I had gotten some comfort in Nassau, which took some adjusting to, I was pulled out and placed in a hostile environment called Florida. Again and again I found myself having to leave behind the comfort gained and move on. After a time it became a ritual.

For a while it was New York, and then it was California. It was the various plays and movies and venues of the acting profession. It was the social friends that I would meet and develop at all the levels of my life. Most of these friends were eventually left behind. The moving on lifestyle I had adopted (though not initially by choice) placed all my friendships in perpetual jeopardy. I became a loner, a separate traveler.

I always saw things differently than other people. I heard things differently. I viewed the future differently. Most times I asked of myself much more than I was able to give. I came close to self-destruction on any number of occasions. I unquestionably had to be lucky, since my struggle for survival was no more than a patchwork of trial-and-error. And I’ve got to tell you, there was a satisfaction, a pleasure—no, a
thrill
—in whatever successes happened as a result of dancing close to the flame and beating the odds. In just being lucky.