The Measure of a Man
a spiritual autobiography
To my wife, Joanna Shimkus-Poitier,
whose love and support has
kept me steady in the wind.
When I learned that Diane Gedymin at HarperSanFrancisco had expressed interest in my writing, I was thrilled and rushed to the assumption that she was drawn by something she read in the first set of rough and unorganized pages that outlined a book about the life I had lived. Perhaps fragments of how that life was lived caught her eye. Later, after getting to know her, I would think perhaps not. Perhaps she merely saw what her trained eye has come to accept as the familiar in the human condition. Perhaps she was a fearless observer of the endless variety of patterns that characterize human behavior. Maybe something like that accounts for the fact that her faith in this work registered early and remained so steadfast. In any case, all I know for sure is that without her enthusiasm, her support, and her guidance, this book would not have happened. My thanks to her for staying the course.
Liz Perle, also at HarperSanFrancisco, rendered service beyond the call of duty. She encouraged me to toil at the very edge of my limits and then challenged me to reach beyond. With her tirelessly urging me on. I almost never came up empty. I was fortunate to have Diane and Liz watching my back.
In
The Measure of a Man
, I tried to set my life down on the pages of this book as close as possible to the way it has been lived—without undue emphasis or understatement. When I finished writing, a series of serendipitous occurrences brought my editor, William Patrick, and my manuscript together—a most fortunate turn of events for my book and for me. Bill’s talent runs deep and wide. To my delight, the man and his many gifts were no less than magical in their contributions. His professionalism and keen sense of the power of simplicity were absolutely indispensable in organizing, shaping, and focusing the material for this book. In his bones, William Patrick knows about writing, about books, about English language and literature. If I ever write another book, I hope that William Patrick will come back once more to work the magic in his bones.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my assistant, Susan Garrison, for getting me through the day, year after year without once falling on my face, even under the pressure of our perpetually inflexible schedule. I couldn’t have gotten the work done in the fashion that I did without her special contributions. I am grateful that her hands were in the details.
The knowledge housed in the mind of my friend Charley Blackwell is awesome, whether it is book-learned, experience-gathered, or simply passed on from ancestors long gone. Hard-fought debates, won and lost, littered the space around our friendship—a reminder that we each tried our utmost to be, for the sake of the other, a worthy opponent. Traces of his life and thought can easily be seen on even the briefest journey across the pages of this book.
MANY YEARS AGO I wrote a book about my life, which was, necessarily, in large part a book about my life in Hollywood. More recently I decided that I wanted to write a book about
life
. Just life itself. What I’ve learned by living more than seventy years of it. What I absorbed through my early experiences in a certain time and place, and what I absorbed, certainly without knowing it, through the blood of my parents, and through the blood of their parents before them.
I felt called to write about certain values, such as integrity and commitment, faith and forgiveness, about the virtues of simplicity, about the difference between “amusing ourselves to death” and finding meaningful pleasures—even joy. But I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I’ve suddenly come up with the answers to all life’s questions. Quite the contrary, I began this book as an exploration, an
exercise in self-questioning. In other words, I wanted to find out, as I looked back at a long and complicated life, with many twists and turns, how well I’ve done at measuring up to the values I espouse, the standards I myself have set.
Writers of a spiritual or metaphysical persuasion often convey their message through storytelling. They illustrate their points with parables drawn from great teachers of the past, whether it be Jesus of Nazareth, or Buddha, or the latest Arabic sage or Sufi mystic—the more exotic the better. Some take this natural tendency to great lengths, writing whole books devoted to finding the deep wisdom embedded in ancient folk tales, psychologically complex stories drawn from Africa, Scandinavia, East Asia, Latin America, and many other far-flung countries. They do this, it seems, to get as far away as possible from our contemporary mindset so that we can see modern, digitized, postindustrial life as if through new eyes (or, perhaps, through very ancient, very grounded eyes).
For me the task is much easier. First of all, I’ve spent a very long time working in the dream factory called Hollywood. It’s been my privilege—but also my daily business—to participate in constructing and dramatizing what those of us involved always hoped were meaningful stories, and putting them on the screen. Because I’ve always believed that my work should convey my personal values, as an author I don’t have to look far to find storylines to illustrate points I wish to make. Happily, certain films that are a part of my own personal résumé are also part of the “collective unconscious” of a great many Americans of a certain age. It’s my great good fortune
that many of these films—stories such as
Lilies of the Field. A Patch of Blue, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
, and
To Sir, with Love
—are still familiar today, thanks to home video and repeated play on television. Thus they give you and me the possibility of a common bond and a common frame of reference, and I want to use them that way.
But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don’t have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps even unsanitized—and therefore supposedly more “authentic”—perspective of the Third World. Very simply, this is because that “other” world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came.
IT’S LATE AT NIGHT as I lie in bed in the blue glow of the television set. I have the clicker in my hand, the remote control, and I go from 1 to 97, scrolling through the channels. I find nothing that warrants my attention, nothing that amuses me, so I scroll up again, channel by channel, from bottom to top. But already I’ve given it the honor of going from 1 to 97, and already I’ve found nothing. This vast, sophisticated technology and…nothing. It’s given me not one smidgen of pleasure. It’s informed me of nothing beyond my own ignorance and my own frailties.
But then I have the audacity to go up
again
! And what do I find? Nothing, of course. So at last, filled with loathing and self-disgust, I punch the damn TV off and throw the clicker
across the room, muttering to myself, “What am I doing with my time?”
It’s not as if I’m without other resources or material comforts, you follow? I’ve been very fortunate in life, and as I lie in my bed, I’m surrounded by beautiful things. Treasured books and art objects, photographs and mementos, lovely gardens on the balcony. After many years in this particular business in this particular town, I have a rich network of friends, some only a few steps away, dozens of others whom I could reach on the phone within seconds.
So what am I doing with my time?
Steeped in this foul, self-critical mood I lie back and close my eyes, trying to empty my head of all thought. It’s late, time to sleep, so I determine to focus on that empty space in my consciousness and try to drift off. But images begin to come to me, infiltrating that darkness. Soft, sensuous images of a time very early in my life when things were so much simpler, when my options for entertainment couldn’t be counted on a scale from 1 to 97.
I’M ON THE PORCH of our little house on Cat Island in the Bahamas. It’s the end of the day and evening is coming on, turning the sky and the sea to the west of us a bright burnt orange, and the sky and the sea to the east of us a cool blue that deepens to purple and then to black. In the gathering darkness, in the coolness of our porch, my mother and father sit and fan the smoke from green palm leaves they’re burning to shoo away
the mosquitoes and the sand flies. And as she did so often when I was small, my sister Teddy takes me in her arms to rock me to sleep. While she’s rocking me in her arms, she too is fanning the smoke that comes from the big pot of green leaves being burned, and she fans the smoke around me as I try to go to sleep in her arms.
That’s the way the evenings always were on Cat Island. In the simplicity of that setting I always knew how I was going to get through the day and how Mom and Dad were going to get through the day and how, at the end of it, we were all going to sit on this porch, fanning the smoke of the burning green leaves.
On that tiny spit of land they call Cat Island, life was indeed very simple, and decidedly preindustrial. Our cultural “authenticity” extended to having neither plumbing nor electricity, and we didn’t have much in the way of schooling or jobs, either. In a word, we were poor, but poverty there was very different from poverty in a modern place characterized by concrete. It’s not romanticizing the past to state that poverty on Cat Island didn’t preclude gorgeous beaches and a climate like heaven, cocoa plum trees and sea grapes and cassavas growing in the forest, and bananas growing wild.
Cat Island is forty-six miles long and three miles wide, and even as a small child I was free to roam anywhere. I climbed trees by myself at four and five years old and six and seven years old. I would get attacked by wasps, and I would go home with both eyes closed from having been stung on the face over and over. I would be crying and hollering and screaming and
petrified, and my mom would take me and treat me with bush medicines from the old culture that you wouldn’t believe, and then I would venture back out and go down to the water and fish alone.
I would even go in sometimes and swim by myself. I had the confidence, because when I was very small my mother threw me in the ocean and watched without moving as I struggled to survive. She watched as I screamed, yelled, gulped, and flailed in a panic-stricken effort to stay afloat. She watched as I clawed desperately at the water, unable to manage more than a few seconds before starting to sink beneath the surface. She watched as the ocean swallowed me, second by second. Then, mercifully, my father’s hands reached under, fished me out, and handed me back up to my mother…who threw me back in again, and again and again, until she was convinced that I knew how to swim.
There were snakes on the island, but none poisonous. There were black widow spiders that were poisonous, but I doubt that my parents were fearful I would get killed by any of them. I mean, there were risks and there were hazards, but I could go anywhere, and I had myself as company.
I knew from observation that the sapodilla tree produced fruit, plump, grayish brown, soft, juicy, and delectable, at least twice a year, and that’s where the wasps’ nests were that got me unexpectedly and repeatedly. I learned early that if I got up high in a sapodilla tree, rather than crawling out on limbs to see if the fruit was ripe enough to eat, I could rattle the top branches of the tree and ripe fruit would come loose from the
weakened stems and fall to the ground. And then I could come down and pick it up and eat and get my stomach full. I would eat until I got a bellyache, and then I would get more of my mother’s bush medicine—god-awful-tasting grass weeds or bitter roots of plants whose names I’ve never known or chunks of aloe vera I would have to force myself to swallow. And then I was off again looking for cocoa plums. Or standing on the rocks by the sea and fishing with a piece of thread and a straight pin that I’d bent into a hook. I did all those things, and it was fun, because on such an island poverty wasn’t the depressing, soul-destroying force that it can be under other conditions.
But the special beauty of Cat Island wasn’t just what we had; it was also what we didn’t have. Poverty notwithstanding, I was lucky, and the reason I was lucky was that I wasn’t bombarded with contravening images and influences that really didn’t have any direct connection to my nurturing. I didn’t have to digest television—children’s shows and cartoons. I didn’t have to digest the stuff on radio and have to ask, “What are they saying? They’re talking about selling me something. Why are they selling me something? I don’t have a job.” I didn’t even have to deal with the myriad stimulations that come from the presence of mechanized vehicles. No one on the island had so much as a car or motorboat.
Now, if you take children in the modern United States that you and I are living in, they probably have a mom and a dad (or at least
one
parent), a set of grandparents possibly, and some siblings. But they’re also going to have a radio in the house, and
they’re going to have a telephone (or at least know that such a thing exists), and they’re going to know that there are television sets, and they’re going to see people on the television sets who speak just like their mom and dad speak.
And they’re going to be familiar with motion pictures too, because they’ll start going when they’re five or six. They’re going to see talking animals moving around like people. They’re going to see animals beating up on each other and slapping each other and falling down in crevices and getting up without experiencing intense pain. Some of these animals are then going to turn around and sell them breakfast cereal. These kinds of stimulations come at today’s American kids on a daily basis, but the mental and emotional apparatus for sifting through them, for processing them, for dealing with them in some meaningful way, simply isn’t there.
But children still have to try to make some sense of everything they’re bombarded with. They have to assume
something
, correctly or incorrectly, factual or otherwise. They have to encode all these distractions into the self that they’re slowly, day by day, building. Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually
constructed
by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren’t just what’s directed by our genes, and we certainly aren’t just what we’re taught. It’s what we
experience
during those early years—a smile here, a jarring sound there—that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a
new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?
In the kind of place where I grew up, what’s coming at you is the sound of the sea and the smell of the wind and your mama’s voice and the voice of your dad and the craziness of your brothers and sisters—and that’s it. That’s what you’re dealing with when you’re too young to really be counted into anything, when you’re just listening, when you’re watching the behavior of your siblings and of your mom and dad, noting how they behave and how they attend to your feedings and how they care for you when you have a pain or when the wasp stings you around your eye. What occurs when something goes wrong is that someone reaches out, someone soothes, someone protects. And as the people around you talk, you begin to recognize things that are carried on the voice. Words and behavior begin to spell out something to you. All those subtleties are what’s going on with you, and that’s
all
that’s going on with you, day in and day out.
The rain comes and you hear the sound of it on the thatched roof and you sit waiting for it to stop because you want to go outside and play marbles—that is, play with the dried seeds from the pods of certain trees that were the marbles of my day. And if it’s a Sunday, you want your mother to be able to get to the kitchen and cook the rice, because you know that you always have rice on Sunday. It’s very simple, the exposure to the stimuli; and the stimuli are fairly natural ones, you understand? Fairly natural stimuli coming out of this family moving from the morning to night, to bedtime, to sleep, and they get up
and move from morning to night again. They work in the fields growing tomatoes. (That’s what my parents did when I was young; they were tomato farmers.)
Sometimes someone comes by with fresh fish that your parents can’t put in the refrigerator because there’s no such item. There’s no freezer, either; there isn’t even electricity! So what do they do? They clean the fish, pack it in salt, and hang it in the sun so that it cures and dries to a consistency as stiff as boards of wood. And it stays there for months and months and months, hanging in the kitchen on a line, and when your mother needs to cook that fish, she puts it in water and soaks it, and then she puts it in a pot and cooks it, and it’s as terrific as ever it was when it was fresh.
On Cat Island I was stimulated, but I wasn’t bombarded. I knew how I was going to get through the day, and how Mom and Dad were going to get through the day, and how we were all going to sit on the porch at the end of the day, together, fanning the smoke from the pot of burning green leaves to shoo away the mosquitoes and the sand flies.
THERE WASN’T A PAVED road on Cat Island. There wasn’t a telephone on Cat Island. There were no stores except for a few petty shops, so my clothes were made out of the cloth of grain sacks. But Cat Island had plenty of paths. You walked pathways—trails that were there just because people had chosen a particular route as the quickest way for them to get from point A to point B. But most pathways were no more than
maybe three or four feet wide. On either side of the three or four feet things grew wild. There were weeds, yes, and bushes and trees, but flowers were almost everywhere, and they bloomed like crazy. There were summer flowers, and flowers that responded to the weather, to the temperature, and many, like the sapodilla, that were in the habit of blooming several times a year.
So for the first ten years of my life, the years before tomato farming failed and we moved to Nassau, I had the responsibility, to a large extent, of taking care of myself. Things like being stung by wasps unexpectedly even when I thought I was smart enough to dodge them or get to the fruit without disturbing the nest—and I was wrong many times!—helped me to figure out some things about survival. Now, I’m talking about six, seven years old. When I got to a place where there was danger of one kind or another, I had to make a choice. Once I knew, or sensed, that there was danger of one kind or another, I had to determine, What’s the wisdom of proceeding? Do I withdraw, do I try to go around?
There were times when I went near rock formations at the edge of the ocean where there were high cliffs along a road on the front part of the island, and I wasn’t told, but I knew by just figuring it out, that if I fell over there, there was no way to climb back, and so how would I manage? I was smart enough by then to know that I would have to swim, but where could I swim to? Where could I manage to climb up? When I walked past this place where the rocks were high, this place where I would have no chance of recovering if I jumped in or fell in the
water, I knew how far I would have to swim, and I knew damn well that I couldn’t make that much distance swimming. So what did I do?
I chose to stay as far away from that edge as I could. I didn’t need instructions or rules for that. I had a highly sharpened instinct for survival, refined by thousands of interactions with my environment.
On the other hand, I had an irresistible boyhood fascination with the dark mysteries hidden behind the things I didn’t understand. In the village of Arthur’s Town on Cat Island, there was a ditch one hundred feet long, six feet deep, dug from the sea to an inland salt pond. When a hand-hewn wooden trap was lifted, ocean water rushed through this ditch into the inland lake, where it evaporated into salt for the use of the island’s inhabitants. Since it had been dug across the roadway that ran parallel with the waterfront, the ditch was covered over with wood. Six feet deep, at the most two feet wide, the awesome, dark, claustrophobic aspect of this ditch was enough to scare away most of the children on the island. We were all regaled with stories about its properties as a death trap. But I found this ditch just up my alley, so to speak. It was my Mount Everest, and I planned to conquer it.