Sidney Poitier
has succeeded
MICHAEL CHRISTMAS PHOTOGRAPHY
by being open
to the possibilities
Sidney Poitier was a speaker at the 2001 Costco
Scholarship Fund Breakfast, a benefit for providing
financial assistance to qualified minority students.
Recent speakers at this annual event have included
James Edward Olmos, Magic Johnson and Danny Glover.
For more information, visit costcoscholarshipfund.org.
BY TOD JONES
Sidney Poitier is a talker. Not a chatterbox, mind you, but this is a man
who clearly enjoys conversation, discussing and philosophizing with the enthusiasm of a
schoolboy and the wisdom of age. Both loquacious and soft-spoken, he energetically
pingpongs between subjects as wide-ranging as acting, education, consumerism, the power of the
universe, the spiritual nature of man, the role of family and the age-old debate of nature
versus nurture.
A trim and vital 78 years of age, Poitier
appears to be a student of the world, in awe of
the events that have made up his own life and
the lives of those around him.
“At this time in my life, I find myself no
less intrigued by what I still don’t know,” he
tells The Connection, flashing a smile as he settles his tall frame into his chair. “I continue to
wonder about things. That’s the thing that keeps
us going—the sense of wonder in our lives.”
Poitier has every reason to wonder about
things. His life is a story of random chance,
self-determination, stubbornness, daring and
talent coming together at a time when such a
combination could have taken him down a
variety of much more volatile paths.
It began in 1927, when he came into the
world two months too soon. Weighing just 3
pounds, the sixth child of Bahamanian tomato
farmers was not expected to survive more than
a few days. Already having dealt with the loss
of several children to disease and stillbirth, his
father stoically prepared for another burial,
procuring a shoebox for the child’s coffin.
Everyone had given up on him, but his
mother felt he could be saved. She went to a
local palm reader, and the woman told her,
“Don’t worry about your son. He will survive. He will walk with kings. He will travel
to most of the corners of the earth. And your
name will be carried all over the world.”
Following the advice of the soothsayer, the
mother returned home and told her husband to
cast the shoebox out; their son would live.
It would not be the last time that something—call it fate, chance or luck—would help
Sidney Poitier beat the odds.
“Often [in my life] it seemed that something—some mysterious force—walked me
through a difficult patch or covered my back
at a crucial point,” he says.
The child did not die, but thrived.
Growing up on Cat Island, a narrow slice of
land in the Bahamas, under conditions that
would be considered primitive at best, he not
only made do with his limited surroundings,
but used that simple lifestyle to forge a powerful sense of himself—who he was, what he
believed in, what sort of man he would
become—that would endure throughout
every challenge he was to face in his life.
Later he would carry that awareness into
the theater world, where it became a personal
standard, applicable to creative excellence
and professional competitiveness. He received the highest accolades and went further
than even he could have dreamed.
But to accomplish all this, it took everything in Poitier’s power—this sense of himself, the talent he possessed, plus a generous
sprinkling of luck that, he indicates, perhaps
played the largest part of all.
“So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness,” he says.
Yet Poitier’s acting career was marked
not just by the times he was moving through,
