I got to his camp at about two o’clock one afternoon. Time was running out, the fight was not more than three days away, and the atmosphere in the camp was, at once, listless and electric. Nilon looked as though he had not slept and would not sleep for days, and everyone else rather gave the impression that they wished they could—except for three handsome Negro ladies, related, I supposed, to Mrs. Liston, who sat, rather self-consciously, on the porch of the largest building on the grounds. They may have felt as I did, that training camps are like a theater before the curtain goes up, and if you don’t have any function in it, you’re probably in the way.
Liston, as we all know, is an enormous man, but surprisingly trim. I had already seen him work out, skipping rope to a record of “Night Train,” and, while he wasn’t nearly, for me, as moving as Patterson skipping rope in silence, it was still a wonderful sight to see. The press has really maligned Liston very cruelly, I think. He is far from stupid; is not, in fact, stupid at all. And, while there is a great deal of violence in him, I sensed no cruelty at all. On the contrary, he reminded me of big, black men I have known who acquired the reputation of being tough in order to conceal the fact that they weren’t hard. Anyone who cared to could turn them into taffy.
Anyway, I liked him, liked him very much. He sat opposite me at the table, sideways, head down, waiting for the blow: for Liston knows, as only the inarticulately suffering can, just how inarticulate he is. But let me clarify that: I say “suffering” because it seems to me that he has suffered a great deal. It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in the eyes—a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals. And when I say “inarticulate,” I really do not mean to suggest that he does not know how to talk. He is inarticulate in the way we all are when more has happened to us than we know how to express; and inarticulate in a particularly Negro way—he has a long tale to tell which no one wants to hear. I said, “I can’t ask you any questions because everything’s been asked. Perhaps I’m only here, really, to say that I wish you well.” And this was true, even though I wanted Patterson to win. Anyway, I’m glad I said it, because he looked at me then, really for the first time, and he talked to me for a little while.
And what had hurt him most, somewhat to my surprise, was not the general press reaction to him, but the Negro reaction. “Colored people,” he said, with great sorrow, “say they don’t want their children to look up to me. Well, they ain’t teaching their children to look up to Martin Luther King, either.” There was a pause. “I wouldn’t be no bad example if I was up there. I could tell a lot of those children what they need to know—because—I passed that way. I could make them listen.” And he spoke a little of what he would like to do for young Negro boys and girls, trapped in those circumstances which so nearly defeated him and Floyd, and from which neither can yet be said to have recovered. “I tell you one thing, though,” he said, “if I was up there, I wouldn’t bite my tongue.” I could certainly believe that. And we discussed the segregation issue, and the role in it of those prominent Negroes who find him so distasteful. “I would never,” he said, “go against my brother—we got to learn to stop fighting among our own.” He lapsed into silence again. “They said they didn’t want me to have the title. They didn’t say that about Johansson.” “They” were the Negroes. “They ought to know why I got some of the bum raps I got.” But he was not suggesting that they were all bum raps. His wife came over, a very pretty woman, seemed to gather in a glance how things were going, and sat down. We talked for a little while of matters entirely unrelated to the fight, and then it was time for his workout, and I left. I felt terribly ambivalent, as many Negroes do these days, since we are all trying to decide, in one way or another, which attitude, in our terrible American dilemma, is the most effective: the disciplined sweetness of Floyd or the outspoken intransigence of Liston. If I was up there, I wouldn’t bite my tongue. And Liston is a man aching for respect and responsibility. Sometimes we grow into our responsibilities and sometimes, of course, we fail them.
I left for the fight full of a weird and violent depression, which I traced partly to fatigue—it had been a pretty grueling time—partly to the fact that I had bet more money than I should have—on Patterson—and partly to the fact that I had had a pretty definitive fight with someone with whom I had hoped to be friends. And I was depressed about Liston’s bulk and force and his twenty-five-pound weight advantage. I was afraid that Patterson might lose, and I really didn’t want to see that. And it wasn’t that I didn’t like Liston. I just felt closer to Floyd.
I was sitting between Norman Mailer and Ben Hecht. Hecht felt about the same way that I did, and we agreed that if Patterson didn’t get “stopped,” as Hecht put it, “by a baseball bat,” in the very beginning—if he could carry Liston for five or six rounds—he might very well hold the title. We didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to the preliminaries—or I didn’t; Hecht did; I watched the ballpark fill with people and listened to the vendors and the jokes and the speculations; and watched the clock.
From my notes: Liston entered the ring to an almost complete silence. Someone called his name, he looked over, smiled, and winked. Floyd entered, and got a hand. But he looked terribly small next to Liston, and my depression deepened.
My notes again: Archie Moore entered the ring, wearing an opera cape. Cassius Clay, in black tie, and as insolent as ever. Mickey Allen sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When Liston was introduced, some people booed—they cheered for Floyd, and I think I know how this made Liston feel. It promised, really, to be one of the worst fights in history.
Well, I was wrong; it was scarcely a fight at all, and I can’t but wonder who on earth will come to see the rematch, if there is one. Floyd seemed all right to me at first. He had planned for a long fight, and seemed to be feeling out his man. But Liston got him with a few bad body blows, and a few bad blows to the head. And no one agrees with me on this, but at one moment, when Floyd lunged for Liston’s belly—looking, it must be said, like an amateur, wildly flailing—it seemed to me that some unbearable tension in him broke, that he lost his head. And, in fact, I nearly screamed, “Keep your head, baby!” but it was really too late. Liston got him with a left, and Floyd went down. I could not believe it. I couldn’t hear the count, and though Hecht said, “It’s over,” and picked up his coat and left, I remained standing, staring at the ring, and only conceded that the fight was really over when two other boxers entered the ring. Then I wandered out of the ballpark, almost in tears. I met an old colored man at one of the exits, who said to me, cheerfully, “I’ve been robbed,” and we talked about it for a while. We started walking through the crowds, and A. J. Liebling, behind us, tapped me on the shoulder and we went off to a bar, to mourn the very possible death of boxing, and to have a drink, with love, for Floyd.
(1963)
Sidney Poitier
THE FIRST TIME I MET SIDNEY, I walked up to him at an airport. He didn’t know me, but I admired him very much, and I told him so. I’ve never done that with anyone, before or since, and Sidney looked at me as though he thought I was crazy, but he was very nice about it. Some years later, I really met him. We were both in Philadelphia. He was doing A Raisin in the Sun, and I was working with Kazan in Sweet Bird of Youth, and we hit it off.
Then, of course, years passed. Things happened to Sidney; things happened to me. All artists who are friends have a strange relationship to each other; each knows what the other is going through, even though you may see each other only briefly, at functions, at benefits, at airports; and this is especially true, I think, for black artists in this country, and especially over the last several years. It’s ironical indeed, but it’s only the black artists in this country—and it’s only beginning to change now—who have been called upon to fulfill their responsibilities as artists and, at the same time, insist on their responsibilities as citizens. As Ruby Dee once said to me, when we were working on the Christmas boyco
tt campaign following the murder of the four little girls in Birmingham, “Soon, there won’t be enough colored people to go around.” She wasn’t joking—I might add that that statement has, today, a rather sinister ring.
As the years passed, and given the system in which all American artists, and especially all American actors, work, I began to tremble for Sidney. I must state candidly that I think most Hollywood movies are a thunderous waste of time, talent, and money, and I rarely see them. For example, I didn’t think Blackboard Jungle was much of a movie—I know much more than that about the public-school system of New York—but I thought that Sidney was beautiful, vivid, and truthful in it. He somehow escaped the film’s framework, so much so that until today, his is the only performance I remember. Nor was I overwhelmed by Cry, the Beloved Country, but Sidney’s portrait, brief as it was, of the young priest was a moving miracle of indignation. That was the young Sidney, and I sensed that I was going to miss him, in exactly the same way I will always miss the young Marlon of Truck-line Cafe and Streetcar Named Desire. But then, I miss the young Jimmy Baldwin, too.
All careers, if they are real careers—and there are not as many of these occurring as one might like to think—are stormy and dangerous, with turning points as swift and dizzying as hairbreadth curves on mountain roads. And I think that America may be the most dangerous country in the world for artists—whatever creative form they may choose. That would be all right if it were also exhilarating, but most of the time, it isn’t. It’s mostly sweat and terror. This is because the nature of the society isolates its artists so severely for their vision; penalizes them so mercilessly for their vision and endeavor; and the American form of recognition, fame and money, can be the most devastating penalty of all. This is not the artist’s fault, though I think that the artist will have to take the lead in changing this state of affairs.
The isolation that menaces all American artists is multiplied a thousand times, and becomes absolutely crucial and dangerous, for all black artists. “Know whence you came,” Sidney once said to me, and Sidney, his detractors to the contrary, does know whence he came. But it can become very difficult to remain in touch with all that nourishes you when you have arrived at Sidney’s eminence and are in the interesting, delicate, and terrifying position of being part of a system that you know you have to change.
Let me put it another way: I wish that both Marlon and Sidney would return to the stage, but I can certainly see why they don’t. Broadway is almost as expensive as Hollywood, is even more hazardous, is at least as incompetent, and the scripts, God knows, aren’t any better. Yet I can’t but feel that this is a great loss, both for the actor and the audience.
I will always remember seeing Sidney in A Raisin in the Sun. It says a great deal about Sidney, and it also says, negatively, a great deal about the regime under which American artists work, that that play would almost certainly never have been done if Sidney had not agreed to appear in it. Sidney has a fantastic presence on the stage, a dangerous electricity that is rare indeed and lights up everything for miles around. It was a tremendous thing to watch and to be made a part of. And one of the things that made it so tremendous was the audience. Not since I was a kid in Harlem, in the days of the Lafayette Theatre, had I seen so many black people in the theater. And they were there because the life on that stage said something to them concerning their own lives. The communion between the actors and the audience was a real thing; they nourished and re-created each other. This hardly ever happens in the American theater. And this is a much more sinister fact than we would like to think. For one thing, the reaction of that audience to Sidney and to that play says a great deal about the continuing and accumulating despair of the black people in this country, who find nowhere any faint reflection of the lives they actually lead. And it is for this reason that every Negro celebrity is regarded with some distrust by black people, who have every reason in the world to feel themselves abandoned.
I ought to add, for this also affects any estimate of any black star, that the popular culture certainly does not reflect the truth concerning the lives led by white people, either; but white Americans appear to be under the compulsion to dream, whereas black Americans are under the compulsion to awaken. And this fact is also sinister.
I am not a television fan, either, and I very much doubt that future generations will be vastly edified by what goes on on the American television screen. TV commercials drive me up the wall. And yet, as long as there is that screen and there are those commercials, it is important to hip the American people to the fact that black people also brush their teeth and shave and drink beer and smoke cigarettes—though it may take a little more time for the American people to recognize that we also shampoo our hair. It is of the utmost importance that a black child see on that screen someone who looks like him. Our children have been suffering from the lack of identifiable images for as long as our children have been born.
Yet, there’s a difficulty, there’s a rub, and it’s precisely the nature of this difficulty that has brought Sidney under attack. The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. It considers that its job is to entertain the American people. Their concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics, and to watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. And the black face, truthfully reflected, is not only no part of this dream, it is antithetical to it. And this puts the black performer in a rather grim bind. He knows, on the one hand, that if the reality of a black man’s life were on that screen, it would destroy the fantasy totally. And on the other hand, he really has no right not to appear, not only because he must work, but also for all those people who need to see him. By the use of his own person, he must smuggle in a reality that he knows is not in the script. A celebrated black TV actor once told me that he did an entire show for the sake of one line. He felt that he could convey something very important with that one line. Actors don’t write their scripts, and they don’t direct them. Black people have no power in this industry at all. Furthermore, the actor may be offered dozens of scripts before anything even remotely viable comes along.
Sidney is now a superstar. This must baffle a great many people, as, indeed, it must baffle Sidney. He is an extraordinary actor, as even his detractors must admit, but he’s been that for a long time, and that doesn’t really explain his eminence. He’s also extraordinarily attractive and winning and virile, but that could just as easily have worked against him. It’s something of a puzzle. Speaking now of the image and not of the man, it has to do with a quality of pain and danger and some fundamental impulse to decency that both titillates and reassures the white audience. For example, I’m glad I didn’t write The Defiant Ones, but I liked Sidney in it very much. And I suppose that his performance has something to do with what I mean by smuggling in reality. I remember one short scene, in close-up, when he’s talking about his wife, who wants him to “be nice.” Sidney’s face, when he says, “She say, ‘Be nice. Be nice,’” conveys a sorrow and humiliation rarely to be seen on our screen. But white people took that film far more seriously than black people did. When Sidney jumps off the train at the end because he doesn’t want to leave his buddy, the white liberal people downtown were much relieved and joyful. But when black people saw him jump off the train, they yelled, “Get back on the train, you fool.” That didn’t mean that they hated Sidney: they just weren’t going for the okey-doke. And if I point out that they were right, it doesn’t mean that Sidney was wrong. That film was made to say something to white people. There was really nothing it could say to black people—except for the authority of Sidney’s performance.
Black people have been robbed of everything in this country, and they don’t want to be robbed of their artists. Black people particularly disliked Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which I made a point of seeing, because they felt that Sidney was, i
n effect, being used against them. I’m now on very delicate ground, and I know it, but I can’t really duck this issue, because it’s been raised so often. I can’t pretend that the movie meant anything to me. It seemed a glib, good-natured comedy in which a lot of able people were being wasted. But, I told myself, this movie wasn’t made for you. And I really don’t know the people for whom it was made. I moved out of their world, insofar as this is ever possible, a long time ago. I remember the cheerful English lady in a wine shop in London who had seen this movie and adored it and adored the star. She was a nice lady, and certainly not a racist, and it would simply have been an unjust waste of time to get angry with her for knowing so little about black people. The hard fact is that most people, of whatever color, don’t know much about each other, because they don’t care much about each other. Would the image projected by Sidney cause that English lady to be friendly to the next West Indian who walked into her shop? Would it cause her to think, in any real way, of the reality, the presence, the simple human fact of black people? Or was Sidney’s black face simply, now, a part of a fantasy—the fantasy of her life, precisely—which she would never understand? This is a question posed by the communications media of the twentieth century, and it is not a question anyone can answer with authority. One is gambling on the human potential of an inarticulate and unknown consciousness—that of the people. This consciousness has never been of such crucial importance in the world before. But one knows that the work of the world gets itself done in very strange ways, by means of very strange instruments, and takes a very long time. And I also thought that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may prove, in some bizarre way, to be a milestone, because it is really quite impossible to go any further in that particular direction. The next time, the kissing will have to start.
The Cross of Redemption Page 23