Wayne boy, I so vex you dead that I keep staring at the clipping I cut out of the Express newspaper all those years ago on Thursday June 13, 1985. The headline on the article, your then daily column titled In Our Time, was ’Loving The Dark Days’. Before that I was a fan of the Hemingway brevity, but from the time I read ’Dark Tuesday, early morning: the air cool, the sky insupportably black above the Lady Young, a fallen cloud drifting whitely over the high slope of Chancellor Hill like a moving backdrop to the set of ruined Belvedere; and a fine drizzle silently falling’... I was lost in the contemplation of such perfection...nothing was ever the same again.
So I cut it out and took it home and tucked it into a notebook where it remained over the years, to be taken out at intervals, studied and put back. I moved house three times. Sometimes I would panic. Where had I put it? I could not find the notebook and a mad search would begin through, boxes and boxes of books, and then at last I would find it, read it again, the words soothing after the search.
Strange, I find it a month ago...you ever feel like a ghost touch you on your shoulder...what was happening with you then, man, like I see you in front me...but I only read it and smile, and tell myself, you know you have to email him. This death business is real hell you know. George dead, Jean dead, TJ, Willie P, you...The last time I email you was when George die and a piece I write, I send it to you, and you publish it in the Jamaica Observer, without hesitation and paid me a ’lil ting’ too.
Wayne boy, I don’t know how it is you had study rain so. I mean, the way you write that ’Loving the Dark Days’, like it was a subject in school...’Here in the tropics falling rain is our sudden season. I don’t mean that indecision of sweatiness and thunder that interrupts our insular azure for fully five months of every year; I mean the falling rain itself; falling rain for its duration, changes the world...’
You remember long time in the Express ...we’re talking the old one where the front door was next to the old Bryden’s entrance and then later, when the building was evolving into what it is now but was a rabbit warren of corridors, and a certain issue was settled manos a manos...don’t want to digress to that, who know, know...but I still remember the look of incomprehension, then enlightenment, then dismay, then a kind of blocking off on the face of OB when it happened. But it was all part of the way we were growing...like the column you wrote, in our time you spawn a whole lot of writers and sub-editors and you prove that you could be writer and be a journalist and journalism would be a better pursuit for it. In our time you prove what journalism could do and why propaganda will never do it.
I remember you praised me about something I wrote about shopping on Charlotte Street. I wouldn’t lie, I knew it was good...but you came up to me and said...girl, you write like a b..ch...and for the rest of the day whenever I surfaced from the cloud I was on, all I could think was ’he liked it, he liked it.’ And then you started the creative writing courses and encouraged me to attend, along with so many of the other writers who now exist because of you.
But you didn’t only care about writing and the sea and the rain, you cared about people too, so that when I was ill and off the scene for months, you called Hilltop Drive every day, behaving quite ferociously one day when I didn’t want to take any calls, so I had to take yours, very sheepishly. I still have the gift of a book of short stories you left that day you came to visit.
Wayne, I want to say your columns were the best. Now don’t get me wrong. I have two others, all, as the youths like to say ’a bess’. George put the thing in my blood along with all the West Indian novels in his library. Later, when I started to read Keith, I wanted to do it for myself every day. By the time I read you I’d already started to understand that this writing thing, this contract with the Muse, as you referred to her, would always be about love and pain, not always in equal amounts. Because you covered everything in those columns. Three thick files with your clippings, I have in front of me and I know that’s not everything. You understood this place that you had to leave.
On March 26, 1990 (July 27 was still to come) in a column that considered the question of capital punishment you wrote: Trinidad and Tobago is today a country quite unlike the tropical idyll proffered by the tourist brochures (which is why we keep hearing those sad, confused cries about the need to rid our streets of vagrants and criminals ’for the tourists), and quite unlike anything our grandparents could have imagined.
The widespread introduction of guns in the early ’eighties by those associated with the cocaine trade; the general coarsening of the society’s sensibilities as the ’coke murders’ came and went; the entrenchment of a criminal underclass by that same trade; and now, in the past three years or so, the enlargement of that class by spiralling unemployment and deprivation-these have combined to create a climate in which violent crime is becoming something of a cultural norm among, especially, the young initiates of that class.’
What a chronicle of what it means to live here, now, in our time. Eh bien oui, as the old people would say.
I have ’Loving the Dark Days’ in front of me now, the newsprint is creased and yellow and the words still as timeless as the column’s original logo comprising two figures, the female lying relaxed, the male stooping, pondering. You’d written an entire column titled ’Ann-Marie’s People’ on how the drawing came to be and I’m startled now to see Monday November 26, 1984. Ann-Marie Vincent ’a whizz kid’ as you described her was the artiste, and the column had only been running a short while. Of course, reading you made me and so many others a better writer.
And I’ll say it again, in our time, you proved what journalism could do and why propaganda will never do it...you had a kind of lopsided way you used to smile, and I’m seeing that.
