At the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I found a book from 2024 containing an unexpected collection of speeches. It is a posthumous collection titled Sidney Poitier: The Great Speeches of an Icon Who Moved Us Forward. There are portions from it at Google Books. On page 3 it says:
“Sidney Poitier had an inauspicious early life. Raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas in the 1920s and 1930s, he was – from an American perspective, and certainly from a Hollywood one – disadvantaged with the wrong childhood environment, skin color, and accent, but nevertheless he was destined to help change the world’s most powerful country and one of its most influential industries – the movies – forever.”
In his Saint Mark’s School Commencement speech, June 2002, he described Cat Island (page 140):
“I spent my twelve years on an island in the Caribbean. Cat Island was forty-six miles long and three to five miles wide. There were only about two hundred families on the whole island. The population of our village was about thirty to forty families. I had just one friend to play with, and he lived a long distance away. On the island there were no cars, no trucks, no buses, no trains, no paved roads, no electricity, no running water, no television, no ice cream, no movie houses. At night we used candlelight, firelight, or moonlight to get about to see where we were going. Night or day, everybody walked wherever they needed to go, or rode a horse or donkey if they were lucky enough to own one. In fact, there were stretches in my life when I was a kid when I would go for a whole week and never see a single soul other than my immediate family. As a result, some of my best friends were birds and lizards and frogs; some of my worst enemies were wasps, mosquitoes, sea urchins and tarantula spiders. I used to have regular conversations with all of them,”
And in his New York University Commencement speech in May 1995 (pages 116 to 120) he described going from a dishwasher to an actor:
“….I was a dishwasher. That’s how I survived my early years in NYC. Minimal skills were required. Dishwashing provided a salary and three meals a day. I was between job assignments on the morning in question, and my pockets were nearly empty. So empty, in fact, that if no dishwashing position was available, I was ready to glom onto any kind of work that a Black kid with no education might qualify for. I purchased a copy of the Amsterdam News, one of Harlem’s leading newspapers, and started scanning the want-ad page for dishwasher openings.
The last page of want-ad boxes faced the theatrical page, which contained an article with a heading that read ‘actors wanted.’ The gist of which was that a theatre group called the American Negro Theatre was in need of actors for its next production. My mind got to spinning. My eyes bounced back and forth between the want-ad page and the theatrical page. ‘What the hell,’ I thought. ‘I’ve tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted. Why not try actors wanted?’ I figured I could do that. It didn’t sound any more difficult than washing dishes or parking cars. And they didn’t say they required any particular kind of training. But when I went in and was auditioned on the spot, the man in charge quickly let me know, and in no uncertain terms, that I was misguided in my assumptions. I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off I had a thick, singsong Bahamian accent. He snatched the script from my hands, spun me around, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and the back of my pants, and marched me on tippy-toes towards the door. He was seething. ‘You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you could handle,’ he barked. ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.’ That was the line he ended with as he threw me out and slammed the door.
I have to tell you, his comments stung worse than any wasp on any sapodilla tree in my childhood. I hadn’t mentioned to him that I was a dishwasher. How did he know? If he didn’t know, then what was it about me that seemed to have implied to this stranger that a dishwasher’s profession would accurately sum up my whole life’s worth?
Whatever it was, I knew I had to change it or life was going to be mighty grim. And so, I set out on a course of self-improvement. I worked nights, and on my evening lunch breaks I sat in a quiet area of the restaurant where I was employed – near the entrance to the kitchen – reading the newspapers, trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word. An old Jewish waiter, noticing my efforts, took pity and offered to help. He became my tutor as well as my guardian angel of the moment. Each night we sat in the same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant, and he helped me learn to read better than I was able to before.
My immediate objective was to prove that I could be an actor. Not that I had any real desire to go on the stage, not that I had ever given it a thought. I simply needed to prove to that stranger that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more to him than washing dishes. And it worked. The second time around they let me in.
But it was still no slam dunk. In fact, I made the first cut only because there were so few guys and they needed some male bodies to round out the incoming class of new students. But not even that could keep me for long, given my lack of education and experience. After a couple of months they were going to flunk me out, and once again I felt that vulnerability – as if I’d fallen overboard into deep water. If I lose this, where am I? One more Black kid who can barely read, washing dishes on the island of Manhattan? ‘Not if I can help it,’ thought I. So, in desperation I conjured up a truly outrageous offer they couldn’t refuse. I would become their janitor without pay if they would let me continue to study. After some brief negotiations, it was so agreed.
Things began to improve, and maybe even I began to improve. As an actor, that is. But when it came time to cast the first big student production, in walked a new guy, another kid from the Caribbean. Not a member of the group, but someone to whom the director had assigned the part I had secretly hoped to get. After all my studies, busting my butt trying to learn to act, not to mention busting my butt sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace, she cast him in the lead. Well, I had to admit, he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a good voice. He could even sing a little.
I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me his understudy. But little did I know, on the night of the first major run through, the one night an important director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid who had been cast for the lead – a kid named Harry Belafonte – couldn’t make it. I had to go on for him and, son of a gun, the visiting director liked what I did, and he called me to audition for a play he was planning to present on Broadway.
‘I’m opening Lysistrata on Broadway,’ he said. ‘There might be a small part you could try out for, if you’re available.’
‘Are you kidding?’ I thought to myself.
Next thing you know, five weeks later, on opening night, I’m staring out from a Broadway stage onto a sea of white faces in a packed theater – staring back at me – scared beyond belief as I fumbled unsuccessfully for my lines.
The word ‘bad’ cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was bad. The stage fright had me so that I was giving the wring cues, jumbling the lines, and within an instant the audience was rolling in the aisles.
The moment the scene I was in came to its tortuous end, it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.
The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so godawful they thought I was good. They said they admired my ‘fresh comedic gift.’
If you saw this in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? Someone was looking out for me, for sure.
My ‘triumph’ in Lysistrata leads immediately to an understudy’s job in the touring company of Anna Lucasta. Then after a long, lean, and frustrating period I found out, quite by accident, that 20 th Century Fox was about to begin casting for a movie called No Way Out. That, as it turned out, was my first motion picture job. Fifty-years and fifty-six movies later, here I am recalling the year, the day, the words, and the resolve that forged a new and undreamed-of-beginning and launched a journey more incredible than I could have imagined – through the streets of New York, along the highways and byways of life, on to a destiny written in a time before I came, by hands other than my own.”
The 2009 portrait came from Wikimedia Commons.
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