Free Life Beyond Measure by Sidney Poitier Page B

more secure I became not only in the world outside of me but in my own self. There was much to hear: variations of sounds made by the changing winds; the booming battle of sturdy, raucous waves racing in to confront the rocky shoreline, which stands its ground and repulses one mighty charge afteranother until the rage of an angry ocean finally subsides, restoring calm to the waters of the Bahamas. Conversing with those sounds gave me an anchor, a sense of place and location, made possible whenever I tried to figure out the direction each sound was coming from. Was it coming from the trees? From the bushes? From distant places?
    In this process, I came to know and identify the various musicians creating the orchestration of sounds that were the vibrant voices of Cat Island. All those creatures and entities became my friends, my familiars: the birds and the land crabs, the crickets—all the forces of nature that had so much to say to me.
    Sometimes I feel like I was born with the seed of a loner buried deep inside of me; and my external life was tailor-made, by nature, to nurture that seed in ways that were beyond my understanding. This schooling probably began even when I was a toddler and my mother, before setting off to work her long hours, dropped me off to stay with my grandfather and grandmother, Pa Tim and Mama Gina, her parents, your great-great-great-grandparents. She was able to leave me with my elders, who didn’t say much to me and weren’t able to scurry after me, because I was already being raised to be self-sufficient. Later, in the short period when I attended school, I would go home at the end of the school day directly to Pa Tim and Mama Gina, check in, have a bite to eat, and begin my wanderings.
    Some days I headed into the swamps to look for berries, picking cocoa plums and outsmarting the wasps by shaking sapodilla trees and causing the ripest fruit to fall. As long as my eyes were sharp and I caught the fruit at the flood, I could feast on it as well. But I also learned that there are few tastes as terrible as biting into an unripe sapodilla.
    These solo pursuits further tuned my logistic skills, especially when it came to the trial and error of getting past the wasps without being stung about the eyes, both painful and disabling. To that end, I had to study the growth patterns of the fruit trees, how cocoa plums grew wherever they could on branches in haphazard patterns and how the sapodillas congregated higher up, guarded by the wasps, yet hanging heavy enough on their branches that shaking the trees could cause them to fall without my having to climb up and get stung.
    Thus it was that I became a logician in my own terms, developing instincts for survival needs and for responding to threats real and perceived—like those of the two main graveyards on Cat Island that I was forced to pass by on my way to wherever I wanted to go.
    The passing of a graveyard alone was never, ever without impact, because, frankly, the imagination gets to running away with itself. You see the headstones—not modern, chiseled headstones, but rather a rock, with a little planted post at the head of the grave bearing the name of the person in the earth below. In one of the graveyards there were relatives from Poitier and Outten lines, while in the other lay the bones of strangers. Neither location seemed safer than the other. So the closer I drew to the graveyards, the more my internal self was awake and alert, tuned in to suspicious activity of any kind, particularly any motion that might reveal the presence of the bogeyman.
    Now, I don’t want to scare you, my dear, not the way that I was scared as a child when my older siblings and other children planted frightening images of the bogeyman in my consciousness. But that was a part of the culture, and so the bogeyman took root in my imagination very early on—a force that had an impact on me during the day as well as at night. Whatever the cause for fear, no matterwhere I