## The Language He Was Learning in the Dark
There is a particular kind of learning that happens in private, without institutional structure or formal acknowledgment, that is easy to undervalue precisely because it leaves so little trace.
Sidney Poitier’s self-education in New York in the years between his arrival in 1943 and his second audition at the American Negro Theatre was almost entirely invisible. No school records. No teacher. No classroom. No certificate or transcript. Just a young man, alone in whatever room or space he occupied, with a radio turned on.
The radio was not entertainment, though it was that too. It was, for Poitier, a voice coach and a language laboratory simultaneously. He had grown up speaking English — English was the language of the Bahamas, the language of his family, the language in which he thought and dreamed. But the English he had grown up speaking was not the English of American performance. The cadences were different. The vowel sounds were different. The rhythms that American English used to move from sentence to sentence were different from the rhythms of Caribbean English, and those rhythmic differences were immediately audible to any trained ear.
When the man at the ANT had heard Poitier’s accent and dismissed him, he was responding to a real linguistic difference, though his dismissal was rude in its manner and wrong in its conclusions about what that difference implied about Poitier’s capabilities. The accent was real. The work of changing it was real. The radio was where the work happened.