He was the youngest of seven surviving children.
Cat Island in the late 1920s and through the 1930s was, by Poitier’s own description in interviews and in his autobiography This Life, an extraordinarily uncomplicated place. Children wore shoes only on Sunday mornings for church. They wore clothing stitched from flour sacks. They ate what the island provided — fish, vegetables, whatever could be grown or caught. There was no electricity after sunset. There was no radio bringing in voices from elsewhere. There was certainly no film.
What there was, by Poitier’s account, was a particular kind of richness: the social texture of a small community where everyone knew everyone, where the sea was always visible, where children moved freely between the beach and the village and the farms that their parents worked. Cat Island gave him, he said later in multiple interviews, a foundation in self-worth that he couldn’t fully articulate but always felt. “On Cat Island, I was stimulated but I wasn’t bombarded.”
The world he grew up in was not the world that would eventually need to accommodate him. That became clear when the family moved.
Florida had banned Bahamian tomato imports. The Poitier family’s primary income — the crop sales that had taken Reginald and Evelyn to Miami on the night Sidney was born — suddenly had nowhere to go. The family moved from Cat Island to Nassau, the capital, when Sidney was around ten years old. Nassau was larger, more modern, more connected to the wider world. It also had schools, which Cat Island had not reliably provided, and it had a different economic reality: in Nassau, Evelyn Poitier took in washing and ironing to help support the family.