“…Oil money come and oil money gone and poor people remain on the pavement and ghetto … and when Mr. Divider start to divide de bread equally, yes, ah going and sing de whole damn calypso bout Dorothy ….How ah jam she and she jam me….”
That verse and calypso best exemplify what the “Black Man” – Leroy Calliste, the Black Stalin, was all about. His concern for his people reached back to the 1970s, when the first wave of oil bread swept through the economy. Stalin, in “Piece of de Action,” called on then-Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams “This ent no Black Power talk, this is man talking to man … fix up my people before de oil money done.”
But as powerful as the meeting of social and economic justice to his people was, the Black Man did not fail in what he considered his responsibility to counsel his people: “Black Man doh get nutten easy.”
Stalin invoked the memory of the ancestors working in the oilfields of Trinidad Leasehold Limited: “Yuh get up one morning, oil money running, how it come yuh don’t know, but if yuh read bout Uriah (Butler) yuh go find out bout de pressure, how dey ketch so much old hell to get a penny from TLL.”
Black Stalin was uncompromising in his concern for all black peoples and their class struggles. “Sufferers doh care bout race and who living in who place.” Their major concern, he asserted, was “where the next meal coming from.”
Back in the late 1970s, when Stalin won his first of five calypso monarch titles, he caused quite a controversy with what was probably his biggest hit, the Caribbean Man. In it, he advised political leaders of the region to focus on culture and togetherness instead of all “the money speech dem prime ministers making.”
Stalin was also very concerned with the cultural products of his civilisation, Trinidad and Tobago. He advised on the preservation and keeping of the secrets of tuning the steelpan.
His devotion to the family was most pronounced in his call for unity and understanding between black man and woman: “We done take one vow, we cyah tun back now.” His sense of nationalism shone through when he advised, “We can make it if we try.” By self-example, the Black Man chronicled the struggles he and his wife went through to make the family “ok;” and only when the future was assured “de Black Man feeling to party” – arguably the greatest relief song ever.
Stalin’s concerns ranged beyond the Caribbean for the black man suffering in any part of the world. He begged Jah Jah to give him piece of Vorster for the disenfranchisement and slaughter of black people in Southern Africa. His praise for Dr Martin Luther King went back to the 1960s: “Martin was a king of all kings.”
Black Stalin’s name and work over the more than 50 years of being in the calypso gayel will live way beyond his passing. He was reputed by his wife, Mrs Patsy Calliste, to have been an outstanding and loving husband and father of their five children.
Rest well Black Man, you have done what Jah set out for you to accomplish.