Death of a revolutionary

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.

Integrity implies honesty, fairness and – often ignored – consistency, in which the various aspects of one’s character are integrated. Most of us possess one personality in front of our families and friends, yet another with subordinates and another with people in authority. Sometimes those different personalities express divergent values and morals.

But not Troppy. He was the same man in all settings and seasons. He neither genuflected to the big sawatee nor patronised the lil peewat.

That struck me in 2010 when I visited New York with my younger daughter Saskia and her cousin William – two 11-year-olds. We stayed at the suburban New Jersey home of Troppy and his wife Yvonne. Although I’d knocked around quite a bit before with the kids back home, the Big Apple taught me that, being blessed with daughters, I didn’t know how to talk to boy children who weren’t interested in books. Troppy, despite his bibliophilia, knew. He got William to join his morning walks, during which they’d have long conversations about God knows what.

That was my first inkling of his ability to engage anyone, whatever their level, simply by being curious and unassuming and without even a whiff of condescension. And he used his uncanny ability to encourage people of all ages to lift themselves to a higher stage, not only those he encountered as a teacher, but everyone who came within his orbit. One Californian he met at a Mighty Sparrow show started writing for the radical online magazine Troppy helped produce, Big Drum Nation, and flew in to attend his 70th-birthday celebration in January 2024.

I only appreciated that at that birthday bash. The large room in a Caribbean restaurant was filled with his schoolmates, friends and relatives, but also former colleagues, students and proteges (who weren’t necessarily in his classes); those latter were the ones who opened my eyes. One young man, who wasn’t even at his school, recalled how the students’ Society For Independent Thought changed his life. A woman who was in one of Troppy’s classes 40 years ago described how their Society For Social Analysis redirected her life goals from the traditional to one that more fulfilled her potential. That’s how a group of students and their teacher developed a method to counteract the psychic damage done by schooling.

Troppy remained open to students’ needs and ideas, harbouring not a negative opinion, despite on first encounter being appalled at their indiscipline and disrespect, which went way beyond what he had experienced during his own schooling in Trinidad.

Two teachers, one white, one black, said much the same thing: how Troppy inspired and encouraged – that is, gave courage to – his fellow workers in and out of the staffroom as he did his students. A white man said in a thick working-class accent and with a palpable sense of pride, “I used to be a janitor at Mr Holder’s school. He saw me writing, and…put one of my poems in his book Classroom Calypso: Giving Voice to the Voiceless. I’m in there, so I’m a writer.”

Troppy’s humility was not a Christian turn-the-other-cheek variety nor a humorous self-deprecation. Rather, it was a radical humility, arising from his deep belief in the wisdom of ordinary people and especially those looked down upon, such as the students of an inner-city school and even its unskilled employees.

For instance, all the remarkable innovations in his classrooms that had students (not just those in his classes) and staff members (not just teachers) surpassing their own dreams were culled from the students themselves.

When they were inactive in his classes he didn’t assume they were dull or uninterested; he assumed he had missed something. So he studied them in the wild – ie the lunchroom and the halls where, instead of controlling their exuberance, he let freedom reign: “I was able to witness and better understand and appreciate students’ rich humour, vibrant laughter, lively discussions, even the way they engaged in word play while employing verbal repartee to celebrate their prowess.”

His pedagogic innovations didn’t emerge from his intellectual insights or charismatic leadership, but from his radical faith in the students’ knowledge and understanding of their own motivation.

His generosity was legendary. There is a vast number of people in the US, but also in TT, who should go on bended knee to thank his wife Yvonne for tolerating Troppy’s profligacy in buying books for friends, family and students he thought would benefit from this or that tome.

For instance, he saw a young student rapping outside the school and asked him to be part of a project. The student wasn’t in Troppy’s class, and was not even interested in school. He informed Troppy, “You’re not going to persuade me, I’m a Taurus – immovable.

Troppy replied, “Is that so? Well, you know who was also a Taurus? Malcolm X.” And he gave the student Malcolm X’s autobiography, which changed his life.

That student spoke at Troppy’s funeral. “I feel more sad coming in here than I will be leaving,” he said. “I feel special, but now I know that my story isn’t so special.”

Troppy’s love was not a generalised agape. To him every person was special and unique, and you felt that he felt so.

And now that he has gone and you discover you were not the only special one, that doesn’t lessen his stature; rather, it elevates him to heroic proportions. He touched a great many people, and, as Nikki Giovanni in her poem When I Die sang: and if ever i touched a life i hope that life knows that i know that touching was and still is and will always be the true revolution.

Winthrop “Troppy” Holder died on February 19, 2025