Hired, black dress and all

It wasn’t possible to be a journalist under such a great newspaper editor as former Trinidad Express and Trinidad Guardian Editor-in-Chief Owen Baptiste and not have indelible — not to mention nostalgic — memories.

My memories date back to 1984 when I walked into the Express, then located in that old cocoa house on Independence Square, hoping for an interview with Mr Baptiste.

I shared some of those memories at the Nalis library last Monday during the launch of Mr Baptiste’s new book, a collection of columns called No Sacred Cows: The Essential Benedict Wight and Other Writings Part III.

I remember the day I was hired like yesterday. Feeling confident in my long-sleeved black dress, I settled for my interview. Mr Baptiste watched me and said, “Are you on your way to a funeral?” But he hired me. I soon learned about Mr Baptiste’s high standards.

Every morning, he’d come down the stairs; we’d take a deep breath and wait to be summoned in the office one by one. Usually that meant being raked over the coals for our mistakes: grammatical errors, poor reporting... He circled those errors with a thick, red marker. We got praise too. I lived for that praise. Every day I woke up and thought about how I could write a feature with a fresh new angle to please Mr Baptiste. I loved feature writing.

“One day,” I told the audience at Nalis, “Mr Baptiste sent me to interview some squatters on Caroni Ltd (1975) land. When I tried to interview them, they cussed me up one side and down the other.

“I came back to the office wondering what to do. I couldn’t say I didn’t get a story so I sat down and wrote a story that had few words and all the cuss words, which consisted of one letter and a set of blanks. (The story looked like Morse code).

“When I got summoned to Mr Baptiste’s office, I thought this is the day that I die. Much to my surprise, Mr Baptiste said it was one of the best stories he had ever seen.

He always loved when his staff took bold chances in their writing.

On that day, I learned that a story isn’t always about what you say. Sometimes it is about what you don’t say.” Under Mr Baptiste’s guidance, I learned to be a journalist. “A story is never about events,” he said.

“It’s about people.” One time I wrote a controversial news story and the person in the story, a public servant, seemed to have panicked when he saw his quotations in print. He called Mr Baptiste to say I had misquoted him, and Mr Baptiste said, “No, she didn’t. She asked you the same question in five different ways.” I learned that skill from Mr Baptiste.

I also learned that day that he didn’t throw his reporters under the bus when they were right.

There are so many stories to tell about working for Mr Baptiste. I learned over the years that he not only took chances with stories; he took chances with people – like me, an anthropologist, who wandered in his office one day dressed in a black dress.

We are fortunate to have three volumes now of the columns Mr Baptiste wrote under the pen name of Benedict Wight. They are columns that chronicle every aspect of life in Trinidad and Tob a g o .

T h e s e a r e b o o k s e v e r y - o n e should r e a d .

But that is a subject of another column.