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

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Tavis: Back now with part two of my conversation with Mr. Poitier. If you're in the market for a Father's Day gift or a graduation gift right about now, let me highly recommend this, the new book, already a bestseller for Mr. P, called "Life Beyond Measure: Letters to my Great-Granddaughter." I highly recommend it. Mr. P, thanks again for sitting for another half an hour, I appreciate it.

Sidney Poitier: My pleasure, sir.

Tavis: When we left our conversation last night, I had to stop you, regrettably, in the middle of a story about your mother. I'd asked you why it was that all the persons beyond you, beyond the fact that she was your mother, that's the obvious answer, what it was about Ms. Evelyn that made her fight for your right to live.

You were telling us the story that the morning after you were born, less than three pounds, nobody expected you to live but your mother, she got up the next morning, dressed herself, and went out into the Black community of Florida, and I'll let you pick it up right there.

Poitier: Well, she went into the Black community of Florida looking for support. She stood alone in terms of my possibility for survival, and she went out there, and I suspect, because I never heard from her specifics in terms of the places she went to, but I believe she went to churches and she went to some people that she may have met once or twice or so, looking desperately for some help.

And she found none, and when it got dark and she had to be heading back home, she was on her way home and she passed the residence of a soothsayer. And my mother said, "I want to find out about my son." And she said, "Come in," and they talked and stuff like that, and eventually the lady went into - she took my mother's hand and she closed her eyes and she went into herself, apparently, and there was a silence that lasted for a bit, and then the soothsayer's face began to twitch.

And strange sounds started gurgling up from her throat. And suddenly her eyes flew open again and she said to my mother, "Don't worry about your son. He will survive. And he will not be a sickly child." And she said, "He will travel to most of the corners of the Earth. He will -" well, she told her a lot of things.

And my mother came home and told my father to remove the shoebox casket from the house, there'll be no need for it. He did. And when I was old enough to travel, which was a matter of weeks and months, maybe, they returned home with me to their other six children, and all I recall of her not from the time I arrived back on Cat Island but early in life when I began to have the system of perception, she was a very unusual woman, and she was more than my mother, she was some other force.

I grew up with her looking after me no more than she looked after her other kids. It was years before she told me little bits, pieces of that story, and I didn't embrace it because I had no real concept of what she was talking about. But then I grew up, and every thing the soothsayer said, happened. When I became an adult person, doing my own thinking, I could only find a relationship between her and the universe that I can explain.

I can't articulate, but I know it exists, and I don't understand it and I probably never will, because logic and reason applied by me on all of those things I've told you about my mom gets me nowhere. Logically, I can't explain it. Reason doesn't make any sense there. That's how it was, and that is how it happened.

Tavis: Your inability to explain it notwithstanding, I get the sense - and I could be wrong about this, that's why I want to ask - I get the sense that that reality, that journey, is never far away from you, not even when over the course of those 50-some-odd films you've made decisions about what roles to play, what you would do on screen, what you would not do on screen, to your word of last night the responsibility that you had to your community.

I get the sense, and I want you to enlighten me on this, but I get the sense that that story, that journey is never far, your mother, Ms. Evelyn, never far away from you. I want to ask, then, help me situate that beginning, that story, that survival story. Help me situate that in context to the choices that you have made as an actor.

Because it's easy to dismiss you as a great talent who got some good breaks, got some good roles, but I get the sense there's something deeper there that that upbringing needs to be situated in the context of the decisions you've made as an actor, as a director. Does that make sense?

Poitier: Yeah, well, it's the upbringing.

Tavis: It's the upbringing.

Poitier: And it was in concert with my dad. They both were good people, really, really good people. My mother was a disciplinarian to an extent, and one child as opposed to another, it was the same level. As a matter of fact, I remember once when I was busy playing with something and my mother called me, and (laughs) oh, lord, she said, "Sidney," called me, and I was so preoccupied, I said, "What? I'm busy." (Laughter)

Tavis: Oh, no you - see, now I'm amazed that you are still living. (Laughter) That you made it to 81.

Poitier: Well, I got to tell you, I - (laughter) I didn't see the slap coming. It lifted me off my feet and dumped me on my back. The next time she said, "Sidney," I said, "Yes, Mama, I'll be right there." (Laughter) And I was there as fast as I could get there, because that's who she was.

Now, she was also a very shy and inarticulate person, I told you that before. So she was - she lived inside of herself a lot. Her values were expressed I how she behaved with others, and around others. My father and mother were very, very compatible forces. My dad loved her and she loved him, and it was really fabulous, that relationship.

As a matter of fact, I learned so much from watching them. They worked together in a tomato field, and they worked hard from sunup to sundown for years and years and years. And they would spend time together at night, and they would laugh and they would talk and they would do things like that. So all that is being sucked in by me.

When my father had a problem and he went to my mother with the problem, they would sit quietly and discuss it as best they can, because she was not shy or inarticulate with her husband. I overheard some of their exchanges, and there was something in me that was touched by how she was. I got from her something special.

To this day - I'm 81 years old - I can't explain it to you, but I know I got something special from her. Which is not to say that through my life, certainly in my younger years, I was a - (laughter) I was less than grateful. I was a kid growing up, especially when we got to Nassau, and I began doing things I ought not to have done.

I began running with the youngsters like myself who were interested in mischief. I don't know if there is such a thing as a guardian angel. If there is one, my mother is mine, but she was mine when she was alive. And by golly, I bet you if there is such a thing, she's doing it still.

Tavis: How did that guardian angel speak to you? Back to what we were discussing earlier, how did that guardian angel, in the person of Ms. Evelyn, speak to you about the choices you have made? I want to talk about that because one of the things that you want to pass on to your great-granddaughter, you talk about in the book and I'm just paraphrasing it, is choices, the choices that we have to make in life.

As an actor, and even beyond your acting, if you want to go that far, talk to me about that guardian angel and how it's helped you to make the kind of choices, because it's the choices that you've made that we really celebrate. We call you an iconic figure; we're not just talking about your acting skills, we're talking about not just your love for humanity, but about the choices that you've made that we have seen on display for these 81 years.

Poitier: The choices that I made were choices I made in my process of trying to effectuate my own survival. We all do that. But I was in -

Tavis: But you - come on, you're being too modest. I accept that, but you could have survived making different choices. You could have survived making less celebrated choices. We might not be calling you the iconic figure that you are, you might not been an Academy Award winner if you had made different kinds of choices.

Poitier: I made choices, yes, I did. The choices I made, I wouldn't even begin to articulate them, because I believe such choices as I did make, they were overlaid by influences that existed and still exist in the universe. I've always said this, I believe this deeply, that there are forces in the universe that they have an impact on our lives, each of us, individually.

And I think that those forces, at times, nudged me a little to this side or they pushed me forward a little bit, but I could never articulate them, I could never say that is what is happening. I sensed something, and now that I'm an adult person, now that I am 81 years of age, I believe strongly that my choices were assisted or obstructed when this or these forces in the universe felt that for its purposes, they needed me to move a little this way or a little that way, or to turn away from something.

I made the choices on a conscious level, but I am respectful enough of such forces in the universe that do give us a little help here and a little help there, because it is important to them, to those forces, that I not go there, and that I lean this way.

Tavis: Let me see if I can lean you this way, (laughter) if I can pull you with me, then. If we accept everything you've just laid out, and I accept that, if we accept that there are these forces, whatever we call them - the universe, god, whatever these forces might be; guardian angels - whatever these forces might be that are guiding us into certain places, obstructing us, to use your word, from going into other places. If we accept that, then these forces must have a purpose for our lives.

Poitier: Precisely.

Tavis: Ah.

Poitier: Precisely.

Tavis: So then what is the purpose of the life of Sidney Poitier?

Poitier: (Laughs) Well, I've spent my adult life -

Tavis: Trying to figure that out?

Poitier: Right. (Laughter)

Tavis: Well, I'm trying to help your great-granddaughter out here, man.

Poitier: That's why I wrote the book.

Tavis: That's why you wrote the book, yeah. What's the purpose here?

Poitier: I haven't found the answer to that, but I know that there is a purpose, and it is not just my energy, my own force, my own drive, my own reaching and stretching. No, it isn't that alone. That's a part of it. It's a part of a mix, you see. And the forces I'm speaking of are not - my mother had a faith that articulated itself in a religious faith.

I have a faith, but my faith is different from my mother's. I have - I see these forces I'm talking about as a part of an intelligence that is so unbelievably massive that no one can get their head around it, their brain, their instincts. It just gets too big. It's too, too much. And the smartest people in the world cannot tell us that it doesn't exist, and rather put the name of a religious faith to it.

I assume that this intelligence has no favorites when it comes to religions. It does not. It simply embraces all, it influences us all in one way or another, but we are not without a responsibility to contribute to our own choices, our own direction. These forces will take or influence us when we are stepping over a cliff, because it is important for the forces that we not step over the cliff. Am I making any sense?

Tavis: You're making good sense. Again, so much sense that it leads me to ask this, which is how, then, do we explain the madness - that's the word I want. How then do we explain the madness of the world if we are being guided by forces, I'm led to believe now, that too many of us are not listening to those forces, to those better angels, given the kind of world that we inhabit, if I work with your logic here.

Poitier: Yeah, well, my logic tells me that we are all - all human beings are imperfect creatures. Because we are imperfect creatures, we behave in ways commensurate to that. Because we are imperfect creatures, we are unable to see, as I am unable to articulate for you now, what my purpose is. I don't know it. I simply don't know it.

But I seek it, I try to understand it, and I haven't found it yet at 81, but I will continue looking. I am fascinated by the whole thing. If I could excuse my whole life, my career, my good fortune, and all of that by simply saying I was lucky, I worked hard and things worked out for me, it's more than that. It's much more than that.

So I reserve in the back of my consciousness a respect for those forces, even though I don't know what they are, and even though I can't put a name to them. They are there, and because they are there is largely why I'm sitting here. I am not sitting here purely on the basis of my own efforts. I was within a hair's breadth of going to reform school.

I was a kid who stole things I ought not to have stolen, but it was the way we behaved as kids in Nassau. I was exposed to all kinds of things that if they had gone that way by a fraction, I would have been destroyed. So I cannot say that I sit here purely on the basis of my own efforts.

Tavis: Getting back to your great-granddaughter, who this book is written for, because you want her to know, from you, as we're all learning tonight and last night from you, about this life beyond measure. You want her to hear it from you, not from other sources, let me go get a quick bible verse, because I think that we'll agree on the point we're trying to make here.

There's a bible verse, one of my favorites, that says, "In all thy getting, get an understanding." In all that you get, "in all thy getting, get an understanding." I raise that to come back to your point now about your 81 years of constantly being in search, seeking, trying to find, is that the lesson? Is that the lesson for us?

Is that the lesson that - one of the lessons you want to pass on to your great-granddaughter, that life is made richer, that life is made better, that - I don't want to put words in your mouth - as long as we are seeking, as long as we are searching, as long as we are trying to get that understanding?

Poitier: I think, for instance, to give you an answer, and the only answer I can give you is we are today six billion people on this planet. We will double again to 12 billion in a fairly short period of time. We live here on this planet, this is our home - the only one we have. It has to now support six billion people, but we are exploiting its resources without thought.

We are, because we are imperfect creatures, behaving terribly in so many ways. And this one home we have is all we are likely to have. It is a small sphere. There is only but so much topsoil. There is only but so much oil in the ground. There are enormous limitations, and these limitations, we are dealing with them in such a cavalier way that we could be heading over a cliff.

The Earth will be here, moving around the Sun, for billions of years to come - billions of years to come. The universe is 13 billion, 700 million years old. So if the Earth and the solar system is in place and will be here for billions of years to come, we ought to make the adjustments necessary for us to be here when the Sun dies. That's how we are supposed to go.

The scientists remind us about that all the time, that there will come a time when our sun dies. Well, why should we become extinct before our sun dies?

Tavis: I am so glad, as I know you are, that he was not extinct before his time, that he survived that premature birth, and we as Americans and indeed the world community are made the better for the life and legacy of one Sidney Poitier - a life and legacy he has now passed on to his great-granddaughter in the pages of a book called "Life Beyond Measure," instantly on the "New York Times" bestseller list.

Easy for me to say, a lot easier for Mr. Poitier to do. Mr. P; (laughs) glad to have you on the program.

Poitier: My pleasure, sir.

Tavis: Thank you for your time.