He did not yet know what that life was. He knew there was something else. He didn’t yet have the tools to reach it.
The tools came from two directions, more or less simultaneously. One was the newspaper. One was the radio.
Before the waiter, before the lessons, Poitier had been teaching himself through the one free educational resource available to him at any hour: the radio broadcasts he could listen to during the day. He studied the voices of American radio — their pronunciation, their cadences, the way American English sounded when it was spoken by people who had grown up speaking it. His Bahamian accent was distinctly Caribbean, and he understood that it would mark him in ways that could close doors. He listened and he imitated and he practiced in the way that an extremely motivated young person with very few other resources practices: obsessively, alone, for hours.
The reading was harder. You couldn’t hear reading. You had to be taught.
## The Newspaper on the Table
The exact timing of when Poitier first attempted to audition at the American Negro Theatre matters for the chronology of what followed.
The American Negro Theatre was founded in 1940 in Harlem by Abram Hill and Frederick O’Neal, among others. It was one of the most significant Black theatrical institutions of the 1940s — a place that trained Black actors and produced Black plays at a time when mainstream Broadway was still largely closed to Black performers except in the most constrained and stereotyped of roles. The ANT was, in the mid-1940s, where a young Black actor in New York with ambitions toward the stage would naturally try to go.