What he consistently emphasizes in every retelling is not just the practical instruction but the quality of the man’s presence. “Every night,” Poitier said in one version of the story, “the place is closed, everyone’s gone, and he sat there with me, week after week after week.” The waiter didn’t have to do this. There was no institutional obligation, no formal program, no payment. He was an elderly man who noticed that a young dishwasher couldn’t read, and who decided, apparently without much deliberation, to help.
The sessions ended — presumably when Poitier left the job, or when the waiter determined that the work was done, or both. The ending is not dramatized in any account. What Poitier emphasizes is not the ending but the absence that followed it.
He never knew the man’s name. He never had the chance to go back and say: you changed something. He tried, years later — when he was a working actor, when the career had begun to take shape, when he had resources and reputation and the standing to find someone and thank them properly. He couldn’t find him. He doesn’t say the man had died. He says only that it was too late.
“One of my great regrets in life,” Poitier said, “is that I went on to be a very successful actor, and one day I tried to find him, but it was too late.”
## The Second Audition
The American Negro Theatre held open calls, and Sidney Poitier went back.
He had worked on his accent for months — listening to the radio, practicing the sounds of American English, filing down the Caribbean lilt that had immediately marked him as out of place in the first audition. He had worked on his reading with the waiter, until the page was no longer an obstacle but a tool. He was a different candidate from the young man who had been sent away.