The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  Cruelty was present in those acts, as was indifference. Was pleasure also in that mix? I can’t say for sure. Maybe it was, and I edited out that awareness. Nor do I remember being the least bit impressed, at the time, by the ingenious architectural designs of those miraculous creations. Frogs. Birds. Lizards. Chickens. Fish. Insects. Not for one single, fucking moment did it enter my head. Or was I editing again? No. I don’t think so.

  It appears that we are all killers of one kind or another and that life begins in the darkness of a total ignorance that is peeled away slowly, little by little. What little we know eventually, we learn bit by bit. That sort of understanding wasn’t likely to have been present in my earliest memories. Unless…? Yes, unless everything I was ever to know was already there, lying layers deep in the darkness of my ignorance, waiting for layer after layer to be peeled away before the light of my memory could embrace it.

  No evidence has surfaced in my adult recollections to support any notion that such a process lies beneath life’s experiences. On the other hand, if by chance that notion is on the mark and the process is entirely true, then my earliest memories are still holding many secrets. Many answers.

  Answers to questions like these: Is all that we’ve learned all that we know? If not, how much “knowing” do we possess that wasn’t learned? If it’s a substantial amount, how did we come to possess that which we didn’t learn? Was the subconscious being fed by another source? Or was all the info simply prepackaged when the sperm hit the egg?

  There are teenagers by the millions who could swear quite truthfully to having never, under any circumstances, stolen anything. Not me. If I had made that claim at the age of twelve, I would have perjured myself. By thirteen, other symbols of innocence had bitten the dust, and I was taking giant strides toward becoming a full-fledged rogue. All that after just two and a half years out there in that world at large. How much of my lying, cheating, and stealing might have been due, on the one hand, to the vibrating excitement that living on the edge can sometimes generate in the blood? On the other hand, how much might have been due to external contradictions I wasn’t yet old enough to understand? Were the controls of my life not in my power as I had thought?

  And if not, who or what could have been at those controls? Luck? Providence? Randomness? Nature’s design?

  Curiosity is one thing; wisdom is another. Maybe neither can fully cover the territory. Maybe one is meant to drive us, the other to beckon us. It’s a question or an answer, boldly stated or subtlty implied, that gets me out of bed every morning. Curiosity is definitely a part of whatever energy brought me to where I am, good or bad. But wherever it is I am, it’s for damn sure not a place of wisdom. I find myself, at this time in my life, no less challenged, no less plagued, no less intrigued, by what I still don’t know.

  Questions about my father, for instance, still haunt me. I’ve been led to believe, by the accounts of surviving contemporaries, that he was a bit of a rogue in his time.

  “Reggie could hold his own with the best,” said one old guy with a weather-beaten face.

  “First-class rascal, first-class rogue,” another chuckled.

  “Know a couple old ladies still living who could tell you about your pa,” volunteered a third, whose wizened eyes had held me locked in a long, level gaze.

  I’ve plied those old buddies of Dad’s with questions in an effort to see my father through their eyes. And I’ve compared that picture to the one drawn by the dictionary’s description of a rogue: “a dishonest, knavish person; scoundrel; a playfully mischievous person; scamp; a tramp or vagabond.”

  The dictionary’s version of a rogue misses my father by a mile. His old buddies’ version speaks of behavior in a time I never knew. Was he a good man? A loving father? Yes, I think so. But he was other things as well, and now I must try to know him in full for all that he was in the time of his life.

  A seriously flawed man and a loving father are often one and the same person. In some cultures, where “faithful husbands” are anything but monogamous, a highly specific definition as to what constitutes fidelity has allowed men to escape condemnation. My father, thanks to that narrowest of definitions, was an escapee in the culture of Cat Island. So was the local priest. Lots of farmers. Loads of fishermen. Schoolteachers, shopkeepers, house-builders, and well-diggers. All declared “faithful husbands” by a definition with roots in ancient cultures whose wives and mothers had no say. Handed down through thousands of years, picking up strength along the way, that definition has left room for mistresses, open affairs on the side, even polygamy. That narrowest of definitions has declared a faithful husband to be one who can be depended upon to provide for his wife and children. Any man who has met that narrow test has been beyond reproach for any other behavior resulting from uncontrolled drives and passions.

  By that one-sided and far too generous definition, my father, along with millions of others since the dawn of time, was granted forgiveness never earned, never deserved.

  I’ve wrestled with questions about my father’s character in part because I’m still wrestling with my own. And that battle has taught me that if the image one holds of one’s self contains elements that don’t square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be.

  A few years ago I was required to undergo surgery for prostate cancer. In the weeks before surgery my most important concern was waking up cancer-free, but a close second was preserving my image. I hate like hell to admit any weakness or failure. What would the press say if the prognosis was poor?

  But surgery left me naked to myself and to the world, with prostate and camouflage removed. Shortcomings, weaknesses, frailties, vulnerabilities, inadequacies, self-doubts, and all—my total reality in plain sight. No less flawed than most, and no longer burdened by the need to appear otherwise.

  At every point through all the years before, the greatest threat to my life’s program had been my fear of failure. Not failure itself, mind you, but my fear of failure. And now, once the surgery had been scheduled, I managed to translate the publicity that I knew would result into a full-scale, worldwide failure thing. I had enjoyed so many successes over the years that my lifelong fear of failure had been relegated to the subbasement. But it had remained alive and well down there, ready to come out with a roar with the cancer diagnosis. With blunt honesty, my cancer said, “You’re not a ‘star’; you’re a human being, vulnerable like all the rest.” My whole existence up to that point had been based on the mantra, “I will be better; I will be better; I am better.” Now this life-threatening disease demanded that I face the hypocrisy of that charade.

  In the months that followed the removal of my prostate, I grew to see myself as a combination of things, and a recipient of many blessings—not the least of which were the influences of luck, timing, and all of the other “mysteries” that went into the making of my life. Though one can never put one’s finger on such intangibles, one nevertheless knows that they’re real and are definitely a part of the mix.

  I’m a person who’s never lost sight of appreciation for anything I’ve had above subsistence. When I went to pick up my first check as an actor in a film, I was afraid that the studio would see the truth, which was that I was so happy to be acting that if I’d had the money and they’d asked me. I would have paid them for the privilege.

  I still watch money, having learned the hard way, and I spend it with a certain mindfulness. I try to be reasoned in my dealings with money, because somewhere inside myself I’ve always been afraid that I’ll be judged unworthy of it. With me always are recollections of lines from the early years—lines like, “Ah, well, they haven’t caught up with me yet.”

  I often heard another kind of comment as well during those early years. People would say things like, “You get paid for this?” (I still hear that one.) Or people would say, “How ya doin?” and answer, “Not bad for colored.” Later, I would discover how many meanings that last comment carried in the black community.
Among other things, it was a bonding expression born out of racial matters and widely used as a reminder of all the dreams shared in common. That’s the way it was. “Are you workin’ hard, or are you hardly workin?” Big answer: “Doin’ all right”—and keeping a straight face was a part of it. Oh, my life and days, yes, in ways subtle and otherwise, a scarcity of money goes a long way in shaping the vocabulary of a community.

  A sobering rediscovery of an awareness I had relinquished to denial came back to me with jolting clarity when I was in the postsurgery stage. That awareness was that I had come to believe a little bit in my own press clippings. Having been a principal player in motion pictures for a very long time, mine was considered a successful career, and certainly it has provided a good living for my family and me. I’ve received plenty of recognition, and I’m well thought of throughout a sizable portion of the world. Moreover, I’ve become closely identified with several of the parts I’ve played—uplifting, interesting, positive, good guys, brave and with dignity. You can’t receive (and enjoy) those kudos and that kind of acceptance without some of it going to your head. A little bit, anyway. And if you keep hearing it, somewhere along the way you start accepting it as the truth. I had, in fact, reached that point. I enjoyed believing much of the praise I heard. It brought me good feelings of acceptance. Feelings of worthiness, usefulness. I was thought of as someone with a gift, a skill, a craft. And one that hadn’t been wasted or abused.

  Bathed in all that praise, I had lost touch with my own personal measure of myself, a more realistic assessment that incorporated the weaknesses and foibles, the generosity and the darkness, the human vulnerability. There were even times, during bouts of doubt and depression and feelings of inadequacy, that I found myself giving the public image a boost. While manipulating and inflating that image, I would ease my conscience by referring to my actions as a gentle massage necessary for the sake of maintenance.

  There are different kinds of strength, you know? My parents weren’t people of great power, commanding huge resources. Much of the time they simply clung to life on an island that could have been reclaimed by the sea at any moment. But they carried on with great dignity, and they accomplished much. There was a kind of strength in their existence that I hadn’t been forced by difficult circumstances to practice. But now, with cancer and an uncertain future looming, I knew that the moment had found me. I couldn’t not try to summon their strength. I knew that if I was going to die as a result of this disease. I had to find the strength to face death with some dignity, some courage, and some acceptance of the inevitable. Some honesty. Especially when I had to say to my wife, “Here are the possibilities.” In preparing her as best I could, I tried to let her know that I was concerned but not panicked, so that she would gain strength from that to carry her through whatever would be the outcome.

  WHEN I WAS quite young, with no awareness of the personal demons within me or the different forms and faces those demons could endlessly assume, I developed a belief system that was fraught with danger. I had come to believe that the hard work of good, honest, fair-minded people with a passionate commitment to justice would bring about a world in which a life of dignity for all would be the rule. A world in which opportunities to pursue fulfillment would be limited only by the outer margins of one’s individual ability. I had come to believe that problems of race, ethnicity, color, education, sexual preference, class, and poverty, and the attendant afflictions left in their wake to plague the modern world in their names, would be successfully resolved through the efforts of those same good, honest, fair-minded people. A new progressive force with insight and cohesion was in the making, thought I. The ills of my generation would ultimately be addressed. Frictions would be tamed, tensions neutralized, and out of the hearts and minds of good men and women would come the way to a better future—one in which we would all lend a hand at weaving the strong cultural threads of our social diversity into a more caring, a more human, community.

  Bullshit!

  At eighteen I was plenty old enough to damn well know better than that. And if it sounds like I’ve rendered a self-assessment far too harsh in light of my age, trust me, I haven’t. I was wrong to embrace that crap. Spending my impressionable years operating in the real world on such wishful thinking wasn’t only too costly, it was also too dangerous. I well remember as a young man learning day by day to test my wings in life by stepping farther and farther away from my ignorance. Then one day, at a bold distance from the safety of that ignorance, I finally spotted my demons—first one, then another, then another.

  Some people don’t want to know of the presence of personal demons; they pretend not to know even when they do know. And there are others whose consciousness merely dances around the edges of their dark-side reality all their lives. Those folks never step close enough to look even one demon in the eye.

  But listen, the day one decides to take the reins of one’s own life into one’s own hands, to captain one’s own ship, that’s the day the dance around the edges starts to slow down, bringing that person to a place where gnawing questions will no longer lie still. To a place where one just can’t help wondering why so often in life an obvious solution to a problem gets twisted and pulled into a knot of frustration, with no regard for logic or reason. To a place where one finds oneself more and more at a loss to explain why logic and reason themselves so often go down in defeat at the hands of energies that are negative, hostile, destructive, and cruel.

  I don’t remember exactly when I began to ask myself those questions that “wouldn’t lie still,” but when I did, they led to endless face-to-face encounters between myself and the dark side of my own nature—that part of me that has always been there, saying to my deaf ears, “I’m here, and one day you’ll be ready to take me into account. On that day you’re gonna have to take me into account. You aren’t ever going to manage through your life without coming by me.”

  Age-old speculation as to whether the dark side is full-blown in some people and almost nonexistent in others or is distributed more widely—some in everyone—rages still from generation to generation. I personally think that there’s some darkness in everyone, though the “some” varies as widely as do personality profiles in the family of man. Darkness can explode in nuclear proportions with disastrous consequences or make itself felt in small, subtle, irritating ways, depending on the day, the time, the hour, the situation, and who’s in the room.

  The extent of the dark side isn’t easy to fathom. People who kill aren’t evil twenty-four hours a day, and the dark side doesn’t advertise. The dark side in each of us operates from behind masks of varying complexity, coming to the fore when we elect to use its services. We all have a reservoir of rage, dissatisfaction, self-loathing, unhappiness, intolerable feelings of inadequacy. But we don’t necessarily express these things. They’re veiled, hidden from ourselves as much as from others. But whether hidden or not, they make us all capable of terrible things. And the evil that we’re capable of enacting doesn’t flourish only in moments of rage or revenge, or in response to some unspeakable offense. Sometimes horrible acts are entertained and allowed under very considered and thought-through circumstances. “Everybody is entitled to a job,” someone might say, “but not my job. You try to take my job and I’ll kill you!”

  Sometimes the violence in the dark side is turned inward. Some people take pills; some jump out the window. But whether violence is turned inward or outward, people can’t isolate components of their rage—it’s an accumulation. We think we’re raging against the darkness, but in fact we’re struggling against a life we can’t control. We opt to struggle for balance rather than fight chaos. “What got into him?” people ask of a well-mannered neighbor who turned ballistic. “He isn’t that kind of guy.”

  But of course he is! We’re all that kind of guy! Do I have the wherewithal to be a violent person? Or course I do. I could do unspeakable things to protect my children. Would that be a choice made at that precise moment? Yes. But where
would I go for that intensity? Into what well of murderous impulses would I dip? That reservoir has to be there already, waiting.

  For me this awareness was the beginning of a new perception of self, of others, and of the world around me. In light of my growing understanding, I took aggressive steps to try to find out why my best efforts had so often been defied by problems I would have thought were fixable. I boldly peeked inward—saw nothing I understood—then retreated again to ponder where inside myself I should look for answers to external human problems that defy one’s best efforts. I spent much time looking in the wrong places, but even there I came away with lessons. For example, some things simply aren’t going to get better. And some people just refuse to learn; if learning isn’t good for them, doesn’t profit them, they’re not interested.

  So what else should that worldview have encompassed? Having grown up in an idyllic place that I mistakenly believed held the whole story if I could just discern it, my determination to find the answer to that question pulled me into a process that led to discovery.

  The first conclusion that struck me was that the pace toward “progress” was slower than it should be. Growing increasingly impatient with that pace, I observed it closely and found out that the problem wasn’t pace but direction. I concluded that other people and other forces weren’t just going slowly; they were trying to go another way, other places altogether. There were parts of me as well—of every individual—that were trying to go other places altogether.