SIDNEY POITIER AND THE TRAIN MEN

In honor of the death of  Sidney Poitier, this is a special presentation this week.

I remember the night Sidney Poitier came to accept an Oscar for special achievement. Tall, straight and slim, he appeared at the back of the stage as his name was announced. As he began to move into the light, I noticed his characteristic careful carriage. But on this night, it was touched with an overlay of carefulness that comes when the body is no longer young. I mourned a little for this.

However, it was not his age that caught me unaware and held my breath captive for a moment in stunned surprise. It was that he looked familiar in a new way, a way that brought back memories from my earliest childhood.

The control, the graciousness, the utter civility, the slicked back, close-cropped gray hair above a brown face aging into sallow—it was these that time-warped my thoughts to train rides from California to Illinois when I was seven and younger. I suddenly saw in him the men who had helped us with our luggage and laid a metal step stool down to help a little girl reach the first high step of the double-decker train. I saw again the brown faces of the men who served us dinner, who came through the cars with the xylophone-like chimes to announce the dinner seatings. The men who passed us in the narrow halls on their way to prepare the sleeper cars.

I never really knew these men, except for their polite assistance. But I felt I did know Sydney Poitier, at least as much as a fan may. I had seen him when he was young and strong, full of vigor. I had seen him angry, laughing, troubled, hurt.

What caught and held my breath upon seeing him this night was all those other men I had seen as a child. Suddenly I realized that I never saw them as ever being different from the way they were while at their jobs. I had never ever imagined them so full of life as the man I had come to know through the movies who was standing there tonight looking so like all those other men. I am ashamed to say that only on this night did I see those dark-suited train attendants as the vital young men they were or had been.

Vaguely I remembered incidents when the other passengers were particularly nasty toward these men. I believed, then, that those passengers were just mean people. It did not occur to me that they might feel it was okay to be ugly with those men because they were of a different race. The train men invariably responded with civility. This I did notice. Sometimes I wondered if they did so only because they were afraid of losing their jobs, and sometimes I wondered if they were just afraid. But mostly, I thought they were very strong to be able to ignore the Ugly Train Passenger and treat that person with the same politeness as any another passenger. My parents would have supported this last interpretation.

Memory came to me about a time I asked my mother and father about why all train men were of the same race. I don’t remember their answer. Something about an organization? A Union? I am not sure. The way I understood it was that they belonged to some kind of club.

To be in a club where you could share common experiences seemed like a good thing. To have to be in the club to get a job did not. The clubs I knew would keep you out because some member did not like you. It did not have to do with how good you were, how smart, or talented. Someone did not like you and you were kept out. That was not fair. I did not know if the train men’s club was like that or not, but I thought it might be.

There is a memory that lies against my mind like the white feathers of a dandelion gone to seed.

I grab at it, yet it escapes on the air stream created by my reaching out to capture it. Probably this memory came from my dad’s words. He was the history buff in the family. He undoubtedly told me about the history of the railroad and how the train men came to organize. Somewhere in that telling there was an explanation that had to do with the topic of race, but the memory is elusive.

#SydneyPoiter #RedCapsandTrains #Raceandprejudice