FORMER Poet Laureate of Jamaica Lorna Goodison is again mourning the loss of a sibling — brother Nigel Goodison, the outstanding schoolboy athlete who represented the Jamaica national football team while a student at St George’s College in Kingston.

The youngest of nine children, 47-year-old Nigel Goodison’s passing came last month, on the eve of the second anniversary of the death of famous sister Barbara Gloudon, the veteran journalist, playwright and radio talk show host, aged 87.

In a heartfelt tribute which she shared with the Jamaica Observer, Lorna, author of the oft-quoted title My Mother Who Fathered Me, remembered her departed brother as a brilliant orator who had a great passion for social justice; a great dancer; a gifted all-round athlete; and who even, as a teenager, “was everybody’s favourite deejay, when he was at the turntable”.

Following is an edited excerpt from her tribute:

This is about my brother, Nigel Norman Goodison who died on Monday, March 4, 2024. Nigel was the last of my parents’ nine children and who came to us as a surprise for, as my mother always said, she thought she was done having children when I was born, at number eight. And then three years later here comes Nigel, “the washbelly”, as Jamaicans call last babies.

He looked just like one of those cherubs you see on postcards. He was plump, round-limbed, and sweet-faced. It seemed to me that people were always gathered round his crib gazing at him when he was a baby. But one day, soon after he was born, he stopped breathing. Here is my poem about this:

My baby brother could have been taken

For one of those cherubic presences

Hovering over the action in a nativity scene.

I stood by his crib and marvelled,

And could not find it in my small self

To be jealous that he had come to displace

Me as the last baby of the family.

I sensed he had brought something

Of the divine into our ordinary lives.

For then came the dreadful day,

When his small chest ceased to work

And his face took on a bluish cast.

My mother bent and put her lips to his

And tried to blow life back into him.

He remained unmoving.

Here entered our neighbour

Midwife Lindsay, who came bearing

Basin and ewer like a good woman

In a Barrington Watson painting. She was all

Calm as she streamed hot water

Into the wide bowl of white enamel.

Midwife Lindsay held him by the feet,

She dipped him headfirst into hot bath

Then into another filled with ice water.

She baptized him back and forth

Till he bawled out. She dipped him

Till his lungs pumped, he bellowed,

His flesh unmarbled. A miracle.

Everybody said we witnessed a miracle.

After this incident everybody in our house slept lightly, and we would often hear my parents getting up to check on him to make sure he did not slip away and leave us during the night. My mother breastfed him until he could speak. But I’m told that was not unusual in those days. He grew into a beautiful boy. Tall, handsome, strong, athletic and highly intelligent.

Manning Cup captain, national player

Nigel could drive a car by the time he was about eight years old. My father allowed him to sit on his lap and steer his big, blue Ford Consul, and when his legs grew long enough to reach the pedals, he drove, just so.

He was, like all my brothers, a very gifted, all-around athlete, and he developed into an outstanding soccer player who captained his school’s Manning Cup team and would go on to play for the Jamaica national soccer team when he was still a schoolboy at St George’s College.

Nigel was a fine student who thrived on the teachings of the Jesuit fathers. He loved history, economics, and English literature, and he excelled in school elocution contests. A brilliant orator, he was a quick study who easily memorised long passages of prose and poetry that he then delivered flawlessly on stage. He became known for what the editor of his school yearbook called his “forensic eloquence”.

He also developed a great passion for social justice. Nigel could not bear to see any form of wrong meted out to others, and he would not hesitate to speak up vehemently about perceived injustices. He had a brilliant sense of humour. He was funny. Very, very funny.

He was a great dancer. When he stepped out on to the dance floor, others were inclined to stand back and take in the performance. As a teenager he was everybody’s favourite deejay, when he was at the turntable — he rocked the house. Everybody wanted to be his friend.

It was his outstanding abilities as a soccer player that won him a full scholarship to Michigan State University (MSU) in 1970. He was scouted along with four or five other Jamaican players. It must have been a tremendous culture shock for someone as protected as Nigel to land in East Lansing, Michigan. It would have been the biggest town he had ever seen and, with all due respect, it is not a particularly scenic place — like, say, Ann Arbor — and, like everywhere in the Midwest, it gets brutally cold in winter. Cold and steel grey.

MSU also had a large student body. Nigel never complained about any of these things in his early letters home, but he did mention that his classes were huge and that the professors did not know the students by name.

Lorna Goodison7

In those days before cellphones and the Internet we, his family members, did not get all that much information about Nigel’s life at MSU but what we do know is that he became very active in the Black Students Association, and that he was involved in efforts to help bring about better playing conditions for student athletes. He was elected the student spokesperson who presented the case for better playing conditions for student athletes to the Big Ten in Chicago.

There is somewhere a wonderful photograph of my brother Nigel stepping off an airplane in Chicago as a member of that delegation. There was also a great picture of him that appeared in
Jet Magazine, as he, with his forensic eloquence, addressed the members of the Big Ten. He became more and more passionate about making intercessions on behalf of others… black people everywhere.

There is another photograph online of my brother as a lone figure standing up in a crowd in the middle of a basketball game at MSU. He was trying to urge the crowd to join him in protest against the violent death of three African Americans who had been killed in the southern United States. But the crowd just wanted to watch the game. He was led out by the police. He spent the night in lockdown. He never spoke of what happened there but after that, he became a different person.

You could say that a cruel set of circumstances converged to bring Nigel down but one day his world imploded. He came back to Jamaica and his life fell apart. He went from being Nigel with whom everybody wanted to be friends, to Nigel with few or almost no friends. But somehow he kept going for decades.

We often wondered if he was waiting for a sign, another miracle to reassure him that his entire life had not been lived in vain. A sign that someone appreciates the fact that a young Jamaican man believed that black lives mattered, decades before the Black Lives Matter Movement — a young man named Nigel Norman Goodison who tried, in his own way, to call attention to the need for better conditions for student athletes, for more justice for people of colour in the USA and everywhere.