TO her, he was ‘prof’. To him, she was ‘Miss Morg’.

To many, he was Professor Rex Nettleford — scholar, dancer, choreographer. To her, “he was everything in one”.

“I’m still in mourning. I was assigned to him in 1984 as clerk/typist and he was just professor at the time. Then he was deputy vice chancellor and I moved up to being his secretary; when he became vice chancellor I became his personal assistant and I held that post to present. As he moved, I moved,” Eula Morgan, the woman who saw the man many revered from a distance, in all his modes for nearly three decades, tells the Sunday Observer.

The office he occupied above the radio station at the University of the West Indies, Mona, sat bathed in the warm glow of the Thursday evening sun. Everything was like he had left it. There were books on the floor in neat stacks, books on shelves, books on his desk, books everywhere. Paintings, sculptures, portraits.

His space told his story, eloquently in his silence. His beloved desk chair sat worn, empty now. His electric typewriter — an IBM 6742 with which he would not part and from which he typed “everything” — now silent. His empty sweet jar once stacked with the sweet treats he loved won’t ever be rattled by that hand again.

His stash of Christmas gift bags that he filled each Christmas for just about everyone he knows lies abandoned.

On his desk, not an empty space; files, pens, paper clips. There was work waiting to be done. But Nettleford has left the building. February 2, a day shy of his 77th birthday to be exact.

“Prof just gone like that,” Morgan says, abandoning her brave front momentarily. Voice cracking and eyes glistening with tears she says heavily, “He was a wonderful individual. He was like my father, my friend, everything in one. He taught me a lot. He will tell you ‘I taught Miss Morg to do things my way’. He was a very special human being.”

In her office, which adjoined his, almost every file said NDTC — the National Dance Theatre Company which he founded. Almost every portrait was of dancers in motion. Those, too, told a story.

“He wore many hats,” she says forlornly.

Hand to her forehead, she lets the adjectives roll.

“The man is so: wide-ranging, hard-working, dedicated, precise, detailed, thorough, a gentleman, very classy, but not fussy,” she ends in answer to a query about his worn-out desk chair.

He was a “hard taskmaster” who beat his staff to the office consistently over the decades.

“Early bird, always on time. He gets into office between 5:30 and 6:00 am. He hates latecomers. When I get to work in the mornings my work would be piled in the centre of my desk and on it is “Miss Morg, very urgent”, she recounts, smiling now.

“I have never seen one thing that isn’t urgent for prof. Everything to him is ‘very urgent’,” she adds.

She still speaks of him in the present tense.

“He’s still here. Every morning I come in I’m looking to say morning prof. Darling, this is my boss. He always says, ‘Miss Morg runs my life’,” she chuckles.

She has a legacy of memories of one of the finest minds ever to grace the annals of the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus that few ever shared.

“Mi an prof, wi have a marriage. What a man. I don’t see his second. You have to be clicking when working with him.

“I have learnt so much. It’s like working with a president or a king. The man is an icon.

“A great sense of humour. We would laugh, share jokes, crack up. But when it is work time it is work; I never said no to him,” she says.

He was as human as they came, though. He stayed on no pedestal.

“Prof made me angry, prof made me cry, prof made me happy, all of this on the job. All the emotions prof evoked. It was well worth it,” she tells the Sunday Observer.

She is the guardian of his space now.

“You see he is not here? The office is being protected and secured by Miss Morg. I miss him so much. I miss everything about him. There’s no one thing that I miss. Even when he explodes. Everything about him I miss,” she says with a faraway look.

The itinerary she typed for him before he left for the overseas trip now seems to mock the reality.

“It had strictly overseas commitments. The gala he was to attend in New York was just one thing and when he came back he was to go to Cayman. It’s a lot of things he had to do, that man never has one thing doing, he always has a whole host of things doing one time,” she says, regret lacing her voice indicating a wish to finish the interview.

But another memory is pulling at her senses and she reveals it.

“We called him Santa secretly. At Christmas he remembered everyone. Everybody got a gift. From the ladies at the VIP lounge at the airport to the office attendant. Everybody close to him got a little bag,” she smiles.

He had other loves than academics, she confides further.

“He loves sweeties, he has a sweet tooth. He loves his Jamaican foods, he loves fritters — stamp and go, he called them. Prof is a man if he goes away even for a week or a few days as he gets out of the airport he says ‘oh it’s so good to be home, there’s no place like home’. He loved Jamaica. He would never live anywhere else,” she tells the Sunday Observer.

That he died on foreign soil and that he left the world he helped shape in an unconscious state is almost a betrayal.

“I never dreamed he would go that way. Even though he always said he preferred to work till he dropped dead. I used to say, ‘Prof, why do you keep saying that?’

“I never expected it. I thought prof would live to even 90 something, his mom lived till she was over a hundred,” she says wiping the tears which refuse to be held at bay any longer now.

“Prof just gone like that,” she repeats, her mind still fresh with the memory of a 3:15 am rush to his office the January 28 morning she learned of his hospitalisation after a brutal heart attack the night before.

“I came right to the office here and I woke up people in the US, Canada, all over. To show you how much I loved that man. I can’t think. My brain is fuzzy. I’ve been living on Panadol. I can’t believe Prof just gone so,” she says quietly, the memories too much now.

Secretary and treasurer of the NDTC, Briget Spaulding, chimes in to relieve Morgan. “Great man, a genius. I keep repeating myself in all the interviews I have done since,” she says smiling.

But Miss Morg had one last memory, and Spaulding urges her to tell.

“At the end of every NDTC season I had to type approximately 50 letters for all the individuals and they were all unique. Prof would tell me what to say to each person. No two letters were the same, it was amazing,” she says. The interview had ended.

But elsewhere across the campus on which he worked since the 1960s and had studied prior, there were other memories of the essence seen day to day waiting to unfold.

“It’s a great loss, but knowing the type of man he was, he wouldn’t have wanted to be around and not be able to do anything (on life support). He was on university business right to the end and that’s how he would have wanted it,” Kathleen Gayle, secretary at the Marketing and Communications Office at the University, tells the Sunday Observer.

At the Rex Nettleford Hall named in his honour, pictures, a condolence book, flowers and a huge scented candle pay silent tribute. Even if all who signed had never met him in person, they had felt his influence.

‘RIP. I always wanted to meet you but unfortunately I did not get the opportunity to. But we will miss you. Your work will always continue,’ first-year student Shadae McLean wrote.

‘Great scholar. We will miss you. A little piece of sunshine has been lost,’ wrote Carla McLaughlin.

Another simply said, ‘Return if Possible’ — Nicky.

And another, ‘Your memory will live on just like the candle that lights a dark room; your memory shall shine too, but brighter’.

“It is sad that he died; we didn’t really know him but I heard he was a really great man,” first-year Humanities student Renee Francis and a resident at the hall says.

“I feel I missed out… but the fact that he is so recognised for someone who contributed to the arts also tells you something,” she notes further.

James Johnson, second-year Humanities student and also an on-hall resident, says “his work speaks volumes. He has left a legacy that is worth emulating in terms of his achievements educationally and in the arts”.

For Emerson Johnson, past resident advisor at Rex Nettleford Hall, the professor had made an “inestimable contribution”.

“He brought tremendous vision to academics. His insight was remarkable. He focused on seeing to it that as an emerging region of people, education was at the forefront. We have moved forward through his vision for us as a region and as a people,” he adds.

Donna Mae Jackson, student services and development manager, is today still struck by Nettleford’s ability to walk with kings and not lose the common touch.

“For someone who had achieved so much and was known as a cultural and intellectual icon it was just amazing how humble he was. He never imposed, he just guided,” she says.

She, too, has regrets. She, too, had hoped it was all a ruse.

“I didn’t believe at first, and even when I heard the news all over I didn’t expect that because I knew he was a fighter and he wasn’t sick so I thought he would be back,” she says.

“One of the reasons I was so sad, we have a week of celebrations every year in February for the hall and the reason we had chosen February was because it was the month he was born.

“The last two years he had engagements in France so he could not make it. This year we spoke and he said he would want to be here this year.

“It’s for me like a double tragedy in that we didn’t even get to have him one last time,” she says.

For Professor Roy Augier, who taught Nettleford during his days as a student at the university and later co-lectured a course on history and politics with him at the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication, Nettleford was an arrow drawn and released, that surely met its target.

“I taught him in the second half of the 50s. He was very bright and very active as a student on campus, foreshadowing what he was going to do later on,” says Augier.

The combination of his scholarship and his activities on campus made him a very powerful contender for the Rhodes Scholarship and when he applied he got it and there were no surprises there, nor was it a surprise that he decided — unlike other scholars before and after him — not to do a degree in law but to excel in politics.

“There were signs. His activities on campus as a student, foreshadowed what he would do in life,” says Augier.

He says the dance company, which is one of Nettleford’s most visible contributions, “is an emanation of his interest in Jamaican, African, Caribbean and urban culture”.

“I see Rex’s life as based on a sustained effort in all its directions to propagate the value of our own culture, to make persons understand it because there are these inherent divisions of class, divisions of those who glorify European culture at the expense of our own African derived culture. His work tells us don’t try to deal with them at the expense of one or other,” he reflects.

From all accounts, the man who sprang from Falmouth on Jamaica’s north coast in 1933, when he returns to the dust of the proud country that bore him will be indeed remembered as a most strident Voice from the Caribbean.