Retro Bio: Sidney Poitier: The Long Journey by Carolyn H. Ewers

The Long Journey is a short book. It doesn't seem that way though, as it details an interesting life, Sidney Poitier's life since his childhood on tiny Cat Island in the Bahamas to his rise to fame on stage and screen during the '50s and '60s.

Poitier was born in Miami, Florida in 1927. A few months after his birth, his parents, who were farmers, moved the family back to the West Indies. The family of ten was poor and the rocky land there made it tough to plant crops, though they managed to survive. Droughts and hard economic times forced them to move to Nassau in the Bahamas when Poitier was 11, where he first saw cars ("From way off, I thought they were beetles"). He got in trouble with the law during his teens, worrying his parents that he would eventually land in jail. When he was 15, they sent him to Miami to live with his older brother Cyril. There he encountered racism, and angered after many incidents with prejudiced whites, at age 18 he headed to New York, where he worked at menial jobs. After service in the army during World War II he auditioned at the American Negro Theater. He learned he needed to remove his thick accent to help him win parts. He eventually landed his first role as "Polydorus, A Messenger" in an all-black Broadway production of Lysistrata. Critics considered what was a nervous performance on opening night "a triumph of comic acting." That performance was enough to land him a role in the A.N.T.'s touring production of Anna Lucasta, and he later accepted his first movie role in No Way Out (1950).

It's unclear whether it's an authorized biography, or if the author herself interviewed Poitier and his friends and family; she quotes from many interviews with them. Ewers artfully contrasts Poitier's adult personality with childhood incidents which helped shape it, and his movie roles, such as the day the then 15-year-old Poitier lept from garage to garage taking jobs parking cars despite not having driven before, leaving each garage after he had dented other cars. Poitier is portrayed as a stubborn perfectionist who was able to turn rejection and perseverance into success, while always seeking new challenges. "It cannot be denied that Poitier had an appalling abundance of gall, the brassy variety. Once he set his mind on a goal, he let nothing stand in its way. Audacity is merely the flip side of pride, after all, and both are as central to his nature as a fender to a car."

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