TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• About Life Beyond Measure
• "Unbound: Profiles in Black History"
• Mr. Poitier's bio

E-mail a friend

Tavis: I am pleased and honored to welcome Sidney Poitier to this program. The iconic actor has been a legendary presence in Hollywood for years, following memorable performance in movies like "The Defiant Ones," "Lilies of the Field," "To Sir With Love," "In the Heat of the Night," the list goes on and on and on.

His latest project is a collection of letters he's written to his great-granddaughter and is an instant "New York Times" bestselling book - no surprise there. The book is called "Life Beyond Measure: Letters to my Great-Granddaughter." Mr. P - and I should tell the audience I've always called you Mr. P since we became friends years ago, so I'll say "Mr. P" throughout our conversation - good to see you.

Sidney Poitier: Good to see you.

Tavis: You all right?

Poitier: I'm good.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.

Poitier: It's a pleasure to be here.

Tavis: You and I were talking just before we came on the air, at least starting a conversation about how good you look. I was saying that; you weren't saying that. I was telling you how handsome you are at 81 years young. And I was starting to tell you that on the way into the studio I was thinking today about the moment a few years ago when you were presented the lifetime achievement award from the academy, and it was a powerful presentation that you gave that night.

But I'll recall for as long as I love that part of your speech where you ran a list of those persons in this business who you were honored to work with, and you prefaced every name by saying, "the late, the late, the late, the late." And in that Poitier delivery, it just hit so many of us, watching you talk about your friends long gone. What do you make of the fact that at 81, you're still here?

Poitier: Oh, what do I make of it?

Tavis: Yeah, how do you?

Poitier: Well of course I'm fortunate to be here at 81, and I miss my friends and I wish they were here, but that's not the process, is it? Some of us go earlier than others. But they were guys who were revolutionary in terms of American motion pictures. They did - I did 58 movies for men like that, and naturally I miss them, because they represented the turning point for us in American films.

Tavis: When you say, "for us," you mean now for?

Poitier: African Americans.

Tavis: African Americans, yeah.

Poitier: Before them, and they came precisely at the moment the civil rights movement was at its most expressive. And they wanted to say to their fellow Americans that my position is this on not just this question, but many other questions that have to do with our culture, our society, all of us. And they took great risks to do that - risks with their careers, risk, I suppose, with some of their friends. But they decided to make such movies.

Tavis: You, though - I was saying, someone was asking me earlier today, given the years that I've known you, what kind of person you really were. I said to them, "The best way to sum him up," in my own words, "is that he is the most gracious man you will ever meet. He could write a book simply on grace notes. He's the most gracious man you'll ever meet, but he doesn't often take compliments well, either." (Laughter) "He's gracious, but he's so - he doesn't really like to talk about himself in that way."

I raise that only because they did take risks, to your point, but you didn't let them down, either. When they gave you these opportunities, when you starred in these roles, you hit home runs. I think of '67, you are the box office star in '67. "To Sir With Love," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "In the Heat of the Night," all out in the same year - unheard of for three classics like that, starring one actor, to come out in the same year.

I raise all of that because I want to ask now while they took great risk on the one hand, you didn't let them down on the other hand. I sense there may be - my word, not yours - a burden that has come along with being the one who they let in, being the one who stood out in the way that you did as an African American. Am I right or wrong about that?

Poitier: Well, burdens come to us all, you see. In every area of our lives, we face burdens. Mine was not as much a burden as it was a responsibility. It was an obligation for me to step up as best I could because so much was riding on it - not just those guys, but I represent a community, and the community asks of me the kind of representation that they've never had. So I tried my best to step up to it, and it was my obligation at least to try.

Tavis: You did more than try, and we are grateful and all the better for it. This book tells a story that I've heard you tell many times before, but every time I read it, it still gets me right here in the heart. You're born premature, three pounds. They didn't expect you to live. A shoebox, in fact, had been gotten to bury your remains in, because they literally did not expect - your father, in fact, didn't expect you to make it.

When I think of that and I read the text, I wonder what the abiding lesson is that you went on to learn from Reginald and Evelyn Poitier, the abiding lesson that you most want to pass down to your great-granddaughter?

Poitier: The abiding lessons I most want to pass down?

Tavis: Yeah, that passed down that came directly - the lesson that comes from Reginald and Evelyn Poitier.

Poitier: Well, the lesson I got from them was how to treat life, how to deal with life, particularly if it's difficult. Life was difficult for them, and I saw how they treated each other during that difficult period of life, and how they treated their neighbors and how they treated their friends, how they treated their children.

I had no other force from which to learn about those things. I had to watch them, how they greeted their friends, and I knew the pressure they were under during certain periods of their lives. I learned how they kept their children each within a kind of love embrace so that when I went out into the world, I carried those behavioral patterns with me.

I had to. I didn't get it from anywhere else. I didn't go out into the world until I was 10 and a half years old, and when I left them, I went to Florida, I was 15. And when I entered Florida for the first time in my life, over and above the time when I was born in Miami in 1927. It was my first exposure to the American culture, and it was a shock.

It was an experience. And it was not what I was accustomed to. I was accustomed to a different kind of value system. I was introduced to a system that had no room for me, and told me so in so many ways.

Tavis: When you say the system had no room for you, unpack that for me.

Poitier: Unpack that for you? (Laughs)

Tavis: It had no room for you.

Poitier: Well, it was segregation, there was racism, there was a separation of people on the basis of color. I found in my first few days there that I couldn't go certain places because it was off-bounds for me. I found that I wasn't perceived as I perceived myself. I was almost always in those early days tolerated, and I knew it. I recognized it right away, because I was not tolerated when I was a kid on Cat Island.

I knew the people who were our neighbors, I knew my siblings, I knew the community, I had a life, a texture, a cultural existence that was reflected back at me. It was a caring, I was accepted by my parents' neighbors, and I was always careful to behave in a way that they will go back and get me a whipping, because I misbehaved. (Laughter)

So by the time I reached Florida, much of me had been set in place in terms of values, does that make sense to you?

Tavis: It does. It makes so much sense that it makes me now want to ask, as I will, why go forward? Why go forward - if I can use this phrase - why go forward in this new world that maltreated you than to return to the place that embraced you? Why go forward?

Poitier: Well, there is no turning back. I got to Florida by the time I was 15 turning 16 years of age. To go back there - I was born in Florida, and my parents went there to sell their produce, they were tomato farmers. And I was born there because my mother was six months pregnant. They had no intentions of staying in Florida at that time.

But her water broke - which is a phrase having to do with births - and unexpectedly, obviously, and I was born in Florida, brought in by a midwife, and I was less than three pounds, and I was not expected to survive. And my father did go to a local undertaker's parlor, looking for a casket for me, and he came home with a shoebox.

Anyway, for reasons that really surprised everyone except my mother, by the way, I survived. And then, of course, when I was old enough, about two and a half months, I could travel, they went back to the Bahamas, and that's where I grew up. So I actually grew up in a culture where I got all of my senses, my feeling, my instincts from. And that was principally from observation - observing my parents and the other people in the village, and there weren't that many people.

There were about - oh, I would think about 100, 150 people, including children, and the village range was a wide range, for miles and miles. My one friend lived about a mile away, so I didn't get to see him very often.

Tavis: You've said two things here now that I want to go back and get right quick. The first is you used the word "observed." You observed things, and for some reason the word observed triggered in my head your observing yourself in the mirror. I found this story rather humorous, of the first time - because you grew up in such an impoverished area, it was some years, you tell in the story, before you actually saw yourself in the mirror.

Poitier: Correct.

Tavis: That's a funny story. Tell the story of how that happened and what you saw for the first time when you saw yourself in the mirror. (Laughter)

Poitier: Well, first to get the picture really straight, I didn't see myself in a mirror because there were no mirrors in our house, and I could speak for the overwhelming majority of houses on Cat Island. We had no electricity, we had no running water. And so I would see myself in a pond or I would see myself in a piece of broken glass, like a bottle, like a bottle that probably was a rum bottle. But I would see an image that is totally not clear.

Tavis: Distorted, yeah.

Poitier: Yes, really distorted. And I was sitting alone at a pond and I'm watching my image on the water. The breeze had control of the little waves so I couldn't see anything, it was like that. And then the sun, which was at my back, I would learn years later, was throwing that image on the pond that was this way. I was being introduced to my shadow.

And every move I made, this shadow replicated the move, and it would - if I would go so, it would go so. And I wondered what was this imagery trying to do? Was it mocking me? So I moved my hands as quickly and - so that it would confuse it, but everything I did, it did it as well. (Laughter)

Then the sun came back, and I wondered about that. I became introduced in that peculiar way to my shadow, and my shadow then became my closest friend for the longest time, because I had this one friend I told you about, and we could -

Tavis: A mile away, yeah.

Poitier: A mile away. So I would race my shadow along the beaches, and whoever got to the given point to determine the winner, which was always the sun was behind us, and that's how we decided the winner - we, meaning my shadow and I.

So I grew up with my shadow. I made of my shadow not just a friend, but a companion. And my shadow and I had a whole life unto ourselves, for instance. With my friend being a mile away, I became acclimatized to other friends, such as crickets and birds and wasps, god bless them, and all kinds of other insects and stuff, and tiny fish in the pond water near the sea.

So that I lived that kind of life. Okay, at the age of 10 and a half, my father's business went into the tank. It wasn't a great business, but it kept us alive. He made enough money to support his family. But we had to leave there because the U.S., the Florida government put an embargo on the importation of tomatoes to Florida from the Bahamas, and my father's business went to pot.

So we had to move to Nassau, which is a tourist area, the capital city, to find a job. And we went there and it was the first time I saw a car. I was 10 and a half years old, I saw a car for the very first time. I saw electric light for the very first time - the whole difference between a semi-primitive existence and a mature economic structure where all kinds of interesting things existed that I had never seen.

And as my mother and I were walking down the main street, I saw a lady in a store, and she was preening herself in the front of a mirror, and I could see her and the image of her in the mirror. So I knew that that was a mirror, and I wanted to jump in front of that lady (laughter) and look at myself for the first time.

But my mother wouldn't let me do it, so - oh my God; you got me on to something, didn't you? Anyway -

Tavis: Well, it's a great story. Go ahead; I want to hear the rest of it, when you actually got in front of that mirror, though.

Poitier: We went to a place we had been - we were received by friends of the family with whom we would stay, because my mother was there in Nassau with me to find a place for the family to live, the rest of the family. Then my dad would come down with the other children.

And the first day she went out she said to me, "You stay here, and mind you, don't go moving around, because I don't want you underfoot," is the phrase they used. And I promised her that I would not, and I lied, because this -

Tavis: (Laughs) You say it so calmly - "I promised her I would not, and I lied."

Poitier: And she went off looking for a place for us to live, and I was drawn out of the house, and I went to this main street and I started at the end of the street going into stores, looking for a mirror. And I found one - not the one the lady was - I found a store and I saw myself for the first time in a mirror, and I'm 10 and a half years old. Well, I saw myself.

Tavis: What do you make of that Sidney Poitier?

Poitier: Well, I'll tell you what I thought. I said, "Wow," I said. I liked my teeth, because my teeth (laughter) were pretty okay. And I kept smiling at myself. (Laughter) Oh, my god. Anyway, I had this enormous kind of first exposure to my face, and I wanted then - by the way, this was a mirror like so. Fairly large, but the mirror that the woman was preening herself in front of was a full length.

Tavis: Full length, yeah.

Poitier: And it got into my head - go to the full-length mirror and see. (Laughter) But I knew my mother. I've known my mother at that time for 10 and a half years. She was a very, very loving woman with the biggest, hardest slap you have ever seen in your life. (Laughter) And I knew, and if I ever went to that place and she found out, I would be done. So I didn't go. But later on I eventually stepped in front of a full-length mirror and (unintelligible).

Tavis: It's an amazing story. I want to go back, before my time runs out, and we'll do some more of this tomorrow night. Before my time runs out, though, I want to go back to Ms. Evelyn. You made the point a few minutes ago, Mr. Poitier, that your mother was the one who had the abiding faith. Not just an abiding faith that you were going to survive, but indeed that you were going to thrive, that you were going to do something with your life beyond Cat Island, where you were raised.

Tell me about your mother and what it was that made her so uniquely different than everybody else. I suspect part of it has to do with the fact that she is your mother, but there's something deeper than that, I think.

Poitier: Yeah, I think there's something deeper. I never understood it and I suspect I never will, because it has to do with forces in the universe, in our lives, that have influences on us. My mother was an uneducated woman and a shy, shy woman, and she was - she was a shy woman.

Anyway, when I was born, it became obvious to everyone present, including the midwife, that there was something unusual. I was just a child that didn't appear to be - that would survive. And that was the general opinion of everyone, including my dad. And my mother took exception to that. She got up the following morning and she dressed herself, next morning, and she left that house where we were, and she went out into the environs of Florida, within the Black community, looking for as much support as she could find, because she did not want me to die.

Tavis: Hold that thought - hold that thought. She goes out into the community to find the support that she can, because she does not want Sidney Poitier to die. He obviously did not die because he's here with us tonight and will be back with us again tomorrow night to pick up this story where we have to leave it right now.

The new book from the iconic star Sidney Poitier is called "Life Beyond Measure: Letters to my Great-Granddaughter." I suspect we'll get to her tomorrow night on this program. Mr. P, good to see you, and we'll see you tomorrow night.

Poitier: See you tomorrow night.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. Join me again next time for part two of our conversation with Mr. P.