Kim Johnson
Only after his death can a man’s full story be told, out of the love that lingers after.
Some people die before their bodies, sometimes long before. My friend and comrade Troppy lived right up to the very end. Up to the day before his departure he was asking the publisher of Everybody’s magazine, Herman Hall, about a manuscript Herman was to have written. As he had done for the previous half-century, Troppy was helping someone elevate himself.
His antidote to death was love. It was not rage but love that ensured he did not go gentle into that good night.
I have been fortunate or blessed to have met many remarkable men and women, giants in many fields: the sciences, cultural pursuits, social and political activism. But only a few amongst that broad group were possessed of nobility of spirit, a quality transcending talents, abilities, knowledge, intelligence or any other gifts.
The towering twentieth-century noble spirit is of course Nelson Mandela. Closer to home, those I knew personally included Barry Chevannes from Jamaica and Roy Neehall from Trinidad. A third is a woman whose name I’ve forgotten, an Orisha priestess at a palais in Sangre Grande in whose presence I immediately felt sanctified. They were all people animated more than anything else by love.
To that short list I must now add Winthrop R Holder, better known as Troppy.
Such men and women radiated something I can only describe as goodness. Their goodness first strikes you as a kind of naivete, because it is not rational. It presupposes people are better than they really are. They can only think so highly of me, you feel, because they don’t know me and the mean pettiness that lies coiled in my heart like a snake.
Goodness is based on faith, which is unreasoning. Such men and women, however, are able to summon into existence qualities in you that you didn’t know you possessed.
One former student at Troppy’s funeral said: “He saw in me something that I didn’t see.” That is how such an influence is perceived, but it’s misleading. Troppy saw what no one else did because it didn’t yet exist. It was only a potential, which is invisible. He looked at a seed and saw a mighty tree; he saw a future possibility, which his goodness conjured into reality.
The words “real” and “reality” refer to something that exists in the here and now. However, it is also related to the word “realise”: to bring something into existence. I realised that when my daughters were born, in 1993 and 1998, and out of thin air blossomed in me a love that could not exist before because I was not previously capable.
Troppy’s nobility of spirit was manifest in his integrity, humility and generosity. To engage him was to become a better person. You automatically became less inconsistent, less egotistical, less selfish.
[caption id="attachment_1143078" align="alignnone" width="1024"] William Ayin explains how his camera works to Winthrop Holder. - Photo courtesy Kim Johnson[/caption]
Integrity implies honesty, fairness and – often ignored – consistency, in
