Free The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier Page B

moment before continuing. “You know, I’ve never met anybody like you. That part was a pretty good part. It had no racial overtones to it, and you turned it down. You haven’t done anything since, and it would have been—well, it was paying 750 dollars a week. It would have been a nice piece of change.”
    He once again asked me to explain why I hadn’t taken the part, but all could say was. “Well, you know, it’s the way I am.”
    He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but anybody as crazy as you, I want to handle him.”
    I said, “Okay.” And that’s how I landed with a big agent, and that’s when my career got on solid footing.
    Now, I couldn’t tell him at the time, and maybe it’ll sound a little sanctimonious even now, after all these years, but I rejected that part because, in my view, the character simplydidn’t measure up. He didn’t fight for what mattered to him most. He didn’t behave with dignity.
    My father, Reggie, was a certain kind of man, and he was a certain kind of dad. He was a poor man, for certain. He was a hard-working man, for sure. The only thing he knew how to do was tomato farming, but the soil in Nassau wasn’t good, and it was a tourist economy, and there was simply no room for him to plant. By this time he was fifty or fifty-five, and he was suffering severely from rheumatoid arthritis, among other things. He had worked in a bicycle shop in Nassau, but after some years he’d lost the job. The only way he could make a living now was to have my brother in Miami send him boxes of very cheap cigars. My father would then spend the day walking around town, going from one bar to another, selling the cigars. One to this person, two to another. That’s how poor he was. But he did what he had to do. And I wasn’t going to play any part that might dishonor his values.
    My mom, too, always measured up. She would go scouring the neighborhood and into the nearby woods, picking up rocks and stones—sometimes as much as twenty-pound stones or thirty-pound stones, even fifty-pound stones. When she had gathered upwards of two thousand pounds into a mound in the yard in front of our house, she would sit under an almond tree with a hammer in her hand and a big wide straw hat on her head, and from morning to night she would hammer those stones into pebbles and those pebbles into gravel.
    It would take her weeks to break a pile of stones that reached close to ceiling height in a pyramid fashion. That’s a hell of a lot ofstones to break. And she didn’t work at it just for a few weeks; the weeks would sometimes run into months. When she had an impressive enough pyramid of crushed stones—mind you, other poor women were doing the same thing—a man would come by with his truck and his workers, and he would bargain with her for her pyramid of crushed stones, and he would pay her whatever she was able to negotiate—on average, ten shillings, twelve shillings, a pound and a half. Fifteen shillings would have been the equivalent of about six dollars. The man would pay her the six dollars, or whatever it was, and his workmen would shovel all the gravel into his truck, and they would go.
    Then, after some respite of a week or so, she would start gathering stones all over again.
    But what Reggie and Evelyn did for a living in no way articulated who they were as people. There was this whole race/class thing in the Bahamas, and among blacks the class thing was prevalent and vigorously administered. If you were really poor, you were without leverage and powerless, and that was the majority of the people. Also, there was a class of blacks who felt they were above you. They mimicked the colonial value system and saw themselves at the top of the black community. It was their hierarchical sort of thing. Well, my dad was so poor that he was dismissed by the black social structure, dismissed by every social structure. Dismissed by everyone, pretty much, except his