Ridley Greene: writer, editor, mentor, friend, and one of the featured acts at ArtsEtc’s launch at Waterfront Café way back in 2004. Photo Copyright © 2023 by Kingsley Roberts.
SINCE THE OFFICIAL END of the coronavirus pandemic in May, I’ve been trying to reconnect with old friends and family. Childhood friends, former professors, even those who could be described as ex-in-laws. Ridley Greene, my senior editor at the Nation newspaper, was on that list. Looking over my calendar recently, there was a note on September 8, starred: Find Ridley Greene.
I hadn’t heard from Ridley in a while, not regularly since he retired from the Nation in 2010, though I always felt we had been keeping tabs on each other from afar. Then the Madam picked up the Sunday Sun of September 10 and told me, “Ridley’s gone.”
He passed away on Friday night, September 8, aged 77, after what the Nation report described as “a lengthy illness.” He is survived by three children, sons Ripley and Ridley, Jr, and daughter Penney.
So many have gone, or are going, from my extended community. Among them, some of the same childhood friends, former professors and ex-in-laws. Ridley’s passing is another reminder: anything we wish to do, or dream we can, do it now.
Terrible tutelage
Ridley and I met when I went to work for the Nation full-time as Associate Literary Editor in 1997. I can’t say I knew Ridley well outside of our professional and personal office interactions the years I was there (I was made redundant in 2001), but I liked his spirit well enough and admired his abilities deeply.
My ArtsEtc partner, Linda M. Deane, ex-Nation like me (it’s where we also met), recalls Ridley giving her “a real hard time as a rookie reporter” when she started in 1982. “Was only years on I was able to appreciate why & thank him for it. He helped shape me as a journalist. But I used to call him my tormentor!”
His terrible tutelage didn’t stop at the news desk. In 2003, Ridley invited Linda to perform for Crop Over in his Celebrity Tent. She accepted. And has never regretted it. Ridley had already been recognized by the Barbados Landship in 2000 for his contribution to folk music in the island. His tent featured folk talent as well as seasoned calypsonians. Ridley sang as The Masque.
Laugh it off
I felt I understood what Ridley stood for as a newspaperman. More than that, as a creative person working with words and images who loved them so, their power and boldness, their ability to convince or charm. To make you laugh your ass off or cry yourself a river. If used right, and for right, he might amend.
Robin Jarvis, another senior Nation editor, once came through the newsroom. Barrelled was more like it, as Robin had that sort of bullet-shaped physique and piercing way of expressing himself, too. Cultured yet cutting, depending on what was called for in the moment. Robin always struck me as forceful, no time for foolishness—especially not on the page. Pop Walker was the other Wise Man among the duty editors during my time. To take his twinkly eyes for a light touch would have been an incorrigible mistake….
But either of these three men could be fierce, wielding little more than a pen, a word, and a look.
Robin was surveying one of the proofs Ridley had edited for the evening. It was possibly a page Robin had already gone over. I believe I told him that was the case.
“Ridley made some more changes. All it needs is your initials, Robin.”
He peered up and down from the page to me, standing ready (I was such an innocent) to hand it back to Ridley forthwith. Clearly hesitating to make any further amendments, or reversals, Robin said, without looking up, “But what…is a Ridley Greene?”
Simply the best
I still can’t figure out if it was because it was getting late and we were tired, or because we were expecting a jab and it was one to which we had no answer. Or none of us dared to offer one. Robin shot up from his chair and spread his hands out so, as if to say, That’s all I want to know? That is all I am asking?
We all burst out laughing. The too few of us in that newsroom way down Fontabelle, trying to put the paper to bed so we could go home to our own. Ridley was laughing loudest as Robin swivelled to barrel in his direction. “Can you, Mr Greene, tell me?”
Ridley was, quite simply to me, then and now, one of the best editors I’ve ever had take a blue pencil to my copy. He understood what I was trying to do in my writing, and am still trying to do, and took my gambit seriously. Whether the work was fiction or non-fiction, prose or comics. That bit of extra attention to the details of what I offered as my best efforts caused me to up my game in the process. To please him. To learn from him. To show him I could do it, we all could do it, with the proper attitude and guidance, which was to create better, more truthfully and beautifully, than we first thought.
Ridley cared about how language was used and how our various griots—singers, poets, journalists, visual artists—presented the stories we would tell Barbadians. And if we got it right for ourselves, at the highest standard, as he knew we could, then we would never have to second-guess what we are, or who.
Robert Edison Sandiford is the cofounding editor with the poet Linda M. Deane of ArtsEtc Inc. He is the author of several award-winning books and well-received graphic novels. Read more by Robert at dcbooks.ca, nbmpub.com and writersunion.ca/member/robertedison-sandiford.
Last Modified: October 4, 2024
