Olive Lewin was one of my mentors

Laura Tanna Letter From Laura

"There was always an underlying sadness about my mother ... . She was a very gentle person, very sensitive and easily hurt. She didn't talk much. I used to feel very privileged because when I'd go home as a big person, she'd come and sit in the room with me and talk. We were very, very, very close." This is Olive Lewin, many years ago, telling me about her mother and, in so doing, telling me about herself.

"My mother had been married before and had a son. She'd been married to an overseer on an estate in Vere and he was murdered by a jealous husband. I think that that was the underlying sadness in my mother's life .... She was a teacher, but we knew that home came first. Mama took us home at midday for lunch and again after school. But Papa, who was also a teacher, would get home at six o'clock, because he was always helping students. He never charged for private lessons but he was always giving them."

A first Meeting

I arrived in Kingston 40 years ago, April 11, 1973, a refugee from a military dictatorship in Uganda, armed with a list from Michael Smith, Jamaica's leading anthropologist, though he lived in California when I met him, advising me on people who might be helpful in my research on African oral narratives here. Olive Lewin was on that list, then head of the Jamaica Institute of Folk Culture and, after an interview, introduced me to her assistant, Hazel Ramsay McClune, who drove with me to August Town, led me down a gully and introduced me to Theresa Adina Henry, the old-time Jamaican jippy-jappa maker and marvellous storyteller, who would become my second mother.

Miss Adina graces the cover of Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories. Two of her grandchildren work with us today, a third who is in the United States, I've invited to New York to speak about Miss Adina's contribution to Jamaican folk culture and the rest are still family to me.

Having passed the test of dealing decently with Olive's first network of contacts, she then began to warm up to me. Because I was researching narratives and not necessarily music, though songs might be part of some narratives, I was never directly in competition with her same sources and so she was guardedly generous in sharing rural contacts with me. I also met people like Oliver Samuels, Fae Ellington, Brian Heap, Bernard Jankee and others. When the government at the time decided her institute should be subsumed into the School of Music and that all her research tapes should go over there - she was not amused by that - I helped Hazel label them so that people would know what Miss Lewin's contribution had been.

Olive was a guarded soul, in large part from her upbringing, but once she realised that I was staying in Jamaica, she became more open. She took me into the penitentiary downtown where she regularly gave musical rehabilitation to inmates. Her car was searched on entering the medieval-like stone walls of the penitentiary. We entered a classroom where inmates all responded to her instruction, her singing, and being alive for an hour. It was afterwards, in the yard, returning to the car when they surrounded her asking for various favours, I saw her courage and dedication. She did this religiously, for years, as part of her commitment to humanity, her Jamaica.

DOCUMENTING JAMAICAN CULTURE

She took me into the mental institution, Bellevue, to see her rehabilitation work and that was even worse, truly frightening.

I never went back there with her. I was afraid. Perhaps it was the coup, the dictatorship and the knowledge that life can end for nothing but she kept going back.

What I did do for her, for Jamaica, was to faithfully record whatever I could of her beloved Jamaican traditional culture. My own mother, who grew up on a homestead in Montana, taught me never to go to the social butterfly in a room but to always look for the lone person in a crowd and draw them out. Mama gave me the skills to understand that every individual is a novel in their own right and so I enjoy bringing that out for others to share. Olive and I were a match for Memory Bank and she invited me to join the Central Committee a year after it was formed by herself, Gwenllian Hart and Sybil Francis. I'd started writing for The Gleaner and recorded in detail those first years in an article: Olive Lewin and The Memory Bank, The Gleaner's Sunday Magazine, January 27, 1985, Cover, pp 2 & 3. She'd invited me to meet Imogene 'Queenie' Kennedy, and in a series of photographs, I captured the joy and warmth on Olive's face as she listened to the Kumina Queen, who had been such a mentor to her. That was the photo on the Sunday Magazine but Olive liked the photo so much she asked to use it in her book, Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica.

SO MUCH MORE TO TELL

There is much more I would tell you about the woman who helped to mentor me, and hundreds of others, including her own daughter Major Johanna Lewin, the first female helicopter pilot in the Jamaica Defence Force, of whom Olive was enormously proud. I would tell you of her work with Prime Minister Seaga, her doctoral success and work with international organisations but there isn't space to share it now. What I can tell you is that there was another mentor in my life, Olive Senior, who also cared deeply about preserving Jamaica's heritage. As editor of the Jamaica Journal she gave me the encouragement and space to publish an article based on my interviews with Olive Lewin in which Olive spoke in detail about her father's slave ancestry, her experiences with prejudice, her education here and abroad, her husbands, her intense love of music and country. I strongly urge you to read: Olive Lewin: A Life of Service, Jamaica Journal, Vol 21, No. 1, Feb-April 1988, pp 2-11. I might add that Olive had a great sense of humour. Another article in the same issue dealt with Amerindian Cave Art in Jamaica. Underneath a beautiful cover photograph of Olive, Hazel McClune and Joyce Meeks as Jamaican Folk Singers, the copy read: Olive Lewin Cave Art. She found the juxtaposition hilarious.