Almost from the moment I started covering court trials in this town of one-trick ponies, I’ve wondered about what might be going on in the minds of usually defenseless accused citizens while jaded magistrates and state lawyers performed their courtroom pantomimes. The man in the dock usually appears disconnected. Seemingly unperturbed that depending on the day’s performance he could lose his freedom. Or his life.
It had struck me that the majority of accused individuals shared a similar morphology: male, aged 19-30, unemployed or unemployable, barely literate, destitute, mentally challenged, a nondescript resident of one of our ever-proliferating ghettoes. I never covered a police case against a businessman, a school principal, a lawyer, a clergyman, a banker or a politician—never mind the widespread whispers about their curtained proclivities. As I say, for years I had tried to understand the apparent indifference of most victims of the law. No more do I wonder. I know now that what I had for so long taken for apathy, acedia and torpor, among other afflictions, were actually the ever-changing faces of surrender. Resignation. It didn’t matter all that much if a judge handed them over to the rope or to the prolonged other inhumanities of prison wardens with their own mental maladies.
The man in the dock had never meant much to anyone. Certainly not to the system’s chief operators, whom our prime minister recently referred to as “the prominent people.” In the scheme of things, he was of no special significance. He owned nothing, therefore was nothing. A nonentity without push or pull. He influenced nothing. He was just another letter in Derek Walcott’s alphabet of the emaciated.
For two days this week, I sat in a courtroom waiting to learn whether I would be sent to prison for publishing what I truly believed was in the public interest, a response to published accounts of an incident I knew to be incorrect. I took my seat with my lawyers, self-convinced the justice system would deliver a fair verdict, that it would confirm I had done nothing wrong, that I had delivered to my readers only what was expected of me: the truth as I had witnessed it, with malice toward none.
As for the charge by the former police commissioner Cuthbert Phillips, that I had set out to turn against him a jury not yet chosen, I can at this juncture say little. The judge has not yet delivered his verdict. But as the picture unfurled before me in court, as I took in the well-fed faces of observers observing Saint Lucian justice in action, it had occurred to me they mostly belonged to “the prominent people.” And all at once I realized I was at the epicenter of a nightmare. At one time or another I’d had cause to write about some of them in terms less than fawning, these peacocks that carried on as if their bank balances and their pedigree rendered them above the law!
I thought about the residents of Gros Islet and Vieux Fort and Choiseul, as well as other communities barely a two-hour drive from where the prominent people live in air-conditioned comfort while the sun savaged ordinary folk: men and women employed on banana plantations, children too, who lived in hovels without running water, toilet facilities, and other basic amenities. Who mowed the lawns of the prominent people, or toiled in their kitchens, or took care of their prominent offspring while their prominent parents accepted every gilt-edged invitation to party, whether in their ivory towers or at the official residences of the prime minister and the governor general—and who, in most cases, received in return less than three hundred dollars a month.
The prominent people were incumbent politicians and their well-heeled friends, libidinous clergymen, captains of local commerce. In the best interests of the ordinary citizen, I had criticized them for their public demonstrations of arrogance and self-importance, exposed their decorated clay feet to public examination, proved them to be under their various cassocks not nearly as holy as they pretended, ridiculed their posturings. On more than one occasion I had dared to report about cover-ups involving celibate priests who had somehow impregnated young members of their flock while washing away their sins in the blood of the Lamb.
Alas, it had also occurred to me that few of the regular citizens had shown up in court. They preferred to telephone their good wishes, to assure me God was not asleep, that He would never let me down. Evidently, they had not yet learned that God was always on the side of the prominent people. The ones with the big batallions.
And then there were the prison inmates, lead among them Michael ‘Gaboo’ Alexander, whose trial on charges of attempted murder I had recently covered. He had received word in prison that Cuthbert Phillips’ lawyer had asked the judge to afford me a tax-funded vacation at the Bridge Street hellhole a visiting British MP had unforgettably renamed “the real dark hole of Calcutta,” locally known as Her Majesty’s Gaol.
“No problem,” Gaboo had assured me via a friendly cop. “Stand up, Rick. Doh let dem fellas break you. Let them send you to jail. Gasa, we go take good care of you. Trust me, you gonna be all right in the morning!” Despite that he was facing a 15-year sentence [reduced on appeal to four years—the judge of the prominent people had been grotesquely at fault!] he retained his sense of humor. Now, he was punning with the title of my first book about politics in Saint Lucia!
Small comfort, of course. Even with the legendary Kenneth Foster and his brilliant son Peter at my side I still could not shake the feeling that the behind-the-scenes operators of the system—the prominent people!—were in control. That they would somehow find a way to take me down for the inconveniences I had caused them or their prized associates. Is this the demon thought that had rendered others less blessed than I paralyzed in court, looking for all the world like one of Walcott’s “corpses scattered through a paradise?”
Am I afraid? You bet I am. On the other hand, I continue to believe truth and justice are finally unconquerable. That despite losing an occasional round or two to the system’s operators, right will prevail. When I can no longer believe this, that’ll be the day that I die!
The preceding first appeared in the STAR in April 1990.
