That capacity was, in the mid-1940s, still several years away. But the foundations were being laid simultaneously, through two different methods, by two different teachers — one of whom was a radio, and one of whom was an unnamed old man with infinite patience and a newspaper.
The invisibility of this period — the private, unrecorded, unwitnessed work of self-formation — is part of why it is easy to tell Poitier’s story as if it moved in a straight line from the waiter’s newspaper lessons directly to the Oscar stage. It did not move in a straight line. It moved through years of labor that left almost no external record, through failure and discouragement and the specific difficulty of building capability without anyone to confirm that the building was working.
He had his own intelligence and his own will and his own formation from Cat Island as resources. He also had a kind of faith — not necessarily religious, though faith in that sense was part of his inheritance too — that the work was worth doing, that what he was trying to become was something he could become, that the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be was crossable.
The waiter helped him cross one part of it. The radio helped him cross another. The rest was Poitier himself, in the dark, practicing.
## The Stage as School: The ANT’s Methods and Their Legacy
When Sidney Poitier was accepted as an apprentice at the American Negro Theatre, he entered an institution that was doing something genuinely unusual in American theatrical life.