Life Beyond Measure (5 page)

In my ten and a half years of life I had never experienced anything so cold. On Cat Island, nothing was cold. The island had no electricity; hence, no ice, no refrigerators, no ice cream, no cold drinks. Temperatures, winter and summer, ranged between seventy and ninety degrees, with humidity levels often going through the roof.

My mother, who had first tasted ice cream on trips with my father to Miami, was preoccupied that morning with the fragile state of our finances, which threatened to thwart her efforts in arranging affordable housing for us, not to mention the multitude of other concerns that needed to be addressed for our family to make the challenging transition to the new, sophisticated environment ahead of us.

Meanwhile, my teeth had frozen, so had my tongue, and my lips were starting to go numb—sensations that provoked a guttural cry
that I couldn’t contain. It was as if there were fire in my mouth, burning up everything inside it. My verbal and physical reactions were enough to draw my mother’s attention and, apparently, her realization that she had not properly introduced me to this totally foreign food. She then gently walked me through the paces of ice-cream eating. Lick by lick I got the hang of it. And for the next fifty years, I was an ice-cream devotee—until lactose intolerance came between us. But I’m OK with that; we had a good run. And, as you and I both know, Ayele, nothing lasts forever.

Well, let me tell you, ice cream was not the only astonishing discovery I made on that first day in Nassau. More was in store, just moments ahead, as we maneuvered our way through the swirling traffic of local residents and tourists moving in both directions along the crowded sidewalk of Bay Street. My mother and I paused occasionally to peer through plate-glass windows at shops filled with things I had never seen nor could begin to identify—articles of clothing and shoes for children and adults, toys, furniture, strange containers of items for eating and household use, objects made of materials of unknown origin. Unbelievably, there were electric lights that lit up the interior of the stores, making the inside as bright as the sun was making the outside. No one had told me anything about that! Sure, I knew what petty shops on Cat Island were like, but I had never dreamed of anything like the stores on Bay Street.

All the while, behind and beside us, traffic spun in all directions: people in cars, in carriages, on bicycles, on horse-drawn drays laden with wholesale products destined for local retail merchants. There were barefoot men struggling with backbreaking loads on their shoulders, delivering something somewhere nearby to a seller or a buyer, or from one warehouse to another, or from the hold of a cargo ship to the government’s customs shed, or to the nearby Straw
Market—where vendors with colorful, indigenous hand-crafted items hanging from their arms raced alongside tourists, aggressively trying to coax them into purchasing souvenirs that would guarantee memories of the pleasurable vacation cruise they once took.

As my mother and I moved along with the bustling sidewalk crowd, continuing to glance into display windows as we passed, stopping at times for a closer look when something captured our attention, I was aware of the discreet happiness on her face as she observed me in the throes of amazement—my eyes, no doubt, full of wonder and surprise as I gawked unabashedly at every item on display, every character in this unfolding new drama.

And though my mother had seen these sights before on selling trips with my father, even though she had much to accomplish in a limited amount of time, she chose not to rush us but to slow her pace and allow me the incredible gift of drinking in this wonderland experience. Everything was sumptuous, glorious, out of this world—no one aspect more important or compelling than the other. That is, until suddenly I came upon the treasure I’d been seeking for years! A major find! A stunning discovery!

Yes, maybe you’ve guessed already. It was a full-length mirror that hung just beyond where I could see, right inside a store we were passing! I knew that it had to be a mirror because I could see a lady standing in front of it, preening herself, and as I peered closer into the store window, I could see her reflection in it. My heart raced! At once I knew that it would be in this complex, intimidating new place called Nassau that finally I would see my face in a mirror for the very first time.

My mother immediately sensed my fascination and intent. Pausing as though to consider stepping inside so that I could investigate further, she then took another look at the lady in the store
meticulously checking out her image in the full-length mirror. If I knew anything about Evelyn Poitier, I understood that she would have given the world for me to have something that appeared to be of the utmost importance. But a dynamic of entitlement that I didn’t yet understand stood in our way. Lessons would come later about rights and privileges of those who can buy and those who can’t, and there were to be many more store windows that I’d need to press my nose against before I could enter freely. Instead of disrupting the lady customer’s hold on that mirror, my mother chose to teach me that sometimes gratification has to be delayed. Gently placing an arm around my shoulders, she led me along to the next display window. We didn’t exchange one word, but both of us recognized that I would be back again at my earliest opportunity to put myself in front of a mirror that I now knew existed.

In the meantime, there were other distractions to behold as we made our way to the home of friends who had migrated from Cat Island to Nassau a few years earlier and with whom we had arranged to stay. Their house was as modest as the one they had built for themselves back home. Nevertheless, they received us with open hearts and provided space for us in their tidy, now-overcrowded dwelling. Before we went to sleep that night—no easy undertaking for me with all the excitement—my mother announced that she would be leaving early the next morning to comb through the lower-income sections of the island for affordable housing. My job, as she repeated to me the next day when she left me to wait for her at the house, came with a typical Cat Island warning: “Stay from underfoot and don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am, I hear you.” Due to past experience, she may not have completely believed me.

When the parents of the house had left for work and their children had left for school and I was alone, I searched the premises for a mirror, but there weren’t any that I could find. So I left the house for a walk through the unfamiliar neighborhood, and found myself unable to resist the urge tugging me to have another look at Bay Street. Once there, I started entering stores, looking for mirrors. Within no time, I spotted one on a wall at the back of a shop. As I approached it, ready for ten and a half years of suspense to come to an end, it mattered not that it was smaller than full-length, only that there was no one in front of it. My time had come.

So, there I was at last, giddy with excitement, standing in front of a mirror, looking at my face in detail for the first time! I examined every inch of its contours and features: my nose, my eyes, my cheeks, my chin, my throat, my hair—all bearing resemblances to my mother and father. Wow!

Mesmerized by what I saw, I smiled at myself and couldn’t help giggling, and I was particularly happy with my teeth. I moved my lips and batted my eyes. Turning this way and that, I checked out my profile and found it much to my liking. For a flash, I considered returning to the store that had the full-length mirror, but I knew that my mother would not have been pleased if she found out. Besides, I wanted to savor this moment for as long as I could.

Another six years passed before my eyes would come to rest on a photograph of myself for the very first time. That happened after I made it to New York City, at age sixteen, and had worked enough hours as a dishwasher to afford to stop into an instant photo shop—where I finally had my picture taken. By then I had cultivated a look in keeping with the prevailing style that was all the rage in the Harlem of that era—a zoot suit and a broad-rimmed felt hat.

As I look back at that torn-edged photo, the fellow in it doesn’t look much like the me I’ve come to know. Of course, that look was my way of trying to fit in, to be indistinguishable from the hip and the cool who were setting the style, defining the tastes, and reaping the accolades. Being the outsider that has long characterized me, I was young enough to suppose that by masquerading as one of the insiders, I would be able to siphon off a little of the popularity so generously lavished upon them.

But my zoot suit added nothing to my efforts to escape loneliness and be seen as a person who mattered—a person worthy of a “hello” and a smile and a look in the eye. At that point in my travels, as I will recount to you in subsequent letters, the experience of dismissal and constantly being overlooked was to become much too familiar. It takes a toll, leaving one with the feeling of being erased gradually, silently, bit by bit.

So, a long, long distance from Cat Island, I did finally have my first picture taken, but I had accomplished little else, and there is some irony in the fact that the camera, providing no improvement in my social status and no record of my early childhood, would one day make my face recognizable around the world.

A
s I write to you, Ayele, of the adventures, challenges, and changes that arose in the course of my early lifetime, news has arrived that the men’s basketball program at East Carolina University has added Darryl LaBarrie, your dad, to its coaching staff, and that you are moving with your parents to a new home in Greenville, North Carolina—where I look forward to visiting you at my earliest chance. You may have already discovered in my letters to you so far how much I value family and community. What’s more, I’m certain that as you grow, you will continue to discover that there is no shortage of interesting and unusual people among our relatives—a wonderful group of characters. On every branch you look at, it’s easy to observe that our family
tree has borne some fascinating fruit, you being the most promising of the bunch!

On your great-grandmother Juanita’s side, though it has never been fully researched, I’ve always been of the opinion that the ancestors were from one of the American Indian tribes that were very much evident in earlier years in many of the Southern states—where her folks were from. Before we were married, I went to meet her parents to ask for her hand. And not only did I see them to be very good people, but I was also convinced of the strong Native American influence in their background. What I can also relate is that your great-great-grandmother was an excellent cook; your great-great-grandfather Edward Hardy was a bricklayer by trade; a quiet, reasonable person, a very likable man. Edward Hardy and his wife had four children, a son named Edward and three daughters—Joan and Eleanor (your great-aunts, both now deceased) and Juanita, your great-grandmother. Because our marriage ended before I learned much about her family’s earlier history, I’ll leave it to you to do some more investigating in due time.

Meanwhile, there is much more to tell you about several members of the family on my side who, each in his or her own way, are all part of who I am today and who played memorable roles in what I have learned about life and human nature.

Family relationships, I have learned, are not always easy to understand and predict. This was definitely true of an event that took place on Cat Island a few years before we left for Nassau. Back around the time that I was just going on eight years old, in addition to helping my mother take our laundry into the woods to wash in ponds where clean, clear rainwater had collected, and sometimes even helping work in the tomato fields alongside my parents and siblings, I was frequently sent to pick up an item or two from my
Uncle David’s small grocery shop—a six-to eight-minute walk from our house.

David Poitier was my father’s brother. He lived next to us with his wife and children, and his grocery supplied basic foodstuffs and other staples to many of the villagers in Arthur’s Town. Since it was a regular chore that I enjoyed, when my mother sent me for a few items about midmorning one sunny day, I was glad to oblige.

From the moment I arrived at Uncle David’s store and told him what it was that my mother had asked me to fetch, I could sense some note of antagonism in his voice. Uncle David, a man known to be given to moods, seemed to be slowly working his way into one. “Where’s your father?” he asked me.

“Home,” I answered.

“Tell him I want to see him,” he growled back as he handed me the items for my mother.

I headed home with no further thoughts on Uncle David’s mood, having long ago decided for myself that my dad’s brother, for some inexplicable reason, always managed to draw a strange kind of pleasure from ruffling his own feathers. What followed, therefore, caught me by surprise.

No sooner had I started off than I looked up to see my father coming toward me on his way to his brother’s store. Suddenly, from behind me came Uncle David’s voice, barking threats and curse words at my dad.

As my father passed by me, his expression severe, he urged me to hurry on home. I didn’t, but instead ducked behind a tree and watched as a bizarre encounter played itself out. It wasn’t pretty! The next thing I knew, war was declared as my Uncle David started in by pelting my dad with a barrage of stones at close range. My dad darted about in erratic patterns, trying to avoid making himself an
easy target for his brother. He wasn’t completely successful, and he took many hits, a few very serious ones. Reggie Poitier, with a dignity that defined him, never picked up a stone to fire back.

Neighbors, hearing Uncle David’s verbal tirade, came rushing out of their homes and intervened. They dragged Uncle David back to his shop and calmed him down, while other neighbors joined together to safely escort my dad and me back home.

My mother’s response, at first, was to calmly and quickly set about to stop the bleeding and to dress my father’s wounds. As soon as that was done, she took a deep breath, and then she exploded. I mean, nuclear! Never had I seen her like that before, or after! A grievous offense had been committed against her family, and the volcano could no longer be held in check. It was about to blow.

There, just watching, I held my breath as my mother walked out of the kitchen, where she had just attended to the last of her husband’s wounds, and looked out across the four-hundred-yard salt pond that separated the homes of Reginald Poitier and his brother David. At that time, there was a two-foot-wide path running along the edge of the salt pond from one house to the other. My mother began by muttering to herself about the unwarranted attack on her husband, all the while casting her gaze toward the salt pond.

Three of my older brothers who were on hand were paying enough attention to anticipate that perhaps the worst of the eruption wasn’t over yet, and they appeared to casually stand together as a barrier between our mother and the pond, just in case she made a move. As the youngest and most recent of her offspring, I was better at reading her than my older brothers, and I knew that a major move was indeed imminent. One glance at her face, and I could have told them that she was picking her spot.

Soon she was no longer muttering. Her voice level started to escalate as she began moving around in circles, at the same moment that she began to moan and keen. Then suddenly she screamed out toward the house at the far end of the pond, calling on Uncle David’s wife to come over and see what her husband had done to his brother. The louder she screamed, the closer she moved to her point of detonation.

Then, as if on cue, Uncle David’s wife appeared at the far end of the pond. She didn’t waste a second. She came loaded for bear. She started out screaming back at my mom, firing off unfounded accusations. My brothers circled closer around our mother. But not close enough. Before they could readjust, she broke through the line of defense my brothers represented and was off, headed for the narrow pathway that ran along the edge of the pond all the way to Uncle David’s house.

My mother flew at meteoric speed, heading for a serious dustup with a woman she had tried very, very hard to like. My brothers, too, were flying. To avert disaster, they had to reach her before she made it around the pond. The swiftest of my brothers finally pulled her down a few yards short of her goal. But by then, Uncle David’s wife had deserted her post, frantically realizing that the whirlwind on its way to do her in was likely to make it after all.

The violent squall that had arisen so suddenly, for reasons never to be further discussed or addressed, thus subsided. From then on, the two families coexisted with as little contact as possible. To my knowledge, the two brothers never spoke a word to each other after that morning when an unspeakable chasm, to remain forever unbreachable, had opened between them.

Some years later, after we’d moved to Nassau, I was wandering about on the waterfront one day when a sailor on a cargo ship that
had just pulled in recognized me and called out my name. I walked over to him, and he said to me, “Tell your pa his brother David is dead.”

Without hesitation, I ran to the place where my dad was employed in that era and told him the news.

My father didn’t say anything except to nod in acknowledgment that he had heard me. But I could see in his eyes that he was deeply saddened that his brother was gone—disappointed, too, that their rift, such as it was, could never be mended.

There were other surprising turns to follow in the lives of different family members, particularly as my four brothers and four sisters, one by one, left home to seek their fortunes and start families of their own. One of the most ambitious of the brood was my brother Cedric, the one I followed by birth.

A dreamer who desired most of all to go to America, where he felt his dreams would be fulfilled, Cedric never made it because, being a dreamer, he was a guy for whom dreams were the stuff of life, and in his outrageous capacity for dreaming, he dreamed himself right into jail. When I was twelve years old, doing my best to stay clear of trouble in Nassau, Cedric and a friend nicknamed Rooster, having seen too many American films about gangsters and such, wrote an extortion letter to a businessman, the owner of a chain of grocery stores in Nassau, demanding protection money in order to prevent the stores from being burned down. The businessman was no lightweight. He went straight to the police, who in turn set a trap; my bother and his compatriot were ensnared, and off they went to the hoosegow.

When Cedric was released, he wanted desperately to leave Nassau and stowed away on a boat heading for America. Again he was
caught, and went back to jail. That was the way his life went, and I regret to say that he died young, at the age of thirty-four.

What happened to Cedric and my other siblings, earlier and later, gave me a chance to observe how we all shape our lives and how situations that arise shape us. I don’t know where I got it from, but along the way I discovered that I was able to look at family and close friends and sense when they were being confronted by circumstances for which they were not prepared.

This was true of Cedric and of my brother Carl, my brother in line before Cedric. A longshoreman who worked on the docks in Nassau, Carl was troubled in certain ways. Reclusive and disconnected from others, he was not a very socially adjusted person. On the other hand, he never got into any trouble, and he worked very hard, had children, and did the best he could for them. But he had not been ready for challenges, as I recall, like the day he was sitting on a church wall near our house, and a couple of guys, friends of his, decided to test his bravery. I was near enough to see in Carl’s eyes that he received their remarks as a challenge, and the receipt of it was too much for him to handle. Though younger than he, I knew that he should have diffused the challenge by dismissing it. But he couldn’t dismiss it, because all his life he had been unable to look challenges in the face. Despite how mild it really was, Carl was rattled by it. I felt sorry, and was ashamed for him, for he knew that I had caught it, and that once again he hadn’t stepped up to a challenge.

But that was Carl’s nature, and I knew it. Just as I knew that it was in Cedric’s nature that he and his friend Rooster would be sending extortion letters. Carl never rose above the tendency to be intimidated by what ordinarily would be characterized as inconsequential
stuff. Ultimately, his was not a very eventful life. He remained a longshoreman until he died at the age of sixty-five.

While those two brothers fended off difficulties in their respective ways, my older brothers Reginald and Cyril found opportunities they pursued to better advantage.

Reggie, named after my father, was the brother who had preceded Carl. My father had pinned his hopes on Reggie, and when we moved to Nassau, having had no children attend college, my dad went to someone he had once known, the headmaster at an advanced academy, seeking to get Reggie enrolled. The headmaster, knowing my father’s financial state of affairs, warned him that it would cost a considerable amount of money. But my father declared he would try to manage it, and the headmaster agreed to accept Reggie as a student.

About a year into Reggie’s schooling, the headmaster came back to my father and told him it wasn’t going to work out. Reggie, he asserted, was not student material. My father was disappointed, but he was a stand-up guy against difficulties, so he faced the truth as he realized it to be and took Reggie out of school.

My brother soon thereafter became a cab driver, and remained one all his life until he retired. And as I write this Reggie is still alive at the age of eighty-eight, with lots of children and grandchildren who are flourishing today. He has a daughter who holds an important position in the dialysis division of a local hospital. He also has a son who for many years worked for a casino company and now has a business of his own. He has another son who has taken up the taxicab business that his father ran, and Reggie has other sons who work for the government or have other rewarding jobs.

Like his namesake, Reg is a decent man through and through, and was devoted to his wife, who some years ago became gravely ill and
slipped into a coma. When her condition came to the point where the pulling of the plug seemed an option, Reggie and his daughter—I suspect with the concurrence of the other children—elected not to. They knew what a difficult task it would be to keep her because they all worked, except Reggie, but he and his daughter committed to taking care of her. Reggie kept her alive, sleeping in the same bed with her for five years. For all the strife, he and his daughter, who lived in the house but still had to be away at the hospital, maintained that it was a wife and mother that they were not going to let go until she went, those five years later.

The eldest of our brothers, Cyril, was both a dreamer and a hardworking pragmatist who lived to be eighty-one years old. Like Cedric, Cyril stowed away on a ship to America. But unlike Cedric, he was not caught. Once in Miami, as an illegal alien he worked with his hands, earned citizenship, and married an American girl named Bertha; she also worked with her hands. Together they raised ten children, and sent them all to college. You can imagine how proud that made your great-great grandparents Reggie and Evelyn Poitier—that so many of their grandchildren—your cousins—had made it to college.