Melvile CookeI HAD planned to write an extremely simple column about the Eventide Home Fire of Tuesday, May 20, 1980. I had planned something as stark as a lightning-struck tree poking the belly of a sky that rained fire along with water, yet on a personal level comparable to actually taking gifts to a children's home, instead of simply dumping them in the bin provided at church 'round Christmas.
I had planned to walk the short distance from the Gleaner's 7 North Street, Kingston, office, up East Street to the National Heroes' Park (which forms part of the route from the Holy Trinity Cathedral on North Street to that burial place of Prime Ministers and Governors-General), find the mass grave for the
remnants of 144 charred women, write their names, birth and death dates and reproduce same as a column.
No additives, no preservatives. No names, actually.
144 KILLED
I found the slab of unprotected, unswept, 'unflowered', once pristine white concrete 19 paces long and five and a half wide outside the white perimeter fence of the protected area reserved for monuments to the National Heroes and Heroine. There is a headstone, on which is painted 'EVENTIDE HOME', under which is the legend 'In the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eighty, Tuesday, May 20, one hundred and forty-four men and women perished in the Eventide Home Fire and were buried in a mass burial on Monday, May 26, 1980'.
MAGNITUDE OF THE TRAGEDY
Now how is that for starkness?
The location, level of care and construction of the final resting place for the women (The Gleaner's records mention no men) of the Myers Ward wing of the Eventide Home which went up in flames shortly after midnight on Tuesday, May 20, 1980, are no indication of the magnitude of the tragedy.
Subsequent treatment has not made the situation any better. We skirt the memory much like the U.S. track and field fraternity studiously avoids Flo Jo's 100m and 200m women's world records.
MICROFILM AND POLITICS
Microfilm had to substitute for mourning and The Gleaner records on page one, Wednesday, May 21, 1980, that "at least 153 destitute old women, some blind and many physically handicapped, perished in Jamaica's worst fire at Eventide Home, Slipe Pen Road, Kingston, yesterday morning".
There were actually 144 bodies recovered, 52 survivors and nine missing, presumed dead, of the 205 occupants of the Myers' Ward; some of the missing would turn up and the official figure would not rise. The Home was built of pitch pine and dated back to January 1, 1870, and fire chief Allan Ridgeway said, "even if Mona Reservoir had been on site we could not have done anything better."
The firemen took a mere five minutes to arrive.
In the run-up to the pivotal 1980 general election, which ushered out socialism, it took mere hours for politics to get involved.
In an early statement Prime Minister Michael Manley said "first reports from the security forces indicate strongly that this may have been the work of arsonists", though later in the day he told Parliament "the possibility of arson cannot be ruled out."
In a page one editorial The Gleaner (a newspaper of big business which was not, shall we say, overly friendly to socialism) said "there is no comfort for the survivors and the bereaved in the doubts about the origin of the blaze, but we trust the truth will emerge in good time."
Is 24 years and four months 'good time'?
It did not take long for party supporters to get in on the action as well; "as speculation as to how the fire started got stronger, supporters of the PNP began to shout accusations at the JLP and they organised a march down Slipe Pen Road, singing party songs."
POLICE FIRED SHOTS
On the day of the fire, the police fired shots in the air to restrain a group of PNP supporters outside the seat of Parliament, Gordon House on Duke Street, downtown Kingston, who "had placards which suggested that the fire was caused by arsonists and that the JLP was responsible for setting fire to the home."
Interestingly enough, as The Gleaner reports, initially burial was set for the Calvary Cemetery on Lyndhurst Road. And when Heroes' Park was decided on, there was no march from church to burial site. (I wonder if Fletcher's Land, where the marchers would have had to pass, was as JLP then as at Michael Manley's funeral march, when Edward Seaga was cheered on as he walked past?)
'A WHO BURY YASO?'
On the day of the funeral, a day of national mourning, The Gleaner reports that there were no disturbances at the funeral, although "at the entrance to the Cathedral, immediately after the service, hundreds of people waved the JLP's 'V' sign and booed."
For such an emotional occasion, though, I found the reporting generally impersonal. It took Franklyn A. McKnight, writing in The Sunday Gleaner of May 25, to put personal faces of loss on the overwhelming statistics. In a story under the headline 'From Fire to Fire- and Death', he tells the stories of some of those lost loved ones. Among them was 'Aunt Gaye', who moaned for her dead sister, as "dem nah go even give har back to me. Mama! Mama!."
The 144 blind and handicapped women who could not feel their way out or flee the fire came out of holes like charcoal, in pieces, spent five days above ground and were then returned to the earth, in pieces.
And forgotten.
Melvile Cooke is a freelance writer.
