“Good afternoon, ma’am,” I said. “I’ve come to deliver your package from the drugstore.”
“Get around to the back door where you belong,” she snapped.
“But I’m
here
. Here’s the package you ordered.” I extended the bag containing her items.
She huffed and slammed the door in my face. I just couldn’t understand what her problem was. I set the package down on
the step in front of the door and left. I didn’t think any more about it.
A couple of nights later, when I came home my brother’s house was completely dark, and the family was lying on the floor, huddled together as if they were in a state of siege. It seems the Klan had been there looking for me, and everyone in the house was terrified. Everyone except me. Being new and from a different culture, I was wide-eyed with
curiosity
, mostly at the family’s reaction. I just couldn’t get used to this strange place and this strange way of behaving.
In Nassau, while learning about myself, I had become conscious of being pigeonholed by others, and I had determined then to always aim myself toward a slot of
my
choosing. There were too many images of what I could be. Where I could go. Too many images of wonderful, accomplished, interesting black people around and about for me to feel bad about my color.
In Miami, this strange new society started coming at me with point-blank force to hammer home its long-established, nonnegotiable position on the color of skin, which declared me unworthy of human consideration, then ordered me to embrace the notion of my unworthiness. My reply was, “Who, me? Are you fucking crazy?
Me
? You’re talking to me?”
I was saying, “Hey, not only am I
not
that which you would make me. Here’s what I in fact
am
. First of all, I’m the son of a really terrific guy, Reginald James Poitier. And Evelyn Poitier, my mom, who’s a terrific woman. I have no evil designs; I’m a well-intentioned, meaningful person. I’m young, and I’m not
particularly headstrong—though I can get pretty pissed. I’m a good person, and nothing you say can undo that. You can harp on that color crap as much as you want, but because of the way I was raised, I don’t have a receptor that’s gonna take in any of that.”
Of course, over time, osmosis brings a lot of that sewage to you, and some of it does seep in, you know? But having arrived in America with a foundation that had had time to set, the Jim Crow way of life had trouble overwhelming me.
Vanity, which the dictionary says is an excess of pride, was the only way I could brace myself against the onslaught of the culture’s merciless indictment of me. With no other means at my disposal to fight off society’s intent to restrict my range of motion, to smother and suffocate me, excess was engaged to speak on my behalf. I was saying, “Okay, listen, you think I’m so inconsequential? Then try
this
on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value—to you I say, ‘I’m not talking about being
as good as
you. I hereby declare myself
better
than you.’”
Later, I would carry that theme, detached from questions of color and race, all the way into the theater world, where it would become a personal standard, applicable to creative excellence and professional competitiveness. Marlon Brando was an idol of mine, a consummate artist and one of the good guys. I aimed to be
better
than even him.
But I didn’t need anyone to torture me or deny me or coddle me or cajole me into having that kind of drive. I was born with an innate curiosity, and it took me to the damnedest places.
When I was small the world was an Eden. I woke up in the morning saying, “I’m seven and I’m free! I can walk to the ocean and I can jump in. My brothers kick my ass now and then, but that’s okay. There’s all this newness! There’s life! There’s girls! There’s that damned ditch that nearly got me killed. It’s a whole world of fascinating challenges.”
Natural threats laid the foundation, but there was always a who or a what or a condition challenging me to prove my value. Pushing, forcing, threatening me to be better. Always better. I was challenged to understand all the abuse in the world. When I got to Nassau, it was race and class and economics, a colonial system that was very hostile. So my motto was
Never leave home without a fixed commitment
. I couldn’t deal with those awesome odds either by waiting for society to someday have a change of heart or by saying, “I’m gonna be as good, one day, as you are.” My heart said, “I am already as good. In fact, I’m starting out with better material, and I am going to be better.” How do you like
them
apples?
Young blacks coming up in America were frequently subjected to parental lectures, almost all of which carried the same message: “Face this reality. You’re gonna have to be twice as good as the white folks in order to get half as much.” That was drilled into them. Bahamian lectures had another ring. “Get that education. Get out there and work. Get out there and hustle. Take whatever opportunities there are, and use them as stepping-stones.”
That’s what we were told. But when I got to the States, things changed. I had to choose to be
better
, because I didn’t feel
anything like what was demanded of me to be. Couldn’t fit the slot.
“Me? Dog shit? Listen close. Not only am I not dog shit…watch me win this race. I’m dog shit? Yeah? Watch me win.”
There was simply no slot for a kid like me in a place like Florida, so I was itching to go north, despite the fact that I had no idea just how big this country was. As a teenager who tended to run away, I had made it as far as Tampa a couple of times. But my brother had six children of his own and didn’t need the aggravation of having to go fetch me back in the middle of the night when I’d run out of money.
Then a summer kitchen job in the mountains of Georgia put me within striking distance of breaking out and away before Miami could register more damage on my psyche. I worked through the vacation months, and at the end of the summer I found myself in the Atlanta bus station with thirty-nine dollars in my pocket. So I had to decide where I was going to go and what I was going to do.
I knew that Miami wasn’t for me, because Miami designated me, by law and social custom, as being undeserving of human consideration. While waiting at that bus station, I decided to test the waters in Atlanta. I remember taking an excursion by streetcar, roaming around for hours with all my senses alert for resemblances to the Miami of my recent acquaintance. I covered both sides of the railroad tracks, but I saw nothing that would entice me to consider dropping anchor in Atlanta. Those two southern cities were too much the same in all matters that bore directly on my situation. There was simply no
room for me to be
me
. I was still running from the nightmare of Miami, looking for signs of the dreams I had left behind in more congenial places. Dreams that were holding on to me as tightly as I was holding on to them.
I soon found my way back to the bus station’s ticket window, with the inquiry, “Excuse me, please, but where’s the next bus going?”
“Chattanooga,” said the agent, his voice rumbling through the caged window of the booth. “And it leaves in five minutes.”
“How far is Chattanooga?” I asked, and he told me so many miles.
And I said, “How much is that?”
He said, “Two dollars and five cents.”
“No. Not far enough,” I said.
“Well, where do you want to go?” he pressed.
“Where’s the next bus going after that?” I asked him.
“The next bus is going to Birmingham.”
“How much is that?”
“Two forty-five.”
“No. Still not far enough. Where’s the next bus going after that?”
“The next bus is going to New York.”
And I said, “How much is that?”
And he said, “That’s eleven dollars and thirty-five cents.”
And I said, “That’s far enough.”
“Round trip?” he asked.
“No. One way.”
Most of the people in Nassau have never been to America, but still there were the myths, the tales, the stories about the country, the most enchanting of which had their roots in a legendary place called Harlem. Always Harlem. People spoke of Harlem as if it were the whole of New York City. The Apollo Theatre, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald. Harlem was the Mecca for black people in America.
So when the ticket agent said that a certain bus would be going to New York, all of the good things I’d ever heard about Harlem translated into a place that would be positively different from Florida. Florida was oppressive and Florida was mean-spirited. New York was far, far away from Florida—in miles and in promise.
So I went to New York. When I got there, my first conversation was with a well-dressed black guy from whom I sought directions on how to get to Harlem. He pointed to some steps leading down into the ground and told me to go that way. I went down those steps heading underground—and it all began. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Never in my life had I heard of such a thing! Trains running at breakneck speed under the ground! Loaded with people! Trains swooshing by one another in different directions! Under the ground? Of New York City? If this is the way one gets to Harlem, I thought, Harlem must be one hell of a place!
IT WOULD BE two years before I wandered into the American Negro Theatre, and they were two indispensable years. It’s the way of all ancient stories. The young man must go “down” in order to find the right path for going “up.” Call it the “time of ashes.” In some African tribes the young boys must cover their faces with ashes before their initiation into manhood. In certain Nordic cultures the young boys used to sit down in the ashes by the fire in the center of the lodge house until they were ready to take on their adult role. And everybody knows about Cinderella, the girl who had to tend to the cinders and do all the other lowly chores until her true identity became known.
Well, for me this time of ashes was when I learned to fight for my life, when I learned what it’s like to be tested and what it’s like to scramble. And New York City, in its mercilessness, went about testing me without regard of any kind. As is generally the case in the time of ashes, I learned to survive with little more craft than they teach kids in Sunday school. I began to learn about balancing the good and the bad in myself, about finding the place for all sorts of energies circulating within, and about discovering how all those attributes and energies fit into the natural order of things. Most of all, I began to learn how the entirety of my person melded into one fully acceptable human being. I realized that I wasn’t some Goody Two-shoes for public consumption, who kept hidden some other identity that harbored all the dark desires and deep resentments that kept popping out anyway. On the streets I developed a little mercy regarding myself as well as others, and maybe even a little wisdom.
For weeks in New York I rode those subways with a sense of wonder. I gorged myself on hotdogs and malted milkshakes. I slept on rooftops, worked in kitchens, and was close enough to at least one race riot to find myself shot in the leg and playing dead in order to avoid worse.
There were many, many close scrapes, but I was young and resilient. Often it seemed that something I could neither touch nor see—some mysterious force—had just walked me through a difficult patch or had covered my back at a crucial point. Was that something a spiritual presence? An intuitive sense? Wishful thinking?
Whatever it was, I had little time to linger over such thoughts, struggling as I was at the age of sixteen with much more immediate issues of survival.
Over a long holiday weekend I took a train to the Catskills to work as dishwasher at a famous resort. I was in an all-black group of temporary workers “imported” from New York City to beef up the hotel’s manpower. In our group was a chap named Jojo Sutton. I knew that Jojo was going to be trouble the first time I saw his eyes focus on me. For no apparent reason, there were vibrations negative enough to crinkle paper. Jojo was dark of skin, with chiseled features and haunting eyes.
My first reading was “He bears watching.” Looking back, it should have been “Avoid at all costs.” That would have been impossible, of course, since we were obligated to work at each other’s side, scraping and feeding dirty dishes into one end of a giant machine, then retrieving and stacking them by size and shape at the other end. Jojo was good on both ends, and I was past apprenticeship; so one would think we would have worked smoothly together, skill for skill. But Jojo was simply a mean and dangerous guy. To him the territory around the machine was
his
turf.
His
was the power of consequence there. I was a serf at the disposal of the emperor. Out of a sense of self-preservation, I bowed to his hallucinations with respect. I knew the long weekend would soon be over. I needed to simply hang in for the four days and get the paycheck. I concluded that Jojo, the machine, and the turf surrounding it, in combination, were all “live withable” for as long as I would have to be there.
In a small black community not far from the resort was a hoochy-cooch bar with food, music, a dance floor, and an enticing percentage of unescorted women waiting for a group of male kitchen workers to roll by about four o’clock in the afternoon in search of R&R. This mix was explosive enough without adding Jojo and his problems.
At the bottom of Jojo’s list of issues was the fact that he wasn’t much of a dancer. I wasn’t much better, but I
was
better. And how was I to know that the girl
he
liked to dance with preferred dancing with
me
?
That afternoon, after some time on the dance floor, Jojo asked me to take a walk with him. While my mind was on full alert as we walked along a deserted path in the nearby woods, instinct was screaming at me, “Be careful!” For a while Jojo made conversation about normal guy stuff. Then he segued into profiling the kind of people he didn’t like. Soon enough I started recognizing myself in his narrative. As he continued talking, I was jolted by the Jekyll and Hyde transformation I saw coming over him. As the verbal attack grew more heated and more direct, I got to wondering how best to protect myself if push came to shove. Jojo never broke his stride. His right hand simply disappeared into his right back pocket and reappeared holding a switchblade knife. The button was pushed, the blade was released, and the sweeping motion of his right hand stopped with the blade pointed inches from my chest.
I hadn’t been expecting anything good, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting
that
! The element of surprise paid off. I was scared, and Jojo noticed. The knife moved up slowly toward
my face. I flinched. In silence he savored my fear. He touched the blade to my cheek. He lowered it to my neck, where it rested on my jugular. He was like a maestro, slowly moving the knife to orchestrate my degree of terror.
“I oughta kill your ass right here,” he said. “Who the fuck’s gonna know?”
He fell silent again, his eyes still boring into me. Then he said, “You don’t think I’ll kill your ass, huh?”
I didn’t say a word.
“Go ahead, start some shit so I can show you,” he challenged.
He stepped back to give himself room in case I was dumb enough to make a move. I waited. He waited. Seconds passed. Then he abruptly turned and walked away. Thirty or so feet along, he turned back to me and said, “You watch yourself around me. You hear? You got that?”
“Yeah, I got it,” I said.
As we parted ways, I had the feeling that Jojo would always try to win by intimidation.
Years later, in psychoanalysis, I would relive that moment, wondering how far I might have gone in self-defense if we had really gotten down to blows, analyzing too the range of insecurities that might have led a character like Jojo to go through life that way.
But I had another opponent about to land on my ass—one whose brute force could bear no analysis. I was about to face my first New York winter, and I simply had no idea. Coming from a tropical island, as I did, I couldn’t comprehend what was
about to happen as the skies began to brood in November and then let loose with the white stuff starting around Christmastime. This was not an adversary I could simply stare down while trying to stay cool. This was a months-long, relentless test of endurance. I didn’t have so much as a pair of gloves. No scarf, no boots, no heavy coat—and without them I was no match for Mother Nature, not when she turned into a bitch and gave us that cold shoulder, that bony old shoulder that could literally freeze a guy’s ass off—as well as his nose, his ears, and his fingers.
That winter worked me over so bad I chose the Army as a refuge. I had to lie about my age to get in, since I was just nearing seventeen, but the service did at least get me off the rooftops, and it gave me three meals a day and a warm place to sleep. But I had no more tolerance for military discipline than I did for southern Jim Crow. Which is why, in 1944, I was in custody of the U.S. Army military police, charged with assaulting a senior officer. Which is why I was thrown into the psycho ward of Mason General Hospital on Long Island, New York, and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation by a team of head-shrinkers to determine whether or not electroshock treatments should be administered to my brain.
From all indications, according to information supplied to the shrinks by the MPs, something had gone wrong in my head. Prominent in the Army’s version was the assumption that the offending act was premeditated. They saw it as designed to appear lightning quick and seemingly impulsive but
suspected that it was, in fact, a painstakingly calculated intent to do bodily harm.
In any case, there I was. Looking smack into the face of a court-martial that could effectively lock me away for twenty-five years if, in the end, I was declared to have been of sound mind when I threw a massive wooden chair at that senior officer’s head.
When the raw truth surfaced, it was revealed that the Army was right in their assumption. The act
was
premeditated. Yes.
And
calculatedly designed. Yes. But
not
to do harm. My scenario called for the chair to miss that officer by inches. And in fact it did. It went crashing through the huge bay window that stretched from wall to wall behind his desk, exactly as I had planned. My overall purpose was aimed at something other than that officer’s head. An excuse was my immediate objective. My actions were a shameful attempt to establish an excuse that would allow me to eventually walk away from obligations I had freely and solemnly assumed.
Simply put, I wanted to get the hell out of the Army. Nothing more lofty, nothing less worthy. But within a few days’ time, I could see that throwing that chair was shaping up to have been a very bad call, a mistake I would come to wish I had never, ever made. On the drawing board of my mind, it had been laid out as the first in a series of events that would deliver me from the mess I had gotten into. The Army wasn’t what I had expected—we were ill at ease with each other, didn’t like each other one bit—so…I opted to move on. Hence the “premeditated,” “painstakingly designed” plan was
hatched in my head, pretty much as charged. What I devised was a new approach to an old procedure for bucking out of the Army by pretending to be nuts. According to Army tradition, crazy folks had to be separated from the herd and ultimately sent away—in the best interest of the herd.
The dramatic hurling of the chair was the act chosen to initiate that process. Which it did. But another key ingredient lay at the heart of this mistake. It had a hand in the sculpting, shaping, molding, timing, editing of everything that added up to the total event, including the selection of chair-throwing as an opener. That key ingredient was inside of me. A weakness. A flaw that resided deep within. And on the afternoon the chair flew, my behavior, to my sorrow, spoke directly to the absence of character. To the presence of weakness. To the flaw that sometimes operated independent of my better judgment.
I had access to alternative pathways out of the Army. Why did I choose the approach that was a huge mistake? Was it more macho? Yes. Was it more exciting? Yes. Was it more dangerous? Yes. But most of all, it was far more irresistible to demons inside me whose existence I hadn’t yet become aware of. Oh, I suspected even then that my choice was lacking in character. But I went for it anyway. And I didn’t just suspect, I knew
for sure
, that my choice was of dubious value as a tactical advantage. But I went for it anyway. Reaching, it seemed, to grab hold of an intangible too complicated for the understanding of my teen years.
The alternate pathway out of the Army promised none of the charismatic power of my favored option. In no way was it a
testosterone-kicker. It was the truth, and it was therefore dull. It was plain. It wasn’t seductive. It didn’t boogie. No euphoric highs or valley lows. No wooden chairs. No smashed bay windows. As so often happens, the absence of room for kicking the dog and disturbing the peace caused dogs to be kicked and the peace to be broken.
What transpired between the Army and me over the torturous months that followed was fascinating, bittersweet, and somewhat scary. Many of the go-rounds between the head psychiatrist and me had a hold-your-breath, cat-and-mouse quality to them. He and I each took as much as we gave. He was white, looked to be about mid-thirties, had serious eyes and an easy smile. He got me to focus on a me inside of me that no one knew, including me. In turn I taught him stuff he hadn’t known, including things he’ll never forget. From him I learned that on some occasions it’s possible to see more than meets the eye. In some small yet meaningful way we were teachers to each other.
BY THE TIME I was eighteen years old, I was back on the street in New York, struggling once again to survive on a dishwasher’s pay.
If I could have pulled together the scratch, I would have headed back to Nassau—that’s how big and fierce the prospect of another winter loomed over me. I even wrote directly to President Roosevelt for a loan, hitting him up for the hundred dollars I figured it would take. If I had succeeded in that effort, I probably would have spent my life at some low-level job
taking care of tourists, spending Sundays sitting on a rock outside Nassau town trying to catch me a big fish. So even in my lack of luck, once again I was very lucky.
One day shortly after my discharge, as I was scanning the want-ads for dishwasher openings, an article on the theatrical page of the
Amsterdam News
, a New York paper, caught my attention. I was between jobs and my pockets were nearly empty—so empty, in fact, that if no dishwashing position was available, I was ready to glom on to any kind of work that a black kid with no education might qualify for.
The page of want-ad boxes faced the theatrical page, on which sat an article with a heading that read
ACTORS WANTED
. The gist of the article was that a theater group called the American Negro Theatre was in need of actors for its next production. My mind got to spinning. My eyes bounced back and forth between the want-ad page and the theatrical page.
“What the hell,” I thought. “I’ve tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted—why not try actors wanted?” I figured that I could do the work. Acting didn’t sound any more difficult than washing dishes or parking cars. And the article didn’t say the job required any particular kind of training. But when I went in and was auditioned on the spot, the man in charge quickly let me know—and in no uncertain terms—that I was misguided in my assumptions. I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off, I had a thick, singsong Bahamian accent.