It misses Florida and the bus ticket north, the specific geography of American racial terror that pushed a sixteen-year-old to spend $11.35 on the one thing that would take him as far away as he could get.
It misses the public toilet in Penn Station and the army discharge and the years of kitchen work, the daily reality of a young man’s life in New York in the early 1940s who had decided he was going to be something but did not yet know what or how.
It misses the first ANT audition and the deliberate, sustained work of rebuilding — the accent and the reading simultaneously, the radio during the day and the newspapers at night, the methodical construction of the tools that the career would require.
It misses the second audition, and the years of theater work, and the specific night when Belafonte didn’t show and Poitier stepped in and a Broadway career began from that accident.
It misses No Way Out and The Defiant Ones and A Raisin in the Sun and the opening night when Poitier knew, finally, that this was what he was for.
It misses the films he refused and the films he chose, the sustained decision to play characters whose dignity the camera honored, the professional cost of being a troublemaker and the historical benefit of being exactly that.
It misses 1963 and Lilies of the Field and Homer Smith building a chapel in the Arizona desert.
It misses April 13, 1964, and Anne Bancroft’s kiss on the cheek, and the brief speech that compressed sixty-four countries’ worth of distance into one sentence about owing a debt to countless numbers of people.