The world that Sidney Poitier moved through as a young Black man in postwar America was not generally organized around the principle of unexpected generosity from strangers. The opposite was more often true: the stranger was a threat, the unfamiliar space was a space where the rules of Jim Crow or its northern equivalent operated, the help that came from outside your immediate community was often not help at all.
The waiter was different. And Poitier held onto the difference for the rest of his life.
At the AFI ceremony in 1992, sixty-four years old, one of the most celebrated actors in the history of American film, he told the story and said: “I cannot tell you his name. I never knew it. But I read pretty good now.”
The line is delivered with a particular compression — sixty years of gratitude folded into two sentences, the regret of not knowing the name acknowledged and then turned into something that approaches, without quite reaching, the lightness of humor.
He could read. It turned out to matter quite a lot.
## What Cat Island Gave Him That New York Could Not Take Away
There is a through-line in all of Poitier’s accounts of his own development that does not always get the attention it deserves in the stories told about him.
Cat Island.
The emphasis on the waiter, on the ANT, on the auditions and the theater training and the film roles, can obscure the foundation that predated all of it. Poitier was not, by his own account, a person who arrived in New York as a blank slate and was written on by the kindness of strangers and the training of an institution. He arrived with something already formed.