Eric CoverleyMichael Reckord, Freelance Wwriter
Twenty-odd years ago, for probably the last time in Jamaica, Eric Coverley, O.D., FRSA, gave one of his famous 'Chalk Talks' at the Institute of Jamaica. The occasion was one of the Institute's regular lunch hour concerts.
I was privileged to be in the audience, one of, I suspect, the many seeing the performance for the first time. Coverley had not performed for a while. While delivering humorous patter, he drew numbers and symbols with chalk on a blackboard, creating a caricature of a human face. As he spoke, he walked a few steps away from the board, to the other side of the small stage.
Without warning, in one fluid action, he threw himself to the floor, rolled head over heels and landed on his feet. Then he turned over the board on its side (or upside-down) to show the audience a completely new figure. After the gasps - because 20-odd years ago Coverley, who died August 7 at 91, was not a young man - came the applause.
We had been entertained by a master.
Earlier this year, in a taped message played at the Louise Bennett Garden Theatre during a tribute being paid to her by EXED's Performing Arts Department, Louise Bennett-Coverley told the audience how she met her husband. She was a student at Excelsior High School and at one end-of-term prizegiving-cum-concert both she and 'Chalk Talk' Coverley, as he was popularly known, performed. She recited a dialect poem, he did a chalk talk.
After the show, she took the book she had received as a prize for her literary endeavours to the special guest and asked: "Please, Mister Chalk Talk, would you write something in my book?" He wrote: "Very unusual talent."
Not long after, he invited her to recite her poems on one of his Christmas morning concerts and there she received her first 'professional fee' for her poem, one guinea. Many years after, stated Jamaica's cultural ambassador, she and Coverley met again in New York and subsequently got married.
On Tuesday, the Little Theatre Movement (LTM), with which Coverley had a long association, paid tribute to him at a function at the theatre. So good was the turnout by the theatre fraternity that had the audience been 'beamed up' into a spacecraft by Martians, Jamaican theatre would have been set back by 100 years. Also in attendance were Burchell Whiteman, Minister of Education, Youth and Culture, the Reverend Dr. Byron Chambers and - themselves former performers - Father Easton Lee and Monsignor Kenneth Mock Yen.
LTM chairperson Barbara Gloudon welcomed the audience and gave a general introduction to the readers and performers for the evening. They included actresses Lois Kelly Miller and Leonie Forbes, tenors Cecil Cooper, Jimmy Tucker and David Reid and members of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC).
Other performers, all instrumentalists, were saxophonist and flautist from the Jamaica Military band Kevin Bondfield (with Redemption Song), Sean Hird (with Many Rivers to Cross) and master drummer Calvin Mitchell and trombonist Calvin 'Bubbles' Cameron, who together performed By the Rivers of Babylon.
Spoken tributes came from, in order of delivery, Dr. Chambers, Mr. Whiteman, Professor Rex Nettleford, Mr. Charles Hyatt and Frank Gordon. Dr. Chambers spoke of Coverley's membership from childhood, because of his mother's influence at Coke Methodist Church. Even though in his later years Coverley lived in Canada, Dr. Chambers said he remained on the books as a church member.
Recognising, he said, a "poignancy" in Coverley's dying the day after Jamaica celebrated its 40th anniversary of Independence, Mr. Whiteman said he had, with a "sense of wonderment", seen 'Chalk Talk' perform in May Pen years before. The minister referred to Coverley as "magical", a "communicator par excellence" and a "genius" who recognised his own qualities in his wife.
Prof. Nettleford said Coverley contributed "seminally" in the 1930s as an actor and in all "nurtured" theatre in Jamaica for three decades. He was also, said Prof. Nettleford, "a great designer and builder of floats" and was "the official calligrapher to the nation". As beneficiaries, the speaker concluded, we must continue to take the "high road" Coverley took "of self-esteem and self-confidence."
Mr. Hyatt said Coverley was to be "blamed" for Hyatt himself becoming a performer, as Coverley gave Hyatt his first professional fee, one guinea, for performing on one of the 'Christmas Morning' concerts which Coverley staged at Coke Church Hall. Coverley was "a gentleman and could tie his own bow tie," said Mr. Hyatt to much laughter, and he was always "snazzily" dressed but never vain.
Mr. Gordon said Coverley, "a colossus" and a patriot, mounted the first manufacturers' expositions in Jamaica in the 1930s. They helped to get people to buy Jamaican manufactured goods.
In the video taped interview, shown on a large screen, Coverley spoke of performing in one of the early LTM Pantomimes, Babes in the Woods, and of staging 21 Christmas concerts in 19 years. The well-received tape also showed Coverley and 'Miss Lou' singing It Was Under De Coconut Tree. Ambassador Bennett's taped voice singing Walk Good, an Good Duppy Walk wid You ended the function.
As the audience repaired to the Little Theatre's outside reception area for hors d'oeuvres and drinks, members agreed the evening was 'sincere', 'genuine' and 'touching'.
