At Home the Green Remains || If I Die

If I DieAuthor(s): MARSHALL MORRISSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1/2, <italic>At Home the Green Remains</italic>(March-June 2003), pp. 121-125Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654357 .

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121

If I Die...

by

MARSHALL MORRIS

The Figueroa's came to Puerto Rico at about the same time I did, which was in August of 1970. I remember John teaching in the Honors Program of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, where my department, the new Graduate Program in Translation, was temporarily housed, in the early 1970's. We were both on the fringes of the English Department, too - I was teaching Spanish-to-English translation and the occasional English course, and John, though officially at the Cayey Campus, also taught in Rio Piedras - and the English faculty of that time went out of its way to make the several newcomers feel welcome. I was very much taken with John's manner of speaking, and the fun in his eyes, and I remember that a lot of the time, back then, John was angry.

The Figueroa's did not have an easy time of it in Puerto Rico. John was hired by Jaime Benitez, the brilliant and insightful president of the University of Puerto Rico, to help develop an honors campus in Cayey. Don Jaime had been very successful in bringing superb writers and teachers to Puerto Rico from Spain and the United States, and his eye was just as good when he got to Jamaica, but by then circumstances had changed. As chancellor of Rio Piedras, he had always been a presence on the campus and a force to deal with; he had both the authority and the exceptional insight to choose people to head departments and colleges who had excelled as writers or teachers, people who knew what university life could be, and they enriched the life of the University of Puerto Rico. And that was the university John was intended to be a part of - where there was room for his exuberant personal style, where his knowledge of Caribbean, English and Classical lan- guages and literatures, and his broad interest in ideas, would be valued, where excellence in writing and teaching would be prized. But Don Jaime was no longer the chancellor of the Rio Piedras Campus, and the university as a system was too large to manage in the same way. Don Jaime himself perhaps did not see that his style - however effective it had been in preparing the way for the modern institution that the university is today - would not be allowed to continue: politicians without and adversaries within the university saw to it that Don Jaime was moved up and out, and his plans, including the plans for Cayey, were halted.

John had just arrived in Puerto Rico when this happened. He had given up his post as Professor of Education at Mona, uprooted himself and his family, to come to Puerto Rico, but he was not even to find a comfortable home within the UPR system, much less one where his rich talents would be allowed to flourish. Caribbean Literature was still thought of as Hispanic; little English Caribbean literature was taught; and an unintended result of Don Jaime's policy of bringing



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in outsiders from Europe and the United States was a certain degree of resentment

among the faculty. That, alone, would have been enough to make life hard -

Puerto Rico is a small island - even if the man himself had not turned out to be

larger than life: with his great white beard (children in Puerto Rico would run

along after John, shouting, "Santa Clo! Santa Clo!")9 his imposing form, the

darting, penetrating, humorous eyes, and certainly the irreverent tongue, but he was also from a different academic world and intellectual tradition, from a different experiential and literary universe, and he had what was, for the Puerto Rico of that moment, an unfamiliar, disconcerting way of talking and relating to peers. In the rather sober university of the time, John's fast-talking, quick-witted banter was taken by his new colleagues as overly familiar. With the exception of only a few of his colleagues - Gerald Guinness, Gene Mohr, Jim Collins, Marshall Morris, whose friendship lasted the rest of John's and Dorothy's lives - the reaction was cool, and left him isolated and perplexed.

The Figueroa's lived on a lovely rural property near Cidra, where he and

Dorothy made good friends away from the university set and the intellectual center of Puerto Rico. It was too far away, really, from some things that mattered: Esther's school was down in the Caguas valley, and the tennis coaching for which she longed, which she should have had at just that moment in her development, was unreachably far off, in San Juan.... And while they lived in Cidra, Tommy died in an automobile accident away in Jamaica, bringing a further great sadness into their lives. Lacking a home in the institution, and up against the formidable bureaucracies of the two campuses where he taught, and perhaps thinking of what he had given up for this life, John stayed angry. What he did not get was bitter.

Ralph Long once wrote him marveling that he had not also become bitter.

The Figueroa's made the best they could of the situation. There was a line of handsome tropical laurel trees from the road to the house where they lived. The house itself was open, with large windows and wide porches, and the green hills and flame trees, palms and flowers were very close and pleasant to the eye. In a

university where undergraduate students were still kept at arm's length, the

Figueroa's did what came naturally and invited them into their home. When I visited them, there were almost always students about, and parents, too. Parents were at first unsure about this new professor and unfamiliar style, so John told his students to "Bring them along!" and they did. With some of the parents, John and

Dorothy made lasting friendships, and this perhaps assuaged some of the hurt, but the initial distrust added to the perplexity John felt.

John turned more and more to friends in the religious community and to

lecturing abroad, moving about in the larger world of Caribbean letters, which was more comfortable to him and more receptive, and when the opportunity came, he left the University of Puerto Rico for a job teaching in a post-graduate center under the auspices of the Episcopal Seminary in Carolina. In Carolina just as in Cidra, Dorothy quietly walked the neighborhood, and met the people, and left them



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charmed. And she went forward with the Spanish instruction books she loved

researching and writing.

I was still a young man, at the time, trying to make my way and do a decent job in the university. It is fair to say that the Figueroa's saw me through the

growing pains of the program in which I was teaching, and through my studies in

England, and through the building of a house on a piece of land not far from them, including the burning down of that house, and through the years of destructive

political struggle that affected everyone in the university, and through my years as director of the Honors Program at Rio Piedras.... In looking back over the letters which have survived, I find the Figueroa's just as I remember them: the most constant of friends. So there are letters and cards from the most distant points on John's travels, letters from their time in Nigeria, notes sent as they tried to settle into a financially difficult retirement in England... and in each of these, there is kind attention to whatever was taking place in my life at the moment.

Dorothy was the rock, deeply certain in her faith. "Read St. Augustine," she said to me. "He was once a young man, too." She did not say what, exactly, I would learn that she saw would help me in the struggles of my youth, but she was

perfectly certain that I would discover what I needed there and be helped. Utterly patient, she said no more. She was always glad when I visited, at the airy country house in Cidra, or at the cool, tree-green place on the grounds of the seminary in Carolina, or later, when I could no longer claim to be a young man, at the miniature English house, in Woburn Sands, a house filled to overflowing with the accumulated books and papers of their two, full lives. Wherever it was, the sweetest of doves, she would coo her welcome, offer her cheek to be kissed, and

pass me on to John - who was in his study, working, always. And in no time at

all, but without ever seeming to hurry, she would produce a cup of black coffee -

"Lovely," John would say, holding on to the "1" with the "o" rising, looking at me as if to ask whether I really grasped how lovely it was: I did - and serve it with toast and whatever jam she had just made.... I remember best the one of small, wild

guavas she had collected from the field in Cidra. Dorothy was all those graces, tastes, and pleasures, sweet and intense, but each somehow sweeter and more intense because of her quiet, and unworded, perfect certainty.

John, in his study, would be looking for some papers.... How would he ever find them, I wondered, among so many files, and books, and scattered notes and papers.... "Marshall!" he would say, his voice large, deep, and welcoming, "Come in, come in.... I'm just trying to write something for a talk in..." - and he would name some place in the Caribbean, or the States, or Europe - "but I cannot seem to lay my hand on the papers I need.... They are here, somewhere.... See if

you can lay your hand on them," he would say, drawing me into the hunt. "Figs!" he would call to Dorothy, "have you seen the folder I need?" His eyes busy, his hands busy, his mind very busy indeed, he would turn to me, to talk - in that

supple, resonant, often ironical voice of his, gesturing with his large, expressive



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hands - about friends, the university, his teaching, something he was writing, something he was reading, perhaps a poem he thought had possibilities, never anything too personal or anything that might embarrass.... There was more of "What do you think of this?" (John asking, as he handed me a roughly typed sheet of paper on which some new idea was taking form) than there was of "Are you quite sure you want to do that?" (though he asked that, too). Soon, Dorothy would come into the study and quietly apply her deft hand to finding the missing file, and she would find it, and place it before John, so that, when he came round to it again, his important work could go on....

This ritual of greeting and incorporation into the doings of the Figueroa's seems to me to have happened, with variations, over and over, all the time I knew them, which was from the time they moved to Puerto Rico until their passing, almost 30 years later. I am sure it is the way they received others, too, welcoming them into their home and work and hearts. It became so familiar and so happy a

part of my life, that it is hard to think it cannot take place again. It seems to me that there were always fresh fruit, vegetables, and flowers in Dorothy's kitchen, particularly in England, where she loved having her very own garden, and, in John's

study or over tea, there was always that restless, eager, word-rich intelligence, and the amusement at the things people think and do, and the delight in the play of voice and gesture.

The hurried letters from John and the longer, more peaceful ones from

Dorothy, those that have survived in my care, record a life scattered over so much of the world. The car in England, the books in Puerto Rico, the children and brothers and sisters in Canada, England, Jamaica, Washington, Hawaii, and refer- ences to friends, many friends in many places, and requests that this check be

deposited, the books shipped, or the enclosed letter delivered to a friend... and there were reminders that if I was in such-and-such a place, I should call a friend there, "Do look up Faloon," and here are greetings from Taffy in Oxford, and Gerald in London, who called to bring them up to date... John would be teaching in Jos, advising in Manchester, lecturing in Washington, broadcasting in Bar- bados... if you need to reach me, Joe or Ed or Jennifer or Frank will know where I am.... there were the quick, comforting visits with family, but also ominous news of Dorothy's health and then John's health... "We all grow older..." and also

reports of hard times and requests for lectures: from England, "Petrol is up to $3.40 a gallon!" "I do wish I cd. find a way of putting my experience & knowledge to work".... Just a short note, John would say, not a proper letter: Pressure, pressure! There is hardly time to write. I must get back to work... After retirement, "I will have to scuffle for a living"... in England, there is no academic work, editing, broadcasting, to be had... Pax. Pax Christi! Shalom.... P.S. Say hello to

Rom, to Rey and Chuck, to Sunchi, to Piri, to Elena, to Mike, to Jim, to Bill, to

Evelina, to Casares, always to Gene and Gerald and Jim... All woven together, made a part of the life that John and Dorothy were composing until they came to the little house in England, with the possibility of roses and a little garden, not so



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very long a walk to the little Church of St. Mary, Woburn, a cosy house, filled with familiar things, in a comfortable place, where, it is true, John still dreamed of another lecture, another place, another group of listeners.

In "Poetry and the Teaching of Poetry. In Memoriam Francis Drumm, Teacher, Friend, Colleague," John accepted Drumm's invitation to try to teach young people to read a poem. He did so through patient questioning and a gentle leading into understanding by reading aloud then questioning, reading aloud again then questioning further, working through whatever was strange in sense or sound, then reading aloud again, always returning to the reading - until the young people had the pleasures of sense, language and craft inside them, and the music of the poem outside them, in the form of their voices. No reduction to abstract sense, here, but the weaving together of human meaning.

John broke off from his demonstration with the recollection of a kindness that Drumm did him when he was a student, plagued by a bad cold, rather isolated and without money to meet his needs. Good teaching, John says without saying the words - that is, without reduction - is given form by human kindness, even if the job of work to be done with the student is tough, even if the student must grasp difficult things....

John and Dorothy dispensed much kindness over the years that I knew them. A word here, a suggestion there, a note that arrived when one was needed but not expected, a connection with someone or some text or some experience that they knew would be right soon, a remembering of something they had no cause to remember, an understanding of something one might have thought no one could understand, a lovely cup of coffee, ajam made from fruit they had picked, students on the balcony, their parents beaming, "Here, tell me what you think of this,".... If John did not find the comfort of a place, in Puerto Rico, where his remarkable gifts could flourish and inform - and should have done if there were such a thing as justice in this life - he and Dorothy made a home of their language and their faith, then, wherever they were, they opened the doors, most particularly to young people. Despite jagged human paths and the losses that break human hearts, despite the price of petrol and the telephones not working, John's and Dorothy's pattern, worded and unworded, is luminous. But it has its ironies. John's translation of Lorca' s "Despedida," which he called "Goodbye (after Lorca)," ends with

If I die Leave the shutters open. You can sense here John's own love of life, and Dorothy, understanding

that it was important, though satisfied herself, would quietly have done as he asked.



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At Home the Green Remains || If I Die