The Measure of a Man (22 page)

Then the reaction came. Not good.

Charley and I were disappointed, but we swallowed hard and digested the details. Finally, it came home to us that we had made a mistake in the selection of the source material. We were forced to admit that the material should have been taken not from
my
life but rather from life itself. We resolved to return to the drawing board with this new point of view.

Charley and I didn’t see much of each other over the next several months, a time spent mostly in note-gathering. Early one evening he dropped by to visit with my wife and me at our New York apartment and to report on his progress. An hour
later we shared a cab with him across town. My wife and I were on our way to the theater; Charley was on his way to somewhere else. At 97th Street and Columbus Avenue he got out. We said our goodbyes, and we never saw him again. The cancer had returned. He died on June 2, 1995.

Sometimes it seems that when crushing losses are the reality, a resistant mechanism springs into action to protect the mind from instant overload, mercifully allowing for the gradual absorption of invasive and toxic information. Charley Blackwell was no more. He had slipped into what W.E.B. Du Bois once called “that long deep and endless sleep.” Needless to say, the world we knew hung heavy in the days and months that followed.

After the magnitude of the loss had hit home and family and friends were finally able to turn the corner toward healing, I drifted back to the “material in progress.” I remember thinking of it at the time more as “material in shambles,” due to Charley’s untimely departure.

As to questions that remain standing in the face of humanity’s relentless pursuit of answers, maybe Nature arranges it to her benefit that some of us set out on journeys that can have no end. Consider, for a moment, that the amount of energy spent by human beings in pursuit of something that doesn’t exist might, in very real terms, represent a sizable chunk of the energy Nature needs to make the world go ’round. Which might also explain why—even after a lifetime of struggle—most of us never find the rainbow we promised ourselves would lead us to our pot of gold.

Charley never lived to see our dream fulfilled. The same cancer that declined to take me called him back to Nature. I don’t know why he died any more than I know why I went from being a stargazer on the beaches of Cat Island to an actor in Hollywood. But I
do
know that I’m responsible not for what happens but for what I make of it. It’s up to me to take my own measure, to claim what’s real, to answer for myself.

I’m still here, and truth be told, the compulsion to create and express is still here. Our first efforts at a one-man show met with failure, and oh, how I hate to fail. My colleague has succumbed, and to an illness that I’ve shared, which is at times doubly dispiriting. But I still dream of that final moment onstage.

Surely this must be the highest-stakes game of all. And maybe the oracles are trying to tell me that this is one I can’t win. That my survival instincts aren’t going to help me this time. That I won’t be able to charm this opponent into neutral, no matter how much drive and hard work and talent I apply. But there’s still a beating heart at the center of my being, and while there’s life…

Human life is a highly imperfect system, filled with subordinate imperfections all the way down. The only thing we know for sure is that in another eight billion years it will all be over. Our sun will have spent itself; and the day it expires, you’ll hear the crunch all over this solar system, because then everything will turn to absolute zero.

But you can’t live focused on that. You can’t hang on to that. Anyway, luckily we puny individuals have only seventy-five
or eighty-two or ninety-six years to look forward to, which is still a snap in the overall impenetrableness of time. So what we do is we stay within the context of what’s practical, what’s real, what dreams can be fashioned into reality, what values can send us to bed comfortably and make us courageous enough to face our end with character.

That’s what we’re seeking. That’s what it’s all about, you know? We’re all of us a little greedy. (Some of us are
plenty
greedy.) We’re all somewhat courageous, and we’re all considerably cowardly. We’re all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

SEARCHABLE TERMS

Acapulco, Mexico

Acting: Academy Award, Best Actor

American Negro Theatre

black actors

black filmmakers, pioneers

blacklisting and loyalty oaths

camera and “presence,”

directing by Poitier

dramatic focus, determining

inherited talents

pantomime

Poitier’s box office success

Poitier’s craft and approach to

Poitier’s early audition

Poitier’s first ambitions

Poitier’s first film

Poitier’s first theatrical role

Poitier’s janitor job in exchange for acting class

Poitier’s love of

Poitier’s mentors and teachers

Poitier’s personal standards

Poitier’s roles and congruency with principle

preparing for roles and finding character

purity of profession and power to transfix

racial barriers broken and

racially stereotyped roles

Raisin in the Sun
and acting challenges

studio contracts

values and selfhood conveyed in

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