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1 Patches (1927–1943)
- The University of North Carolina Press
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c h a p t e r 1 PATCHES (1927–1943) v Sidney Poitier would stand tall, six feet and two inches. He would have broad shoulders, long legs, and perfect posture—almost a regal bearing. He would exude grace in every movement, emotion in every expression, conviction in every word. If only one quality could define him, it would be this energy, this vigor—this life. But in Miami, Florida, on 20 February 1927, he was born small and sickly. A premature baby of seven months, he weighed less than three pounds, and he seemed closer to death than life. Reginald Poitier accepted that fate. The gaunt farmer had come to Miami to sell tomatoes, not bear a son. The Miami Produce Exchange offered the best prices for his goods, which he harvested and packed on his native Cat Island in the Bahamas. He arrived expecting to unload his crates, haggle with some merchants, and return home. The newborn delayed matters. He had endured similar ordeals before—previous children had died in infancy, by stillbirth or disease. It was fairly common on isolated Cat Island. Reginald found an undertaker and purchased a tiny casket, no bigger than a shoebox. His wife, Evelyn, resisted this surrender. She, too, remembered her own lost offspring. But she resented Reginald’s stoic realism. She had been only thirteen when she married the twenty-eight-year-old Reginald. Seven children and a lifetime of farming later, this dark, thin woman had hardened. Shy and inarticulate, she could barely communicate her frustration . Desperate for some reassurance, she paid a visit to a soothsayer.∞ Evelyn had never been to a fortune teller, but she was willing to suspend disbelief. She sat before a wizened old clairvoyant with gray, braided hair and a string of beads tumbling over a loose dress. Soggy tea leaves congealed in a cup, portending the infant’s fate. The room was silent. Finally the soothsayer’s face trembled and twitched. A raw rumbling emerged from deep in her throat. ‘‘Don’t worry about your son,’’ she 8 poverty & progress began. ‘‘He will survive and he will not be a sickly child. He will grow up to be’’—she paused, amending her prophecy—‘‘he will travel to most of the corners of the earth. He will walk with kings. He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world. You must not worry about that child.’’ Evelyn might not have believed such grandiose predictions—the child of a poor tomato farmer, walking with kings?—but she cherished the words. She paid fifty cents, marched home, and insisted that Reginald expunge any trace of lost hope, starting with the miniature casket. For the next three months Evelyn and Reginald Poitier remained in Miami, far from their other six children, nursing Sidney back to health.≤ The ordeal was the first link in a chain of improbable events that proved the soothsayer correct. Sidney’s premature arrival in Miami gave him automatic citizenship in the United States, a twist of fate that bene- fited him fifteen years later. Fortune smiled on him, sparing him where others fell. But Sidney Poitier also shaped his life through his singular personality: proud, stubborn, intelligent, restless, resourceful, virile, outwardly confident, and inwardly insecure. He would return to the United States to become a man, an actor, and an icon. But he was a child of the Bahamas. v The Bahamas lies close to the American mainland, its northernmost isle only fifty miles from Florida. Hundreds of tiny islands and cays stretch to the southeast, creating a flimsy shield between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Since 1492, when Christopher Columbus weaved his way through Long Island, Rum Cay, and Crooked Island, the Bahamas has been a crossroads between the Old and New Worlds. Its history combines intrigue with exploitation. By 1542, the conquering Spanish had deported over 20,000 native Lucayans to Hispaniola, enslaving them on encomiendas under Spanish overlords. The islands soon became a popular corridor for European explorers. Ponce de Leon passed through in search of the Fountain of Youth, a legend gleaned from the Lucayans. English colonists landed at Cat Island in 1585 on their way to the ‘‘Lost Colony’’ of Roanoke. By the late 1600s, the international quest for gold had infested Nassau. British colonial governor Nicholas Webb complained that the capital city had become ‘‘a receptacle for all rogues.’’ By 1713, over a thousand pirates called Nassau...