When the Bahamas declared a period of national mourning after his death in January 2022, the gesture acknowledged what was genuinely there: a connection that decades of living elsewhere had not severed. Cat Island gave him something that New York and Hollywood and Tokyo could not replace and did not try to.
## “I Read Pretty Good Now”: The Joke That Was Not a Joke
The sentence that Sidney Poitier spoke at the 1992 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony has been quoted many times and in many contexts, and it gains with each repetition rather than losing.
“I cannot tell you his name. I never knew it. But I read pretty good now.”
The construction is precise. The first two sentences are the wound: the man who changed something fundamental about his life, whose name he never learned and cannot now provide, who gave something irreversible and then disappeared from the record. The third sentence is the recovery: but the thing itself — the skill, the fluency, the capacity to do what acting requires — is there. It is there, verified by everything that followed.
“Pretty good” is the compression where the sentence does its most interesting work. It is formally modest — not “I read excellently” or “I became a highly literate man” or “I went on to write several books.” Pretty good. As if reading well is a modest achievement. As if the gap between the young man who couldn’t tell the waiter what was in the newspaper and the celebrated actor addressing a roomful of his peers is a small distance, easily crossed.