Telling myself I would probably lose took the edge off being afraid to lose. “Prepare for the worst; hope for the best.” I did that a lot. That was the credo that enabled me to get from crisis to crisis.
Survival pressed me into being more of a serious fellow than I would have liked. But not to the complete exclusion of
some
delight and
some
joy. Only in the Bahamas, however, was delight taken fully, without reservation.
A survival tactic that worked well for me was one I had gotten from my mother: “Charm them, son,” she said, “into neutral.” Being charming bought me time by allowing me to at least temporarily deflect the jabs of a threatening society.
You can see, within the context of how I lived and how I was beginning to work out a relationship between myself and this complex place, that I wasn’t free to indulge totally in delights. There
were
delights; there
were
indulgences. But I never lost sight of the fact that I had to cover my back, that I was always onstage.
Society had created laws to keep me at a distance, or out of sight altogether. Learning to survive in that often-hostile world was trial-and-error, step-by-step; and just as when I was learning to pick fruit from the sapodilla trees. I often got stung.
“Oh, so that’s how
that
works,” I would realize. So my closet is full of encounters and mistakes and tools and lessons learned truly the hard way.
After I got out of the Army and started at the American Negro Theatre, I was more of an observer than most. I was from a black culture in the Caribbean, but it was wonderful being a part of the black culture of New York. Life had another rhythm there. Boundaries were emotional and physical, but they didn’t confine the spirit. There were so many places where one could find welcome and ease. Delight was plentiful. And fully taken by many, as far as I could tell from conversations overheard and behavior observed.
I was, however, also involved in white society. That’s where I went to work. That’s where the movie houses were, for the most part. That’s where 42nd Street was. I was always going into that world. The lights of Broadway kept drawing me. On a Saturday night you got dressed and you went downtown, you know?—drawn by the busyness of it. You just walked around and—well, you got addicted to the electricity.
There was a multitude of things taken for granted by the city’s longtime residents that had to be learned, practiced, rehearsed. Like depositing a nickel and dialing a public pay-phone—though at the time I learned that I didn’t know one solitary person in the whole city, much less anyone who had a telephone. Learning street names and signs. Learning subway and bus routes. Learning where I was welcome and where I was not. Learning to listen harder, look deeper and further beyond that which first meets the eye. Especially since hustlers and pimps sometimes look like doctors and lawyers, no less than doctors and lawyers sometimes operate like hustlers and pimps.
The workaday heads of families—blue-collar and professional, downtown and in Harlem—had to become as readable for me as their Bahamian counterparts had in the city of Nassau. Only quicker in this American city, where time itself seemed to be a currency—the only kind I would have enough of.
By the time I had reached my early twenties, I had fought many battles, lost many wars, and lived many lives (unprepared for each of them). Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play. And nowhere along the roads I traveled can I recall
ever hearing the word “outsider” applied to me. I had for years considered myself an old hand at the game of staying alive. But with failure walking in my shadow every minute, waiting for the misstep that could derail my whole existence, “survivor” seemed to me a more appropriate label under which my life should be filed.
Over time, however, I began to notice the frequency with which “outsider” was applied to others. The term began to resonate with me, causing me to wonder who I was really, at the center of myself. Eventually, I came to see myself in the outsider, and the outsider in me. I knew that outsider and survivor often work as partners, but they’re not twins.
What was it about outsiders, I wondered, that attracted the curiosity of others? What made such personalities tick? What were the forces driving them—forces that kept them intact and in motion, moving to the beat of their own drum, no matter what? Was theirs a way of life rooted in sacrifice and challenge in defense of nobler purposes and higher values? Or was it a lifestyle of out-of-control appetites in a materialistic environment? Were outsiders simply trespassers, obliged by the nature of their lives to be constantly on the alert, known as “one of those” but never as “one of us”?
For me as a young man, the most relevant question was. How might such an outsider expect his life to unfold? What were the penalties? What beauties occurred and what scars resulted from all those times when a life-altering situation suddenly jumped in his face, blocked his path, issued a threat, or laid down a challenge? Daring him to pass through if he were
foolish enough to think he had the stuff to do so. “You gotta get by me, if survival is what you’re after. So suit up, Mr. Outsider. To get where you think you want to go, you have five minutes to become a flesh-and-blood person walking in shoes you’ve never even tried on.
But first you’ve got to outmaneuver me
.”
Only in my sixties did I fully absorb my outsider status and begin to settle into some kind of comfort with it. I’d been on the fringes for fifty-odd years whether I knew it or not, so at last I accepted the likelihood that I would
always
be an outsider.
I live in Beverly Hills now, but I’m still an outsider there. And Hollywood let me know my place from the beginning. Back at Columbia in the early days I was doing a picture called
All the Young Men
. Cast and crew combined were close to a hundred people, and I was the only black person on the set. I qualified hands down as the only black person on the set. I qualified hands down as the quintessential outsider. Accordingly, I felt very much as if I were representing fifteen, eighteen million people with every move I made.
One guy in particular, an electrical grip, took great delight in asking the cinematographer if he wanted to use a tiny spotlight to highlight my eyes. Whenever the cinematographer said yes, the grip would shout across the soundstage for one to be fetched by his subordinates. The N word was a nickname for that particular spotlight, and this guy used it with relish.
Years later, Arthur Ashe made reference in his book to the many times in his professional life when his response to similar situations wasn’t his
natural
response, but rather the
calculated
response required of someone walking on the edge. Johnny
Johnson of
Ebony
magazine and Berry Gordy, Jr., of Motown have spoken of the same experience. Long-term outsiders know that struggling on the edge can be beneficial in ways more far-reaching than the personal reward any individual outsider might reap. Ashe, as a black man in a white sport; became an ambassador for this country. When he went to South Africa with the U.S. Tennis Association, he had to be “accommodated”; he had to be dealt with. Outsiders know that their struggle is being watched. Silently, often dangerously, they bear witness.
In the early fifties I made the rounds of every casting office in New York City, and I would walk through and stick my head in and say hello, and the secretaries and the receptionists and even the agents themselves got to know me.
It was in 1954 that a guy from the New York office of
MGM
called and said, “We’re doing a film, and we’re looking for some young actors.”
I said, “How young?”
“Well, you know, it’s gonna be high school.”
I said, “Oh, yes, I know some guys.” I automatically eliminated myself because I was about twenty-seven years old at the time.
I gave them a list of these actors, and they were in touch with them, but they called me back and asked if I would stop in for a test. Well, we did the test, and they sent it to California, and Richard Brooks, the director, was interested. Then they looked at my other pictures, whatever else I had done, and lo and behold, they offered me the part.
Now in New York City, as a black actor in the theater, there weren’t but so many things coming my way. As a matter of fact, Broadway had almost nothing for a black man. Over a period of years there was
Lost in the Stars
and a play called
Deep Are the Roots. Porgy and Bess
and a few other musical presentations were in the repertoire, but with all the black actors and singers and dancers available in New York City, trying for careers in the theater, there wasn’t enough work to fill a thimble, as my mother used to say. Naturally, there were those of us for whom that didn’t sit right in terms of fairness.
I mean, in those days, there would be forty-odd plays on Broadway, but none having to do with
our
culture,
our
community,
our
lives. We used to petition the Actors’ Equity Association, and we would try to raise the question of more employment opportunities for us, but those of us who petitioned wound up being blacklisted. I was one of the young black actors who became persona non grata, charged with being a troublemaker.
The head of the Negro Actors Guild was a man named Leigh Whipper, whom I considered to be in cahoots with the very forces that were trying to keep us out of sight and out of involvement and out of participation. One day, on 125th Street at 7th Avenue, I ran into Mr. Whipper as he came out of a little tobacco store on the northwest corner of the intersection. He spotted me, walked right up, and started chastising me about my friends, meaning my leftwing friends. Then he got personal.
Whipper felt that we blacks should be accommodating and take whatever the system was able to give. This guy was a lot
older than I was, so I didn’t say anything disrespectful to him; I just listened to what he said. He was blowing off his steam and getting hotter under the collar, and then he said. “Look at this, look at this.” He opened his coat and there was a gun stuck in the waistband of his pants, and he said that he would use it on me and all my friends if we fucked with him. But I wasn’t a fuck-wither, you know?
So I just kept my cool, and I let him blow. And when he was finished dressing me down and appeared satisfied that he had put me in my place, he walked away. But what he was telling me wasn’t new. I mean, as young black actors we all knew that he was rabidly against the way we saw things.
Well, that was the background, mind you, against which I got this particular job offer from
MGM
.
I went out to California to do the movie
Blackboard Jungle
. I went to the wardrobe fitting. I did all the necessary preliminaries, and I met with the cast. We did the first reading and were scheduled to start work in four or five days.
Then I got a call from the front office, from one of the studio lawyers. He said, “Could you come up? I’d like to talk to you for a second.”
I said, “Sure.”
I went up to the front office to meet this man, a man I didn’t know from Adam, and he said to me, “You know, we’ve been told that you know some people who are questionable characters.”
“What people are you talking about?” I asked, though I knew instantly what he meant.
Then he came clean and said, “Paul Robeson. Canada Lee.”
These, of course, were some of the most stand-up people in those days for things racial, and I was proud to be associated with them.
I said, “So what is it that you want from me?”
He said, “Well, we need you to sign a loyalty oath.”
And I said, “What am I supposed to do by signing the oath? I must swear what?” It drove me wild that these men could see red but couldn’t see black. That was galling enough. But what also appalled me was that I was being accused of being sympathetic toward, respectful of, even admiring of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee—men I
did
respect tremendously! How could I
not
admire men of such courage and integrity? Robeson had come to my house and played with my children, which filled me with pride. I got to know him well enough that he became concerned about me, urging me to be careful in my association with him.
Well, this studio lawyer—it seemed to me he didn’t fully believe in what he was doing. I think he was ashamed of himself, because I sensed that he was trying to disassociate himself a little bit from what he was asking of me.
I held my ground and said, “Well, I’ll have to think about it.”
He said, “Okay. You think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I left the office knowing full well that I would be heading back to New York within the week, because nothing in the world was more offensive to me than what he was asking. Here I am in a culture that denies me my personhood. I’m taking the Jim Crow car in all trains below the Mason-Dixon line.
I live in a city in which I’ve been rebuffed at the doors of many restaurants, a city where Josephine Baker gets turned away and barred from fashionable nightclubs. I’m living with the constant reminder that the law of this land once declared me to be three-fifths of a human being, and that only one hundred years earlier the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court had declared people of my race to be “so inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, every attempt I make to articulate myself as otherwise is met with resistance, and here this guy is saying to me, “We want you to swear your loyalty.”
To what
I wanted to know.
Okay, I went back to rehearsal and Richard Brooks asked me what had happened.
I said, “Nothing.” I said, “The guy’s gonna call me tomorrow.”
Brooks didn’t say anything more, and the next day I went in to work, and there’d been no phone call. The third day I went to work, rehearsing, getting ready, and still there was no phone call.