Читать книгу Island People - Joshua Jelly-Schapiro - Страница 14
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
BADNESS
IT WOULD BE FOLLY to suggest that Kingston, at least on its surface, is a lovely place. “The center resembles the nastiest of London outskirts,” wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1948, “and the outskirts are equal to the most dreary of West Indian slums.”1 He’d be more damning now. Kingston has little in the way of the shaded squares or comely spires that describe the Catholic capitals of Spain’s or Portugal’s New World empires—places designed, at least in part, to exude the majesty of those imperiums’ hearts. Unlike Havana or Rio, Kingston was never intended to be a capital of anything but its makers’ crass commerce in sugar and people. Back in the island’s Spanish days, Jamaica had the makings of a stately capital. Sited in a sheltered river valley a dozen miles to Kingston’s northeast, the Spanish founded Villa de la Vega in 1534. The town sitting there now, which Jamaicans call Spanish Town, still has a few colonial buildings redolent of Seville. Outside one such, visiting academics hop from taxis to sift crumbling records in Jamaica’s National Archives. But for most Jamaicans, the phrase “Spanish Town” evokes images not of Conquistadors Past but of a dusty suburb reached by the busy and slum-choked Spanish Town Road, which runs between here and the core of the city whose great modern laureate, Peter Tosh, dubbed “Killsome.”
No, Jamaicans don’t have a beautiful capital to love. They have Kingston, a concrete jungle founded across the harbor after Port Royal’s fall. It was built from an old farmer’s field with little rhyme or foresight, along a sloping road leading up from the waterfront and toward Halfway Tree, now Kingston’s symbolic heart but then a crossroads named for a huge cotton tree that shaded a popular pausing place, in olden days, on the route between Saint Andrew’s hinterland and its port. By the early twentieth century, the blocks between the sea and Parade, old downtown’s central square, were lined with Syrian- or Chinese-owned shops selling armchairs and egg creams. Down by the water, Kingston’s old downtown even boasted the Myrtle Bank Hotel, a handsome white-columned pile to rival Havana’s Hotel Nacional. Never what one could call prosperous, though, downtown fared even worse under Jamaican rule than it had under the British. In 1960, the Myrtle Bank was razed to make way for the vast port complex now containing the notorious “free zone,” surrounded by razor wire and created by the IMF, where foreign conglomerates like Hanes and Levi’s pay Jamaican women US$6 a day to sew underwear that’s then loaded onto nearby ships. After independence, downtown’s fate was sealed when Kingston’s monied classes hatched a plan to move its key functions elsewhere. That plan unfolded on the grounds of the old Knutsford Park racetrack, just beyond Halfway Tree and near the foot of uptown’s hills, and resulted in what’s now called New Kingston: a soulless thicket of medium-rise banks and expensive hotels where the business of the country, and of governing it, takes place. With that monstrosity allied to choking traffic on treeless boulevards cutting across it, the greater KMA—Kingston Metropolitan Area—is an urban planner’s bad dream.
But as is the way with such things, downtown’s abandonment by its rich also fed the ragged charm now exerted by the old byways, like King and Orange streets, along which I strolled a few days after that visit to Countryman, passing discount stores whose facades haven’t been changed since 1962, along sidewalks, crowded with “higglers” peddling bananas and flip-flops, that buzz with the feel of West African market towns. Not long before the witching hour, at dusk, when the higglers disappear down potholed side streets that lead into the notorious garrisons bleeding westward from Parade, or hop into route taxis taking them back to country homes, I walked down the stretch of Orange Street once known as beat street. It earned its name for the density of old record shops and spaces where the old sound system men, rolling blaring speaker towers here most nights of the week, once ruled. I stopped by the crumbling facade of Forrester’s Hall: this is where King Edwards’s Giant Sounds used to clash with Duke Reid’s Trojans. The front gate was locked, but some shadowy figures, inside the now-roofless space, were swinging hammers at wooden planks. “What are you making there?” I asked through the gate.
They replied over their shoulders: “Coffin.”
There’s a saying here: “Inna yard, dead everywhere.” But in neighborhoods with few weddings and lots of funerals to dress up for, street dances still remain, sixty years after the sound system’s birth, the thumping core of Jamaican culture. Most nights of the week, deejays from leading systems like Stone Love and Kilimanjaro erect their speaker towers by side streets or parking lots to boom dancehall hits at volumes evidently designed to test Marley’s adage, from “Trench Town Rock,” that when “music hits, you feel no pain.” Since Bob’s day, the cadences have quickened. The sounds have grown rougher. So, too, has the dance style known as “daggering,” through which Jamaica’s young, pantomiming rough sex in clothes, further the old process of transforming the body from an instrument of pain into one of pleasure, in this ex-slave society, amid an air of barely suppressed violence. In the early sound system era, the dances weren’t guarded, as one of the first I attended was, by glowering sixteen-year-olds holding Uzis in the dark. But if this culture’s sounds and settings have grown more extreme, its guiding tensions, I thought as I approached the old Ward Theatre on Parade, have remained the same. This was where, back in 1964, an eighteen-year-old Bob Marley, with the group he’d formed with his friends Peter and Bunny, had their first big gig. The Wailing Wailers had won an audition with Clement “Sir Coxson” Dodd, a leading sound system man, and signed for Dodd’s label, Studio One. The first Wailers record Dodd released, “Simmer Down,” had shot to the top of Kingston’s charts, and stayed. Addressing themselves to the “rude boys” with whom they passed their teens on Parade, the Wailers called for calm amid the heady days of their nation’s newfound freedom. “Simmer down,” they sang on that first hit. “Oh control your temper.”
Simmer down, for the battle will be hotter
Simmer down, and you won’t get no supper
Simmer down, and you know you bound to suffer
Simmer down, simmer, simmer, simmer right down
Here in the Ward in 1964, when the young Wailers performed “Simmer Down” in public for the first time, they affected shiny suits and shinier dance moves. Loud claps and yelps filled the hall. The raining applause was joined, Peter Tosh would recall, by a shower of coins. “Me look at some two and six-pence piece lick me head,” he said years later. “So I stop sing and just go and pick them up . . . two pockets full!” For young singers being paid a pittance, if they were lucky, by their label, this was a lot of coin. Sadly for them, they didn’t get to keep it. “Before I come offstage,” Tosh said, “it was begged out. Every man in the audience come beg it back.”2
Five decades on, the Ward’s white-and-blue facade was crumbling; dirty paint peeled from the walls. I asked a large woman out front, squatting by a rack of plastic sunglasses with too-large Ray-Ban logos stenciled on their sides, what had befallen the Ward. “Hurricane!” she said, looking up briefly before returning to her wares.
“Which?” I asked. “When?”
“Gustav,” she said to my shins. That storm had blown up the Caribbean in 2008, and taken care of the Ward’s roof and once-shining marquee. Lord knew when it would be fixed. I handed her a bill for JA$500 (“Continued devaluation of JA’s currency,” said the IMF, “is good for the economy”), and slid a pair of eyeshades—they’d cost US$5—over my nose before continuing across Parade, in the afternoon’s fading glare. I walked down King before pausing, outside the courthouse, by a large monument. The statue included a big obsidian head, ten feet tall. Onto its cheeks were welded two brass tears. Its base was engraved, like Maya Lin’s wall in Washington, with rows of names and numbers—Joshua Hill, 6; Shanna-Kay Robinson, 1; Tia Murray, 15. The numbers were ages. The statue’s larger title, engraved on its base, explained its meaning in this town whose tabloids are filled, every day, with stories about the bad things that happen among destitution-damaged people trying to rear kids in an “afflicted yard.” The memorial said this: “In Memory of Children Killed Under Violent/Tragic Circumstances.”
The phrase and its punctuation (what was up with the slash?) were striking, for its conflation of two concepts—violence and tragedy—sometimes linked in life, but often not. The monument was also striking, though, for what it said about this movie-mad town whose young have had a shortage of neither experience with violence nor the narrative conventions of tragedy. The theaters where Kingston’s ska stars shone, back in the ’60s, were also the movie houses where “rudies” flocked to shoot-’em-up Westerns and joined the action by shooting their pistols at the screen. Perhaps the second most memorable of early Wailers gigs, after their debut at the Ward, was at the Palace Theater, now vanished but long near where I stood. A few months after “Simmer Down” hit, they headlined a packed Christmas concert. Again, coins pummeled the stage. But just as they kicked off “Simmer Down,” the house lights went dark. The blackout was citywide. The crowd, though, didn’t know. A notorious rudie called Big Junior, his head swollen from a cameo appearance in the film version of sometime-Jamaican Ian Fleming’s novel Dr. No, smashed his wooden chair on the floor. The Wailers escaped the ensuing riot only by barricading themselves in a backstage toilet. In a young country where the rule of law was as inchoate as its electrical grid, a song urging self-control may have made street-tough youths into singing stars. But it was their town’s outlaws, like Big Junior, who remained its favorite folk heroes.
* * *
“BADNESS! AND BAD MEN.” They’re still around, in this weary, wary city where plastic shopping sacks are called “scandal bags” and where the only sure way to have regular electricity is to live in the precinct of a big enough bad man that he extorts or pays for “yuh current,” and your fealty, himself. But downtown, by now, is not the sort of place where people can flock to old-style bijous or shoot their pistols at their screens: there are no cinemas, and few businesses targeting anyone with real disposable income farther down than Half Way Tree. When I went to a film one night, it wasn’t being screened in a cinema, but in a more homey venue on downtown’s western edge. Earlier that year, the long-awaited documentary Marley had reached cinemas here and worldwide. The film I headed downtown to see was related, but different. Marley had been the result of a decade-long saga that began as a project helmed by Martin Scorsese, and then, once he’d wearied of dealing with Rita and the gang, chewed up another fancy director—Jonathan Demme. Finally the film was completed by a young Scotsman called Kevin Macdonald. Macdonald was previously best known for The Last King of Scotland, a drama about the mad Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. His achievement with Marley was to allow all the living principals in the great man’s story to share their refractive memories of his life and end. It included such nuggets as Rita, sitting poolside in regal Asante robes, informing us that Bob’s cancer “came from his white blood.” Macdonald had his pick, with the family’s full support, of a great array of archival footage of Bob in concert and repose. There was one key bit of old tape, though, that he hadn’t been able to use. And it was to see this tape, edited together in a new film called The Making of a Legend, that I went all the way downtown, to an abandoned old building by the water that someone had converted into a kind of extra-rootsy art space for events like this.
I parked by the building and headed up to the second floor, arriving to find the film’s maker, a onetime paramour of Marley’s, standing at the front of the room. She was now a tired-looking sixtysomething woman, dressed in made-in-China Rasta regalia. She explained the story of her film. Forty years before, she’d been a young model enjoying a fling with a hot young star. She had lugged a primitive Super 8 camcorder into their briefly overlapping lives. For thirty-odd years, the resulting footage was mislaid in a friend’s Toronto garage. When it was found, she had refused to part with it or license it to anyone else. Instead, she had made the film we were about to screen in this space that a white woman from foreign had turned into a wood-working studio for local youths and, rumor said, a place for seducing them. Who knew if it was true. But Kingston is like that: leave no good turn unpunished. The space, in any case, was cool. And though the tech, with dodgy wires hooked up to tinny-sounding laptop speakers, was wanting, the footage was something.
There, flickering on the wall, were the three members of the trinity—Bunny, Peter, Bob—right On the Cusp. When our filmmaker met them, the Wailers had just released Catch a Fire, the 1973 album into whose raw reggae mix their new producer, Chris Blackwell, hoping to win them careers in England and beyond, had overdubbed electric rock guitars. The album was received with rapture by the critics. In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote that “half these songs are worthy of St. John the Divine.” But the jury was still very out as to whether Blackwell’s scheme to turn these raw yardies into rock stars would actually come off. Back on their home island, they were writing songs for a new record. The girl who photographed them doing so was a sometime publicist and full-time hustler. She had beat Marley and Co. to London by a few years, and her light brown glamour had won her film work and a role with Blackwell’s Island Records. She had returned to Jamaica, with Bob, to shoot video and stills of the group for their label (her photo of a shirtless Bob smoking his morning spliff came to adorn Catch a Fire’s cover), in that big clapboard home, Island House, that Marley would later own but that was now known as the Kingston HQ of Blackwell’s label.
We watched the trio lazing about, their matted Afros just turning into dreadlocks. This was the moment of grace before the Wailers blew up—and split apart. Captured with one of the first-ever camcorders, our filmmaker’s images showed the men lying around with guitars. Playing riffs back and forth. Trading lines. The moments of creative spark that we who are interested in art making wonder at. Also, plenty of stoned conversation whose stoned profundity maybe wasn’t so profound (“Belief can live and belief can kill,” we watched Bob intone), but that we nodded along to, nonetheless. Marley’s charisma-filled cheekbones leapt from the screen: the man, as this PR flack and all his brand’s builders learned, never took a bad picture. The same, alas, couldn’t be said of the film’s maker, whose sad need to insert herself into the narrative found her ludicrously staged, in between these lovely spells of footage, by an ornate Victorian mantel in a chunky necklace, recounting how she helped her lover write “I Shot the Sheriff.” The coughs and fidgeting in the audience during these passages were loud. But for us to whom the friendships captured by the old footage were the subject of obsessive thought, the moments of filial love were thrilling. Here they were, the lanky brown-skinned Marley and the darker Tosh trying, as friends do, to make each other laugh. The looks exchanged between chords were all the more poignant for us watching from the future. Mere months later, Marley would step onto a path, at the front of a band that could have only one front man, that made him into the kind of rock star in England he and his minders envisioned. Soon enough, he won the kind of fame that made him a figure who belonged as much to the world as to his friends.
After Bob blew up, Peter and Bunny did enjoy their own fame. Each made great records. Tosh, with the help of rabble-rousing hits like his pro-ganja ode “Legalize It,” became a figure even more dearly embraced in Jamaica than Marley. Many still call him “Jamaica’s greatest music man.” It’s not hard, playing back Tosh classics like “Stop This Train” and “400 Years,” to understand why. Peter, who much more closely resembled most Jamaicans than Bob, also came much closer than his pal, during what remains Kingston’s most-famous-ever concert, to voicing most Jamaicans’ feelings on their postcolonial state. The One Love Peace Concert, convened between the bloody election seasons of 1976 and 1980, was aimed to convince members of the capital’s PNP- and JLP-affiliated gangs to stop shooting each other. The event is best recalled for Marley’s enjoining the party’s two leaders, Seaga and Manley, to join hands above his head during an extra-long rendition of “Jamming,” to “show the people that we got to unite.” That was the night’s takeaway image. But it was another moment, little recalled beyond Jamaica, that distilled the lasting distinction between two figures who have resounded since as rough equivalents of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: one an inspired conciliator with a prophet’s smile (never mind how key the juxtaposition of “screwface” scowl and lover’s grin were to Bob’s appeal); the other an icon of black rage, glowering behind dark glasses (never mind the goofy strain central to Peter’s manner and hits). On the night Marley provided his great tableau of music’s peace-making power, Tosh capped his own set by lighting an enormous spliff onstage. He defied the “shitstem” to arrest him.
“I am not a politician,” he intoned before the bloodiest election yet, “but I suffer the consequences.”
* * *
PETER MACKINTOSH WAS BORN in a small seaside village in Westmoreland. He was reared, like most Jamaicans, by his mother. He learned to play piano and sing, like most of the country’s musicians, in her church. Peter’s father was little seen in the village of Belmont (“a bad boy, a rascal,” Tosh described him, who “just go around and have a million and one children”).3 Gainful work was scarce too. Peter left the provinces to make a life in Kingston’s slums. When he met Bob and Bunny, his fellow Wailers-to-be, he was selling sugarcane juice from a cart by Parade. When his life later ended under decidedly “violent/ tragic circumstances” (he was shot in his home at the age of forty-one), his body was brought back to the sleepy town where he was born. Belmont is a teeny village by the turquoise sea, not far from the old Spanish slave port of Savanna-la-Mar, whose most notable site is its favorite son’s tomb. Tosh’s mausoleum is a cement box painted red, gold, and green. It sits by the water, on the road that hugs Jamaica’s sleepy south coast, in a shaded yard by the tidy little house that Peter bought his mother in the 1970s. It’s a quiet tourist trap, most days, where the young men who work the rum shop by the yard’s gate rouse themselves from their dominoes, when the few Tosh-obsessed Germans and Japanese who make it here turn up, to demand ten dollars apiece from visitors. Marley’s tomb, across the island in St. Ann Parish, is patronized not only by scores of such pilgrims daily but also by busloads of casual vacationers who sign up, in plush north coast resorts nearby, to visit the reggae king’s home. Belmont, by contrast, remains outside the tourist circuit. But as perhaps befits its great son’s contrasting place in Jamaica’s memory, it does serve, as I saw visiting one Peter Tosh Day, as a pilgrimage site for Jamaicans. More especially, for believers of the born-in-Jamaica faith that island boosters claim is “the only major world religion born in the twentieth century”—in whose pantheon Peter resides, ever blacker and just a touch badder than Bob, too—it is the resting place of an enduring saint.
Rolling into Belmont, I turned my rental car’s radio to 107.1, Irie FM. The deejay said that Jamaica’s “roots radio” had been broadcasting live from Peter’s gravesite since 6 a.m. “Tha sisdren and bredren,” he said, had been arriving since dawn. He introduced a snippet of recorded speech from Tosh’s Red X Tapes, a posthumously released spoken-word album whose digressions Peter’s admirers know by heart. “I don’t smoke marijuana.” His baritone filled the car. “Marijuana is a girl from Cuba. I smoke HERB.” Tosh pronounced the last word with a hard H, emphasizing the sacrament it was. “Lawmakers make every name illegal, to incriminate the underprivileged. . . . But herb, and music, is the healing of the nation. Key to the doors of inspiration. Without herb, any other thing cause distortion, and confusion. Seen?”
Seen. Into Peter’s yard and through its gates, the sisdren and bredren streamed. Elder Rastas in army fatigues and colorful headwraps. A tattooed young woman wearing a gold necklace whose shape spelled “BAD.” A young man, shirtless and resting a flagpole on his shoulder, carrying a great banner in Rasta’s colors of red, gold, and green. On a fence outside, someone had painted a big marijuana leaf, captioned with Tosh’s most famous lyric. “Legalize It.” Right in front of it, a uniformed policewoman and policeman stood in their colonial-looking black caps. Jamaica’s anti-cannabis laws are far stricter than most spring breakers here think. But this pair seemed little interested in enforcing them. I stepped into the yard to see a striking woman, six feet tall and wearing burlap robes accented with Rasta-colored trim. In her arm she cradled an immense bundle, like a baby, of pungent green herb. On a dais nearby, Mutabaruka, the deejay from Irie FM, wore his own robes to describe how in the 1760s the veterans of Jamaica’s Maroons journeyed to Haiti and played crucial roles there in fomenting history’s only slave revolution. Here, in their thousands, was a great convention of the Rastafari of Jamaica. Actual followers of this faith still amount to only a fraction of the number of Jamaica’s Adventists or Baptists. But the Rastas’ particular riff on Christian scripture, and the charismatic reggae-star apostles who’ve embraced it, has played an outsized role in shaping Jamaica’s external image and internal culture. And here, by the resting place of one of their great apostles, the sisdren and bredren had come to praise their lord, Jah.
The roots of Rasta, like many strains of Jamaican culture, came from its makers’ imaginative interpretation of mediated images from abroad. In Jazz Age Harlem, Marcus Garvey founded and built the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His stirring rhetoric—“Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad,” he said—attracted many admirers on his home island. A few of these, watching a newsreel in Kingston’s Carib Theatre in 1930, saw footage of a black king being crowned Ethiopia’s new emperor, amid nuff pomp and pageantry. They grew convinced that one of his prophecies had come true. “Look to the east,” Garvey was supposed to have said, “for the crowning of an African king.”4 Developing an elaborate eschatology built from the King James Bible, the Rastafari (named for Haile Selassie’s Amharic honorific, Ras—Prince—Tafari) espoused the smoking of ganja as a sacrament (“He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man,” Psalms 104:14), and eschewed the eating of meat and the cutting of hair (“They shall not make baldness upon their head,” Leviticus 21:5). For most of the next few decades, they remained an obscure, if visible, feature of Jamaican life. And then, in April 1966, Selassie visited the island.
Among the thousands driven that day to worship Selassie as a living god were Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. Marley, having joined his mother in Delaware to “work some money” as a custodian and assembly-line worker at a Chrysler plant there for some months, wasn’t present. But he received a letter from his sweetie Rita, back home, about how when the emperor waved to her from his motorcade, she’d glimpsed Christ’s stigmata on his palm. All three, upon Bob’s return, stopped cutting their hair and began spending much of their time at the Trench Town yard of Mortimo Planno, the prominent Rasta who had hosted Selassie on behalf of Jamaica’s government. Whatever their personal reasons for embracing the faith, Rastafari gave the Wailers a liturgical language that, in an era of Black Power and African freedom struggles, bespoke connections among black people everywhere. Their success in setting those links to music made them stars—and forced Jamaican leaders like Michael Manley, in the 1970s, to embrace a sect whose adepts his father’s generation had suppressed. In 1962, military police raided a Rasta camp in the hills over Montego Bay, beating and jailing its inhabitants—a few were killed—to signal the new state’s determination that these unkempt cultists weren’t welcome. A decade later, as that nation’s dreadlocked singers won fame at home and abroad, this changed. Michael Manley traveled to Ethiopia and returned with a long staff he called the “rod of correction.” He played hard to the Rastas, who called him “Joshua,” even advocating for laws allowing the Rastas their sacred herb. His government’s main patrons in Washington, at the IMF and in the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue, put the kibosh on that. But this history may help gloss the reply supplied by the woman in burlap robes, there at Peter Tosh Day, when I asked her, as she cradled her weed amid the reggae filling the air around Tosh’s tomb, why she wasn’t concerned about the police outside. She looked at me hard. “Di music mek it legal.”
In the decades since Rasta gained something like mainstream tolerance, if not full acceptance, in Jamaica, its faithful have weathered many crises, including the dawning realization on the part of many that their “immortal” god was an earthly despot unrevered by his subjects. More challenging still was the fact that, a mortal man, and a frail old one at that, he up and died in 1975. Had the latter event occurred before reggae’s greats “went Rasta,” one wonders if Rasta would have survived. But luckily for the faithful, and Selassie’s memory, those greats were already selling millions of records in 1975, when Marley wrote his response to his Jah’s demise: “Jah no Dead.” By the time Selassie passed, the cult he’d inspired had spawned singing saints with prophecies of their own. And infelicities of earthly history aside, “the larger point of Rasta,” a musician friend told me in Kingston, was that “we needed to connect some dots—between now and our past, between here and Africa.” Which, no matter the squiggly lines it used, was true. And there in Belmont, it was plain that Rasta was still furnishing a usable language and worldview for poor people seeking ways to grasp the larger history that made them poor, and to reject the larger “Babylon system”—the entire white capitalist West—that keeps them that way. And it still offered ways and means, with the help of excellent vibes and ital goods, to live outside Babylon’s walls.
Beneath the breadfruit and mango trees in old Tosh’s yard, vendors peddled some of these. In front of ital food stalls, they hawked low-salt corn porridge and green callaloo. A juice stall’s bottles were tagged with aphrodisiac names like “Mannish Wata” and “Front-End-Lifter,” and bore ingredient lists rich in Irish moss, ginger, and ra-moon bark. Next door, the turbaned proprietor of I-Nation Books and Necessities stood over tables stacked with not a few of the titles one sees lining the racks of “black book” peddlers on 125th Street in Harlem. Perusing a comic-book biography of Marcus Garvey and another of Nanny of the Maroons, I passed over Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery and Elijah Muhammad’s Fall of America. Eschewing a few others pertaining to numerology and Candle Burning Magic, I picked up a volume called Olympic DNA: Birth of the Fastest Humans. Its cover was done in the colors of the Jamaican flag. Its argument, I found when I read it, posited that all of Jamaica’s world-class sprinters, for a complex mash of reasons pertaining to chromosomes and history, owed their gifts to the runaway Maroons whose resistance to slavery, and physical feats in Jamaica’s jungle, helped their progeny develop insuperable speed—and become the modern-day heroes of people like the man dressed in flowing golden robes who stopped me as I walked by with my purchase to point at “Usain!” on its cover.
I inspected the ital “jewels” the man in gold robes was peddling, and complimented the tray of necklaces he’d laid on a cloth on the ground. They were made from dried bits of carrot and mango, accented with fish skin, and covered with clear rosin. His golden robes, he told me, signaled “uplifment, yuh know.” His name was Rasta Shaw, and he had come here from Sav-la-Mar, just up the coast, “where di slave ships come,” because “Peter a revolutionary. Seen?” Seen. “Him stand up for equal rights. Equal rights . . . and justice.” He sang the last words, as Peter did in a famous song whose chorus continued where Marley had left off in “Get Up, Stand Up.” Tosh demanded not just equal rights now, but redress for past wrongs as well. This may have been what distinguished Tosh, most of all, to his admirers here. The flyer Rasta Shaw handed me agreed. “Commemoration Coral Gardens,” it read, in gold ink. “Atrocity Against Rastafari.” Coral Gardens is the name of the old Rasta camp by Montego Bay that was devastated by the “Bad Friday” massacre in 1962. In a couple of weeks, many of those gathered here would reconvene for “cultural presentations, drumming,” and a stage show featuring a pair of performers called Mackie Conscious and Ranking Punkin. On the flyer, an outline of the African continent was overlaid with a slogan that was also a statement of faith. “Victory of Good Over Evil,” it said.
I took the flyer from Rasta Shaw’s hand, with thanks, and moved on.
Down by the stage, a few dozen Rastas sang and drummed along with one of Peter’s sons. Dressed in camo pants and a black T-shirt printed with the block-lettered phrase “BABYLON CAN’T WIN,” he mouthed his dad’s songs into a mic. At the yard’s other end, I approached a small house on whose porch a stooped old woman sat. She was dressed in a high-necked gray blouse and an ankle-length skirt. I mounted her porch’s stairs to pay respects. This was Mrs. Coke: Peter’s mum. Her unseeing eyes were mostly shut; whiskers ringed her chin. I told her how pleased I was to meet her, touching her hand, and she smiled gently. I asked her how it felt to welcome all these thousands of people to her yard, to honor her son. “Bless,” she nodded. “Joy.” Which seemed about right for a ninetysomething woman. As I took my leave, I pressed a small bill into her palm, as seemed to be the custom here, and turned to greet a man, standing on the porch nearby, whom I’d noticed before.
He wasn’t the only other white person here. Ganja Man, naturally, was also on the scene. He was everywhere. He’d spent much of the afternoon on the dais with Irie FM’s deejay, reasoning with passion on air about the ital importance of ensuring balance in your endocannabinoid system. There were also a few aging bohemians, led by the ex-wife of the novelist Russell Banks, who kept winter homes in the area and whom I recognized from meeting at a restaurant down the way. This fellow, though, was different. He was youngish, but with a proprietary air. He had the shabby-chic facial hair and skinny stylish girlfriend of an LA hipster. James Baldwin wrote, “One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party . . . cannot but wonder how the other got there.”5 The same, but different, could have been said about us. But this man’s alibi, and larger hustle, became clear when I shook his hand. He was the person now in charge of Tosh’s estate. It was his dollars, rather than Peter’s mum’s, that were underwriting this free celebration of a figure whose brand’s star, he was convinced, could rise even higher than Bob’s. He’d worked closely with the family since winning the estate manager’s role a couple of years before, to get a new “Peter biopic” off the ground, and, more generally, to leverage the departed’s memory, and tunes, for good and for cash. “The Beatles had McCartney and Lennon,” said Mr. LA. “But one of them—Lennon—will always feel cooler. Peter is that. Marley is McCartney; Peter is John. That’s what we want to do.” I wished him luck.
I wasn’t sure if Tosh’s avowedly black act, and message, had the same crossover potential twenty years after his death as the mixed-race Obama-ite figure his old friend Bob became. But at this party, where, Peter’s estate manager told me, everyone was performing for free, the reverence accorded “the Toughest” by the sisdren and bredren singing his songs, anyway, was clear. For them, the question of how the great Peter Tosh could be sold to kids in Peoria was as irrelevant as Babylon’s impertinent queries about their god’s end. And up onstage, the Rastas were pounding their drums, dozens strong, with open palms. The elders waved their flags in time, and then parted behind them to allow a new party to come to the fore.
A diminutive figure, stepping from between two bearded drummers, shuffled onstage. He was spectacularly attired. He wore a mock policeman’s outfit, made of pink cloth, topped off by a matching pink sailor cap with gold and green piping. Down his back, a single cord of braided dreadlocks hung, reaching nearly to his knees. It was the last of the Wailers. Bunny. In a pink sailor cap and all. Burdened with the weight of being both the least charismatic and the least successful of Jamaican culture’s holiest trinity, Bunny is also the only Wailer not to have been martyred before middle age. When he left the group, he took their name as compensation: he has gone, for forty years, by “Bunny Wailer.” He is a tricky figure. Given to reclusive paranoia and mad pronouncements, he is a man more warily respected, even among his fellow Rastas, than actively loved. But on this day, his pro bono appearance at what felt like a family reunion shook with meaning. Bunny embraced Peter’s son, in his black T. Taking the mic in hand, he extended a pink-sleeved arm.
“Get up, stand up!” The elders beat their drums, good and slow. Bunny growled. “Stand up for your rights.” The song is known as Marley’s, but it was one of the last songs the original Wailers recorded together—and its most searing verse, as all Jamaicans know, and as Bunny sang, loud and strong, by its author’s grave, was penned by Peter Tosh.
We’re sick and tired of your ism-schism game
Dyin’ ’n’ goin’ to heaven in-a Jesus name, Lord
We know when we understand
Almighty God is a living man
The last living Wailer, his sailor hat bobbing in the fading light, conducted his flock.
You can fool some people sometimes
But you can’t fool all the people all the time
We all sang along.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?)
We gon’ stand up for our rights!
As the sun dipped into the waves, I piled back into the rental car with Ganja Man and pair of new Rasta pals who I watched flick their half-smoked spliffs into the sea. The music might have legalized the herb for the afternoon, but not now. “Too much Babylon on di road.” We pulled out into traffic. And then, after pausing in Sav-la-Mar, where old Tosh’s forebears were unloaded as slaves and our friends took a pee break by a seawall scrawled with the phrase “Don’t Piss Yah,” we hopped back in the car and rolled on toward Jamaica’s western tip.
* * *
ONCE, WESTMORELAND WAS BEST known for the slave ports where Africans were delivered to this island where the roots of badness, as every hack reggae writer and historian parrots, reach back centuries. Now another species of arrivant crowds the once teeny town at Westmoreland’s end, providing the parish with its dodgy lifeblood. As recently as the 1970s, Negril was reachable only by dirt track. The tourist mecca’s famed “seven-mile beach” was inhabited by a few fishermen and a growing colony of counterculture types from the capital, who came to live out their own “Countryman” fantasies or join the area’s main industry at the time. Negril and Orange Hill, in the bush nearby, were famous for their weed. In those days, before the United States’ own production of the plant had become a cash crop to rival corn, smugglers used grassy airstrips out past the coral cliffs north of town to toss loaded duffel bags into prop planes bound for Florida. Such was Negril’s outlaw air, in that era before electricity reached the beach, that those days’ veterans are full of stories about how Babylon’s soldiers turned up, more than once, to arrest their friends and sack tent cities lousy with Castro-ite Rastas, the authorities claimed, and commie plots. In the 1980s, all that changed. That was when the developers moved in, along a new road from Mo’ Bay they paved for the purpose, to exploit Negril’s super sunsets for themselves. Among them was Butch Stewart, a white Jamaican who began his career as an air-conditioning magnate before switching industries to invent such crucial tourism technologies, at his resorts, as couples-only guest policies and swim-up bars. Stewart built an outpost of his Sandals chain here in 1988. Since it opened, Negril’s famous beach has been so built up that scarcely an inch of its west-facing shore, for five miles on either side of its teeny town center, isn’t filled with resorts, ranging from Stewart’s old Sandals to Hedonism II, a clothing-optional “sandbox for your inner child,” its website says, “where the word ‘no’ is seldom heard.”
For the sun-starved honeymooners and others who come here for three to eight days of all-inclusive fun, the smooth road down from the Montego Bay airport, traversed by courtesy shuttle or chauffeured SUV, proffers few visions of “the real Jamaica.” Approaching Westmoreland’s tourist hub from the south, however, reveals more typical Jamaican byways, riddled with potholes, on which the first rule of Third World Driving is strictly observed: If there’s a car in front of you, you pass it. Whether the fatalism feeding that rule is a simple epi-phenomenon of poverty or comes from some deeper historical well, it’s hard to say. But either way, and especially when careening around a tight corner or crossing a one-lane bridge at night, it can lead to some close calls, and, naturally, to tale telling about times when the close calls didn’t work out. Times like the night, on the road past Sav-la-Mar, when Ganja Man said he happened on the aftermath of an awful accident that had taken the arm of a car’s driver—and then watched a couple of bystanders, before the police turned up, run out to lift a gold watch off that severed limb. Or the time, after an evening church service like one of the many we passed on that road, when another of our party watched some addled motorcyclist, for reasons unknown, barrel into the crowd outside, killing four—and then ending up, after someone walked over to where the motorcyclist lay and hurled rocks at his head, “getting dead” himself. (The next day’s newspaper, like the police report, read, “The driver died at the scene.”) Such were the stories filling our car as it passed dusky hillsides dotted with the half-done houses that émigré Jamaicans build in piecemeal fashion by sending a bit of money back each year. With bits of rebar sticking skyward from their flat roofs, these homes awaited second stories that may or may not ever be completed by owners who, after thirty-two or forty years working in Brooklyn or Brixton, may or may not come to retire on their native isle. Jamaica was known in slavery days as a place synonymous with death, and the name that a leading historian of that era gave it—“the Reaper’s Garden”—may still fit.6
If the ghosts of colonial violence are never far away here, they’ve certainly found a home in the other trade, alongside tourism, that makes Negril go. At huge all-inclusive resorts owned by Spanish and other foreign conglomerates on the island’s north shore, the assumption is that guests will spend their three to eight days lounging behind their hotels’ barbed wire walls, that they’ll not glimpse a Jamaican beyond the ones pouring their drinks or cutting the grass. On the white sands fronting Hedonism II in Negril, by contrast, part of the allure likely derives from the prospect of closer contact. There’s a reason why Terry McMillan, the American author of bougie-black-women’s fantasy par excellence, set How Stella Got Her Groove Back in Negril. There’s also much to be gleaned from the real-life truth that the man on whom McMillan based the book, a gorgeous green-eyed Jamaican she met while vacationing here and then brought home to wed, later divorced her. Her fantasy man, when not performing for a green card, was rather more into romancing fellow young men than women twice his age.
For a man walking down the beach here, any innocent query for Wi-Fi or directions can win a reply proffering something else: “Nice girls!” The dreads peddling shell bracelets or Red Stripes say, “Yuh need nice girls? Nice and clean.” If you’re sitting in a nearby beach bar to use the internet, the hustling women aren’t shy. “I need to get back to Bog Walk,” says a buxom young woman with sad eyes. “You sure you don’ wan a massage?” The attention from local males toward foreign women is even more overt. The swimsuited youths playing football in the sand, all bouncing pecs and sidelong glances, always keep an eye on passing quarries. They’re players in an elaborate pantomime in which tourists and natives both play their part, their “yah mon”s and “no problem”s sounding less like their countrymen’s and more like those spouted by vacationing white boys in dreadlock wigs. But on this beach where “rent-a-dreads” flourish, so does the trade in the ra-moon bark and ginger juices meant to fortify the “big bamboo.” I stopped by a shop advertising “shot glasses, T-shirts, sunglasses,” and, less predictably, “Bob Marley.” Inside, the man himself wasn’t for sale. Nor was the stuff for which his name was code in tourist Jamaican. (“Bob Marley!” the weed sellers crow. “You need some Bob Marley?”) The place’s shelves were stocked with the typical panoply of Marley T-shirts and Jamaican-flag towels. But against a back wall stood a wooden statue, four feet high, that made a rather succinct point about another aspect of Bob’s memory and the crucial aid it’s been to the many thousands of Jesus-haired men it has helped get laid. A smiling fetish fashioned from dark brown wood, the figure had ropy hair hanging to his shoulders. He was a wild-eyed all-purpose “ethnic.” He had sculpted muscles and, protruding from his middle, an immense erect cock.
Subtle, Negril isn’t. There’s something to be said, though, for the place’s way of stripping culture’s transactional uses, and the tourist trade’s full-contact aspect, down to the essence. Sipping a Red Stripe at Alfred’s, one of Negril’s seedier beach bar/guesthouses, one wins a new sense of what the wag who wrote a book on Las Vegas called The Last Honest Place in America may have meant. There is, at least, a certain clarity of motive emitting from the characters plying this VD-breeding dish, from the rent-a-dreads and sex tourists to the hustling taxi men and working girls who convene each Friday night at a Canadian-owned hotel, the Seastar Inn, where a local troupe of dancers perform for hotel guests and debauched local expats who know it’s the best show in town. The Seastar Dancers worked out a mélange of West African moves and beat their djembes with expert force, leaping and spinning in loincloths for the only people—horny foreigners—who’ll pay to see them. After the show, I complimented one of the dancers and asked her how, as a performer plainly devoted to her craft, she felt toward her gig here. “Dancing is my passion,” she said. “And here, I get paid to dance.”
The built-in tension between art making and the often tetchy exigencies for artists of earning a living is hardly unique to Jamaica. But that tension perhaps finds extra force here, as in other places where performing for tourists is one of the few reliable ways musicians and others have ever had to make a living. The homegrown record industry, now such a symbol of the Jamaica brand, began the same way. The first musicians to be recorded for sale here, by island impresarios, were the mento and jazz men who made their living playing by the pool at the Myrtle Bank in Kingston or Mo’ Bay’s Half Moon Hotel. Years before Bob Marley strode into Chris Blackwell’s London office, the latter had captured the tinkly stylings of a Bahamian piano player named Laurel Aitken, who spent three months each winter playing at the Half Moon. From that first effort, Blackwell grew Island Records—whose roster eventually included Nick Drake, Roxy Music, and U2—into “music’s greatest independent label.” What he understood about Marley’s rebel allure—“He looked like the real character from The Harder They Come,” Blackwell recalled—was both rooted in Jamaican culture and always crucial to his genius for pop. Since selling Island for $300 million in 1989, Jamaica’s greatest entrepreneur has dabbled in producing films and distilling rum (his Blackwell’s brand of tipple is delicious). But it makes a kind of sense, given where he began, that now he pours the bulk of his energy into building Brand Jamaica’s other key industry: tourism.
Among the properties Blackwell owns with his company, Island Outpost, are Strawberry Hill, a Georgian-style retreat high over Kingston, and the Caves hotel, in Negril, a Tolkienesque warren built into Negril’s coral cliffs by some of his old hippie friends who escaped here in the ’70s. But Blackwell’s greatest passion, and general home base, is the place he’s developing on a property he’s known even longer. In the quiet village of Oracabessa and near the old banana port of Port Antonio, that property—GoldenEye—was named by its first owner: Ian Fleming. When Patrick Leigh Fermor visited the elegant clifftop home Fleming built there, he dubbed it a “model for new homes in the tropics.” This is where the famed spy novelist wrote all fourteen of his novels about that suave agent for the MI6, James Bond, whose name he borrowed from the author of a 1936 guidebook, Birds of the West Indies. Blackwell’s mother, the noted island socialite Blanche Lindo, belonged to an old Portuguese Jewish family whose forebears came to Jamaica in the seventeenth century to make their fortune, during the era of slavery, in sugar and rum. Blanche was a close friend of both Fleming’s and Noël Coward’s. It was from her family’s old lands that Blanche carved out a plot for Coward to build his famous Jamaican retreat, Firefly, and it was Blanche, too, who found Fleming the splendid sea frontage on which he built GoldenEye.
* * *
I FOUND BLACKWELL on his teak deck by the lush green lagoon. There down below the original Fleming villa, I watched a pair of resort guests paddle up, mistaking their host’s stoop for a bar, and ask for a beer. “Some people did that earlier,” Blackwell chuckled. “I just gave them a drink, and off they swam.” Dressed in his daily uniform of bright T-shirt and shorts, he looked years younger than seventy-six; he could as easily have been GoldenEye’s well-sunned barkeep as its boss. His delight in his guests’ occasional error was grounded in something important to him. Forging a relaxed vibe is as crucial to resort making, in his eyes, as it was in making records. During his thirty years running Island Records, he said, “we never tried to appeal to the majority. You don’t want the 80 percent. You want the 20 percent who get what you’re going for. That’s all you need.”
He should know. These days, though, the great tastemaker had largely moved from promoting pop stars to touting a place. Intent on marketing the island where he grew up, Island Outpost’s hotels are “like artists on a label,” Blackwell told me over tall glasses of coconut water. “Each with its own feel.” All of them, though, were meant to serve a larger passion. Chris Blackwell, the man once responsible for bringing Jamaican music to the world, was now driven to bring the world to Jamaica. “Jamaica isn’t a country that can manufacture plastic chairs, you know, and compete with anyone,” he explained. “But what it has . . . it’s such a beautiful country, with incredible people—funny, smart. And it has its own soundtrack!” His eyes shone. “A country with its own frigging soundtrack! Imagine that.” Blackwell’s first experience with that soundtrack came in childhood. “I was a sickly boy,” he said, smiling at a housekeeper as she refilled his glass, “so I spent a lot of time inside, with the staff—I got to know them, what they liked.” His first job in the record business, as a teen, required him to ride a motorbike around the island’s countryside to change out the records in its rum bars’ jukeboxes. As a location scout on the first James Bond film, in 1962, Blackwell found the beach where Ursula Andress, dripping in her bikini-and-dagger suit in Dr. No, became a star. But it was in England that he made his mark.
“When we won independence in 1962,” Blackwell said, “I didn’t really know what I could do for Jamaica as a white person. I thought I could contribute more in England.” So he went. Having founded Island Records in 1959 to distribute Jamaica’s music among its emigrants abroad, Blackwell now delivered his wares from the boot of his Mini Cooper to West Indian shops from London to Birmingham. And then he decided, with trademark foresight, that one of those records could win white kids’ acclaim, too. In 1964 he arranged to have thousands of copies of a chirpy tune by a sixteen-year-old girl from near Montego Bay, Millie Small, pressed onto 45s. Millie’s cover of “My Boy Lollipop,” an obscure R&B record from the 1950s, didn’t just become the first Jamaican single to reach number one in the UK; worldwide, it sold six million copies. Blackwell accompanied his young charge to all the hot parties and broadcasts. He got to meet all the players and promoters, too. “Pretty quickly,” he said, “you go from being one in ten thousand to being one in a hundred.” Island Records, leveraging its owner’s new ties and energy, became home to Cat Stevens and Traffic in the late ’60s, before it broke Marley’s reggae to the world in the ’70s. Later that decade, Blackwell glimpsed a photo of a young model with an androgynous style in a magazine and exclaimed, “We need to make a record that sounds like that.” A fellow Jamaican who’d grown up in Spanish Town before making her way to New York, Grace Jones was quickly signed. Jones’s records with Blackwell, once he became her producer, included the enduring post-disco classics Nightclubbing and Living My Life.
In the meantime, Blackwell had helped Marley buy Fleming’s sea-front home—before Marley then pronounced GoldenEye “too posh,” and signed it back over to his producer. Blackwell seems to have agreed with his friend: beyond loaning the place to assorted Rolling Stones and other pals in need of a spot to dry out or write (a gold record hanging there, signed by Sting, says “‘Every Breath You Take’—written at GoldenEye”), he didn’t really know what to do with it—until he decided, in the 1990s, to turn the house into a plush vacation rental. Blackwell added a few more tasteful villas to the grounds, and his GoldenEye resort was born—and with it, his ongoing effort to revolutionize Jamaican tourism.
For Blackwell, the “all-inclusive” model that’s guided most efforts to sell Jamaica’s sun and sand, since the 1960s, is anathema. “These massive hotels who warn you, ‘Don’t go outside,’ with their food precut and pre-portioned, flown in from Florida—they’re killing the country.” His aims were different. “We encourage people to go out and about—to meet locals, to meet the producers. Because I’m convinced that that’s what makes long-term business sense, for us—and for Jamaica to thrive.” And it was here at GoldenEye, and in the neighboring village of Oracabessa, where he was focusing his efforts. After striding across a new suspension footbridge over the lagoon, we plodded down a white sand beach lined with tasteful cottages, toward where Blackwell, on a promontory the government built to make a new port here, was planning to expand GoldenEye further. He gestured over the bay, and toward St. Mary’s hills beyond. “When I was a boy, I used to watch the banana boats anchor here.” Those boats’ workers, loading the boats by night, wished for the daylight that would let them go home. “Day-o!” they cried, giving Harry Belafonte the inspiration for what became, when he released his Calypso LP in 1956, history’s first million-selling LP—and launched a career that inspired Blackwell’s own. It was the title of Belafonte’s 1957 film, Island in the Sun, based on Alec Waugh’s novel, that inspired the name of Island Records. “That’s where it started,” Blackwell murmured in the breeze. “And now, there are three musics that you hear everywhere in the world. American, English, and . . . Jamaican.” We arrived to an open-air restaurant whose decor featured collaged photos of Blackwell’s musician pals, and sat down to lunch.
Since the completion of the first of Blackwell’s planned expansions, a couple of years before, GoldenEye had won raves in luxury travel rags for its easy elegance. It wasn’t hard to see why, as I admired the callaloo and pepper that came from Pantrepant, Blackwell’s own organic farm. Across from me at the table sat a striking black woman, laughing in her big red hat. It took a few beats to realize she was the selfsame “Grace” whose image hung nearby. In the early ’90s, Grace Jones introduced Blackwell to his wife, the designer Mary Vinson. (Vinson, whose fabrics and ideas are all around GoldenEye, died in 2004.) Jones had come home for vacation, as she often did, and to see her old friend. She nodded as Blackwell explained how Island Outpost had begun organizing farm-to-table meals and tours of Pantrepant. I wondered if patrons of this paradise would ever want to leave GoldenEye’s premises, having paid upward of US$1,000 a night to stay. But Blackwell was undeterred. He was convinced that “the 20 percent” of Jamaica’s visitors who both covet authenticity and can afford to pay are out there—and would further his goals. “I love the island, I love the people. That’s why I’m doing my work here,” he said. “And if I’m successful in what I’m trying to pull off, it will genuinely make a difference.” And then he excused himself to partake in an afternoon ritual he never forgoes. Minutes later, a poof of white hair bobbed past: a proud Jamaican on a Jet Ski, tracing a bit of the St. Mary’s coast he first fell in love with as a boy, and where, now, he was building his legacy.
* * *
FROM ST. MARY’S BANANA FIELDS to the famous statue in St. Thomas of the rebel preacher Bogle; from Westmoreland’s beaches, and weed, to the Karst convolutions of Trelawny’s “cockpit country” which sheltered the Maroons; from Portland’s Blue Lagoon to the arid shores of St. Elizabeth, from whence a pair of lovelorn slaves offed themselves, when they couldn’t wed, at a place called Lover’s Leap—each of Jamaica’s fourteen parishes, like America’s states or the countries of Spain, has its own identity and fame. The “garden parish” of St. Ann, comprised of fecund peaks tumbling down to the sea, was for most of its history best known for a stretch of coast called Discovery Bay: this is where Christopher Columbus brought history’s first whites, and his conquistador’s particular breed of badness, to Jamaica. In the past couple of decades, though, word has gotten out that the peaks above Disco Bay were also where, 450 years later, history’s most famous Jamaican was born, and where, 36 years after that, he was laid to rest in the little hillside hamlet of Nine Miles. St. Ann’s identity changed. Today the parish may as well be known as Bob Marley Parish. But as I learned the first time I visited Marley’s birthplace, by way of another hamlet a few hilltops over, St. Ann’s hills and quays have shaped not a few of Jamaica’s greatest modern exponents.
The village of Aboukir, St. Ann, was like many obscure outposts of the British Empire named for a famed battle long ago and far away—in the case of Aboukir, the site on Egypt’s Nile where Commodore Horatio Nelson routed Napoleon’s army in 1798. Not that this matters to the people of a hamlet whose denizens pronounce its name “Ah-boo-kah,” and who live in a place where the sight of a white man in shorts, to judge from the quizzical stares my presence earned from kids walking home from school, is pretty uncommon. In the town rum shop, I chatted with a few old-timers passing their afternoon in dominoes and booze, and soon found what I had come for—an aging cousin of Aboukir’s favorite son, Harry Belafonte. The singer’s Jamaican mother, emigrating from here to Harlem, found work there as a maid, but grew wary of the trouble her rambunctious son might find in the cold city’s streets. She sent him away, on one of the United Fruit Company boats the boy’s father worked on as a cook, for “safekeeping” in her own mum’s home. And so it was in St. Ann’s hills that Belafonte, who spent parts of each year with his grandmum here, absorbed the songs and stories to which he’d later turn, as a struggling young actor back in New York, to launch the new vocation—as a folk singer—that made him a star. His Calypso record of Caribbean folk tunes, released in 1956, didn’t merely become the first long-playing record to sell a million copies. It made Belafonte America’s “first black matinee idol,” and earned him the royalties he then used, over the next decade, to bankroll his friend Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement. Not bad for a kid from Aboukir. But it wasn’t surprising to his cousin, whose name was Norman and who shared Harry’s light brown skin (their grandmother, he said, was a Scotswoman) and with whom I chatted, fortified by bush rum, about all this and more. Norman dilated on his and Harry’s boyhood mango-throwing exploits, and also recounted, when I asked, how their uncle Callbeck had sold off their grandmother’s shack, “down by Old Bethany,” when he went to work for Kaiser Aluminum in St. Ann’s Bay—the town where I was going to end that day. Not, that afternoon, to pay respects to Uncle Callbeck, but because that sleepy port was the natal home of yet another massive figure—Marcus Garvey—in the modern history of black culture and politics.
Watching the sun set from the town’s ancient jetty, I pictured a young Garvey doing the same, before he emigrated to Harlem and from there spread his message to a global flock of followers that included Belafonte’s mother. “Garvey’s model was everything to us,” Belafonte told me back in New York, after I wrote him a letter about my time in Aboukir and we met at a seafood place on the Upper West Side. “That constant striving, for more than we were given.” As he sipped cranberry juice with his clams, the old singer’s voice was gravelly, his presence immense. He thought that this outlook, and its particular badness, was crucial to how he and his best friend, Sidney Poitier, won a sort of fame previously unthinkable to American blacks. “When me and Sidney were coming up, people took the way we carried ourselves as proud, imperial; they said we were special.” Belafonte laughed. “But that’s every fucking Jamaican I know! And a lot of them are a pain in the ass!”
That was one impact of Garvey’s rhetoric. Another was to furnish Bob Marley, born a few hilltops over, with the liturgical language to become his turbulent century’s greatest translator of history’s muse into the idiom of pop. Garvey, Belafonte, Marley. This out-of-the-way parish, on this poor little island, birthed not one but three totemic figures in the great twentieth-century story of black freedom. Astonishing, when you think about it—and even more so when you’re standing in the middle of St. Ann’s hardscrabble poverty. But then, this was Jamaica, where punching above one’s weight is a kind of national sport, and where, passing through Aboukir’s quiet, years after that first visit, I watched the uniformed school kids walk across their old field, now lined with a wavy-lined running track, on which they could train to become their island’s next gold-winning star. I wound through blue-green hills cross-cut by the ochre gashes of bauxite mines to find the town where Bob Marley, like the Age of Three Worlds he so shaped, was born in 1945.
* * *
HIDDEN IN THE HILLS above the larger market town of Brown’s Town, Nine Miles is a dusty hamlet as remote as it sounds. Its one main street winds past sloping plots, planted with dasheen and yams, that Marley’s maternal kin have tended for centuries. His mother, when he became her firstborn, was a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, dark-skinned and homely. His white father, employed as a surveyor of Crown Lands in the area, was the short outcast son of a prominent Kingston family. He was past sixty when he rode into Nine Miles on a white horse and chatted up young Ciddy, who soon thereafter bore Captain Marley’s son. Christening her little half-caste boy Nesta Robert, Ciddy raised him here; then, after she brought him to the capital when he was twelve, he finished the job himself. Rising from the Trench Town streets, where in his teens he earned the nickname Tuff Gong for his scrappy prowess as a fighter, he became a man so revered by the time he died that every mile of the winding road to Nine Miles was lined with mourners when his hearse passed. That route is still traversed by old lorries carrying bananas and sugarcane and by shared roto-taxis carrying kerchiefed country women, stuffed five across in rattly Toyotas’ backseats, heading home from town with their shopping. Now, though, these vehicles have been joined by white-paneled tourist buses which bump up the rough road from Ocho Rios and disgorge their sunburned cargo within the high-walled gates of the compound that’s been built up around Marley’s refurbished birth shack and the rather grander mausoleum, alongside, where he’s interred. Outside the walls, affected Rastas mill about, trying to sell visitors mix CDs and “Bob Marley weed!” Offput or scared by the poverty glimpsed through the bus windows, few of their prey experience much of Bob’s world beyond the disembodied voices or hands that, reaching through slats in the wall, proffer those CDs and herb. The tourists prefer patronizing the overpriced gift shop, strategically located between the parking lot and the bar, with its stuffed monkeys with dreads, Rasta-colored water shoes, with little sockets for your toes, and shelves full of all you might need—rolling papers, all kinds; a metal “herb grinder”; a six-inch “Marley’s mood” lighter—to craft a spliff to puff while kicking about the hacky-sack affixed with Bob’s face, also for sale here. Nine Miles can be a gnarly scene. Until, that is, you move beyond the several square feet of transactional nastiness around its one tourist trap to stroll through a place exuding the mellow air of little mountain towns everywhere.
Having had the fortune, this time, to arrive with a man who lawyered for Bob’s mom, and fought to win her wing of the family their piece of Bob’s posthumous pie, I listened to Ganja Man ring up “Bob’s brother Richard”—one of Ciddy’s other sons; he lived in Miami—to see about crashing in the family’s home by the mausoleum, which he managed “from foreign.” We rolled into town. Ganja Man lowered his window to greet one kindly local after another, identifying them all as “Bob’s cousin.” His phone rang. It was Richard: “It’s cool.” Sleeping spot sorted, I stepped from the car and walked down a main street lined with the familiar features of country life here. Outside the little Yah Suh Nice Store, a cheery higgler was selling “gunga rice and peas” in Styrofoam trays, “wit chunks if yuh like.” (“Chunks” are a soy-based meat substitute that some development scheme somehow worked into Jamaicans’ diet long ago.) Down farther, outside a crooked wooden house that sat just below the Marley mausoleum, a hand-painted sign advertised “Mount Zion Apostolic Ministries Incorporated.” Nearby, a rough concrete retaining wall was painted with a fresh mural, of a sort one sees all over Jamaica, showing a round-faced local potentate who’d recently passed. “In Memory of Karl ‘Busta’ Brown,” it said. “Our Father Our Hero Our Strength.” I poked my head into an open door by the wall that led onto a darkened barroom. Inside, a low stage was equipped with a metal stripper pole and decorated with a metal street sign. The sign said “Pimpin’ Ave.” I asked a young woman outside where we were. “Is Busta Brown place,” she explained. Whatever else the biggest local bad man was up to, this country go-go bar, it seemed, was among his holdings. She pointed behind the bar to a cement structure guarded by faux-Doric columns, likewise freshly painted, in saffron. This, she explained, was Busta Brown’s mausoleum. That Friday would be his “nine night”—the all-night ritual, rich with music and rum, by which Jamaicans mark their fellows’ passage from this plane to another. It was clear, from how she said it, that Busta’s nine night was a big deal.
The young woman outside the bar, with her big eyes set in a wide face over a button nose, bore more than a passing resemblance to the photos of a young Ciddy, Bob’s mother, that hang in her mausoleum. (She died here in 2008, after returning from Florida and opening a school in her old hometown.) Were they related? To some degree, probably. Omeriah Malcolm, Bob’s maternal granddad and a local grandee of his day, fathered dozens of kids. The kinship ties that bind this bit of St. Ann’s to itself, with Omeriah’s offspring still hoeing his lands, are hardly rare in rural Jamaica. What distinguishes Nine Miles, though, is that not a few of Marley’s darker cousins earn their living from his memory. This fact, it’s fair to say, doesn’t occur to most tourists who come here picturing their hero’s latte-colored face. But back at the compound, on old Omeriah’s land, which has been built up in Bob’s name, it is various of his cousins who work there as tour guides, and who prod visitors with their own theme song: “One love, one heart / Tip your tour guide, and feel alright!” They lead visitors up the hill to show them the little shack where Bob was born (his childhood bed is decorated with a marijuana-leaf flag reading “A Spliff a Day Keeps the Doctor Away”). They point to a rock outside that may or may not have inspired his verse, in “Talkin’ Blues,” about how “rock stone was my pillow too.” They take their charges through the handsome marble chapel where Bob is buried, right next to the newer one where his mother is. By day, this Temple Mount felt overrun. But that night, after the cruise shippers cleared out and the compound’s high gates were locked, I accompanied Ganja Man up the path to the mausoleum that he called “Zion,” to a nodding night watchman called Chicken, to “smoke with Bob.”
There in the chapel, around a marble plinth two tombs high, lay the offerings of pilgrims from the four corners: a charcoal drawing of Malcolm X; a small Canadian flag on a wooden dowel; a book emblazoned with Marley’s face and the title, in what looked like Serbo-Croatian, “Boba Marlija.” From the road below, the plaintive sounds of singing people drifted up: the congregants of Zion Apostolic Ministries Incorporated were praising Jesus. On one of the chapel’s walls, a large black-and-white photo showed Mother Booker smiling and hugging a handsome young man who shared her smile. This was another of her sons—a bodybuilder in Miami named Anthony, who, like her firstborn, died too young. Ciddy had ordained that he be interred here, with Bob: it was Anthony, rather than the woman for whom the tomb’s second berth was first built—Rita Marley—who lay next ot Bob in the two-slot tomb. The presence of the matriarch’s less-famous son here, though, wasn’t the only bit of intrigue surrounding the tomb—nor, Ganja Man revealed, did Anthony’s quiet interment mark the tomb’s last opening. Puffing his spliff, my companion looked over as the hymns floated up from below. “You know they cut him out,” he said through the haze. “Bongo Joe—he took Bob out; put him back again.”
There was only one thing, the next morning, to do. Find Bongo Joe. We found Bongo Joe sitting on the porch of a sturdy split-level ranch house on the edge of Brown’s Town. Out front, a few of his bredren sat by a fire, roasting bits of the breadfruit they helped him farm in the backyard. Bongo Joe waved hello. He was a wiry little Rasta man with smiling eyes and his locks tucked into a knitted tam. He showed me into a home whose rooms were furnished with a few mattresses on the floor, an old antique globe, and an old unplugged refrigerator being used, with its doors open and absent of “current” to cool its shelves, for simple storage.
“Give thanks.” Our host offered the traditional Rasta greeting. He bid me sit on a bag of fertilizer. I asked him his name. “My name Bongo.” He paused. “My other name—my Babylon name—it’s Gilbert Powell.” He chuckled gently. And then he told me his tale.
Born here in Brown’s Town, he had adopted Jah as lord in the late 1960s and taken his nom de Rasta around the same time he “met a lady, yuh know, from up in the hills.” Said lady was from Nine Miles. It was in renting a house there, from Bob Marley’s aunt, that he got to know the local kid who always made time, Bongo Joe said, to drive his Land Rover up from town and, tending to one of the family plots, to fill his jeep with “plenty punkin and yam.” Bongo Joe was a trusted fellow Rasta in the rural homeplace where Marley returned, even after growing world famous, “when him want to relax hisself.” The men became close. And when the end came, Bongo Joe was there. The hearse that carried the Gong up from the capital, he said, had broken down around the town of Ewarton; Bob’s bredren, following in one of the departed’s trucks, slid his coffin from one carrier into the next. They continued into St. Ann’s and, once they reached Nine Miles, slid the box containing Bob’s battered body and his Gibson guitar out of the pickup’s bed and into his marble tomb—without remembering, some said later, to turn the coffin around again. No one knew for sure. But the prospect that “Bob went in wrong way” set the stage for the secret drama in which Bongo Joe, who worked with the Marley family and served as a tour guide at Zion for years, played his indispensable role.
“We always tell people,” he recalled, “that Bob Marley head face east, face the star.” The heads of the dead, in Jamaica, must face the rising sun. Tombs on the island, no matter their context, are angled that way. It matters. “But we never sure,” Bongo continued. “And then Bob mother and him lawyer start having dreams. Having dreams that Bob not happy in him tomb.”
“They thought he was faced the wrong way?”
“Yeah mon. And so one day, Bob brother Richard, he say, Bongo! Come up here.” Up by the tomb, Bongo found Bob’s brother standing with their mother and a robed priest from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. “‘We need to get in there,’ Richard say. ‘We need help to dig Bob out. We need to turn him round.’” Bongo, there on his porch in Brown’s Town, lifted a pantomime hammer and chisel. “So I start to dig. Dig and dig and dig and dig. The whole of me face white up. Dust flying in me nose. I couldn’t leave it, cause they wanted me to do it. So I dig and dig.”
Back in Nine Miles that night, as the townspeople gathered by Busta Brown’s bar to toast the bad man’s life, I walked up the Temple Mount to Bob’s tomb once more. The praiseful sounds of Zion Apostolic Ministries floated up in the dark. I sat by the tomb’s western end, crouching by the little Canadian flag and a burning stick of incense. I moved aside a bit of the gauzy cloth hung over its end. I could see, through the haze, a wide seam of rough stone where someone had chiseled an opening and then, working in cement, covered it up again.
