The waiter lit something. The fuel was already there.
That is the most honest version of the story. And it is the version that Poitier himself, across sixty years of telling it, consistently told.
## The Women in His World
The accounts of Sidney Poitier’s life tend to move quickly past the women who shaped it. This is a tendency worth resisting.
His mother, Evelyn Poitier, is present throughout his early accounts in a way that makes her influence unmistakable even when it is not made explicit. She was a woman who moved her family from a small island to a colonial capital when the family’s economic survival required it, who took in washing and ironing when the family needed income, who maintained the household through conditions that were materially difficult. She was also, in Poitier’s account, a source of emotional sustenance — a person who communicated to her children, through the specific modes of a mid-twentieth-century Caribbean working-class family, that they were loved and that they were worth loving.
What his mother gave him is not the same as what the waiter gave him. The waiter gave him a skill. His mother gave him a framework in which skill was something worth having and worth working for. The two gifts are not comparable in their form, but they are related in their function: both made something possible.
His father, Reginald, appears in Poitier’s autobiography and interviews as a man of strict values and clear expectations, who had made the decision to send his youngest son north when Nassau was becoming dangerous for him, who had the foresight — or perhaps simply the parental love — to understand that the thing the boy needed was distance and a different context. That decision, made in 1943, was in some sense the first link in the chain that ended at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1964.