Margaret Carter-Hope
Mine is a tribute to Walter, the husband, the father, the friend, the comrade and compassionate freedom fighter for the downtrodden and underprivileged.
Walter was a friend, a mentor and a hero and I will always regret that fate and dastardly deeds robbed the Caribbean and the world of this great revolutionary and visionary.
I first met Walter in the 60s in London, fresh from his stint at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, and we became members of the CLR James Study Group, a band of young, passionate, and committed persons. The group comprised Walter, a Guyanese; Selma James, a working class Jewish American and CLR’s wife; Stanley French, a St. Lucian playwright and engineer; Norman Girvan, a Jamaican economist, who also graduated from the Mona Campus; and there were the two Jamaican committed lawyers, Richard Small and Adolf Edwards; and, of course, there was yours truly, a writer of sorts.
We respected and adored Walter, but we were also a little in awe of this fierce, bearded young man who dared to challenge CLR in debates on Marxism and the interpretation of the history of Africa and the Americas. These two titans also clashed over the role of Europe in the underdevelopment of Africa, a thesis that Walter later produced as a major work.
I described Walter as fierce, but that was only in debate, for in temperament he was the most gentle and gentile of men , a quality which he has passed on to his son Shaka, whose success as a businessman owes much to his gentle manner of dealing with the most difficult client.
I was there when Walter married the love his life, Pat, and heard him whisper in my ears, looking across at Pat, “isn’t she the most beautiful woman in the world”.
After our stay in Britain, I met him again in Jamaica where he was grounding with his brothers, and caused tongues to wag as he dared to personally sweep his veranda and clean his house, and set about working with several dispossessed people.
Years later in the 70s, after his sojourn in Africa and his jobless return to his homeland, I recall him performing the roles of mother and father while Pat was away pursuing studies in Jamaica. I vividly remember him plaiting his daughters Kanini and Asha’s hair, cooking pepper pot for days on end, managing his family and organizing the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), the political party of which he was a leading member.
When he traveled to Barbados to give a lecture at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies, accompanied sometimes by one of his children, we would sit on the popular Worthing Beach in Christ Church, and, while our children played in the sand, he would share with me his dreams for and thoughts of his beloved Guyana. His vision was a racially united Guyana, across political and ethnic lines, where all had the chance to fulfill their promise, without fear of intimidation or violence.
And, it was on one such occasion that he asked me to promise him that if anything untoward ever happened to him to bring Pat and the children to Barbados. It was as if he had a premonition that something was amiss. Unfortunately, it was a promise I kept for a ghastly act was perpetrated against him,
Of all the things that Walter was and could have been to Guyana, the Caribbean and the wider world the greatest tragedy is that he did not live to see the wonderful men and women that his children have grown into, and to love his three grand-children or see the powerful intellectual and matriarch that his beloved Pat has become, as she has worked tirelessly to keep the flame he lit alive.
Walter was a burning firmament and his passing left a political and intellectual vacuum in the Caribbean and the world which has not yet been filled, and probably never will be. But, I live in hope, cognizant of the legacy from the CLR James Study Group…. ‘never give up hope’ while working tirelessly with the promise of that legacy wherever it exists.
His memory will live on forever in the minds and hearts of all of us who were associated with him in one way or another; as well as those whose lives he would have touched and influenced.