Within 24 hours in Cape Coast, my phone rang with an unknown number. The voice on the other end was surprisingly easy to understand. When I found it was Sebrina from Ngoma, Driftwood C.C., York...she will tell you how excited I was to hear from her. As destiny would have it, Pierrette and I were heading to the city of Elmina that she was staying in before she had called.
Instead of going in to town though, we headed to their hotel (The Almond Tree Resort - I recommend it highly!). One of the first things that struck me was that Sebrina was staying in what was called the "Louise Bennett Room"...Ms. Lou?...at the same time that she just passed?...after just posting a tribute to her?...Note that I only heard about that room becaues Sebrina in her group of about 20 was staying there...I don't know any other icons that have rooms in their honour.
Apparently, after she passed the room kept flooding, though repairs kept being made...take that as you choose! Just a note on that, the resort was built by a couple from Jamaica who have retired in Ghana. Beginning with one room, it is now a beautiful place...as they say of the building, "a mickle makes a mockle". Dream big, it is possible.
So I wanted to add something more about Ms. Lou because I was touched by this article from The Toronto Star about the funeral which took place at RTT (Revival Time Tabernacle). If you look at the photo, I stood in that very spot as I gave my testimony before I was baptised on that very stage! So many memories there...
Rousing send-off for Miss Lou
Jamaica's first lady of culture remembered
Aug. 4, 2006. 05:25 AM
ROYSON JAMES
A couple thousand Toronto residents yesterday were the envy of two million Jamaicans abroad. And the local settlement did the diaspora proud.
Jamaicans and their friends here gave a rousing send-off to Jamaica's first lady of culture, the soul and voice of the island nation, the beloved Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley, known universally as Miss Lou.
With exquisite music, eulogies of unparalleled quality and timing, and an epic funeral that would have tried the patience of a less resolute and entranced crowd of admirers, Toronto said goodbye to the greatest Jamaican we will ever see in our lifetime.
Miss Lou died last week at Scarborough Grace Hospital at age 86. She'd been living in Canada since 1987, but her popularity worldwide has never waned. She will be buried in Jamaica on Wednesday.
Her body, accompanied by Jamaican government officials who were here for yesterday's service, is being flown to Kingston for a state funeral. Her body will lie in state at the National Arena for public viewing on Monday and Tuesday before she's buried in National Heroes Park, with the likes of former PM Michael Manley and black nationalist Marcus Garvey.
The who's who of the Jamaican community here, bolstered by Miss Lou's people, the common folk, attended the thanksgiving service, stopping traffic as the throngs spilled outside the Revivaltime Tabernacle, overflowed the basement rooms and flooded the yard at Dufferin St., near Finch Ave.
Yes, the service was long — spanning three and a half hours of sweltering island heat in a crammed sanctuary — but it was oh, so sweet, thanks to the delicate direction of Pamela Appelt, former citizenship court judge.
There was ole talk, dialect, old time stories, recalling of radio dramas and television shows, repeating of dialect poems, resurrecting long-forgotten folk songs, unearthing memories of the annual Christmas pantomime and all the time tearing up over one poignant moment after another only to burst into uncontrollable laughter and joy.
This was no day of sadness, despite the unmistakable loss of the woman who taught Jamaicans to embrace their broken English, their dialect, their unique speech patterns as an essential, vital element of who they are.
Turning on its ear the eulogy that Shakespeare's Mark Antony gave in Julius Caesar, Miss Lou's friend and colleague, Maud Fuller, captured the sentiment of the "mourners" when she said: "I come to praise Miss Lou, not to bury her.
"For how do you bury creativity, imagination, originality and artistic integrity," said Fuller, president of the University of the West Indies Alumni Association, a friend of 50 years.
"Above all, how do you bury laughter?"
Praise — and laugh — they did yesterday: Jamaican Chinese, politicians from the Ontario government and city hall, Miss Lou's theatre buddies from the 1950s and 1960s, family friends and consular officials.
"She was the barometer of Jamaican life," said Robert Pickersgill, Jamaica's minister of housing, transport and works, who flew up for the service. "We know the people in Miss Lou's world; they are us."
Olivia "Babsy" Walker, representing the opposition party in Jamaica (a former Toronto journalist and sister to police board member Hamlin Grange), said Miss Lou was "no ordinary Jamaican. Her mortality prevented us from acknowledging how great she." But Miss Lou is in the class of Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey — "pillars of our country."
Gail Scala said the parade of visitors to her Scarborough home always wanted to touch her, as if to determine if she was "real, and not a figment of our homesick imagination."
And Carol Wong, a Jamaican Chinese, broke up the mourners with her recollections of her family and the Chinese populace falling captive to the Jamaican way of speaking — "Jamaican patwa with a Chinese accent."
It was as if each participant went out of his or her way to represent, to live up to the powerful legacy of one Miss Lou.
Miss Lou has a long connection with Toronto. She was the star performer at the first Caribana festival in 1967. In the 1970s, she performed here with Tim Tim, her counterpart from Trinidad and Tobago, in a production with Black Theatre Canada. She has an honorary doctorate from York University.
Still, it seemed incongruous that the most quintessential Jamaican, the woman most responsible for forging Jamaica's sense of themselves as a people, a nation, would be living off the island — even though she carried the title of Jamaica's cultural ambassador.
It's only right that her final resting place will be on the island she so loved, among the native people she so elevated. Miss Lou represented the best in Jamaicans. Yesterday, our Jamaican citizens gave her of their best. And it was a beautiful thing to experience.
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