The waiter’s response, as Poitier recounts it, was immediate and without fanfare: would you like me to read with you?
Poitier said yes.
## Nights After Closing: The Shape of the Lessons
What followed, in Poitier’s telling, was a sustained and structured act of private instruction that took place every night after the restaurant closed, week after week after week, for approximately six months.
The setting was always the same: the empty restaurant, the chairs on the tables, the cleanup done, everyone else gone home. The two of them with a newspaper.
The waiter taught punctuation first, or alongside the reading itself — the function of commas and periods, the way a colon works, what a dash signals. He taught Poitier to break words into syllables, to sound out what he couldn’t immediately recognize, to use the structure of the word itself as a guide to its pronunciation. He taught pronunciation through the reading, connecting the written word to the spoken sound in the way that a good language teacher does, making the page into something that could be heard.
They used newspapers because newspapers were available, practical, and written in the language of current American life. The stories in a newspaper — politics, crime, sports, entertainment — were connected to the world that Poitier was living in. The vocabulary was not literary vocabulary; it was the vocabulary of the street and the city and the moment.
Poitier supplemented the evening sessions with his daytime radio listening. The reading and the speaking reinforced each other: what he read with the waiter, he could practice pronouncing through the radio’s model of American English. By the end of six months, Poitier could read fluently. Not just haltingly decode — genuinely read, with comprehension and with confidence.