"People say: Don't wash your dirty linen in public. But biography is nothing but having a jooking board and a washtub set out in Woodford Square, and you just get the dirty linen and you wash away..."Biographer and literary critic Arnold Rampersad made this joke last Thursday, on the process of crafting an authentic biography (as opposed to a "dry-cleaned" one)–writing which uncovers the truths of a person's life, and the context shaping their achievements.
Prof Rampersad was talking on the subject of his own father, the Trinidad journalist Jerome Rampersad, as part of a lecture series on historical figures in T&T journalism hosted by The Friends of Mr Biswas. The event took place on April 16, at the National Library, where Dr Rodger Samuel, Minister of National Diversity and Social Integration, inducted the professor as a Distinguished Friend of Mr Biswas.
Jerome Rampersad (probably initially baptised Geronimo Ewart Hernandez, according to family sources–he may have been born out of wedlock, said his son) was a middle-class maverick who wrote a lively and popular court column often rooted in the lighter crimes of poor people, especially poor black people, at a time when pre-independence local media usually only represented news and views of the ruling elite of whites.
His column was called In The Courts Today, and ran in the Evening News (printed by the Trinidad Publishing Company daily from Monday to Friday) from 1947 to the late 1950s, under the pen name of McGee. It's said the column virtually sold the paper.
Prof Rampersad's talk skilfully painted a portrait of Jerome Rampersad, in an observant, funny and at times mildly sardonic way that had the audience of academics, media people and others in a thoughtful and at times laughing mood as he revealed risque family foibles that threw light on the man his father was.
A comic column
The McGee column captured elements of personal drama in the magistrate's courts, and expressed different voices, from the near muteness of the intimidated, to the "perversely inventive, like the man who insisted, Your Honour, that he hadn't used curse words in the rumshop the way the policeman said, he had simply said he wanted some liquor 'for curiosity's sake!'"
One hero of the column was the quick-witted, unpretentious judge Fabien Camacho, a paternal though not paternalistic judge with a deep sense of humanity, quick to give people second chances, and an ability to talk to people freely, said Prof Rampersad.Defendants were always a central part of the column. Their crimes included petty thefts (of a bicycle, or cigarettes, or bread, for instance), cursing, drunkenness and loitering; the crimes of poor people.
All of this was under-reported in the Evening News, noted Prof Rampersad, until Jerome slipped it in by making a joke of it.Because matters took place in the dignity of the court, the columns became a way to search for justice, resolution and order in a chaotic society, said the professor.It was an early, gently comic look at Trinidad neuroses, anxieties, injustices, and accomplishments, said Prof Rampersad, written by a conflicted being who triumphed over his own sense of adversity through the creation of a form of written art via the medium of print journalism.
Fresh style, new subjects
The McGee column was among the first to use the dialect tone to add life to newspaper stories, a style with elements of literary fiction. This approach broke from the newspaper conventions of the time and helped make the McGee column both unique and entertaining. It also opened the way for use of more idiomatic dialect, an influence that may have helped shape other writers, including the novelist Sam Selvon who in his early years also wrote for the Evening News, and knew Jerome Rampersad very well.
The McGee column's content also introduced new subject matter–the life of ordinary people, via their crimes in court–which appealed to many more readers.
Speaking of possible connections between Guardian Central reporter Seepersad Naipaul and Jerome Rampersad, Prof Arnold said: "Culturally the men were alike in some ways, but also quite different. Both sought to explore aspects of Trinidad life hitherto ignored or downplayed in the newspapers. Both wanted also to be fiction writers, with Seepersad publishing a book in the early 1940s, and Jerome finishing a short novel in 1962 that has never been published."
But whereas Seepersad Naipaul came from a rural Indian culture with an interest in Hindu high culture, Jerome's background was very different; he was an urbanised, creolised, Christian-born man of mixed heritage, including some Venezuelan white or mulatto, and possibly Indian or other blood. Seepersad, the professor said, had an interest in learned European and Indian culture; Jerome, on the other hand, was more inclined to street life.
Turbulent times
Prof Rampersad noted that Jerome worked in that post-WW2 era where social change and conflict was sweeping through Trinidad: joblessness, illegal immigration from other islands, acute housing shortages, prolonged food rationing, soaring prices of commodities, racial friction, religious intolerance, and the simultaneous stimulation and erosion of moral and intellectual values were all bubbling up to make T&T a "new, exciting, challenging, puzzling, exhilarating and dangerous place."
In this volatile context, Jerome repudiated the expectations of his class and "descended" into an underworld of the poor, to become its sole dramatist and spokesman, said Prof Rampersad.
The move wasn't just philosophical. Jerome's personal life became involved with poor, working class people (often through his relationships with women, and the children they had with him), in so doing, apparently turning his back on his middle class upbringing. He chose to understand the poor in a very direct way, and also entered the world of gambling, alcohol, and the rough, tough male culture that sponsored this, said Prof Rampersad.
His McGee court columns quietly subverted the myth of faceless, undeserving black people, so common at that time of institutionalised racism in T&T."He wanted to cross the line between rich and poor, black and Indian or half-Indian, and Spanish, and so on," said Prof Rampersad, "...the lines that, from his point of view, disfigured Trinidad society."
Influenced by Runyon
An early influence on Jerome's writing style was Damon Runyon (1880-1946), a tough-talking, hard-smoking, sports-loving, heavy drinking American newspaperman and the author of short stories. Runyon's characters were of the Brooklyn demi-monde, tales of gamblers, hustlers and gangsters, and he used a vernacular style mixing formal English with colourful street slang. Runyon's stories seemed to be born of a cynical vision that all life was a gamble, and only the toughest survived. This rubbed off on Jerome's writing approach, said Prof Rampersad.
By 1947, Jerome was living a fully double life, noted the professor–straddling the worlds of both middle class and poor."Jerome was born middle class but grew into a rebel against that class while holding on to it at the same time, in certain ways," summed up Prof Rampersad.The hardscrabble, precarious nature of T&T journalism for those workers under the thumbs of the media bosses emerged from the lecture, as Prof Rampersad mentioned how his father, towards the end of his career, tried to form a trade union for all journalists.
Jerome died in 1978, close to destitution, said Prof Rampersad. But his column lived on through other ghost writers who were delighted to take up the mantle of McGee, as they respected and admired the tradition Jerome Rampersad had begun.
�2 Correction: In the Monday, April 20 story 'Ramchand calls for urgent digitisation of crumbling records,' it was stated the Evening News was published from 1935 to 1989. Mr Kelvin Choy, who was senior subeditor of the Evening News, advises that the paper was printed right up to July 27, 1990, the day of the coup.
Who is Prof Arnold Rampersad?
Prof Arnold Rampersad is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford University. Born in Trinidad, he attended Belmont Boys Intermediate School and then St Mary's. After teaching for a year at Fatima College, (1960-1961), he joined Radio Guardian (610 Radio) as an announcer, and worked briefly in the Prime Minister's Office. In 1963, he moved to Barbados where he joined Barbados Rediffusion as a newscaster. In 1965, he left for the US on a partial scholarship from the US State Department.
He is a graduate of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in English and American Literature in 1973. A retired member of the Department of English at Stanford, his books include The Art and Imagination of WEB Du Bois; The Life of Langston Hughes (two volumes); Days of Grace: A Memoir, co-written with Arthur Ashe; Jackie Robinson: A Biography; and Ralph Ellison: A Biography.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and for the National Book Award in non-fiction prose, he has won fellowships from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the JS Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also been awarded the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House in 2011, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Medal for contributions to society, from Harvard University.
