Though I wasn’t always happy when girlfriends’ parents disapproved of my background or my choice of career, I tried not to take it personally. Instead, I focused all the more on improving my standing with the work that I’d chosen. In much later years, from time to time I would run into an old flame or two, or their parents, like an ex-girlfriend’s mom who regretted that her daughter hadn’t married me. “Oh,” she said, “if only I knew that you were going to turn out to be Sidney Poitier!”
Back during the ups and downs of becoming secure and successful in that pursuit, I received a memorable phone call from a friend, William Garfield Greaves, a gifted filmmaker of documentaries on African American culture. He said, “I have somebody I think you ought to meet.” He knew how many times I had been dumped, and he was a good friend looking out for me. He went on, “I’ve met this girl. Her name is Juanita Hardy. She’s a model and a dancer, and an absolute show-stopper.”
After he showed me photos, I was intrigued, and then I went to see her dance. He was right: she was quite attractive, and she was a show-stopper.
After such an inviting introduction, Juanita and I began dating. Given my lack of experience, I figured that I was ready for a serious relationship, and she seemed to be similarly disposed. After dating for quite a while, we began talking about marriage. Then came the daunting prospect of meeting her family—who turned out to be quite gracious. They asked me a few questions and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t a bad guy.
We were married not too long after that, amid much celebration. Neither of us, however, was prepared for marriage, and neither of us had a way of knowing that. One may have seen successful marriages among family and friends, but there are so many independent energies intertwined in marital success that luck of the draw has to be a part of the whole equation. And we weren’t lucky.
We were kids who didn’t know what to look for in each other. We saw images that were more out of our imagination. We superimposed over our togetherness a kind of potential that we didn’t have, and we didn’t have the wherewithal to analyze, pick apart, and see how much depth was really there. Once we had gained acceptance of each other, we got married. We had a strong imprint in our minds of what marriage ought to be, but we didn’t know how to bring that about. And we were coming at each other from two different sets of circumstances.
I knew that my mother and father were as they were. I experienced their love for each other every day of my life with them. And Juanita had loving parents as well, as was demonstrated to me. But she was no more versed than I was as to the manner in which two people can begin to build something, realizing that each comes with what he or she is. You have to take those two forces, if there is a mutual compatibility, and make out of it whatever you can. You have to look dead center at what the possibilities are—not the daydreams, because that is all foreplay. You have to determine what the real possibilities are of understanding each other. You need to have exchanges through which you learn each other’s positions on things—a relationship where the economics of it and the sense of responsibility for the nurturing of children can be determined.
Juanita and I came to marriage without having a sense of how the dynamics were made to work, even if they were operative in our individual families. We weren’t ready—and few people are. Almost half the marriages in America end in divorce. Among those that do last, some do so unhappily, welded only by children or religion or economics. And where unions have lasted a lifetime, many couples look back with recognition of how little they knew in the beginning of those compatibilities that would later bond them so joyously and can only say, “How lucky we were.”
There you have a candid understanding, as great-granddaughter to Juanita and to me, of the love and the challenges that were met in our marriage—which lasted eighteen years; and, to her joy and mine, resulted in four children, four beautiful, brilliant daughters, who were—and are—really terrific people.
There may be within you, Ayele, as there was once in me, the streak of the undying romantic who sees love only in its mythic perfection, and not for its thorny though still beautiful reality. Rather than protect you from the complexities, I would rather you know about them in advance, not for you to guard yourself from love when it comes, but perhaps to see its true intentions for you.
In any event, experiencing hurt, disappointment, and even a broken heart or two can still be worth the price of taking the chance to love.
Even if you are someone used to wearing armor, guarded and afraid, I think love is such a strong force it would find a way through your protective guard. It will get to your heart, and you can’t put any fences around that. As much as you might try, you simply can’t. You’re going to have other forces that will be operative at the same time if it is right for you to fall in love with this activity or individual or cause or process.
There is no right or wrong in the general scheme of things when it comes to love, only what’s right or wrong for you. Like all of life’s great mysteries, we have to search for our own answers. What I now know, as a basic, is that love has many forms and shapes. It is an indispensable element in the bonding of all creatures. We fall in love because we have a capacity for it. This capacity may never find the object of it, the one who will make it whole. And the capacity within us can wither and die, depending upon external factors. Many times we sense a potential, or we engage in wishful thinking, assuming that it would be wonderful if one’s capacity for love could be fulfilled by that which one believes to be in this or that personality, and something wonderful could come to fruition. And that something wonderful happens every day. There are people who can just pick it up in another’s eyes, or laughter, or the way the person walks or turns away when embarrassed. There are endless numbers of such moments that can spark an array of possibilities.
But though there is always a capacity, there is not always the destiny. Among other things, love might be damaging. Or maybe the hurt comes from the lack of love, or the absence of love, or your love being rejected—such that some people, greatly disappointed, turn bitter. Many have a great love for a very short time and never experience it again, and they live a full life in the number of years that they have left. They live with a wounded self, but they live. But the greater tragedy is that there are some who live full lives in terms of years and yet never experience the love of another human being.
You will probably discover for yourself, Ayele my darling, that love does not always last. There is a perishable quality to it, and if it is not nurtured and tended much like a garden, it may wither. But you will also discover, I pray, that though love is complicated, it nevertheless is an essential, endlessly abundant force in our lives.
What I can add to that, as well, is that sometimes, when you least expect it, when you’re not even looking to find the love of your life, every now and then love comes along and discovers you. In any case, about forty years ago, that’s exactly what happened to me.
In those days of the late 1960s, I was riding a wave of a great deal of success as an actor. Earlier in the decade there had been such well-received films as A Raisin in the Sun and A Patch of Blue, along with Lilies of the Field—the movie for which I won an Academy Award. In 1967, I had the good fortune to become the year’s top-grossing actor, thanks to three major hits, released that same year, that touched a deep nerve with the public: In the Heat of the Night, To Sir with Love, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Well, I mention some of those highlights to give you a sense of the atmosphere of those days, when my focus was very much on continuing to grow creatively and professionally, not on falling in love or starting a new relationship. So when I prepared to start shooting a picture called The Lost Man, nothing in my instincts led me to suspect that the love of my life was waiting in the wings. An extraordinarily beautiful Canadian model and actress then living in Paris, she had come to the director’s attention after appearing on the cover of French Vogue. When she was first approached by Universal Pictures to do a screen test for the movi
e, her initial question was “Who else will be starring in it?” And when she was told, “Sidney Poitier,” her response was “Who’s that?”
Yes, indeed, that was Joanna Shimkus, and though she had never heard of me, after some encouragement she did agree to do the screen test, and was cast in the role. It didn’t take us long, once we started working on the movie together, to wonder if perhaps forces greater than ourselves had brought us together. By the end of production, we knew that we would indeed be together from then on.
And that was forty years ago.
This time, I was ready to live the love story that I had seen in my parents’ marriage at the start of my life. Part of our compatibility is that we are so different. Where I’m a thinking guy, she has such a great heart; where I’m private, she has an outgoing nature that puts everyone around her at ease. With our differences, we have so much more to discuss—our kids, our interests, friends, family, life, new ideas; nothing is off-limits. A woman of boundless generosity and energy, remarkable creativity, and a dog lover, too, Joanna stopped her acting career to raise our children, and has also become extremely close to my four daughters from my first marriage.
Later, even though Joanna wasn’t looking to embark on a new career, as the girls got into their teens, my wife found that her natural gifts for interior design were responsible for opening up a new professional chapter for her. Before long, the ball began rolling so dramatically that today—you will be happy to hear, Ayele—your great-grandmother Jo has a partner, and the two are represented in several showrooms around the country.
So you see, the entrepreneurial spirit of the women in your family lends encouragement to the stance that there are no limits to how far you can go or to what you can do. As I think back on my mother and my sisters—of the women in the Caribbean and other cultures who don’t have the freedom and the economic power, rights, and protections that we have in our time and our country—it makes me all the more happy and proud of the women in our family and their accomplishments as independent individuals, charting their own destinations in life.
Of course, Ayele, let me not forget to add that the formula for the kind of love story that I share with Joanna isn’t something you can buy over the counter. Certainly, in our case we weren’t looking to buy anything when the fates were so kind as to bring us together. But there is one key ingredient that my wife has helped me to recognize over the years, and that is the importance of articulating love for one another on a daily basis. The words I love you, spoken in acknowledgment in the morning upon rising and before going to bed, or when sitting down to dine, make the most beautiful music recognized by human ears. In every conversation with our daughters, never have I heard my wife not emphasize those three words or their message, no matter what the subject of the discussion is.
Simple though it may seem, when it comes to love, there isn’t much more I can ask but that you are graced throughout your life to hear the music of it spoken aloud to you and given unconditionally, as you grow up in an environment that encourages learning, exploration, and the appreciation of opportunities to experience great love—in all its splintered magnificence.
eleventh letter
FEAR, DOUBT, AND DESPERATION
Ayele, one day in the years ahead, your eyes will come to rest on the contents of this page. It is my expectation that by then you will have discovered for yourself that fear is a visceral response to imminent jeopardy, real or perceived, threatening to come crashing down on you with devastating results.
Undoubtedly you, your parents, and your experiences will have prepared you for dealing with different aspects of fear and with challenge in general, to which I might add a handful of the understandings that I’ve collected over the years—starting with the basic notion that fear is a name given to a particular feeling. Now, by definition, feelings came first, long before the arrival of language, thereby allowing the eventual placement of names on every feeling that human beings are known to have.
Let me briefly return to the example of the graveyards of my childhood on Cat Island. The feeling that reverberated through me while walking past a graveyard in broad daylight with not another person in sight was pure, unadulterated fear. I was always scared out of my wits! On a dark, moonless night, when I was walking past a graveyard, even with my parents holding my hand, I was apoplectic!
Maybe in hindsight, the cause of my fear wasn’t as logical as, say, when I swam in waters where sharks and barracudas wandered about in search of food. That overabundance of caution, and a like amount of fear, were well founded. It was similarly logical for me to be guarded and afraid whenever I went scampering up fruit-bearing trees, careful to avoid drawing the attention or ire of the wasps who were on patrol, looking out for plunderers like me.
The irony, Ayele, is how so much of what we fear can shape who we become. In that connection, graveyards, sharks, fruit trees, and wasps owe their names to the survival needs of mankind, among which was the indispensable tool of language—a tool that took the human species hundreds of thousands of years to hammer into its present form; a tool that allows us to understand our feelings and say of ourselves, We are what we are, and half of what we are is what we are not. That’s why I was drawn to graveyards equally as much as I was petrified by them!
The other way that fear and its ancillaries must have also evolved was that at some point our ancestors realized that we were imperfect creatures, and didn’t like it, not one bit; never got used to it, and in fact fought against it mightily. We nursed resentful feelings toward whatever it was that didn’t provide us wings with which to fly, as birds were able to do so easily, or provide us with the size, strength, or swiftness of other creatures whose intimidating presence would signal, “Heads up, everybody! A threat is in the vicinity! Death is in the air!”
Without wings we couldn’t scatter swiftly. Without size and strength, we were open to being lunch or dinner. If, with luck, we lived to see another day, we busied ourselves in search of ways to extend and secure our survival across as many days as luck would provide. Birds we were not, nor elephants, nor lions, nor saber-toothed tigers, nor alligators. We were at risk, night and day.
That’s the truth of it, and has been the truth of it for millions of years—since Homo erectus followed Homo habilis 0.4 to 2.0 million years ago, who followed Australopithecus robustus 1.6 to 2.2 million years ago, who in turn followed Australopithecus africanus 2 to 3 million years ago, who followed Australopithecus afarensis 2.7 to 4 million years ago.
So, it’s as if we are tapping into our ancient origins when such feelings occur as part of some larger inborn response mechanisms, programmed to send out alert warnings whenever danger is believed to be lurking nearby. This range of feelings was a part of our beginnings, experienced by our ancestors long before the creation of language—which eventually clarified such differences as existed between our feelings, one to the other; identified their presence; and gave each of them a name appropriate to their function.
Though we developed a range of tools with which to defend ourselves from entities that stalked us then, we retain those feelings that continue to stalk us, often from within—the feeling we call fear, as well as the feeling known to us as doubt and, not far behind, the most damaging of them all, desperation.
Ayele, by age twenty, I am sure you will have at your disposal all the words necessary to chart your course through life, providing you always remember the following: behind each word is a meaning. Some words are friendly; some are not. Some will cause you pain. Some will make you cry. Some will protect you. Some will deceive you. Still, words and their meaning can be indispensable in preparing you for the battles you must win in order to survive.
The fact is, my darling great-granddaughter, long before your young life will deliver you to this moment on this page, fear, doubt, and desperation will have made many appearances in your life. But it is my hope that by then you will be standing strong in the face of each one; that you will know them by their nature; that y
ou will have come to understand each by its function: they can alert us, they can hurt us, they can strengthen us or weaken us. And, in time, you may even come to know why they visit some of us more frequently than others of us.
I have danced with them all. Never to the same tune; and never with the same results! Fear, doubt, and desperation: they are almost related. I’ve never been afraid when there wasn’t doubt somewhere, and I wasn’t doubtful when there wasn’t some desperation near at hand.
Let me put these dramatic responses into the context of the period in early adulthood when, though I had begun to understand my path, I had no guarantees of future security. After making a few movies, contrary to the assumption that it was all going to be smooth sailing from there on out—and contrary to what many assume once they’ve had a taste of initial success—I found myself in a gloomy passage. A young man with a family, I had, at that time, no acting or other job, no rumors or possibilities of acting employment.
Aware and willing to reroute and reconsider my options for finding work, I faced the same obstacles as before—no marketable professional skills and only a rudimentary literacy that I was still developing. Whatever I could have done, I would have. With a wife to support and a child, plus another on the way, to feed, clothe, and eventually send to school, it was a scary time for me—damaging to my generally healthy sense of self, provoking doubt as to my worth, making me fearful about providing primal survival needs for me and mine.
Unlike my boyhood response when food wasn’t readily available, it wasn’t as if I could head out to the ocean and put a baited hook in the water for fish, or gather sea grapes or pick cocoa plums in the forest. I was way out of my natural element in New York—an urban, industrialized setting not set up for fishing in Central Park or foraging for native fruits. When we came perilously close to having to worry about not having food for our children, fear, doubt, and desperation raised their heads simultaneously for sure. Before sliding down that slope, however, I was able to find temporary work that required the harshest physical labor. Fear and desperation subsided, although the doubt lingered. The feeling that then stalked me was that of an unsavory “what if?” What if the life fashioned for me by the guy who threw me out and told me to stop wasting his time as an actor was coming true?
Life Beyond Measure Page 12