Crosskill
Bernard Headley, Contributor
THE EARLY Friday-morning, June 7, shooting death of radio broadcaster Hugh Crosskill touched the people whom he touched in diverse sad ways. Those of us who mostly were admirers of his professionalism - be it his impeccably precise on-air delivery, his brilliant grasp of whatever the subject was that he was interviewing a guest on, his sharp witticisms or just his bearing - have over the past several weeks missed his gentle erudition amidst the confusion and hassles of evening drive time.
But, no disrespect to his capable replacement(s), we just knew, felt it deep in our hearts, Hugh would be back. We clung to the belief in his soon return even when we suspected, because we had no way of knowing, that the reason he had been off the air and away from his job was that his old "demon" (as he himself referred to his drug-addiction problem) was probably riding him again.
We are all now family, colleagues, friends and faithful radio audience suddenly thrust deep into terrifying and dreadful miring. Did we do enough, or all we could have done, to prevent Hugh's dark and terrible ending? I for one came in on the tail end of his un-awakened nightmare: a couple of perturbed telephone calls from him while he was in the stranglehold of his demon. I told him how much I missed hearing him and how important he was as a newsman to me. "I love you, man," I remember characteristically telling him; so too did a critical listenership that valued and respected the work he did.
We closed off a final lengthy conversation with him promising he would go see a prominent priest that evening for more guidance and counsel. I said I'd check back to see how that turned out. I never got a chance to; or maybe I didn't try hard enough. But I kept wondering how he was doing. The news on Friday morning last confirmed that he had not been doing well at all.
No one's painful and tragic end should be treated as some kind of public 'lesson'. But as any good preacher will remind us, the ultimate significance of a life ended, its telos or point of it all, is to bear witness to the living: to teach us to not merely "number our days," but how to do so. We ought in ways that sustain as well as embrace the community of weak, faltering, fellow travellers.
Hugh's death brings back furiously to mind the equally tragic life and miserable end of Black Panther founder and brilliant political theoretician, Huey Newton. Huey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. laid out for my generation of blacks in America radically different paths to self-respect and liberation. Malcolm we liked for his fire, King we adored for his eloquence, but Huey we revered for his revolutionary genius and awesome "book knowledge." But Huey became, before he had fully blossomed, a full-blown junkie: a crack/cocaine addict. He died early one Sunday morning, strung out and facedown, on the asphalt in an Oakland (California) ghetto, shot by a supplier he was trying to con for one more fix.
Perhaps in reflecting on Hugh Crosskill's unhappy ending and sad life we might also as a nation ponder if, really, we have this whole 'drug thing' down correctly. Is our national approach to dealing with the problem of illegal drugs and drug addiction really the only "right" way? Maybe in the midst of our fascination with things like IONSCAN and Go-fast boats we can behold in our brother Hugh's gruesome demise a real life, and a real victim. And then, perhaps, we might ask ourselves: How has what we've been doing in our anti-drug policy and war against so-called narco-terrorists helped (or has it hurt) weak, fallen, sick humanity?
Bernard Headley is Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, UWI, Mona.
