Kevin Sessums' Facebook page – which should just give up and become a blog already – has a lovely meditation on Sidney Poitier, the first African-American man to win an Oscar, and whose 85th birthday is today. Kevin grew up in Mississippi (Mississippi Sissy is his unforgettable memoir about it), and used the n-word reflexively when he grew up, even in front of his family's black maid, Matty-May. The day after Poitier's Oscar win, Kevin remembers:
I asked Matty May, as she was making my bed the next morning before I went to second grade, if she could "believe a n—-r won Best Actor." It was a pivotal moment in my life and it is a pivotal scene in the book – as is my seeing Matty May a few years later as we both picked cotton on my uncle's farm and I overheard her quietly saying his name, "poitierpoitierpoitier" over and over, it having become a kind of mantra to calm herself with each boll that she reached for and belligerently wrenched forth to put into her sack.
Decades later, he found himself at a Hollywood shindig where he spotted Poitier as a fellow guest:
I gathered up my courage and went and knelt at his side and began to tell him about Matty May and my book and how much he had meant to her. In the middle of my telling him all this Penny Marshall came up to say hello to him and I rose to leave them but he grabbed my hand and asked me to stay. Penny said her helloes and went to sit with some other friends at a neighboring table. I continued to kneel by Mr. Poitier's side and he continued to hold my hand. "Now finish telling me all about Matty May," he said softly, her name now coming from him as his had so often come from hers. In that moment I not only felt Matty's presence in my life once more but I felt God's.
It truly was a moment of grace to have arrived at that moment from that earlier moment back in Mississippi when as a little southern boy I had broken Matty May's heart with my use of the n-word to describe this dignified man who now held my hand and before whom I was kneeling. I can still hear her old soft throaty voice now whispering to me even as I type this birthday wish to one of our country's greatest actors: "…poitierpoitierpoitier …" And I can hear him too whisper her name: " … Matty May …"
The Dish 