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We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?
I think that this is the basis for what has come to be called “emotional intelligence.” It’s a capacity that’s nurtured by silence and by intimacy, and by the freedom to roam.
My mother’s discipline was emotional. When she would get to whipping on me, it was as if she could beat into me some wisdom that she knew would be essential for my survival.
If you walk down the street and someone is with you, he’ll adjust to your pace or you to his, and you’ll never be aware of it. There’s no effort. It simply happens. And the same thing can happen with the rhythm of your life. We’re connected with everything. We’re connected with the primal instincts. And whatever is primal in us goes to the beginning of the species and back even beyond that. You follow? We carry a sensitivity panel, a panel of connected sensitivity remembrances all passed along through the blood, because if we’re standing or sitting or lying somewhere alive at this moment, then
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Never was I able to recall having seen myself in a mirror. So I never got a fix on my color. No reason to. With no frame of reference to evidence its necessity, the issue never arose. There was one guy in Arthur’s Town, a doctor, who was white, and Damite Farrah, the shopkeeper, who was white. These guys were different-looking, yes. But neither represented power. Therefore, I never translated their color into that. Or control…or hostility…or oppression…or anything of that nature. They were just there, and I never wondered why they were white and the rest of the people were black.
When I got to Nassau, it was race and class and economics, a colonial system that was very hostile. So my motto was Never leave home without a fixed commitment. I couldn’t deal with those awesome odds either by waiting for society to someday have a change of heart or by saying, “I’m gonna be as good, one day, as you are.” My heart said, “I am already as good. In fact, I’m starting out with better material, and I am going to be better.” How do you like them apples?
Most of the people in Nassau have never been to America, but still there were the myths, the tales, the stories about the country, the most enchanting of which had their roots in a legendary place called Harlem. Always Harlem. People spoke of Harlem as if it were the whole of New York City. The Apollo Theatre, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald. Harlem was the Mecca for black people in America.
We got locked in a conversation once, I remember, about who she was and who I was, as individuals, in America. “How we see ourselves, how we see each other,” she said, “should be determined by us and not by people who generally don’t like us; people who pass laws certifying us as less than human. Too many of us see each other as ‘they’ see us,” she continued. “Time for that shit to stop. We’re going to have to decide for ourselves what we are and what we’re not. Create our own image of ourselves. And nurture it and feed it till it can stand on its own.”
Telling myself I would probably lose took the edge off being afraid to lose. “Prepare for the worst; hope for the best.” I did that a lot. That was the credo that enabled me to get from crisis to crisis.
A survival tactic that worked well for me was one I had gotten from my mother: “Charm them, son,” she said, “into neutral.” Being charming bought me time by allowing me to at least temporarily deflect the jabs of a threatening society.
Of all my father’s teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain. I didn’t know where I was going next, but I knew that failure wasn’t an option.
Governor Wallace, before his death, said he was sorry for what he had done, and he spoke of the harm and the pain his views and actions had caused. Jesse Jackson went to see him, and I think a form of absolution took place. When you genuinely and sincerely apologize for harm and pain, it’s a sign that your life has taken you to another place from where you were when you caused the harm and pain and had no apologies to make. But the process is never simple, and words can never undo lives destroyed.
This was a revolutionary attempt at filmmaking, so I was mentally awake in every way. I had my eye out, my ear out, and I was quite primed to make sure that nothing untrue, uncomplimentary, or stereotypical occurred. I wanted to make sure that the story was told with dignity and respect for the questions involved. This wasn’t the story of an interracial couple, mind you. This was simply a guy trying to help a young girl who was in need. It was a very human story.
So I look back on them with respect and appreciation. They were our predecessors, and they endured. They were the ones that life and nature and history required to walk that road. They gave birth to me, because a part of what I do, a part of what Denzel Washington does, a part of what Angela Bassett does is to respectfully reflect on the endurance of those people. We were, and are, as they would have wished to be, but we could not be as we are without their having paid a price.
This was another Stanley Kramer picture, of course, and he’s the kind of filmmaker who had always asked, “What can I do that will be daring, interesting, and necessary?” In 1967, when he had me read the script for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, I was very impressed. Stanley knew that the country wasn’t ready for this one, but his attitude was—well, we’re going to do it anyway.
Here’s the story of how I was taken to Miss Hepburn’s house so she could check me out. When I arrived at her door and that door opened, she looked at me and didn’t say a word and didn’t crack a smile. But that was her M.O. After the longest while she said, “Hello, Mr. Poitier,” and I said, “Hello, Miss Hepburn,” and the conversation began. I could tell that I was being sized up every time I spoke, every response I made. I could imagine a plus and a minus column, notations in her mind. That’s how big a step this was for her, at least to my mind.
As for my part in all this, all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role. And I have to say, too, that I have great respect for the kinds of people who are able to recycle their anger and put it to different uses.
Anguish and pain and resentment and rage are very human forces. They can be found in the breasts of most human beings at one time or another. On very rare occasions there comes a Gandhi, and occasionally there comes a Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally there comes a guy like Paul Robeson or a guy like Nelson Mandela. When these people come along, their anger, their rage, their resentment, their frustration—these feelings ultimately mature by will of their own discipline into a positive energy that can be used to fuel their positive, healthy excursions in life.
When you’re addressing power, don’t expect it to crumble willingly. If you’re going to say, “Hey now, look you guys, please look at what you did and look at yourselves and punish yourselves and at least try to square this thing, right?”—well, you’ll make slower progress at that than you would expect. I mean, even the most modest expectations are going to be unfulfilled.
Simply put, I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.
And there were more extreme views—people like Marcus Garvey, who was so frustrated, who said, “These people are so intractable, they’re so bullheaded with their wrong-headedness, let’s all go back to Africa. Let’s just get out of here.”
Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment. This is all equally true of effective acting. Acting isn’t a game of “pretend.” It’s an exercise in being real.
Freud once said that life is love and work. But if you do bad work, it can’t provide the meaning in your life that you need from it.
You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.
I believe that this consciousness is a force so powerful that I’m incapable of comprehending its power through the puny instrument of my human mind. And yet I believe that this consciousness is so unimaginably calibrated in its sensitivity that not one leaf falls in the deepest of forests on the darkest of nights unnoticed.
The grand consciousness I perceive allows me great breadth and scope of choices, none of which are correct or incorrect except on the basis of my own perception. This means that the responsibility for me rests with me. I have obligations to be in service to this me, to shape it, to encourage its growth, to nurture it toward becoming a better and better me day by day, to be conversant with all its good qualities, such as they are, and to be aware of all its bad qualities, such as they are. When the living space between the two sets of qualities becomes so uncomfortable that choices have to be
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The whole process of survival tells us that there’s a morality to these natural rhythms, and that this morality is woven into the fabric of nature. For humanity, part of that fabric is the higher consciousness I was speaking of earlier. I feel that to aspire to that higher consciousness is to align ourselves with the natural order—in essence, to let go of the self. When we do this, when we rid ourselves of the petty little ego-drives that get in our way, we find ourselves much more in tune with the natural harmony, and good things can happen.
My fear is this: I fear that as we cover more of our planet with concrete and steel, as we wire our homes with more and more fiber-optic cables that take the place of more intimate interactions, as we give our children more and more stuff and less and less time, as we go further and further away from the kind of simplicity I knew as a child on Cat Island, our Earth—Gaia or not—will become for us the Wire Mother, and our souls will wither and die as a result.
