My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  The ANT would fold in 1949 amid a lot of hard feelings. But it still had some juice in January 1946, and a few more careers to launch. Clarice Taylor, for one, would star in The Wiz on Broadway, and on television as Bill Cosby’s mother, Anna Huxtable, in The Cosby Show. Max Glanville would stage-manage and direct many New York productions, and eventually act in movies (Cotton Comes to Harlem, Desirée) and television dramas (The Iceman Cometh). A third member of the ANT would go on to a pretty good run as an actor after losing his West Indian accent—and I don’t mean me, though this other fellow and I had a lot in common. Both Sidney Poitier and I were skinny, brooding, and vulnerable within our hard shells of self-protection, and each was about as unlikely as the other to become a future star.

  Sidney was so quiet, so monosyllabic, that I didn’t even realize at first he was from the West Indies. One day we found ourselves together under the stage, in a dank, musky place—this is what Clarice called “our department of historic treasures”—digging through old trunks for costumes. Sidney didn’t say a word. I’d known guys like that before; I grew up with them—they were the outside-the-law crowd, with a lot to hide. When the silence stretched on, I finally stopped rooting through the costumes and asked him straight up, “Sidney, have you ever served time?”

  He glowered at me with silent fury. Wow! Whatever I’d touched with my little gibe was clearly reverberating. “Where’d you get that?” he said at last.

  “I didn’t get it from anywhere.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  I stared at this brooding mass for a moment and just dropped the subject.

  Partly I’d sensed it might be true; partly I was trying to find out who he was. In fact, Sidney had been to prison—three times! All three were just overnight stays for petty crimes as a youth: raiding a cornfield in Nassau, for one. But these were deep, humiliating secrets for him, and he was appalled to think they’d somehow gotten around.

  That got us off to a rocky start. Not for a while would I learn how uncannily similar our backgrounds were. Like me, Sidney had been born in the United States—in Miami, Florida—but spent much of his childhood in the islands, in his case the very remote Cat Island, in the Bahamas, where his parents lived. Like me, he’d grown up between two cultures, an angry misfit. Like me, he’d joined the service as soon as he could—for him it was the army—and been assigned to a black company. His own military experience had been rougher than mine. Mercilessly teased for his West Indian accent, he’d almost suffered a nervous breakdown. Like me, he’d come to New York City when he mustered out and taken menial jobs to survive. When I met him, Sidney was working hard to lose his accent—he seemed to think if he didn’t talk at all, it might go away—but he faced a much bigger challenge. He was tone-deaf. Even the stage directors at the ANT assumed that any black actor worth his salt knew how to sing and dance. Sidney couldn’t do either.

  Once Sidney and I got past that rough introduction, we started hanging out together. This was more than a casual new acquaintance for me. Sidney was my first friend—my first friend in life. As a child I’d moved from place to place too often to make lasting friendships. In the navy I’d generally kept to myself; if I socialized with other sailors, it was only in the most superficial way. This was different. Sidney and I were soul mates—separated at birth, or so it seemed. Our setbacks and hurts, hopes and ambitions were so parallel that each of us knew what the other would say—about almost anything.

  Of course, we were both so desperately poor that our main topic of conversation was get-rich-quick schemes. Sidney had a plan to market a Caribbean conch extract said to be an aphrodisiac. Or maybe it had bodybuilding ingredients. Whatever its promise, the plan didn’t go far when we realized we’d need capital to produce it. Then we decided to be a stand-up-comedy team—Belafonte and Poitier. For weeks we feverishly wrote routines, rehearsing them on my rooftop, until we realized they weren’t funny. But we grew close—very close—as we realized not only how much we had in common, but how much fun we had hanging out together. We started going to the theater once or twice a week, splitting the cost of a single ticket. One of us would go in for the first half, come out at intermission and pass the stub, along with a plot summary, to the other. We saw some theater that way, and agreed that seeing half of each play taught us more than not seeing a play at all.

  In those early months of 1946, Sidney seemed no more likely to be an actor than a comic or conch entrepreneur. He’d failed in his first audition for the ANT, losing out on a three-month trial with the troupe. In desperation he’d pleaded to be allowed to work as a janitor at the theater—anything to feel he was at least associated with something he wanted to do—and won his three-month trial that way. Now it was coming to an end, and the ANT’s director, Osceola Archer, was disinclined to give him another trial period. Sidney told me he felt Osceola was racist. She was very Indian-looking, with long, black, thick hair and rather light skin. Sidney felt strongly that she liked me more than him because my skin was quite a bit lighter than his. I never saw any evidence of this, and thought Sidney was just oversensitive and vulnerable. But what made him that way, more than anything else, was the darkness of his skin. He felt isolated by it, cut off not just from white society, but many black people, too.

  Both to Sidney’s shock and to mine, Osceola asked me to fill a role in the ANT’s revival of a comedy called On Strivers’ Row. I hadn’t sought it out; unlike Sidney, I hadn’t even wanted to act. I just liked being around the theater, with all these exuberant characters, doing manual work: being backstage, burning my hands on ropes, handling hot bulbs, building and breaking down sets. When Osceola first asked me to read for a role, I refused. “No, no, you won’t get me into that,” I said. I hadn’t imagined I could be an actor. Certainly I didn’t have the chops yet even to try. But Osceola kept after me, telling me I was the right type, and the rest of the cast began giving me the “group muscle,” making me feel I was letting the whole organization down. By the time they got through all that, I was in the play.

  Anyone in Harlem knew the subject of that play from its title: Strivers’ Row was an enclave of elegant town houses on West 138th and West 139th streets, between Seventh and Eighth avenues, where Harlem’s black elite lived. The play, by Abram Hill, one of the ANT’s founders, mocked the strivers’ social pretensions, which came out in full force when their teenage children brought social undesirables home. I played one of the children, such a small role that I felt less like an actor than a stagehand with a couple of lines. But I must have shown some promise, because right after that, I landed a larger role in a play called The Days of Our Youth, a college drama by Frank Gabrielson. Sidney was about to leave the company—his three-month trial was up, and Osceola had told him it wouldn’t be extended, with or without janitorial duties. But as a parting gesture, she cast him as my understudy. Sidney, of course, thought it was a last swipe on her part not to give him the role and make me the understudy.

  As I read through the play, I began to sweat with dread. This character of mine had a lot of lines! How could I possibly remember them all? I went back to Osceola and asked her to let me off the hook. This had gone far enough. I wasn’t an actor. I’d just ruin the production. Osceola shook her head with a smile. Everyone felt this way at first, she said. I’d get over it. Besides, I thought, did I really want to surrender this moment in the spotlights … to Sidney?

  I got through opening night pretty well, and by the second night, I couldn’t wait for the show to start. My euphoria ended with a phone call hours before a special performance of the play that Osceola had scheduled for an audience of one: James Light, director of the original Broadway production of Days of Our Youth. On the phone was the guy I’d lined up to take over my evening janitorial duties back at my stepfather’s building. Something had come up; he couldn’t make it. I tried everything—even offering him more than a buck and a half!—but he wouldn’t budge. I hung up in despair. As much as I wanted to perform for the prestigious Mr. Li
ght, I couldn’t blow off the 8:00 p.m. garbage run. Every night I had to be in the basement right on time to operate the dumbwaiter that brought the garbage down. I’d ring the buzzer for each floor, the tenant on that floor would ring back, and when he’d filled the dumbwaiter, I’d bring it down with that floor’s garbage. If no one was there to work the dumbwaiter, the garbage would stink by morning, the tenants would be furious—and I’d be out of a job I couldn’t afford to lose. Crestfallen, I told Osceola that I had no choice but to miss the special performance. And so Sidney got his chance.

  Mr. Light, as it turned out, liked what he saw in Sidney Poitier. The fact was, he’d come to the ANT specifically in search of black actors to round out his Broadway cast of Lysistrata, by Aristophanes. It would be an all-black production. Sidney’s first piece of luck was in being chosen by Mr. Light for that Broadway show. His second was more extraordinary. Although the play got dreadful reviews after it opened on October 17, 1946, and closed after four performances, a Hollywood agent attended one of them. He was seeking a black actor for a leading role in a new movie! And from that came Sidney’s Hollywood break, in the crackling Joseph L. Mankiewicz film No Way Out, as a hospital resident forced to deal with two racist brothers, one of them played by Richard Widmark, wounded in their latest bank robbery.

  When the movie came out in 1950, I sat through it with such strong, conflicting feelings: awe, pride, envy, and despair. There was my fellow actor, playing the role I could have had if only I hadn’t had to work as a janitor that fateful night! Mercifully, by the time the film appeared, I’d had a break of my own. But for years after that, I couldn’t help tweaking Sidney every time I saw another interview in which he spoke of his rise from oblivion to stardom. I knew what his success was really based on, I’d tell him. The demands of garbage!

  I did get to perform in Days of Our Youth for the rest of the play’s brief run, which led another ANT director, Charles Sebree, to give me my first lead role, in July 1946, as a young Irish radical in an ANT production of Juno and the Paycock, by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey. That the play was about white characters, written by a white playwright, bothered us not at all. We easily identified with the Irish peasants resisting their British oppressors; we knew exactly how it felt to live in a society where those in power deprived the conquered of their civil rights. The catch, and it was a big one for me, was that the play was written in brogue. I took the play home and struggled painfully, with my poor reading skills, to master every syllable of my part. I nursed my fears by reminding myself I had only one really long speech, and did my best with the brogue by inventing my own West Indian version of it. (The other actors pretty much followed suit.) Then, on that first night, as I felt the audience respond to my opening lines, I couldn’t wait to tear into it. Why did I only have one long speech? At the end, as all of us took our bows, I felt, for the first time in my life, part of something grand and wonderful. I’d never felt so happy. All I wanted was more.

  One night before the curtain went up on Juno, word went around that Paul Robeson was in the audience. This was astonishing. We were so moved that he was there. What was he doing in our humble Harlem theater? Robeson was the American theater’s black god, a star of such Promethean talent that he truly had no equal. That had first become clear in his college days at Rutgers, when, as the only black student on campus, he lettered in every sport, made Phi Beta Kappa, and was named valedictorian of his class of 1919. Playing professional football after that was just a throwaway for him. By the mid-twenties he was starring in every major play that had a black lead character, from Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings to Shakespeare’s Othello. With his remarkable basso-profundo singing voice, Robeson had immortalized the song “Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat, and embarked on a parallel career as a performer of folk songs and spirituals.

  Initially Robeson had felt that as an artist he should avoid any political involvement. But on a tour in Wales at the end of a performance to a sold-out audience, as he left the theater through the back-stage alley in the height of winter, he saw a small group of Welsh miners on strike, standing there with their voices raised in song, trying to raise money for their needy families. Robeson, caught up in the moment, joined the singing with full force. Later, he referred to the story as the quintessential moment in the politicizing of his art. The next day he visited the miners in their homes, and from that moment on never turned his back on needy workers wherever in the world he found them.

  By the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Robeson had begun speaking out against Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his Fascist takeover of Spain. When Hitler and Mussolini joined forces with Franco, Robeson raised money for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an American unit that joined the international volunteer army to defend Spain’s threatened democracy. He also made headlines by going personally to Madrid; during the destructive bombing of the city by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, he stood in the middle of the terror and sang to the liberation forces. In this time of global depression, Robeson felt a powerful bond with the oppressed in all countries. That had led him to embrace the Russian proletariat and the ideals of socialism.

  Throughout World War II, Robeson had given benefits for the American war effort. He’d also begun to speak out against racial injustice in the United States. His strong words to baseball club owners were helping lead the way for Jackie Robinson to break the sport’s color barrier. He’d demanded that President Truman investigate the wave of postwar lynchings in the South that began when southern black servicemen returned home expecting respect, only to stir Klansmen to murderous fury.

  With awe and admiration, I followed everything Robeson said and did. To be such a consummate artist and at the same time speak out against injustice—there could be no higher platform than the one to which he’d ascended. I couldn’t imagine what the great Paul Robeson would think of my Irish brogue, but I would find out.

  We came out after the show to see an even larger man than I’d expected. He grinned at us and said that he couldn’t wait to tell Sean O’Casey, one of his closest friends, what we black actors were doing with his play in New York. Our Juno was a fine production, Robeson told us. Everyone had done well. But what he really admired was our decision, as a black repertory company, to take on this play in the first place: a play of great dramatic power, hard to sustain onstage, and created by a white playwright about white characters. Robeson strongly supported the ANT’s mission of nurturing black playwrights and producing their work. But the sad truth, he said, was that few great black plays were yet to be found. And so while we should do our share of works by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and a very small handful of others, we should also take on plays by white playwrights that dramatized social issues important to us all, from John Steinbeck and Clifford Odets to George Bernard Shaw. There was so much our theater could do to help teach people about those issues; we must do all we could to help it grow.

  We listened in amazement, too thrilled to respond. What I remember, more than anything Robeson said, was the love he radiated, and the profound responsibility he felt, as an actor, to use his platform as a bully pulpit. I had no expectation that my acting on a basement stage in Harlem would lead me anywhere. But I knew I’d found my role model, and that I’d never look at theater the same way again. My mother had told me to wake up every morning and know how I’d wage the fight against injustice. That night, Paul Robeson gave me my epiphany: It would guide me for the rest of my life.

  I had neither the confidence nor the cash in this period to pursue Marguerite. This was especially frustrating because after graduating from Hampton and living at home for a while, she’d landed a job in New York. She would be working at the Bethany Day Nursery, a highly regarded child development center in the East Thirties, and living in the teachers’ dormitory beside the school, while she applied to New York University to pursue a graduate degree in education. I visited her as soon as she settled in. She seemed happy to see me,
but I could tell she regarded me more as an exotic friend than a romantic prospect. My newfound passion for acting genuinely alarmed her. How would acting pay the rent? What kind of insanity was this? Her doubts only strengthened my resolve.

  Along with hoping to rise socially in Marguerite’s eyes, I wanted to do something that gave my life meaning, and being in the arts made sense. Downtown, I’d heard, a German émigré director had established the most exciting theater workshop in New York, as part of the New School for Social Research. Everyone at the ANT was talking about it. Best of all, the G.I. Bill would cover my tuition. Marguerite really flipped at that. How could I think of squandering my G.I. Bill money on … acting classes?

  Undeterred, I went down for an interview. Yes, I could join the Dramatic Workshop, as it was called, and yes, the school would accept payment through the G.I. Bill—assuming I was a high school graduate and had the diploma to prove it. I started pleading my case. How could the New School let a technicality like that keep out such a talented actor, a veteran of so many productions on the venerable stage of the American Negro Theatre? I could save my breath, my interviewer explained; I would have to make a formal appeal to the workshop’s board. At the appointed time, I arrived to find four judges waiting for me. The most intense one had pink skin, a shock of white hair, and penetrating eyes. He spoke with a German accent, and had a stern Prussian manner. That was the German director I’d heard about, the one who’d founded the workshop: Erwin Piscator. He was the one I had to please. I knew he had strong socialist views, so I played up my plight as a victim of society, forced to leave school in order to work. It was a rather melodramatic picture I painted, with the truth stretched a bit. But it worked.