Sidney Poitier on Creativity and Survival--by Sheridan Hill  (c)2003 Sidney Poitier leans his length forward in the upholstered chair of his suite at the O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina. His brow is smooth and brown, wonderfully unmarred by the past 76 years, until he focuses his expression into one that reminds me of Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night. There is a great gentleness about him and an equal measure of "Don't mess with me," charisma. When he speaks of his family and friends, it is with tenderness, love and loyalty. Initially, I was granted a twenty-minute interview, but he has generously entertained my questions for almost an hour now. When he listens and answers, his eyes remain steadily upon mine, eyeball-to-eyeball. In his second autobiography, The Measure of A Man, he describes creativity as a receptive act. I ask him to say more about that. "It's difficult to talk about universally. You come to it as a particularly personal experience. Images come to my brain through my eyes, I experience touch and the senses and the emotions, and I have to figure things out. It is survival. It is imposed on us." A husky quality enters his voice and he lowers it to a deep whisper. "The nature of our fragility as imperfect beings demands that we knit our lives together day by day. When we become adroit at it, creativity is second nature. The imagination is nurtured and everything happening around you is feeding it." Creativity and survival -- thinking fast on his feet --are inextricably linked in the man. As a child growing up in the Bahamas, he was free to roam Cat Island, which was three miles wide and forty-six miles long. He plucked the fruit from sea grapes and climbed coco plumb trees and towering sapodilla trees, taking his chances with wasps nesting there.   Before turning him loose on the island, his mother taught him to swim using a method as primal as it was effective. She threw him in the water, watched him thrash and yell and sink, and at the last minute his father's arm reached in the water and pulled the boy out. Immediately, his mother threw him back into the water and repeated the sink-or-swim lesson until, at last, her son discovered dog-paddling and kept his head afloat.  Growing up on an island without electricity or automobiles, Poitier worked in fields beside his parents and in his free time observed the natural world with a child-like joy that abides in him now. He speaks excitedly about the thrill of finding a colorful lizard crossing the road. "I don't just see the lizard, I see what's behind the lizard and wonder, where did the lizard come from? That kind of wondering is instinctual, and to me, it's the theatrics of it. My imagination was my friend. We traveled together!" He laughs heartily and with pure delight. "My mother thought I was a daydreamer, and I was." A few nights earlier, Poitier held an informal question-and answer session with about 50 students from Guilford College, which brought him to town as part of the Bryan Series. "I was the only guy out there in 1949. Times had to evolve and mature so there could be more parts for black actors besides butlers and field hands," he said. He spoke with a fatherly wisdom about the lessons he has learned. "Serendipity is an energy that comes down and kisses us on the cheek. I believe there are no accidents. Every choice you?ve made, including your regrets, adds up to making you the person you are. I have no regrets. I've been ashamed, embarrassed, many things were not as I would have liked, but I always came away with the determination to improve myself. At my age, it's good to be able to look back and say, on the whole it's been a very useful life." Sidney Poitier speaks about creativity with Southern biographer Sheridan Hill. Copyright (c) 2005 Sheridan Hill