The Measure of a Man (19 page)

Which is another way of saying, “You are a child of the universe; you have a right to be here.” Carl Sagan’s first wife, Lynn Margulis, found another way to express the same idea through the concept of Gaia—the scientific view that our entire planet and all the ecosystems therein make up one organic whole, one living being that must be examined as such if we are to learn the way things truly are. “Mother Earth” is yet another, much older, and considerably less scientific way people have expressed the same thought.

To which I would add one postscript. I’ve read of studies done with youngsters—not with children, but with chimps—that have profound implications for our species and our life on this planet. The scientists behind this research know what it takes to raise a healthy baby chimp with a real mother—all the nutrition and the calories and so on. So they create a wire mother with maybe a bit of fur, a perch like an arm across the chest, and nipples that project through the wicker-and-wire mannequin. The nipples, attached to a sort of baby bottle, supply all the nutrients a chimp is known to need—the same nutrients that would come from a real mother’s milk, maybe even more. But despite the fact that baby chimps can climb up
on their “Wire Mothers” and be safe and get all the same nutrients, the same protein, the same basic protection from the elements they’d get from their real mothers, the chimps with the wire mothers wither and die.

My fear is this: I fear that as we cover more of our planet with concrete and steel, as we wire our homes with more and more fiber-optic cables that take the place of more intimate interactions, as we give our children more and more
stuff
and less and less time, as we go further and further away from the kind of simplicity I knew as a child on Cat Island, our Earth—Gaia or not—will become for us the Wire Mother, and our souls will wither and die as a result.

Every Sunday on Cat Island we would walk to the little church in Arthur’s Town to attend mass. The service was Anglican Catholic, the Church of England. Then we would walk home, all the kids with our shoes slung over our shoulders by their laces—shoes not to be worn again for another week.

When we moved to Nassau we attended the Catholic Church, but this was more a matter of convenience than theology. The fact is the real religion in our lives was grounded in the old culture, a belief that there were always unseen forces at play in our lives, unexplainable mysteries that determined our fate.

All through my childhood, from my first understanding of words, I heard adults speaking of these unseen forces. I think my entire life has been in large part an effort to understand these “mysteries.” I remember my father coming into the house
one day and picking up an enamel plate. As he put it behind his back, he said, “I’m going to show you something, and I’m going to show it to you only once. Are you ready?” And then he brought the plate from behind his back. On it were hundreds of tiny fishes. Then he moved the plate behind his back again, and they were gone. I was astounded! I begged him to do it again, but he never would. This strange transformation was magic to me, and I never forgot it. It was a mystery that I puzzled over for years.

On leaving Cat Island, I began to encounter new concepts and values embedded in strange new words—words like
commerce
and
material success
. I had never heard of such things on Cat Island, but from Nassau and beyond they loomed large as matters of life and death. And yet the mysteries were no fewer in this modern, more commercial environment. What is physics but a repository of mysteries? And astronomy? My God! You talk about mysteries! The migration from culture to culture and through varying levels of technical sophistication doesn’t matter. The mysteries shift their shapes, but the mysteries
remain
. God is the ultimate mystery, and fear of his wrath the ultimate driving force that governs how we behave.

When I was a kid in the Caribbean, there was a church on the next street from us. It was what was called a “Jumper church.” Now, a Jumper church was the kind of church where, at every session, the minister would whip the congregation into a kind of psychological frenzy, which included jumping up from their seats to prance about in a trance while speaking in tongues.

Okay. I was witness to evenings like these. But being too young to really get a grasp on where these worshipers were coming from, I never understood the whole concept very well. But I felt that the worshipers were genuine. This “foreign tongue” I heard—which would be the equivalent of gibberish, I suppose—sounded genuine to me. It was like a long stutter. And never a word that sounded English.

These folks were on their feet, jumping around in peculiar movements and rambling on ecstatically, in this unknown tongue. Many of them would become so overwhelmed by the possession of themselves that they’d slip into a kind of jerking, epileptic-like fit. Once in that state, they would be cared for and nurtured back to normal by other members of the congregation (some who themselves had just passed successfully through the same ritual moments before, and others who in due time would likewise be drawn into the trance). By the end of the evening everybody would be sitting prim and proper in their chairs again.

At the end of the service people collected their fans—there was no air-conditioning in the church—and emptied out into the evening darkness, headed home. I remember observing their faces carefully as they were leaving, just as I had observed their behavior in their trance. Most of them I had known around the neighborhood, but I felt I didn’t know them here.

Okay, now DISSOLVE. I’m a grown person now. Occasionally I travel back in my mind to such times. And still, to this day, I ask myself…unknown tongues? Were they, in fact, unknown tongues? If a recording were made at a service like
that and the words spoken were stacked utterance for utterance against all the known languages of the world, what kind of similarities might appear? Or would the words turn out to be in a totally unknown tongue? Might the gibberish be found to be unique? And if it
did
turn out to be a totally unknown tongue, would it be a tongue unknown only to those of
us
who hear it? Could it be clear-as-a-bell communication in a place where it’s understood? Could it be understood by God? Could there
be
a God? Can
you
be objective enough to perceive of there being a God who hears and understands
every
word?

“His eye is on the sparrow.”

“WHO ARE YOU?” I once was asked when I was young. “I’m the me I chose to be,” was my quick response. “Where did you come from, and how did you get here?” Equally glib responses waited on the tip of my tongue.

I’m no longer young now, and the season for summing up is descending upon me with steady insistence. So no further spin need be placed on answers to who I am or where I came from or how I got here. I am what I’ve become.

I came from a place of purity. I got here with the help of my friends, and my family, and perhaps the benign and protective influence of forces I’ll never understand. I entered this world with the standard equipment of an average child, as was plain
for all to see. Throughout my first ten years, my days were filled with the uneventful but traditional boychild developmental rituals of a semi-primitive society. Outside our island township the world at large didn’t exist, except in snippets infrequently picked up from adult conversations.

In the next five years, the outside world introduced itself to me and instructed me as to where the lines were drawn: what the style of my behavior should be, where I should find a place to fit, and how I should rein in my expectations (never, ever reaching above the level approved for persons like me, if such meager dreams as I was allowed were to find accommodation).

The reining in of expectations was the centerpiece of the outside world’s overall message, and it came through loud and clear. Limits had been defined, had been written into law and imposed on me long before I was even born. Therefore, I was forcefully advised to understand and accept that the burden would always be on me to see to it that my dreams were tailored to fit such width and breath as the limited expectations assigned me could comfortably entertain. While “expectations” meant “the sky’s the limit”
for those favored
, that interpretation should never be expected to apply in cases like mine. I listened intently until each point had been driven home. Then I said, “Fuck you.” in the nicest way I could.

By the end of those five years, the outside world and I had settled on what each could expect from the other. That each would keep an eye on the other had been a foregone conclusion. The outside world was annoyed and irritated by what it saw in me, but it was in no way fearful. Rather, it assumed that
somewhere further on I would undoubtedly self-destruct. And there’s the rub. In spite of the fact that we were ludicrously mismatched, I wasn’t so afraid as
not
to question the world’s power to determine what space I would be permitted to occupy. Nor would I allow it to impose a value of little consequence on my existence, or to reinforce its unyielding demand that its assessment of my value be my worth in the world at large. That power, which attempted to legislate how I should perceive myself in my own eyes, was unaware that, much earlier (long before I ever set sail for the outside world), roots sent down in a gentle place had taken hold. By the time the world and I took each other on, who and what I was had already been formed in my own eyes.

The ground had been broken and the seeds for this self had been sown somewhere inside me in a place called
imagination
. This was a word that had first appeared in otherwise familiar dialogue while my mother was administering one of the many whippings I was regularly accused of having earned.

“That imagination of yours [wham!] is going to get you in a bunch of trouble one of these days [wham! wham!] if you don’t start listening [wham! wham! wham!] to what I tell you [wham! wham! wham! wham!]. Now get it into that thick head of yours once and for all [wham! wham! wham! wham! wham!] and start behaving yourself.”

Imagination and whippings were two “blessings” always available to the young in that semi-primitive society, no less (I imagined) than in the larger world outside. In that beginning process the same imagination my mother feared would get me into
trouble was also my host and guide on excursions into whatever my daydreams envisioned the world at large to be. Together, my imagination and my daydreams whetted my appetite for the wellspring of possibilities they had steadfastly promised would be there. Promises were all that was needed to get the process started in the child that I was, in the place where I lived, in the time of my boyhood. While reality and facts were not given to making promises, they were at the same time also disagreeable and dull and no match for the power of dreams.

Daydreams were guaranteed to please. They had it all over facts and reality when it came to getting groundwork done and foundations laid. However, daydreams were burdened with what in years to come would be revealed as their major weakness. Every ounce of the hard, grueling, exhaustive work necessary in the conversion from promises made to dreams fulfilled was the sole responsibility of the dreamer.

I have shown you, in broad strokes, who I was on Cat Island until I was ten and a half years old, and then in Nassau until fifteen, but contradictions abounded. The first time I lied, the first time I stole, the first time I cheated, my first blush of envy, flirtation with greed—not one of these vices was waiting at the docks in the new world to infect me upon my arrival there. I obviously had brought them with me from that gentle place I had left behind.

But where exactly did they come from? Were they in the genes of generations before, who had passed them quietly down? Or were they socialized behavioral responses, inescapable in human relationships?

I recall that as a youngster I was a killer of frogs and birds and a torturer of lizards. I recall that I fished for chickens with a straight pin bent into the shape of a hook. With a corn seed fixed on the tip as bait and the pinhook tied to a length of thread, I would cast among the chickens, then wait for one to pluck it up and swallow. I’ve killed fish and birds and discarded their bodies without having paid them the honor of eating their flesh. I can recall insects that, posing no threat, were squashed dead by a reflexive foot or hand of mine, long before
and
long after I had learned the meaning of the word
remorse
.

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 experi
ences. 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 condemna
tion. 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.