We write the year 1973.  It is almost June. Anxious fifth formers in a country boarding school on a hill beside the sea where the school song claims they are turning darkness into light, nervously face their first external examination.  The Spanish oral exam. The examiner is Beverly Hall. The challenge is rigorous, but her smile is warm and encourages, and gives us heart - puts us at ease and elicits the best from us. 

​

I next encounter her in the Summer of 1977. At this time, I am a searching university student who is unsure of  my direction: I know what my interests are, but they don’t exactly match the course I pursue at UWI. The African Caribbean institute of Jamaica (ACIJ) to which she had moved as Director from the University organized a summer school. Under her direction it had gathered distinguished local and international scholars and cultural practitioners - among them Professors Opoku and Nketia from the University of Ghana at Legon, Merrick Poznanski who taught at UCLA, Professors Locksley Edmondson, Mervyn Alleyne - her partner in life and work - and Edward Kamau Braithwaite of the UWI. And an interesting array of attendees, some from academia and others from the engaged community of Africanists and Caribbeanists in a dynamic exchange and lively symposium. With the institutional support of a changing Institute of Jamaica under the direction of her mentor Neville Dawes and the astute Chairmanship of Rex Nettleford and building on the foundation laid by Dudley Thompson and Elaine Melbourne, she and her associates were creating a unique space. It was a space, a crucible, simultaneously for serious research and knowledge of contemporary Africa, as well as the study of historical Africa and its diaspora. A space which was as equally welcoming and inspirational to scholars and academics as to the CXC student, and to the ordinary curious citizen.

​

It was only natural then that after my final year exams encouraged by a discussion with my uncle, I responded to an ad for a Research Assistant at the ACIJ in 1979 and joined the ACIJ at Malabre House on Little North St. It was not just another government organization: it was a space with its own genius loci. Under her leadership and direction and with the support of   her Fellows, technical and administrative staff, it had morphed into an incubator of ideas, aspiration and inspirations, capturing the spirit of that summer school. It became a focus for those who wanted to understand the continuum which is Africa and the Caribbean and to find themselves and their identity within it - not in a facile or self-righteous manner, not as an add on, but in a way which was existential and essential: Africa and its retentions in the Caribbean in our heads and hearts. Without pretension and at the expense of her own ethno-botanical and linguistic academic research and ambition, Mrs. Hall-Alleyne gave the institution structure and direction. Her unique gift as cultural administrator was that which she had shown as an examiner: the ability to create a context of challenge, but also a platform, individually and institutionally to enable, to ease and to nurture excellence. Then and repeatedly with the exacting and transformational discipline of the linguist she gave aspiration structure and rigour and integrity, without rigidity or dogma.  Without saying it, she practiced decolonization: she shaped an institution which created its own terms of reference, rooted in a singularly Jamaican historical experience and ambition. While it retained ties with international academia - in Europe, Africa and the Americas - it did not need or crave their imprimatur.

​

For me from the very first day, alongside the other Research Assistant, Garth White, and with the Fellows Cheryl Ryman and Marian Stewart, and Ena Campbell, with Miss Solomon and Miss Thompson, with Peter, Denroy, Fernando and Miss Mac, it was a magical transformational apprenticeship. In the political and physical turmoil of 1980s downtown Kingston, it was a safe space, an oasis, a Tardis. There were no away days or team exercises, but each person knew their valued role in an atmosphere equally of duty, accountability and responsibility, whatever the formal role. It was an almost familial shared space where everyone who came through the entrance of Little North St. could bring and be what we now refer to as our authentic selves, respected by the dint of our mere presence, and where we who worked there could claim - as the poet Lorna Goodison so elegantly puts it -

​

[…} the right to call

all older than you

Miss, mister, or mistress

in the layered love of our

simplest ways

​

Every day was a journey of discovery, through both primary and secondary research, through   field trips which yielded audio tapes and photographs building an archive, creating new systems of classification, nomenclature and documentation - through the questions asked and answered, the dialogue and visits and the performance. Through too those who came for the  regular seminars, including George lamming who spent a day with us, and the Mystic  Revelation  of  Rastafari who had a month long residency in the Courtyard,  and  the  visiting  research  fellows, and local activists -  Madame Samad, Pilot Francis, Frank Gordon, Beverly Hamilton, Dr Sam Street, the visiting Fellows, Francis Nii-Yarty from Legon and Trevor Purcell ( … and those whose coming was heralded but  never  materialized).  They came because of the standard of scholarship she insisted on every day and for the trust which she engendered, though her competence, her unrelenting quest for efficiency and excellence – with the honed skill of the linguist she remained, she edited and reedited drafts - always aiming   for elegance, concision, clarity and most of all accessibility…and always with generosity, grace, graciousness and humor. Her door was always open for the discussion of abstract ideas, discrete research data or the practical logistics of an impending project or event. She encouraged, indeed demanded, sharing and taught me early that the world of ideas should be one of selflessness and of unselfishness: she insisted that we were not building personal empires but were in the service of the common good, paid for by ordinary people who deserved impeccable service. And she demonstrated in the most politically challenging period of our history that academia and research and the world of ideas were firmly rooted in its societal context, that while knowledge, ideas and public cultural institutions should be non-partisan and impervious to the manipulations of those in power, they were never ideationally or morally neutral.

​

It was natural that when I returned to Jamaica after 12 years absence it was to work with her, now in her role as Executive Director of the Institute of Jamaica. Our time there together was not long. It was clear that despite the friendship, solidarity and support of the Chair, the unwieldy almost unmanageable task of holding together a disparate centripetal umbrella organization - famously one that ‘can fix’, without a consensual vision about its role was taking its toll. Literally, she took it to heart.  But before she left, she once again set me a challenge and once again gave focus and contour to my dream-like meanderings, nurtured my beginnings from idealistic returnee to incipient museologist and cultural administrator - a natural transition which reflected my interests and training and skills, and just as she had done so many years before. But she continued to be a point of reference, a sounding board, offering solidarity, perspective, advice and support.

​

It is 2024. We live once again separated by the Atlantic. Hans Georg Gadamer, the German philosopher maintains that while we cannot be with all our friends simultaneously, we are the simultaneity of all our friends.  The physical separation was even longer than the first, but it is the age of the internet: It allows for a virtual community similar to that which existed at Malabre House. We are no longer Examiner and student, Apprentice and master, or work colleagues. We are friends in almost daily dialogue. We continued to discuss art and politics and music - lots of recordings making the Middle Passage in the wee hours of the insomniac nights. It was still a community of intellectual stimulation, of challenge and of ideas, of openness, sharing and support. Hers had become again one of the examined life, the focus more personal, internal, existential even, but never removed from the contexts in which we both lived - the interrelationship between personal, the emotional and the public sphere. She was steadfast in her devoted love and concern for her family, for her sisters and her adult children and their endeavors, and her love of  beauty in nature and art. She was conscientious in her concern for the spiritual and transcendental. To the very end, with the forensic clarity with which she had questioned the world around her in intellectual, or ethical or aesthetic terms, she continued to pose questions, in an essentially visceral way, about this world and the next. One of our last discourses was about the nature of civilization. We eventually agreed about the physical manifestations, of buildings, tradition and manners, but she had over many years enabled me to understand that it was more: it was manifest in the generosity of dialogue, of human exchange and of the essential elegance of the kindness and grace of friendship, as she in her life had shown and lived it.