Poitier navigated it as wisely as anyone did. The navigation had costs. He acknowledged the costs. The acknowledgment is part of what makes his account of his own career honest rather than self-congratulatory.
The weight of the symbol is real. He carried it for decades. It is part of what makes the story of the reading lessons, and the unnamed waiter, such a clarifying element. Because the waiter saw not a symbol and not a representative. He saw a young dishwasher who couldn’t read, and he offered to help. The help was specific, practical, personal, and given without any awareness that the recipient would one day be carrying the weight of an entire community’s aspirations on a stage in Santa Monica.
The specificity of the act is what makes it endure. Not its symbolism. Its specificity.
## Porgy and Bess and the Compromises of a Career
In 1959, Sidney Poitier made a decision that he would spend years reconsidering.
He agreed to play Porgy in the Samuel Goldwyn production of Porgy and Bess.
The play — George Gershwin’s folk opera, based on DuBose Heyward’s novel and stage play — had been contested within the Black community since its premiere in 1935. The characters were drawn from the community of Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, and they were drawn with the condescension that a white author of the 1920s brought to a Black setting: the crap games, the violence, the superstition, the simplified dialect, the overall framework that placed these characters as objects of a certain kind of affectionate but ultimately distancing gaze. Black critics had objected to the original production, and their objections had never fully been answered by the quality of the music or the sincerity of Gershwin’s engagement with the material.