Life Beyond Measure (13 page)

Later, even though Joanna wasn’t looking to embark on a new career, as the girls got into their teens, my wife found that her natural gifts for interior design were responsible for opening up a new professional chapter for her. Before long, the ball began rolling so dramatically that today—you will be happy to hear, Ayele—your great-grandmother Jo has a partner, and the two are represented in several showrooms around the country.

So you see, the entrepreneurial spirit of the women in your family lends encouragement to the stance that there are no limits to how far you can go or to what you can do. As I think back on my mother and my sisters—of the women in the Caribbean and other cultures who don’t have the freedom and the economic power, rights, and protections that we have in our time and our country—it makes me all the more happy and proud of the women in our family and their accomplishments as independent individuals, charting their own destinations in life.

Of course, Ayele, let me not forget to add that the formula for the kind of love story that I share with Joanna isn’t something you can buy over the counter. Certainly, in our case we weren’t looking to buy anything when the fates were so kind as to bring us together. But there is one key ingredient that my wife has helped me to recognize over the years, and that is the importance of articulating love for one another on a daily basis. The words
I love you,
spoken in
acknowledgment in the morning upon rising and before going to bed, or when sitting down to dine, make the most beautiful music recognized by human ears. In every conversation with our daughters, never have I heard my wife not emphasize those three words or their message, no matter what the subject of the discussion is.

Simple though it may seem, when it comes to love, there isn’t much more I can ask but that you are graced throughout your life to hear the music of it spoken aloud to you and given unconditionally, as you grow up in an environment that encourages learning, exploration, and the appreciation of opportunities to experience great love—in all its splintered magnificence.

A
yele, one day in the years ahead, your eyes will come to rest on the contents of this page. It is my expectation that by then you will have discovered for yourself that fear is a visceral response to imminent jeopardy, real or perceived, threatening to come crashing down on you with devastating results.

Undoubtedly you, your parents, and your experiences will have prepared you for dealing with different aspects of fear and with challenge in general, to which I might add a handful of the understandings that I’ve collected over the years—starting with the basic notion that fear is a name given to a particular
feeling.
Now, by definition, feelings came first, long before the arrival of
language, thereby allowing the eventual placement of names on every feeling that human beings are known to have.

Let me briefly return to the example of the graveyards of my childhood on Cat Island. The feeling that reverberated through me while walking past a graveyard in broad daylight with not another person in sight was pure, unadulterated fear. I was always scared out of my wits! On a dark, moonless night, when I was walking past a graveyard, even with my parents holding my hand, I was apoplectic!

Maybe in hindsight, the cause of my fear wasn’t as logical as, say, when I swam in waters where sharks and barracudas wandered about in search of food. That overabundance of caution, and a like amount of fear, were well founded. It was similarly logical for me to be guarded and afraid whenever I went scampering up fruit-bearing trees, careful to avoid drawing the attention or ire of the wasps who were on patrol, looking out for plunderers like me.

The irony, Ayele, is how so much of what we fear can shape who we become. In that connection, graveyards, sharks, fruit trees, and wasps owe their names to the survival needs of mankind, among which was the indispensable tool of language—a tool that took the human species hundreds of thousands of years to hammer into its present form; a tool that allows us to understand our feelings and say of ourselves,
We are what we are, and half of what we are is what we are not.
That’s why I was drawn to graveyards equally as much as I was petrified by them!

The other way that fear and its ancillaries must have also evolved was that at some point our ancestors realized that we were imperfect creatures, and didn’t like it, not one bit; never got used to it, and in fact fought against it mightily. We nursed resentful feelings toward whatever it was that didn’t provide us wings with which to fly, as birds were able to do so easily, or provide us with the size, strength,
or swiftness of other creatures whose intimidating presence would signal, “Heads up, everybody! A threat is in the vicinity! Death is in the air!”

Without wings we couldn’t scatter swiftly. Without size and strength, we were open to being lunch or dinner. If, with luck, we lived to see another day, we busied ourselves in search of ways to extend and secure our survival across as many days as luck would provide. Birds we were not, nor elephants, nor lions, nor saber-toothed tigers, nor alligators. We were at risk, night and day.

That’s the truth of it, and has been the truth of it for millions of years—since
Homo erectus
followed
Homo habilis
0.4 to 2.0 million years ago, who followed
Australopithecus robustus
1.6 to 2.2 million years ago, who in turn followed
Australopithecus africanus
2 to 3 million years ago, who followed
Australopithecus afarensis
2.7 to 4 million years ago.

So, it’s as if we are tapping into our ancient origins when such feelings occur as part of some larger inborn response mechanisms, programmed to send out alert warnings whenever danger is believed to be lurking nearby. This range of feelings was a part of our beginnings, experienced by our ancestors long before the creation of language—which eventually clarified such differences as existed between our feelings, one to the other; identified their presence; and gave each of them a name appropriate to their function.

Though we developed a range of tools with which to defend ourselves from entities that stalked us then, we retain those feelings that continue to stalk us, often from within—the feeling we call
fear,
as well as the feeling known to us as
doubt
and, not far behind, the most damaging of them all,
desperation.

Ayele, by age twenty, I am sure you will have at your disposal all the words necessary to chart your course through life, providing you
always remember the following: behind each word is a meaning. Some words are friendly; some are not. Some will cause you pain. Some will make you cry. Some will protect you. Some will deceive you. Still, words and their meaning can be indispensable in preparing you for the battles you must win in order to survive.

The fact is, my darling great-granddaughter, long before your young life will deliver you to this moment on this page, fear, doubt, and desperation will have made many appearances in your life. But it is my hope that by then you will be standing strong in the face of each one; that you will know them by their nature; that you will have come to understand each by its function: they can alert us, they can hurt us, they can strengthen us or weaken us. And, in time, you may even come to know why they visit some of us more frequently than others of us.

I have danced with them all. Never to the same tune; and never with the same results! Fear, doubt, and desperation: they are almost related. I’ve never been afraid when there wasn’t doubt somewhere, and I wasn’t doubtful when there wasn’t some desperation near at hand.

Let me put these dramatic responses into the context of the period in early adulthood when, though I had begun to understand my path, I had no guarantees of future security. After making a few movies, contrary to the assumption that it was all going to be smooth sailing from there on out—and contrary to what many assume once they’ve had a taste of initial success—I found myself in a gloomy passage. A young man with a family, I had, at that time, no acting or other job, no rumors or possibilities of acting employment.

Aware and willing to reroute and reconsider my options for finding work, I faced the same obstacles as before—no marketable professional skills and only a rudimentary literacy that I was still
developing. Whatever I could have done, I would have. With a wife to support and a child, plus another on the way, to feed, clothe, and eventually send to school, it was a scary time for me—damaging to my generally healthy sense of self, provoking doubt as to my worth, making me fearful about providing primal survival needs for me and mine.

Unlike my boyhood response when food wasn’t readily available, it wasn’t as if I could head out to the ocean and put a baited hook in the water for fish, or gather sea grapes or pick cocoa plums in the forest. I was way out of my natural element in New York—an urban, industrialized setting not set up for fishing in Central Park or foraging for native fruits. When we came perilously close to having to worry about not having food for our children, fear, doubt, and desperation raised their heads simultaneously for sure. Before sliding down that slope, however, I was able to find temporary work that required the harshest physical labor. Fear and desperation subsided, although the doubt lingered. The feeling that then stalked me was that of an unsavory “what if?” What if the life fashioned for me by the guy who threw me out and told me to stop wasting his time as an actor was coming true?

Now the resentment surfaced in response to old fears, the kind that accumulates in us from childhood—residuals from my life as an outsider, old false stories of being dismissed and told that I was valueless to society. I was not valueless to myself; I had a sense of myself. But society back then had judged me next to zero.

That was the gloomy low point to which I’d fallen, even after my exciting launch. The reality was that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were hardly any film roles for black actors and actresses, and of those that there were, many notoriously reinforced racial stereotypes that, even at my hungriest, I couldn’t bring myself to
take on. Ayele, this isn’t said for me to claim any heroic choice to suffer rather than allow myself to be exploited. The truth is that I just couldn’t bear to admit to being so fearful, doubtful, or desperate as to do something that demeaned a person of color, and myself in the process.

In this period, just as we awaited the arrival of our second-born daughter, Pamela, I went in to meet with producers and read for the film role of a father who witnesses a crime in the casino where he works—an acting job that initially seemed like an answered prayer. From the short scene that I read for them, the producers and the powers that be were interested in my doing the role and gave me the full script to read before a final decision was made. But as soon as I read it, I contacted the agent, Marty Baum, who had submitted me (though he didn’t represent me at the time), to explain that I couldn’t do the role.

Marty asked whether it was because the role was racially insensitive.

“No, not really.”

“Is it insulting to you?”

Not wanting to elaborate at the time, I simply said, “I just can’t play it.”

Marty didn’t understand my reasoning, but he must have sensed that there was something of import underneath my decision not to take work that he knew I desperately needed. Some time later I got around to telling him what it was about the story and the role that bothered me. In the script, the father who witnesses the crime is threatened by the bad guys, who kill his daughter and throw her body onto his lawn—as a warning. But he does nothing in response. I couldn’t play that role. I had a daughter, and another one was about to be born at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. My first
thought, in fact, when I read the script was that I didn’t want my father to see me playing the part of someone who allows hurt to be done to his children without fighting back.

Marty Baum decided that I was crazy for turning down the role, so crazy that he wanted to be my agent—and has been ever since.

But having stood my ground and faced down my fear, I had to face another challenge—how to find the money to pay the $150 that the hospital delivery of my second child was to cost. The only option that I could see was to borrow the cash from Household Finance against my furniture. And that’s what I did.

But my choices to turn down certain parts didn’t make me heroic.

By this same token, when controversial roles were later offered to me, I didn’t feel noble for taking them on. Rather, I felt fortunate to be given a shot to play parts in movies that challenged prejudices, took on oppressive regimes, or involved interracial relationships, for example, and whose story lines dared to show a black man as powerful, articulate, and important at a time when that wasn’t acceptable to many. And I should add that during the volatile years when some of the films that I did were banned in the South and when death threats were made against many of us involved, fear was no stranger, either.

As you know, my dear Ayele, in a short enough time that lean period ended, thankfully, and my fortunes soon began to change in hopeful ways. Without question, each time I came out of doing battle with fear for the survival of myself and my family, I came out stronger. The possibility continued to be there that another wave of fear could return at any time, given my circumstances. But it did make me strong enough to be as ready as I could for the next wave, and the wave after that.

And I suppose at the core of me was the lesson that we can all learn in order to safely navigate the shoals—which for me was that
my salvation was in my own hands; my fears were to be worked through; my fears were to be overcome, subdued, wrestled with in the hope of taming them enough to get to the high ground—to never come out of the struggle weaker, because the strength you lose in an effort to come out of it is never recoverable. However, the strength is multiplied if you subdue the fear: you don’t have to thrash it into extinction, but you have to overcome it. You have to put it behind you, and once it’s behind you, there is a victory of sorts—a strengthening of your own view of yourself.

You may be wondering if we ever get to the point in our lives where our fear stops visiting us for good in our daily lives. My answer is no, although its intensity and influence often diminish and its form alters, depending on the constant flow of activities in your daily life. There are some days when you get up and most of it is terrific and maybe a small part of it may be problematic and can cause fear or stress. And you have a night where you go to sleep and rebound the next morning with pretty much the same difficulties facing you as you had the day before. You work your way through some of them, you duck some of them, you climb over some of them, and you turn your back on some of them.

Then there are those causes of fear you can’t turn your back on, that you can’t step away from, and that you have to surrender to or fight. If you surrender, that’s it. If you don’t wish to surrender, if you cannot surrender, you fight. You fight by standing in fear’s face and saying, “You may have me, but you’re going to have to take me. I am going to give you as much hell as I can give you, because I don’t want to go with you, I don’t want to be subjected to you, and I don’t want you to be pulling my strings.” Some of those fights, even, are won.

How have I been left as a result of my confrontations with fear, doubt, and desperation over the years? I have been left wounded in
some measure, in delicate ways. I’ve been made suspicious to some degree; I’ve been made reluctant to engage in some things, particularly in some areas where I have been the loser.

But those are experiences that we generally try to avoid, although we are not always successful. And there are other kinds of experiences that come toward us, and traveling in that force is a requisite amount of doubt, a requisite amount of fear, a requisite amount of desperation.

We are vulnerable. If you strike our skin hard enough, not only does it hurt, but it destroys a part of us. If you are thrashed about in your self-perception by forces that you are not able to defend against, they overwhelm you and leave you weakened in so many ways.