What Cat Island gave him was a specific and durable sense of himself. Not an educated self — the island had no formal educational infrastructure to provide. Not a sophisticated self, in any urban or worldly sense. Something harder to acquire and more resistant to damage: the knowledge that he was a person of worth, that the circumstances of poverty or lack of formal education or an accent that didn’t fit or a complexion that American society had arranged itself to disadvantage were not descriptions of his actual value.
He was Reginald and Evelyn Poitier’s youngest son. He had grown up in a community that knew his family, that had a social structure and a moral framework and a set of expectations about what children were and what adults were owed. He had been poor in a way that was not degraded — a structural poverty, shared with everyone around him, without the added layer of contempt that came with being poor in a richer society that had decided poverty was a personal failing.
When he arrived in New York at sixteen, alone and nearly broke, he was frightened and he was disoriented, but he was not broken. He had a self to draw on. The self was intact.
This is what makes the waiter story, in Poitier’s own telling, a story of building on something rather than creating something from nothing. The waiter did not give him dignity. The waiter gave him a skill that his dignity could then be deployed with. The distinction matters.