Linda M. Deane receiving her journalism diploma from The Honourable Billie Miller at the graduation ceremony held at the Hilton Hotel, June 1982. At the podium, partly hidden, is Harold Hoyte. Photo Copyright © 1982 by the Nation.
WHO was it said: “You can change your mind, but you can’t change your fate?”
Gibran? Goethe? God? I do know it’s a line from a song—the singer and title of which escape me right now. But it’s a quote that’s been swarming about my head like bees in my backyard ever since news that Harold Hoyte, co-founder and Editor Emeritus of the Nation newspapers, passed Sunday, May 12, aged 77. And there are plenty bees in my backyard.
The idea is a romantic one—alluring; scary, even. That you might lead a life down one path then, at some point even much later in that life, switch direction—be or do something entirely different. You make a decision—or it’s made for you—and presto! Your life changes, and whatever that new thing is that you become and remain, that is your fate. Always has been.
What if the switch comes early on, before you even start to live or know what life is?
Picture it. Christmas 1981. A shy, gangly girl with a mere 18 years under her belt is on holiday in Barbados with her family. Just another in a series of trips “home” that the parents make when they can afford, so their two UK-bred children can connect more fully with family and roots. Be among people who look like them, experience what it feels like to be part of a majority on a bus, in a street, in a restaurant. Feel the sun as the only weight on their backs for a while. To put lie to the tourist brochures and let them see is not only white-folks that does go on holiday.
The New Year looms. A week before the family is due to return to its minority status and the bite of English weather, a notice is spied in the newspaper inviting applicants for a six-month journalism course. The shy, gangly teen already has a loose sort of plan to take her one, lonely A Level and embark on training at a journalism college in the east of England. But this ad, in a Bajan newspaper for a course in Barbados, sparks fire in her mind. Encouraged by her parents, and spurred on by the fast approaching airline departure date, she places a phone call, asks a question. Does she also drop off a hurriedly scripted letter of application? Maybe, but as the vacation days wind down, no word is forthcoming. A second, more urgent phone call is placed, circumstances explained and, before you know it, an interview arranged.
She must have nailed that interview because, two days later, her family deposits her with relatives and flies back to England without her. A month later, she, along with ten other like-minded souls, embark on the first ever Nation Newspaper-World Press Freedom Committee diploma course in journalism.
…
I often wonder what my life would have been like if Harold Hoyte hadn’t interrupted his busy day almost 40 years ago to grant me that interview ahead of schedule. Hadn’t taken a chance on an awkward, skinny girl who knew nothing, really, and even less about life in the Caribbean, about Barbados. What if I hadn’t picked up the Nation that day while waiting to leave for the beach? The questions, the what-ifs, hit me in a Curious Case of Benjamin Button–Avengers: Endgame sort of way. The memories hit me, too.
…
This is what I remember about Harold Hoyte.
His appearance: Boyishly handsome, a charming man who sported a goatee with tremendous style, even more so as it turned to grey. (The only other man I know to sport a goatee with equal style is my dad.)
His warmth: He was a genial man who had the natural ability to make anyone feel at ease and to feel as if he was actually listening to you.
His laugh: Like firecrackers going off or rapid gunfire. He enjoyed a good laugh. Was someone who was easily pleased and amused, and just as easily displeased and un-amused.
He was a fair man: He once summoned me to his office to see if I would stand by a negative review I had written of a concert given by his then wife, Carlyn Leacock. We sat, discussed. And when he was satisfied, the piece ran as it was.
He was an emotional man: He was sensitive to the feelings of others, maybe to his own detriment at times. I threw myself out of the Nation, not once but twice. He sat through my tears both times as I explained why I was leaving, or felt I had to leave. The first time was because I could feel the Nation was losing its way, was straying too far from the culture I believed defined its glory days of the 70s.
Nation culture, as I experienced and interpreted it, was about hard work and high standards: editors blasting you and your name across a crowded newsroom if you messed up, but also a sense of fun, adventure and learning; a place where you took the work seriously (yourself less so), and your hard work built toward something bigger than self. A place where your job and responsibility to readers went far beyond mere news-gathering and dissemination. They were about nation building.
The second time I left was because I felt the Nation had lost its way, completely, irrevocably.
The first time I left, Harold sent me off with leads for a job with The Weekly Gleaner UK in London. The second time was simply, and sadly, with his understanding.
…
What else do I recall? He was a man who was not afraid to admit he’d been wrong.
A few years after I’d thrown myself out of the Nation for the second and final time, after Robert Edison Sandiford and I had established ArtsEtc, we had an extraordinary encounter with Harold. It was at the gravesite of art critic, writer, dear friend and colleague Carolle Bourne. Harold and a few other Nation representatives were present at what was a simple burial service. He drew Robert and me aside, put an arm around us both so we were in this mini-huddle, and told us he now understood what we—Rob, Carolle, myself, and a few others—were trying to do all those years at the Nation with our arts and socio-cultural thrust. He apologized for not fully “getting it” at the time and how his tacit support for what we were doing didn’t always trickle down. He praised the two of us for our boldness and entrepreneurship. I think maybe we reminded him of his young-man days, those exciting, unpredictable, fledgling years of the Nation with Sir Fred Gollop, Carl Moore and other pioneers that Moore himself writes about so vividly. I’m not saying who cried under those trees in Westbury Cemetery that day and who didn’t, but there was definite need of tissues—and not just because we had lost Carolle, our immortal co-conspirator. I will always appreciate Harold for those words of honesty and acknowledgement.
He was a generous spirit. A boss who entertained ideas and was willing to give them wings or, at least, the space for test flight. He must have known that Rob and I were operating a forerunner of ArtsEtc out of the top left-hand corner of his newsroom for at least two years before we left. It formed part of what was then the SunShine Magazine, and it’s how I trained for what we do now, recognizing and examining those on the artistic and cultural cutting edge of our society. This month brought the fabulous news that Barbadian writer Cherie S. Jones’ novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House has been picked up by not one but three major publishers. I’d forgotten, but Rob reminded me that Cherie was first published in SunShine in the early 2000s under our stewardship.
Harold Hoyte was ballsy! Coming back from Toronto in the 70s with a big Afro and dreams of creating Barbados’ first black newspaper? Yeah, he was ballsy, and we as publishers learnt how to be, in part, from him. How else could you explain a Canadian-Bajan and a Bajan-Brit setting up on their lonesome, putting out a bi-monthly arts publication, and then an anthology on cricket—a sport about which we felt a great deal but knew very little? Ballsy-ness! And whatever the female equivalent of that is.
…
I often wonder, again in that Endgame-Button kind of way, what would have happened if I had stayed.
In my mind, always, were those early, early days that I came in at the end of. Those were sweet days. Sweet, I tell you! And I know that my fellow graduates from that 1982 journalism course would agree. Omowale Elson, Irene Sandiford-Garner, Hartley Henry, Charmaine McCarthy, William Bradshaw, Roger Hinds, Douglas Stuart, Peter Boyce, Carol Scantlebury, Ernesta Gibbs, and I—the “Educated 11,” we were labelled; not always kindly!—felt invested in the Nation of that era. We soaked up Harold’s vision and expectation of the kind of force for progressive social transformation a good newspaper ought to be. He, and other newsroom mentors of the time (some of them tormentors!), taught and demanded high standards while infusing us with raw energy and determination. We were heady with it all and ran with it for as long as we could.
I know I did.
What partly lured me away was another mentor—a literary one, Kamau Brathwaite, no less—a trickster-spider whispering in my other ear: You’re unhappy? Frustrated? Feeling unfulfilled? Pursue truth&beauty instead, Linda! Write, write! And so I did.
Interestingly, it turns out Kamau and Harold were not too far apart in their respective whisperings. In those first few years after leaving the Nation, but before I learnt how to calmly navigate the absence of a monthly paycheque, another ad in the newspaper caught my eye: Communications and PR in the cultural sector. If I got the job, it would signal a return to a steady income. Yes! I called Harold for a reference, which he gave immediately. But he told me: “Why, Linda? Don’t do it. Don’t go backwards. You’re on the right path, just keep doing what you’re doing.”
I thank him sincerely for that timely steering.
What else would I thank him for, given the chance?
His mentoring.
For dropping me in at the deep end to learn and experience the Caribbean—on the job, and to deadline. On both sides of the Atlantic.
For his ability to welcome prodigals back with open arms.
The 18-year-old kid who’s still inside me (especially as ArtsEtc navigates its own turbulent adventure) thanks him mostly, though, for the provision of space for the testing of wings.
