Both groups found themselves watching an eighty-five-year-old man describe an act of kindness from sixty years earlier with the immediate emotional presence of someone who had never fully set it down.
The Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis issued a statement noting Poitier’s contributions to Bahamian culture and his service as ambassador to Japan. President Joe Biden offered condolences, citing Poitier’s career as an embodiment of the American aspiration toward equality. Denzel Washington, who had said at the 2002 Oscar ceremony that he stood on Poitier’s shoulders, repeated the sentiment. Halle Berry, whose own historic win at the same 2002 ceremony had been made imaginatively possible by what Poitier had done in 1964, spoke about what his example had meant.
The Bahamian government declared a period of national mourning.
On Cat Island, where there is still no movie theater, the people who remained from the community that had formed the youngest Poitier child remembered that he had come from there.
## The Long Journey and the Short Answer
A Waiter Helped Sidney Poitier Improve His Reading. Years Later, He Made Oscar History.
The headline contains the essential structure of the story, and the story can be told quickly: a young man couldn’t read well, an old man taught him, the young man went on to do extraordinary things.
But the quick version misses almost everything.
It misses Cat Island, and the specific quality of formation that a childhood there provided — the self-worth that did not depend on material circumstances, the values absorbed from a community that was poor in every quantifiable way and rich in the ways that turned out to matter most.