“Well, here we are; you looking at me, me looking at you.”
So spoke Sidney Poitier at the beginning of his lecture in Dana Auditorium on Dec. 2, right before complimenting the entirety of the packed house on their good looks and moral character.
“Now how’s that for sucking up to 1,200 people?” said Poitier.
Guilford theatre professor Jack Zerbe introduced him as, “a man of great charm, and great intelligence.”
Poiter, actor for over 50 years and 1963 winner of the Oscar for Best Actor, came to speak about what the program called “The Oneness of the Human Family.”
“Snap judgments too often obscure how much we don’t know about each other,” said Poitier.
He then elucidated his point by giving 14 vignettes, what he called “snapshots” about his life.
In snapshot one Poitier spoke about his mother Evelyn and his father Reggie, tomato farmers from Cat Island in the Bahamas. He spoke about how his mother wouldn’t give up on him and even went to see a soothsayer when he was born two months premature.
“My favorite part of the evening was listening to him talk about when he was a kid,” said Senior Laura Myerchin. “He’s graceful, charming, and a very eloquent speaker.”
Throughout the evening, Poiter continued to stress the integrity and values his parents instilled in him. From discussing his mother’s “whap-whap method” of teaching, to the day his father decided that Sidney should go to America at the age of 15, Poitier spoke of them with respect and care.
“There were lessons to be learned from everything they said and did,” he said.
Poiter did not hesitate to discuss some of his less proud moments; for instance, he described the first time he got drunk, and the time he was arrested at age twelve.
“I believe that everything, all of my experiences in the aggregate, good ones, bad ones, all of them, are what brought me to this spot on which I stand,” he said.
The audience remained silent as Poitier shared his experience of the segregated South and the race riots in Harlem.
He made it a point to thank the police officer who introduced him to the Catholic nuns who cared for him “with genuine love and affection,” during the winter of 1943.
Poitier spoke of how he decided to become an actor after having been rejected by a man who told him to “get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.”
After that, Poitier decided to prove that he was capable of being more than a dishwasher.
Poiter skipped over his actual acting career to discuss his life now, as a 76-year-old man. He spoke of his, “senior moments.”
“The other morning I bent down, tied my shoes, and realized I didn’t even have them on,” said Poitier.
Poitier left the audience with a simple message.
“In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter how many times we’ve been knocked down. What matters is what we do with the time after we get back up,” he said.