Life Beyond Measure (4 page)

A
yele, my little one, in looking at the latest snapshots of you to arrive on my desktop, I am both happy and amazed to see how much you have grown.

Your sparkling, wise eyes, your innocent smile, have once again captured my full attention. And those funny faces you made for the camera had me laughing out loud. I am also delighted to learn that you have spoken your first words:
Dada
and
Mama.
You also made your grandmother Beverly feel very special when your third word was the name of her little dog, Jet.

Even now I’m imagining how conversations between us will grow richer and richer over time. And I assure you, my dear, nothing could please me more than that. In fact, I believe that by age five
you will have accumulated a treasure chest of words and the meaning behind each of them; and that by age ten you will have gathered many times more.

An added bonus in watching your childhood unfold is that I am given a chance to remember moments from my early days that I thought had fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, because no cameras existed on Cat Island, there are no images or mementos other than those I carry in my memory. It may surprise you, Ayele, that never in this eighty-year span of life of mine have I seen a photograph of myself as a baby or as a child. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until I was sixteen years old and had left home to travel very far away that the first photo was ever taken of me.

By that point in time, however, I’d been away from Cat Island for almost six years, light-years away from our village—first in Nassau, then Miami, then the mountains of Georgia, and eventually New York City, in places where cameras were no big deal. Neither were electricity, running water, cars, trains, telephones, radios, skyscrapers, or movies. All were goods and services—no more, no less—and, like the camera, all manifestations of technology that had been destined to materialize in the aftermath of the volatile beginning of the universe.

Later, the topic of how these tools of civilization developed, through trial and error, would become a source of infinite fascination to me, possibly because of how I was raised without them. There were many early versions of the camera, for example, but for a long time none turned out to be a slam dunk. Many tries, many failures.

That was until a Frenchman, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, after many misses, successfully managed to capture light in a box. By 1839, after collaboration with others and further trial and error,
he produced the first-ever working camera to surface in the commercial marketplace.

By the time that I was born, in the year 1927, my father was forty-three years old and my mother was thirty-one. In the eighty-eight years that the camera had been known to the outside world, not even the wisest of our village elders had reason to believe that photographic images were on their way to being capable of capturing and holding priceless moments of our earliest years. For all of us in Arthur’s Town, it was as hard to conceive of printed images of childhood that would be readily available for recall, reflection, and reminiscence as it was for people growing up in the early nineteenth century and earlier in other places of the world. The introduction into our lives of mysterious instruments like cameras was not to take place until many years after my childhood had long since passed.

Suffice it to say that, as to the details of my early years, I am the last witness. To add challenge to the absence of cameras, for those first ten and a half years on Cat Island there were no mirrors or glass panes in which I ever had the chance to see my own reflection. Not once was I able to see what my face looked like.

Of course, I could easily see what the faces of other children looked like. I also knew well what the faces of family members, village elders, and people from other settlements looked like, simply from having seen them in the routine of their daily lives. But I had no way of looking at my own.

This wasn’t, by the way, an issue of great concern for me at first. Besides, I wasn’t alone in this regard. And I could see that I had arms and legs like the other children. We weren’t very different from one other, I figured. Some were taller, others shorter, while our skin color was roughly the same. Making do with logic, reason, and
imagination, I fashioned for myself a mental image of my face that was acceptable to the little boy that I was at the time.

Somewhere inside of me that little boy is still alive, and shows up unexpectedly with one or another irresistible memory from the past—such as the discovery I made one day while playing by myself at the edge of a quiet pond.

Since I had only one real friend, Fritz—who lived a mile away and whose family’s work didn’t always allow him to join me in my explorations—spending long hours alone wasn’t out of the ordinary for me. What was unusual on this day was how the sunlight at my back had thrown a shadow on the surface of the water. Instantly that shadow took the shape of a boy who appeared to be my age, who began mirroring every move I made. Was the shadow boy mocking me? Very well. Assuming it was, I responded with a flurry of nonsensical gestures executed as swiftly as my hands could fly, gestures bearing no logical connection one to the other, gestures I fully expected to prove far too swift and much too complex for any shadow on any pond anywhere to imitate. I was wrong. With not even a fraction of time lapse between its motions and my own, the shadow again mirrored, synchronized, and, yes, one could also say imitated my every movement to the letter.

OK, if it wasn’t making fun of me, then what? As if on cue, the sun slipped behind a cloud and the shadow on the water disappeared. While waiting for the cloud to pass, I found myself having second thoughts about the shadow and myself. Had I misread its intentions? Might it not have been expressing its own playful nature or an innocent desire to engage me at play? Might it have been trying, through playful, childlike imitations, to invite my attention to join with it as a companion?

Soon after the cloud dispersed, the sun returned, and I consciously made the decision to accept this new and unusual friendship. With that, the rest of that day was well spent by us—a little boy and his shadow companion—as were countless days that followed.

We often raced each other along lonely stretches of deserted beaches toward finish lines where the winner was, of course, determined by the position of the sun. Together we could stroll, jump, laugh, and play all the day, every day, as long as the sun was shining.

In recalling those distant times of boundless pleasures, I am also reminded of how much I resented cloudy days and how my mood grew darker as the threat of rain increased. Even now, I am of the opinion that my shadowy companion and I shared the same sentiment.

We were similar in temperament and personality, both shadows and both little boys who had not yet learned how to successfully hide whatever little boys and their shadows might be feeling inside. But we were different, too. This was proven when we were out and about one day and I was startled to see that my shadow was longer than I was tall. Sure enough, it was stretched out in front of me, leading the way, with me following in its footprints.

We were both fond of dancing, and did so together many times, always without music. We were like a set of Siamese twins, each with two left feet and awful footwork. Of course, we were careful and tried dancing only when we were totally alone, since anyone watching, even from a distance, would think it strange: a young boy, all by himself, behaving in an erratic, wildly disjointed manner, as if possessed by demons of one kind or another. “Yes! There he was,” they would say, “Reggie and Evelyn’s little boy Sidney, without one whit of embarrassment, wiggling and squiggling and throwing himself this way and that. What could be going on with that poor child?”

But my shadow and I knew of places where villagers never went, places where we could have been seen only by birds flying overhead, and we always surveyed the landscape to make doubly sure we were alone and not being watched from a distance by anyone. Secure in our privacy, we could let go with abandon—even with our somewhat pornographic choreography, based on conversations I’d overheard from older boys while they were boasting, or outright lying, about amorous encounters with this beauty or that one from our village.

There was an exciting danger in the possibility of being caught, along with the drama of having to take responsibility for instigating the dirty dancing. That was only right, of course, since it would be unfair to blame my shadow—who was, after all, only playing along.

Eventually, the novelty of our friendship did wear off to a certain extent, although we have remained close all my life. In the meantime, at around the age of eight and then nine, as my interest in the opposite sex heated up, I became more and more intent on having a sense of what my face really did look like.

My efforts were to no avail. Even in the absence of the slightest breeze, the shimmering outline of my reflection on pond water was never clear enough to decipher. No matter how much I squinted for sharper focus, how often I twisted my head from side to side in unsuccessful attempts to steady the quivering water, only the same hazy, undefined image would show up. Oh, occasionally I could catch a glimpse of a distorted reflection elsewhere, like in pieces of broken bottles or in the blades of timeworn machetes and other surfaces off which the unfocused image of an unknown little boy might have flashed. Lacking a mirror, which was certainly not among our family’s possessions anywhere in our thatched-roof, sparsely furnished wooden home, I felt doomed never to be able to recognize my face even if I passed myself on the road.

To this day, I can’t say what my smile was like in my boyhood days. Was it my father’s open grin after a taste of rum among friends? Was it my mother’s shy, modest smile as she saw her root remedies curing whatever ailed us? Might mine have been a smile that caused my eyes to sparkle or brought dimples to my cheeks? I’ll never know, just as I had no idea until later that a space existed where my two front teeth had been before my second set of teeth came in. At the least I can imagine how my little-boy face could have registered feelings and thoughts I vividly recall—crinkled with laughter, stung by embarrassment, frozen in shyness, darkened by disappointment, anger, or fear, lit by wonder and innocence, or mesmerized by the spell of the daydreams to which I surrendered so often during those years.

Ten and a half years without the opportunity to see myself in a mirror came to an abrupt halt in the latter part of 1937 when the state of Florida unexpectedly placed an embargo on the importation of tomatoes from the Bahamas—which caused the sudden collapse of our family’s tomato-farming business and our livelihood. In the hopes of finding work in Nassau, my father decided to move us there. At the age of fifty-three, Reggie Poitier was to learn that the pursuit of a new profession was to be a job in itself. But he had no other choice than to do what had to be done to provide for us. Undertaking the many tasks connected to pulling up stakes, he decided to send my mother and me to Nassau first, as the family’s advance team. Our job? To find a rental house at a reasonable price. With that accomplished, the rest of the family would follow, and Nassau would become our new home.

The day we left Cat Island, not for a second did I pause to consider all that we would be leaving behind or even the possibility that I would come to sorely miss the world that had raised me and all the
inhabitants of it. Once we’d set sail and headed into open waters, I never even looked back.

None of the amazing accounts I’d heard from others or imagined in my most far-flung fantasies about where we were headed could have begun to measure up to what I witnessed the day we sailed into Nassau’s huge harbor. As we approached land, I spotted something that was akin to a massive beetle, the size of a small house, as it crawled menacingly down the hillside.

I pointed at it in alarm, asking my mother, “What is that?”

“That,” she said knowingly, “is a car.”

I had heard about cars but was nonetheless stunned at seeing one for the first time. And there in the harbor were boats of every description, from dinghies to motorboats of every conceivable size and shape, as well as gigantic cruise ships that unloaded thousands of tourists per week at the massive dock, officially named Prince George’s Wharf. It was located one block from Bay Street, along which was the main shopping district, the seat of the government, and the financial district—each of which was a driving force in the overall economy of the islands of the Bahamas.

Overflowing with excitement, I leaped from the native sailboat that had delivered us safely to Nassau onto one of the smaller docks, and then waited as my mother got her bearings and then directed us toward Bay Street. As I walked along, my brain hummed with anticipation and my eyes scanned the terrain of the new world. There was so much to see, so much to learn, so much to know.

Never before had I seen paved roads like those in Nassau, with no rocky bumps sticking up everywhere like giant pimples, no wild bushes growing along the sides of Bay Street like along the roads on Cat Island. Here the main thoroughfares were smooth, I could see, so that wheels and feet could move faster along them. But who
made the roads smooth? How was it done? More mysteries to investigate, more unprecedented discoveries to make.

The first significant discovery of the day was set in motion by my mother, who stopped at the window of a tiny shop and bought two orders of a food item I had never seen or heard of before, one of which she passed to me. I looked at it, not knowing what to do with it. As we resumed wending our way along Bay Street, toting such luggage as we had, she referred to her purchase by a foreign-sounding name, something about “ice cream cones.” She started licking at hers with her tongue, and gestured for me to do the same. Having been given the green light, instead of licking it with my tongue as she had indicated, I took a big bite out of the ice cream still sitting on top of the cone in my hand.

The shock that the frozen treat sent through my nervous system can still be recalled these seventy years later. I panicked, big-time!