Free The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier

South Africa, to play the part of the young priest in Cry, the Beloved Country .
    It was heady stuff, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that, not only was I one lucky youngster, but something more had to be at play here. I had grown up in a culture where unseen forces lurked just out of view, where people looked to “the mysteries” to explain both good fortune and bad. As I tried to absorb the changes in my new life, I butted up against the knowledge that this many accidents and lucky breaks just didn’t happen in the movie business, or anywhere else. They didn’t even happen in the movies themselves! I knew that things could be taken away just as easily as they now seemed to come. I rested uneasily on those black-and-white and scary uncertainties.
    After returning from London I at last went back to the Bahamas and came very much back down to earth. I saw my mother and my father for the first time in eight years. I had goneaway a troubled boy of fifteen, and here I was, a man of twenty-three whom they could hardly recognize. It was a powerful moment when I returned to our little house in Nassau and saw them sitting together, alone, on a Saturday night. It was a moment of miraculous joy, but also a time of wrenching guilt for me, because during those eight years I had remained entirely silent.
    It’s an unwritten law in the Bahamas that when people who go to America to live write home, they put a little something in the envelope. I had been unable to contribute to my family for so long that the habit of silence had simply overtaken me. Or at least that’s how I had justified it to myself. I had to wait until I was in good shape, I had told myself. Still, I knew that Reggie was more of a man than to let eight years pass without a word.
    I made amends, but my guilt wasn’t canceled. My parents forgave me—they would have forgiven me anything—and I left with them almost all of the three thousand dollars I had made in my nascent career in the movies. But I knew that, forced to take my measure at that moment, even they would have found me wanting.
    So going back to New York was a valuable exercise in humility. After that initial burst of success—a couple of films and a couple of major theatrical productions—I was back in Harlem washing dishes. Perhaps I had a gift from Cat Island buried deep within me, because despite the setback, I still had faith in myself and faith in the future—enough of each to marry a beautiful young girl named Juanita and try to get on with my life. Then a buddy of mine had the bright idea of opening a rib place. We scraped together the money and opened alittle joint, Ribs in the Ruff (at 127th Street and 7th Avenue), with seating for all of thirteen people.
    My wife was trying her hand at modeling, though that led by way of necessity to a job as a seamstress at a clothing factory. This life was tough, but we were up for it. Having lived with my mother and my father, having watched how they dealt with other people and with each other, I felt prepared for pretty much anything.
    Soon our first child was born, little Beverly, and then another was on her way, and I didn’t have any money. Our little barbecue place was a hole in the wall. Eighty cents for a meal, including side dishes. My partner and I did everything. We cooked the ribs, we made the potato salad, we made the coleslaw, we scrubbed out the place when we closed in the morning. Times were so tough that I used to take milk from the restaurant home for my kid.
    One day when my wife was pregnant with Pam, I was working in the rib joint. I was tapped out and feeling worried. That day, with nothing encouraging in sight, out of the blue a big agent named Marty Baum called me and said, “Would you come down? I have something I want to talk to you about.”
    He wasn’t my agent, of course. He was just helping out on a casting assignment. His office was on 5th Avenue, between 58th and 57th Streets.
    He said, “Go over to the Savoy Plaza