He left behind the books. This Life and The Measure of a Man and Life Beyond Measure — three extended acts of self-examination, three attempts to account honestly for what had happened and what it had cost and what it had meant.
He left behind the changed landscape. American film, after Poitier, was different from American film before him. Not entirely different, not transformed in the ways that would have required transforming the industry’s fundamental economic and cultural assumptions. But different enough that the performers who came after him — Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman and Will Smith and the many others who built careers at the level of major stardom — were building in a landscape that Poitier’s presence had altered.
He left behind the story of the waiter. Which is where we started.
An elderly Jewish man, at the end of a long shift in a restaurant in postwar New York. A young dishwasher from the Bahamas, holding a newspaper he couldn’t fully parse. A question: what’s in the paper today? An honest answer: I can’t tell you, because I can’t read very well.
And then the offer. And then the yes. And then six months of nights, in an empty restaurant, with a newspaper and patience and the slow building of a capacity that would, twelve years later, carry one man to a stage in Santa Monica where he would become the first of his kind to hear his name called in that category.
He never knew the man’s name. He read pretty good.