Who really knew the mind of John Compton?
By Irving Reid

We will never know what regrets lay in John Compton’s mind when he passed on. We know he’d once confided in a self-proclaimed nemesis, his wish for the ultimate glory of dying in office and iron-willed hardhat that he was, he executed his wish for a state funeral down to the final mystery: was his body inside the gleaming mahogany casket draped in the national colours caressed and kissed by flambeau faithful, scene-seekers, and the lady who wore the wide-brimmed black hat and gray gloves?
We know too he’d desired the life of a normal husband and father. We read that he‘d reflected on marrying late in life and he sometimes felt guilty of neglecting his wife for the long and winding road of politics. He’d wanted so much to enjoy his children while they were still children…
Four years ago in September, a daughter was privy to the secret grief of another dying father. “Yasmin,” the sixty-nine year old man whispered, “I made a mistake. I thought politics was all but it isn’t about politics. It’s about redeeming your country from the inside out. It is about creating communities where people love one another, where political differences don’t divide us in a way that we cannot say, you are my brother and I am responsible for you!” As his eyes dimmed in those final moments, he couldn’t see the hope for a spiritual redemption in Saint Lucia. George Odlum died with tears in his eyes, speechless as he too moved on; a man more sinned against than sinning.
For yet another September, Saint Lucians awoke to the news of the death of another man they simultaneously loved and hated. For yet another slow, but inevitable passing, there was an opportunity for profound reflection. George Odlum had remained to us younger travelers, forever young, a Caribbean progressive who fell in the field of battle. John Compton was captured in death by an astonishing flash of imagery. Delivering the eulogy, Central Bank Governor Dwight Venner likened Compton unto Santiago, the old fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s short story: The Old Man and the Sea. The story, simple yet powerful, is of a Cuban fisherman’s fight with a monster fish, and retold a thousand times, with universal appeal, as the struggle between man and the elements; the hunter and the hunted. Sir K. Dwight saw in Sir John’s final, marathon budget presentation, the fisherman’s colossal fight; and the vision contained in the Budget, as Tiburon’s, the great white shark. To the local painter laureate fanning away the oppressive Minor Basilica heat, and recalling Anthony Quinn’s mesmerizing performance as the old Santiago, there may have been a less Gregorian image to behold.
The Legend
During the election campaign of 2006 some of us couldn’t help thinking, perhaps somewhat harshly, of another figure in historical lore. Sir John Compton became El Cid. Remember El Cid, the eleventh century Spanish warrior? Legend has it that after El Cid died, Jimena his wife, believing that his troops would be defeated from demoralization, strapped his body to his horse and sent it back into battle. The troops, thinking that their leader was riding to fight beside them, rallied once more. The opposing army was so afraid of what looked to be an invincible fighter, retreated. Thus, El Cid is said to have won his final battle even after his death.
Now 120 days since we dabbed away two weeks of gazetted tears, we might well see history recording Compton’s final election victory as an unwitting obituary; darkly prophesized in the December 13, 2006 editorial of the Jamaica Gleaner.
One day, someone will truthfully answer two hardly irrelevant questions: Given the terminal nature of what eventually felled him, did John Compton communicate to anyone the certainty of his imminent demise before, during, or after the campaign? And if he didn’t , was his return to election politics at 81, his final act of vengeance on a country whose love-hate syndrome had driven him to deep despair and the out-of-the-blue retirement in 1996?
There is a local trinity who holds the clues to the truth.
SECRET TRUTHS
Listening to whatever was unwritten between the lines of Lady Janice’s politically nuanced tribute; we can easily tick her off as the first.
The second is the journalist with whom he played an extemporaneous and ambiguous game of blind man’s bluff – the one he first seduced, the one to whom he made the crack-of-dawn phone calls, against whom he hatched the deportation plot, the one to whom he delivered the unsigned letters and let slip the Cabinet leaks.
Then third is the one who attended the domestic details: the numerous hire purchase payments here, there and everywhere; the disposal of garbage; the upkeep of the William Peter Boulevard building including the choice of paint; that early morning clearing-out of the WPB law chambers after the first, unpublicized stroke; and even before then, there was the daily task of reminding Sir John where he’d parked his vehicle, when, following the great victory of ’97, snarling partisan pit-bulls ungraciously refused to accord the former Prime Minister the civilized courtesy of a reserved parking slot in the city.
Who knows the count of impenetrable secrets Compton kept stored in the dark corners of his mind? The reasons for his savaging of Labour leader, George F.L. Charles from 1957 to 1960? The truth about the ‘typhoid’ death of the populist Maurice Mason in 1966? The consequent loss (some say through marriage) of his socialist/radical conscience? The overnight deal that went down so that Henry Giraudy would emerge victorious on that post-election morning in 1974? The utter degradation of being pelted with human excreta in 1979? The Babonneau boundary skullduggery that enabled Stephenson King to withstand Michael Pilgrim’s challenge in the second General Elections of 1987?

The orders to shoot protesting valley farmers in 1993? His reason for reversing his mind about George Odlum as party leader and Prime Minister, and replacing Odlum with Vaughan Lewis in 1996? Maybe he owed Lewis one for stepping in front and taking the bullet on that messy Grenada invasion job in 1983? Maybe his instincts cautioned him that Odlum would never have allowed him to become the backseat driver he ultimately proved to be in Dr. Lewis’ Cabinet? Maybe it was all about his acquired belief in bourgeoisie pedigree? (For what other reason would he have promised Guy Mayers the gordian knot of leadership of the Party, eh?) Who really knew the inner workings of the man’s mind?
THE TWO GEORGES
The few who felt they knew the old, dictatorish ‘cold war’ warrior, could sense how lonely, lost and out of time Sir John Compton must have felt in his last Cabinet, as he looked around him - with spiderlings harassing him ceaselessly about the inappropriateness of the Dove-designed seating order in Parliament – shaking his head at the sight of the ‘challenge side’ who’d bummed an election ride in his battered, green pick-up with the flambeau sign.
Fifty years exactly to the day in 1957 when he first turned on his leader George Charles, life dealt John Compton its final, devastating act of retribution. Rufus Bousquet - a wholly more urbane and telegenic version in 2007, and son of the man who’d helped stab George Charles in the gut - outgunned him in the Super 8 graveyard, during that deadly brawl over two women named China and Taiwan. In a way, Sir George was lucky; he was young enough then to have escaped with his life.
Saint Lucia is very much a Caribbean nation - at once a blessed and an unkind place. In his time, another fallen warrior, George Odlum, had become a most vocal and committed advocate of the political empowerment of ordinary folk. He died a disappointed man, taking with him the reflections on how tribal politics had consumed the nation, and the fresh memories of the humiliation of being rejected by the very people who’d clamoured for his words over all the years of hard labour spent more in the banana valleys of despair than on the pitons of success.
Contemplating the crown of praises placed on John Compton’s head evokes a contrasting memory of the thorns placed on George Odlum’s at his death: “…Few regions of the world have produced so many high quality minds as the Caribbean has done in its short history. Yet no other region in the world has sacrificed more of its finest talents at the altar of tribal politics than the Caribbean. This is perhaps one of the major reasons for the persistent underdevelopment of the region. It is as if we are afraid of our own liberation, and so must slaughter the prophets of liberation at every twist and turn, only to reclaim them at the point of death and then throw them to the wolves again after the funeral. But worst of all we justify our actions in the most perverse way. The big question is why - are we fatally flawed?”
DEMONIZING QUALITY
Caribbean commentators have always lamented our inherited condition of despair and powerlessness. One of the worst manifestations of this powerlessness is this habit we fall into of demonizing our quality people – those who ask the tough questions and those who challenge us to live out our true potential. Odlum called it “philistism” - a stinging indictment, wrote his lifelong friend Tim Hector, from a man whose entire life was given to the struggle for the liberation of the underprivileged. But it is an indictment that reeks of truth and should be heeded by commoners and leaders alike.
George Odlum stood up to and challenged the post-colonial order that had emerged in the wake of independence. He and his comrades posed the fundamental question: Just what kind of society should Saint Lucia fashion out of constitutional independence? The question disturbed and frightened John Compton and the conservative following he’d fashioned out of the chamber of store-front mercantilist employers and a flambeau frontline eternally grateful to Compton and his personal buddies, the new offshore plantocracy and patrons of the basics: Geest (bananas), Matalon (real estate), and Hess (schools). He served the country a homemade recipe which went like this: Saint Lucia needed to conduct its affairs as not to introduce into this region of peace and tranquility the conflicts of the Cold War ideology with all its grievous consequences. While recognizing that the island was part of the developing world whose problems may be similar, and whose experiences could assist in providing appropriate solutions, the island’s human resources were too slender, and the material needs too great, to permit Saint Lucians to expend scarce reserves in the barren wasteland of posturing and polemics.
AND IN THE END?
In the end, Odlum saw his painstaking, progressive opposition to such a conservative mindset as an exercise that amounted to nothing – political parties ultimately represented the same class and therefore any hostility between them was fictional rather than real. The real hostility was between neo-conservative capitalist impositions and working-class labour. In the last quarter of his life he wrestled with a development philosophy that was a mixture of economic theory and practical politics: the shortage of capital, due to the division of labour in the world, created a dependency on external capital, and it was imperative that the working classes achieved some degree of control over the economy. A prerequisite of this was a national consensus among political parties, which had substituted class war for hostility to each other.
The telling irony is that every political party in Saint Lucia has been led by the same socio-economic class. In those circumstances as Odlum saw it, vital social forces have been divided against themselves, leading to domestic policy domination by foreign investment interests and neoconservative corporate control. See where it has led us, he lamented just before he closed his eyes, a final time: Our national development record has been more verbiage than reality.