The Measure of a Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

for, then at least land that they could sharecrop and live on.
    Cat Island had enormous land area relative to its population. I mean, it was forty-six miles long, with a population of maybe one or two hundred white families, you know? And maybe three or four hundred slaves. So we assume that my ancestors simply started farming, and if anybody bothered to say, “By the way, what are you doing on my land?” they would have said, in French or whatever, “We’re just here,” and then the owners would have said, “Okay, well, you know, this is my land, and you have to give me some of what you produce.”
    My grandfather, March Poitier, wasn’t a farmer, though. He was very skilled at building. He would be contracted by the state, by the government, to go to other islands and build a schoolhouse or a government building or some other public structure. That required, first of all, having a boat, which in those days he would have had to build himself. It doesn’t appear, according to the oral history of the family, to have been an enormous boat. Rather, it was probably one that took a sail stitched together from the sturdiest canvas cloth he couldafford. He most likely made a mast out of a tree chopped down in the forest, skinned of bark and fastened in the bow. His rigging rope was either store-bought or handmade. If handmade, it was plaited from sisal, an inhospitable plant with thornlike edges running along the sides of its leaves and culminating at its end in a point as sharp as a needle. Put in water, the tough skin of the sisal leaf dissolves after some weeks, leaving a strong, stringy, threadlike material that’s widely used by those in the rope-making business.
    My later experience with boats as a young man leads me to say that his boat probably was a fifteen-footer. It couldn’t have been more than an eighteen-footer. He made a sail because motors were out of the question. You didn’t even talk about motors in those days, though he would probably have had a couple of oars.
    In the Caribbean they row from the stern. He would have had a couple of oars, and he would have had a bailing bucket so that if he ran into difficult weather he could bail the water out of the boat.
    Now, crucial to getting a fix on what his character might have been—the places he went to build these houses for the government, they weren’t just around the corner. He would have had to sail great distances in open water. For instance, to go from Cat Island to the Exumas by motorboat doing ten, eleven knots an hour is a four-hour run. So if he was using sail or the oars, you’re talking about at least an overnight run. In fact, you’re talking about twenty to twenty-five hours or so, in open seas by himself!
    It’s my understanding that his job was to collect local people on-site that he would hire to do the job. He was a builder on Cat Island as well, but he was often gone, sometimes for months at a time. On one such trip he was bitten by a black widow spider and took sick on the return trip. By the time he arrived home, he was in very bad shape, and he died.
    But March Poitier had a lot of sons and daughters. He had been married before he married my grandmother, with whom he had three children—David, Caroline, and Reggie.
    Both grandparents on my father’s side were dead before I was born. But on my mother’s side I knew Pa Tim and Mama Gina. I knew them because they lived close to us on Cat Island, and they were wonderful but very old people who were still very much in the old culture.
    My grandfather Pa Tim was a farmer, an extremely tall man who said few words but was very close to my grandmother. I remember her better. She smoked a pipe and cooked in a thatch hut, and her hair was always tied up with a cloth, like a handkerchief, as I recall, and she was very close to her children. She had five daughters: my mother, Evelyn, Eunice, Aida, Ya-Ya, and Augusta.
    My grandmother lived just across the pond from our family. I remember my