Free Life Beyond Measure by Sidney Poitier

afterward, after Teddy had been living on her own for a time. At that juncture, Teddy took sick, and the doctors at the hospital in Nassau couldn’t determine what was wrong with her. She was so ill, had lost so much weight and become so frail and feeble, that the doctors called my father to take her home, because they felt there was nothing they could do to save her.
    My father not only brought her home at once but adamantly refused to accept that Teddy couldn’t be saved. Like our mother, who put stock in some of the older occult and voodoo practices, our dad had his own connections to such healing arts. And when he got word that a medicine man was coming to Nassau from one of the other islands to treat someone, my father made arrangements to meet with him—whereupon the medicine man agreed to come see Teddy. After the examination, he told my parents little except that he would be back the next day. He returned with roots and leaves from the forest, and he had my father bake and crush them until they looked like tea leaves. Indeed, they were used to make tea, and my father and mother fed Teddy the tea three to four times a day. Slowly, she started improving, tended by love, faith, and nature’s powers. In time she was back on her feet, and soon after that shefound a job in a hotel and returned to work full-time. While there, some visiting tourists from Syracuse, New York, took such a liking to Teddy that she was told employment was waiting for her—if she ever came to Syracuse.
    Here again, Teddy’s adventurous spirit took hold and she subsequently went to Syracuse and worked there, proudly returning home on vacations to tell of her experiences in a world far away from where she had begun, laughing and musing about possibilities for her future.
    Many years after I’d left home and was just beginning my career in movies in Hollywood, I received a call from someone in Syracuse telling me that my sister Teddy had fallen ill and was in the hospital. Within days, she died.
    My sister Teddy was an adventurous soul, born in a time that didn’t allow her room to rise. She was one of nature’s children, kept alive in my memories by the echoes of her laughter and love.
    As I search my recollections of all the members of the Family Poitier—those who are still here, and those long gone—I can’t say that anyone in the family had a preoccupation anything like mine for delving into life’s most elusive mysteries. Was asking those questions the job that was assigned to me at birth? Was it a mantle that I accidentally came across and put on while roaming the island of my youth? More questions looking for answers!
    Here are other variations: how did I end up in the family that I did? How do any of us get here?
    Well, some say by design: faith and the will of God. Others say by random happenstance: trial and error. Modern science, on the other hand, speaking with its customary caution, points to the unfolding of evolutionary processes over billions of years—that when studied in depth will yield proven scenarios that soon will leave no doubt asto how we got here. Meanwhile—ifs, ands, and buts notwithstanding—how we got here remains an unanswered question.
    For sure, some unanswered questions will meet up with answers that fit like a glove; some will not. Some will linger long, have no luck, and wither on the vine. Maybe, for some, there are no answers. Maybe some questions are eternal by nature, and we are never meant to find an answer. Or so it sometimes seems.
    At odd times, it appears at first glance that unanswered questions and unfinished lives share—at the same time—a mutual attraction and an unbearable incompatibility. And yet the search goes on—with explanations as to how and why coming up later on.

sixth letter
T HE L ONER
    A yele, I think by now you have a sense of who I am. And I hope that sense coincides with who I feel myself to be as I write this letter. But it is who I’ve been in the life I’ve