WE WERE WALKING around the compound of Fort George, impossibly located on the top of a hill overlooking the harbour of St George’s, Grenada.
Even that sounds a little underwhelming, until you realise how high above sea level this little fort is. I don’t know the number of feet – but it is really up there.
After we paused at the unremarkable limestone wall in the parking lot, where occurred one of the most unspeakable slaughters in the history of political crime – the execution of the prime minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) Maurice Bishop, and seven others, including Minister of Education Jacqueline Creft, who was pregnant with Bishop’s child, on October 19, 1983 – Leslie Pierre and I walked over the embankment to what looked like it could have been stables or a storeroom when the British Army ran the fort.
It was there, he told me, that he had been locked up for a time during his three-year-long imprisonment under the Bishop regime. He later served out most of his time at the Richmond Hill prison.
By the time I first met Pierre, through our mutual friend Ainsley Sahai, which was, I guess, in the late 1980s, he had already become an epic figure, not only in Grenada, but around the region, and probably the world, among people who knew what he had done, and had suffered as a result.
He wore it well, this fame, this respect he had earned. He was a figure of wit and fun, more of joy, perhaps at having survived and being given the chance to do what he was born to do – be a newspaper publisher and reporter and photographer, not to mention column writer whose pen wielded the very real power to make politicians wonder why they had been put on this earth at the same time as he was.
Always busy, Pierre’s jovial nature and love of conversation never shied away from the issues of the day, and what his opinions, of course, were about them. But, as for his experiences under the PRG, he never became dark or brooding, and he never showed any craving for revenge against those who had so sorely mistreated him.
You have to remember that Pierre was freed when the invading United States forces liberated Grenada and with it, Richmond Hill, shortly after the assassination of those eight people at the parking lot wall of Fort Rupert.
But there were things Pierre said he would never tell anyone about those dark days, this statement always coming up in a pleasant but final way when you tried to take him through some of his experiences as a prisoner of the PRG.
For those of you who do not know what crime Pierre committed, it was that of publishing a newspaper. This newspaper was a stencilled affair, as many church or association newsletters were in the days before photocopiers became cheap enough to replace the crude stencil system.
Pierre told me he and a group of friends had decided to start the newspaper to test the PRG’s commitment to actual freedom, and as the column in the first edition by its shareholder –lawyer Lloyd Noel attests, they did it all correctly to the letter of the law.
But not, apparently, in accordance with the real spirit of the times. Bishop was not having anybody offer independent news and views under his watch. So Pierre, as the editor, and, I believe, some of the other shareholders, were sent up the hill, as it used to be quaintly said of people shipped off to jail by Bishop.
The very man they sent up the hill for daring to try to publish a little newsletter under their own rules was the man who used the said publication, The Grenadian Voice, to constantly press for better treatment for all of the “Grenada 17” while they, in turn, were in prison, and later to call for their actual release, I believe, on humanitarian grounds.
What do you make of a man whose inner light so illuminated him that you could probably see his soul from space?
Leslie made it easier on us. He never played the hero card. He just lived every day to get his paper out even when perhaps he should have given it up to others. When he died a few days before Christmas at 86, he was still doing the same work he had started over thirty years ago.
How could anybody carry for so long his workload – from putting pen to paper to doing computer layout, proofreading, supervising the printing (for years actually taking the pages with him to Barbados or Trinidad to be printed), then to bring them back and help in their distribution up and down the Spice Isle? Always having just written his killer column Personally Speaking?
The man never slept. There was a boundless energy in him way past the biblical threescore and ten, but I do believe he should have retired.
I asked him once: “When are you going to write your book on the Grenada Revolution, Leslie?” He told me he would never do it, because there were things that happened that he could never write about.
Others who are able to put Pierre in the correct historical context are already doing so. There were excellent tributes from Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell and the Media Workers Association of Grenada.
For me, I enjoyed his friendship and, over time, learned to some extent about a person whose fairly routine life and career as a Grenadian businessman was suddenly shattered when he had the gall to test the PRG’s true commitment to freedom.
But his story had a happy ending. The Grenadian Voice won, and the PRG lost.
As for Pierre (which he always pronounced “pare”), he never sought his pound of flesh from those who had harmed him – which I believe added years to his life – but instead strove to use all his talent, wit and charm (which could be considerable) to help make Grenada a place where freedom of expression flourishes, and to help light its way to becoming the modern democratic nation of which he is a true hero and – if it is not too much to claim – a founding father.
