A MEMORY OF WILLIAMS

T&T's MAN OF THE CENTURY

By Wayne Brown

Express

Section 2

January 1, 2000

Pages 4 & 5

In the square that night a light drizzle was falling, enough to shine the variegated faces of the packed crowd and mystify the bandstand lights where the diminutive figure with the aspect of a turtle stood erect at the mike, hectoring his audience with that corrosive, in-and-out-of-the-demotic oratory which, learning from Sparrow, he'd hit upon back in the PNM's green time, but which already seemed ruled by the muse of contempt: a language shaped to demolish.

It was 1964, just two years since he'd led us to Independence, so it was maturity's shock later to realise that by then his story was already almost over, that most of what remained to him (and us) was the autumn of the patriarch, what Lawrence called "post-mortem effects"; most of what remained was reaction. For the rest of the decade, the national economy crumbled, until a time came when "the people he had led to Independence" tried to overthrow and perhaps kill him.

In the following decade the economy boomed (he was no more responsible for one than the other, these were helpless little islands, after all), and out of some mix of distraction and civic demoralization The People left him alone, adored still perhaps by those of is generation who had taken their selfhood from him, but no longer quite real to younger generations, no longer regarded by them, and cherished now mainly by the FAB: for he was 5'6" and bumptious with it, and women loved him. Even without the great exhaustion of 1970 (from which he would never recover) they would have loved him, to the end.

When he saw the money preparing to go away again, he sickened in that deep part of himself that knew it could not survive the marches, the protests, perhaps even the mutiny again - no sir, not again! - until one afternoon in Parliament the spittle gleamed untended on his jaw, and the next weekend he lay down on his couch in full view of his lackeys and died. He succumbed to a diabetic come, they said, but we know now he died of an exhaustion too profound for resistance on his part, and too awesome for us his subjects to comprehend.

He had been a man, in his time, of extraordinary intellectual boldness, enormous dreams, and super-human fortitude: an academician, really, but with a small man's insolence and inconsolable self-foisting. They had led him to "let his bucket down" in the political arena, and in that realm of venality and power the intelligence had blurred and the dreams had broken - broken so early, so almost-at-once, that all that most of us alive today sensed of him in those last 16 years was the fortitude.

And that without the intellectual excitement, that without the hope, felt like mere arrogance, and worse.

Assailed by the power and intolerance of his personality, his early companions in politics had either quit his side or become his negligible eunuchs. And so by '64 ("No damn dog bark!") he was already Solus Rex, a man unbraced by other men, subsisting in a space he had haplessly cleared around him, an emptiness that was like despair. For all the years this writer was aware of him, that was the sense one had: of someone "larger than life' - it made him seem, paradoxically, at once both scary and forgettable - a man forever falling forward (while standing bolt upright!) through emptiness…

It was my generation's loss not to have known Eric Williams in his own green time. It's true that, like James, the best of him had already been preserved in books and articles. But unlike CLR he was too much with us, too near; and the spectre of the Patriarch quite blurred the light of the younger man's thought.

Besides, he was neither as literate nor as nice as James; his prose was formidable, but not a pleasure to read. Trinidad, which "denies itself heroes" (Naipaul), sullied him, as much as he would later demoralize it. The happiness, the kindness, the almost Naipaullean innocence that one hers of or reads in him in the '30s and '40s - gradually, then swiftly, they flickered and winked out as the bruising confrontations multiplied: with racism at Howard, with the bland metropolitan bureaucrats at the Caribbean Commission, with the British Government - how all those must have seemed to him like hapinesses in later years! - but then, tragically, with those nearer to home: the Federation chiefs, the native forces of reaction (whose mouthpiece was the Guardian), and finally the people in whose name he had thought to live: those whose peculiar mix of fecklessness and recalcitrance broke his heart and unleashed the persona he lacked the moral character to resist: the man unbraced by the lesser men around him: a solitary figure, forever falling forward through emptiness…

1944: In the flyleaf of a copy of his new book Capitalism and Slavery, an epochal work of historiography, the young Howard professor writes to his mentor CLR: 'Dear Jimmy…Your godchild! [meaning the book]…In appreciation…Bill." The happiness of that exclamation mark!

1954: A Jamaican recently retired from a career with a UN agency arrives at the Caribbean Commission in Washington. She is 23, nervous and at a loss in that great, strange world where "Bill" at 43 is a bigshot.

"…And he was so kind to me, considerate, helpful, he always looked out for me. And I mean, there was never any of 'the other thing', you know."

She smiles wistfully, a woman in her 60s, remembering.

"To tell the truth, there could have been, if he'd wanted it. Because he was just so nice to me, always. But there was never any of that. He was just being kind."

1964: It's just eight years since he marked his crossing of the Rubicon, the academician falling fatefully upon the world of action, with 154 "lectures": almost one public address every two days, for a year.

And already the story is almost over.

The West Indian Federation has failed, Independence has come and gone, almost at once he has had to rush the Industrial Stabilisation Act through a special nightlong sitting of Parliament to block the labour movement in his own country. Now he has the "godfather' of Capitalism and Slavery under house arrest. Already he must be growing very tired.

But in the square that night, with a drizzle coming and going, this young reporter saw a phenomenon he never forgot.

There was the frank adoration, the stillness of rapture that shone in the gazing faces of the packed crowd. There was the corrosiveness, the mastery, the insolence, the triumph of the oratory coming (in that gravelly bass monotone, emphatic, yet with something withheld, always withheld!) from the diminutive figure on the bandstand, the bumptious little man with the aspect of a turtle.

And to this teenage apprentice writer it was discomposing, for I saw it as predation, and for years afterwards would ask myself of that night, Who was preying on whom? I was much older before I understood that it hadn't been that, but symbiosis: an exultation of the mass will perfectly united with its object.

Nine years earlier he had christened the square "The University". But what took place there was not merely or even predominantly lectures. What it was, was happiness.

And it was a happiness that belonged to the night, like those plantation slaves' dances: the day world, the real world, would shoulder it off.

Besides, like the great house of Gatsby, it secreted by then a great corruption: recall James under house arrest five miles away.

But how dizzying had been his leap into the dark: the brilliant young academician, the bronze medallist, so they said, in the World Championship of Thought, come home to be among his people now, and to lead them into the Happiness of the Night!

Postscript: 1974. One last 'turning point', one last flaring of the dream. From the terrible fright and abiding heartbreak of April 1970 he had fled into the arms of 'the French Creoles. But they had hardly had time to realise their luck when the price of oil skyrocketed.

Now he wriggles free of them and sets about riotously expanding the State sector. Through it, he assumes hands-on control of virtually the whole of the national economy; and through it, also, he siphons, runs, pours the great bulk of the oil largesse down and out to The People. It's the old symbiosis of him-&-them, resurrected again; but now only in terms of money.

The 'French Creoles' rage, and conceive the ONR. The People take their handouts, but with no regard for him. In those last years, it is still the rage against sugar, the plantation, slavery, that drives him, that fuels the creation of Pt Lisas and (after Cuba?) Mt Hope.

It has been a cruel irony, that belated oil wealth. He is s busy as he is alone; yet he is so tired now. What couldn't he have done with that windfall in '56!

The FAB close around him like a phalanx.

It is they who bear the exhausted warrior down the tunnel of the last years…while, all around him, there's a great clamour and heedless celebration as "the people he had led to Independence" head off to Disneyworld…

His aura outlives him: The 'national outpouring of grief' that greets the news of his death is really shock. For by now, to us, he is not a man anymore, but a Fact of Life, a force of nature.

That, inevitably, has been our punishment of him, as he grew ever larger than life, abolishing all opposition, encroaching on institutions, corrupting bureaucracies into extensions of his whims.

Now with his death - inconceivably! - Nature has stopped.

Into the silence rushes a host of panicky voices.

TOP