The joke is the truth, and the truth is: he read pretty good. He read pretty good for the rest of his life.
## What the Story Asks of the People Who Tell It
There is a version of the Sidney Poitier reading story that tells itself. You set up the circumstances, you introduce the characters, you describe the act, and then you describe the career that followed, and the connection between the reading lessons and the Oscar win seems to speak for itself.
The problem with that version is that it makes the story simpler than it is.
The story is not a simple story about how one act of kindness leads to success. It is a story about the relationship between capability and opportunity, between the tools that circumstances deny and the tools that unexpected acts of generosity provide, between an individual’s agency and the structural conditions that shape what that agency can accomplish.
Sidney Poitier received something from the Jewish waiter. What he received was a skill. What he did with the skill was build a career that changed what American cinema thought it was allowed to be. But the career was built through twelve years of work after the reading lessons ended — work that the reading lessons made possible but did not do for him. The waiter taught him to read. Poitier taught himself to act.
The story is also about the specific texture of what was given. It was not money. It was not connections. It was not a referral to an agent or a recommendation to a casting director. It was time, and attention, and knowledge, given freely, every night, in an empty restaurant, to a young man who had asked honestly for help.