Famous Son of Cat Island

Sidney Poitier, the well known actor, hails from Cat Island. His description of his childhood gives an accurate glimpse of life there. My parents moved there at least 20 years after Sidney had left, but little had changed. Here are a few paragraphs from his book, The Measure of a Man, pages 2-3.

 

“I’m on the porch of our little house on Cat Island in the Bahamas. It’s the end of the day and evening is coming on, turning the sky and the sea to the west of us a bright burnt orange, and the sky and sea to the east of us a cool blue that deepens to purples and then to black. In the gathering darkness, in the coolness of our porch, my mother and father sit and fan the smoke from green palm leaves they’re burning to shoo away the mosquitoes and the sand flies. And as she did so often when I was small, my sister Teddy would take me in her arms to rock me to sleep. While she’s rocking me in her arms, she too is fanning the smoke that comes from the big pot of green leaves being burned, and she fans the smoke around me as I try to go to sleep in her arms.

 

“That’s the way the evenings always were on Cat Island. In the simplicity of that setting I always knew how I was going to get through the day and how Mom and Dad were going to get through the day and how, at the end of it, we were all going to sit on this porch, fanning the smoke of the burning green leaves.

 

“On that tiny spit of land they call Cat Island, life was indeed very simple, and decidedly pre-industrial. Our cultural “authenticity” extended to having neither plumbing nor electricity, and we didn’t have much in the way of schooling or jobs, either. In a word, we were poor, but poverty there was very different from poverty in a modern place characterized by concrete. It’s not romanticizing the past to state that poverty on Cat Island didn’t preclude gorgeous beaches and a climate like heaven, cocoa plum trees and sea grapes and cassavas growing in the forest, and bananas growing wild.”

 

The Poitier family moved to Nassau when he was about 10, and he left for Florida at about 15. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

 

Tomorrow I’ll begin quoting from my mother’s journal about their time on the island. I’m actually pre-posting these messages on May 11, so please don’t be alarmed if something goes wrong. They should pop up one each day until we get back to internet access.