By Claude Mills, Staff Reporter
NESTLED IN the cool hills of Gordon Town is the cradle of life that nurtured the creative juices of Jamaica's foremost cultural icon, Miss Lou and her husband, Eric 'Chalk Talk' Coverley.
It is Jamaica's version of Camelot - a bygone era of romance and legend which lives on in dreams, and hearts.
HUMOUR
The zany sense of humour of the Coverley household is immediately evident as you make your way towards the single storey cut-stone house. On the patio, there are two 'Jolly Josephs' (JOS) bus seats that now serve as lounge chairs - a transformation wrought by the creative genius of the late Eric Coverley.
An old-fashioned lion head door knocker stands sentinel on an imposing 'bullet-wood' door. When the door yawns open, you enter a combination dining/living room that could have jumped out of the pages of a Charles Dickens' novel: brick fireplace, exotic looking furniture, quaint lighting fixtures and a cosy but dark interior. The concrete floor is painted an emerald green, and cut into squares. The brick fireplace is home to an ancient stove.
The Hon. Dr. Louise Bennett-Coverley (Miss Lou) would use the fireplace once a year, on New Year's Eve, the owner of the house since 1990s, Ms. Janet Mignott said. A lawyer by profession, she is also the daughter of the late veteran Clarendon sugarcane farmer T.G. Mignott.
The couple had separate bedrooms, Coverley's former bedroom on the left, with Miss Lou's boudoir on the right. Miss Lou's room is now occupied by Ms. Mignott's two sons, aged 22, and 19.
ANTIQUE
In what Ms. Mignott still refers to as 'Eric Coverley's room', there is an antique mahogany bed well over a century old. A number of framed portraits hang on the wall, including one of a Coverley sketch of the folk characters, Brer Anancy and Brer Donkey. This room leads into an adjoining section of the house built to accommodate Eric Coverley's mother who, in the 1980s, had grown too old to live alone.
"There is a peephole in the bookshelf through which Eric would peep into his mother's bedroom and keep track of her. He loved her a lot and because she was old, he worried whether she was alright or not, he liked to always check up on her," Ms Mignott explained.
On the bookshelf stand cobwebbed and dusty books, their pages yellowed by age. In 1990, Miss Lou returned to Jamaica for the Christmas holidays,however, the fatal heart attack suffered by her sister-in-law two days before her arrival, cast a sombre mood
over the trip. That was the same year the house was sold.
"When she came that Christmas, it was a really sad affair," Ms. Mignott said.
Later, at the behest of Miss Lou, the School of Drama and Institute of Jamaica began to remove items of cultural significance from the house. The agencies, however, left behind what Ms. Mignott called a 'shakaray' - a musical instrument which was a gift from Fidel Castro to Miss Lou during a visit to Cuba in the 1970s.
Later, Ms. Mignott found a birth certificate belonging to Miss Lou's mom, and the original draft of Evening Time which she mailed to Miss Lou in Canada.
Efforts to contact the School of Drama and the Institute of Jamaica to find out what became of the collected items, proved futile.
A close family friend, Ms. Mignott seemed the logical choice to be the next owner of a house that had been in the Coverley family for several generations.
"I was reluctant to buy the house. It seemed daunting, expensive and I didn't want to do it. But Miss Lou insisted, she said that she saw in me her spirit as a young woman. She sold it to me at market price... very reasonable... it was a gift from her to me," she said.
The house was sold in December 1990 for $1.14 million.
"This place has given me a total piece of mind and well-being, and a calmness of spirit. When you come here, you are renewed... the scenery of the magnificent hills, the chirping of the birds in the morning. I like to just sit and give thanks," Ms. Mignott said.
Asked if she would be willing to sell the house in the future, she sighed and responded: "If it were for the people of Jamaica, I would contemplate parting with it, but they (the Government) would have to acquire it and maintain it in such a way that it would be a treasure to the people of Jamaica."
