Poitier was careful, in his retellings, to place this act within a larger ecology of people who helped him. His parents, who had given him the foundation of Cat Island and the values that kept him oriented when New York was disorienting. His brother Cyril, who had preceded him to the mainland. The American Negro Theatre, which was a collective creation of many people’s efforts. Harry Belafonte, who was at once a friend and a peer and a kind of mirror for what Poitier’s own ambitions could look like when realized. The directors and writers who had given him material worthy of his ability. The Black audiences who had supported his work and who had also, sometimes, contested its terms.
The waiter was a necessary part of the story. He was not the whole story. A man who could not read could not have auditioned successfully at the ANT on the second try, could not have learned the scripts that stage performance required, could not have prepared for the camera work that film demanded. The reading was prerequisite to everything that followed.
But between the reading lessons and the Oscar there were twelve years of relentless professional work, discipline, sacrifice, and the specific discipline of maintaining dignity in an industry that did not always offer it. That was not the waiter’s work. That was Poitier’s.
## Telling the Story: Why It Persisted Through Sixty Years of Interviews
Public figures develop, over the course of long careers, a catalog of stories they tell about themselves. The stories are true — or true enough — but they are also shaped by the telling, refined by decades of interviews and speeches and the specific needs of the particular audience at the particular moment.