He was not, in these evenings, thinking about the Oscar. The Oscar was not yet imaginable to him, in the sense that the category did not include people who looked like him, and imagining yourself in a category that has never included someone like you is an act of either extraordinary imagination or extraordinary ignorance of the available evidence. Poitier was intelligent enough to know the evidence.
What he was thinking about, probably, was the next audition. The specific and practical question of whether, if he went back to the ANT in six months or a year, with an American accent he had worked on and a reading fluency he was building, the result would be different.
It was different. He went back and he was accepted.
The story of what happened after that acceptance is the story everyone knows, or can know, by looking at the record of his career. The story of what happened in the evenings before the next audition — the quiet accumulation of a skill, in an empty restaurant, with a man whose name he never knew — is the story that Poitier kept going back to because it is the story that the public record cannot fully contain.
You cannot see reading lessons on a filmography. You cannot see the months of private practice that built the voice. You can see, in the films, what those invisible years produced. And you can hear, in Poitier’s own telling of the waiter’s story, the weight of gratitude that never found its destination — that accumulated for sixty years and was still there, still full, at eighty-five, when the tears came.