The six months of reading lessons with the old waiter gave him that fluency. It is not the whole of what he built. But it is the piece without which the rest could not have been built.
He was aware of this. The awareness is present in every telling of the story — not as self-pity or as an account of deficit, but as a specific and accurate description of how capability is sometimes transferred. An old man who knew how to read sat down with a young man who didn’t, and taught him. The young man went on to build one of the most significant careers in the history of American cinema.
The causal chain is real. It is not the only element of the causal chain. But it is there, clearly and unmistakably, in the testimony of the man who lived it.
## January 6, 2022: End of the Journey
Sidney Poitier died on January 6, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. He was ninety-four years old.
The obituaries that followed his death were, by the standard of such things, unusually detailed and unusually generous. The major newspapers and magazines devoted the kind of space to his passing that is reserved for people who have genuinely shaped the cultural landscape — not just the specific landscape of their industry but something wider, something that touched people who had never worked in film and had no particular reason to care about Oscar histories but found that they cared about this.
The CBS Sunday Morning interview from 2013 resurfaced, as such things do in the age of video archives. The clip of Poitier nearly choking with tears as he described the waiter — the elderly Jewish man, the newspaper, the nights after closing, the teaching, the six months, the name he never knew — circulated widely. For many people who had grown up watching his films or hearing his name as a historical reference point, it was the first time they had seen him tell this story. For others, it was a reminder of what they already knew.