The Measure of a Man Read Online Free PDF

Aunt Ya-Ya, who died after I left for Florida, and I remember very well my Aunt Augusta, who also smoked a pipe—that same kind of white-clay pipe from the olden days.
    There was something special in the women of that family. My mother had it, which made my father a very fortunate fellow. Ya-Ya I recall having had it too, but Auntie Gusta—it seems to me I saw most of it in Auntie Gusta.
    Auntie Gusta left her husband, Zack, because he was abusive. He drank, and whenever he was able to scrounge up enough bucks he would shell it out on rum. He was a hard-working man, but he spent such monies as he could manage on rum (or he bartered goods, farm products, for rum), and he was an abuser. She only had the courage to leave him once the children were grown. She got on a boat and she went to Nassau and tried to find a new life for herself. Boy, you don’t know how much courage that took. But that was my mother’s family.
    My mother had a marriage that was unbelievable, and I think it had to do simply with a compatibility that was native to the two personalities. They got along so well. I never heard a cross word. My mother could talk only to my dad— really talk—but they would talk and talk and talk, I mean, they were friends and they were buddies and they worked side by side. She respected him, and he—I think he might have been guilty of a few infractions here and there—was devoted to her and would never hurt her. Never, never . You see, he was some years older than Evelyn. Evelyn was thirteen when they got married. Reggie, then not quite twenty-six, was the only man she ever knew.
    In 1936 the state of Florida imposed an embargo against tomatoes grown in the Bahamas. That turn of events would require thirty-two years to break down Reggie Poitier, and several more to wrestle the life out of him, but the struggle was set in motion mid-morning of a warm, sunny day in 1937, when my mother and I stepped on board a native sailboat.
    Around us, my father, my older brothers and sisters, and my grandparents on my mother’s side all stood or squatted on the jagged coral outcroppings that made the waterfront of Arthur’s Town, Cat Island. Behind them, high on a bluff adjacent to the main road, a chorus of cousins, once or twice removed, milled about in a modest crowd of neighbors, friends, and assorted well-wishers. All had come to offer a prayer for our safe passage and wave us goodbye.
    This was the first step in my father’s plan to resettle the family. My mother and I were to travel to Nassau as an advance party “to take a look at the lay of the land,” search out housing we could afford, and gather such additional information as would be relevant to our survival in an unfamiliar place. The second step, depending on a favorable report, would require the rest of the family to follow in the weeks to come. But on that morning I was a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy whose thoughts were far from the pressing realities of family survival. While I was old enough to pick up ever so slight changes in my father’s face and something unspoken in his eyes, I was still far too young to read or even recognize concerns of obligation when written on a face. Instead, my thoughts roamed freely in a fantasy arena.
    Weeks before departure time, my imagination had begun running wild with anticipation. When the moment to step on board finally arrived, I was almost too excited, too anxious, too filled with curiosity and wonder about what kind of world I would find beyond the horizon. From rumors, hearsay, and snatches of adult conversations never meant for my ears, I hadconcluded that whatever world I would find waiting for me must surely be like no place I had ever seen or dreamed of.
    I had heard that there were real electric lights there, not kerosene lamps like the ones everybody on Cat Island used. Running water inside houses. Coming in through pipes from under the ground. With the twist of a little handle, water would come when you wanted.