Читать книгу Island People - Joshua Jelly-Schapiro - Страница 15

CHAPTER 3

REDEMPTION SONGS

“BADNESS! AND BAD MEN. Dat’s wha gwaan deh.” It’s certainly true in Nine Miles, where Busta Brown’s wake was the party of the year; it’s true all over Jamaica. But most of all, it’s true in the capital, where the forging of the Jamaican state corresponded with the building of a garrison complex whose construction, housing scheme by housing scheme and brick of coke by brick of weed, made the state Jamaicans know today: a twisting concatenation of overlapping interest and contested concern whose presiding logic and larger course are perhaps nowhere better distilled than in the story of the first garrison. That tale is inextricable, like Jamaica’s history as a sovereign nation, from the career of the politician who became known as the “bigges’ bad man of all.” Edward Seaga, the man who built Tivoli, and who used the garrison as a springboard to becoming Jamaica’s elected leader long before the gangster Dudus became its “first president,” was never one to let holding office stand in the way of wielding real power. Seaga never let his background or views—he was born to a prominent Syrian family from Kingston’s merchant class—prevent his winning its poor’s love. A pro-Washington right-winger who was born in Boston (his parents were there for school), he was long chided by supporters of his great rival, Michael Manley, with a tune touting their man’s native-born cred: “He was born here.” But the man PNPers called CIA-ga grew up in Kingston. Seaga attended Wolmer’s Boys School there before earning his BA at Harvard and returning home, in the mid-1950s, to settle—surprisingly, for a young man of his class—by downtown’s poor western edge. His career as a politician, even before he was one, began brilliantly.

Seaga worked as an ethnologist in the downtown slums of Denham Town and Back-o-Wall, becoming one of Jamaica’s leading scholars of black religion. He also became a record producer and promoter whose ties to downtown’s poor, and recordings of their songs, made him a crucial figure in building Jamaica’s music industry. When “independence time” came, Seaga became West Kingston’s first member of Jamaica’s parliament—and Jamaica’s first minister of development and welfare. Still in his early thirties, he was perhaps the only figure in Jamaica’s new government who could have pulled off convincing his constituents and friends in Back-o-Wall to abide the ministry’s bulldozing of their neighborhood. He oversaw the razing of the zinc-sheet and cardboard-walled shacks where they lived, and directed the building of the new community—Tivoli Gardens—into which these once-and-future supporters of his JLP, thrilled to join the era of cement walls and indoor plumbing, moved in 1965. Legend says the garrison’s walls were laid out with their ramparts aligned for armed defense. Whether or not that’s so, Tivoli soon became the potent base of its builder’s growing sway.

In Seaga’s early years downtown, his most crucial source of support came from the congregation of a Revivalist preacher named Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, a charismatic figure whose talents as an artist—Kapo was also a prolific sculptor and painter of folk-mystic scenes in an elemental style—made him one of Jamaica’s most noted artists. After Tivoli rose in Back-o-Wall’s place, Kapo remained a loyal Seaga ally and JLP Stalwart. But as the garrison system took shape, and with it the violent mores of a new island politics, Seaga’s patronage also began flowing to the top-ranking street toughs who rivaled such preachers’ power on the ground. By the early 1970s, area bad men like Claudie Massop commanded foot soldiers with names like “Tek Life” and “Ba Bye,” and were being furnished with arms by the parties whose garrisons they controlled. Men like Massop and his PNP-affiliated counterpart, Bucky Marshall, were responsible for overseeing the copious bloodletting that accompanied Jamaica’s elections in 1972 and ’76. It was also Massop and Marshall, though, whose mutual friendship with the most famed downtown tough—Bob Marley—helped them convince the singer to take part in the One Love Peace Concert.

That show, in 1978, which forms such a crucial part of the Gong’s legend, was Marley’s first appearance in his homeland in nearly two years. He had fled the island eighteen months before after an attempt on his life. His second and third records for Chris Blackwell had won him fame and money, and in early 1975, he’d bought Island House from Blackwell and moved himself, and his entourage, to Hope Road. In moving uptown, though, Marley didn’t so much leave the ghetto behind as bring it with him. And in December 1976, downtown came calling. One warm evening, Marley stood in his kitchen peeling a grapefruit. He was talking with his manager, Don Taylor, when a car turned off Hope Road and rolled through his gates. A pair of gunmen leapt from the car. They spotted their target through his open kitchen door and emptied their rounds in his direction, before then hopping back in the car and, screeching through Island House’s gate, tearing off toward downtown. Inside the kitchen, Don Taylor lay slumped in a corner. His lap was full of blood; he’d been shot in the groin. Rita Marley was unconscious, but alive; a bullet had struck her skull, but only grazed it. Her husband clutched his arm. He was lucky too. A shot that might have killed him had only glanced by his chest, lodging in his biceps. That night, Marley and Co.’s security whisked them up, by way of the hospital, to Chris Blackwell’s retreat on Strawberry Hill. A couple of days later the Gong insisted on performing, with his arm in a sling, at a show for peace called “Smile Jamaica,” the key template for the later One Love concert. He stepped down from the stage and straight into a car for the airport, then flew straight to the Bahamas, and from there to London, where he recorded the album—Exodus—that Time magazine later named the “Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century.”

Marley’s assailants, according to street wisdom if not the courts (no charges were ever filed in the attack), were “Labourite ta Ras”—hard-core JLP men. Marley was a savvy ghetto kid with close bredren from both sects: he always sought to project a public image of prophetic nonalliance—and to maintain juice, behind the scenes, with all parties. But after the PNP’s Michael Manley became prime minister, in 1972, that image grew harder to maintain. Manley allied himself, during his winning campaign, with the Rastas. This risky move proved prescient; in the 1970s, the faith’s icons and argot became the lingua franca of island culture. For Seaga’s JLP, a party nominally in thrall more to Christ and capitalism than to “social living” and reggae, this remained a problem throughout the decade (Manley was reelected twice). Perhaps it also convinced some of Seaga’s soldiers, if not the “Big Man hisself,” that offing the biggest Rasta of all might be a good idea. That offing didn’t work. But neither, sadly, did the One Love Peace Concert Marley came home to play in 1978. The show’s aftermath comprised a bloodier-than-ever election season during which both Bucky Marshall and Claudie Massop were slain. The peacemaking “shottas” heirs, now armed with M16s (guns provided them, if they were tied to the JLP, by the CIA), were responsible for some eight hundred deaths, during the campaign that saw Eddie Seaga installed in Jamaica House for the first time. Among those who abetted that win, in 1980, was a new don of Tivoli. That figure’s rise made him a hero for would-be bad men across Jamaica and heralded an era in which the garrisons, and their dons, would grow more powerful than the politicians who had made them.

The man they called “Jim Brown” was born Lester Coke in Denham Town and first won notice in his teens on the blocks he would rule as a soccer player.¹ The legend of his rise began one day when he was walking home from a kickabout. Jim Brown (who chose his sobriquet in homage to the American football star whose “bad strength and pride” he admired) was jumped by a gang of assailants, affiliation unknown, and found bloodied and dying in the street. His friends brought him to a new free health clinic in nearby Tivoli Gardens—whose doctors were installed by the area’s JLP member of parliament, Eddie Seaga. Jim Brown built his career and fearsome rep from there, at the side of JLP bad men like Claudie Massop. And then he gained control of Tivoli just as Seaga was helping, inadvertently or no, and in his first term as prime minister, to vastly increase the Jamaican underworld’s power and wealth. In the ’70s, Jamaica had earned its reputation as America’s great source for marijuana. In the supply chain that made this so, the best-armed and best-connected segment of Jamaica’s populace—its bad men—had naturally become big players. After Seaga took power in 1980, his own patrons in Washington, D.C., leaned on him to curtail the stream of ganja-fueled prop planes and boats departing Jamaica for Miami. His success at doing so, in the ’80s, had two effects above all. One was to help spur an explosion, still ongoing, in ganja production stateside. The other was to help push Jamaica’s gangsters toward a much more lucrative and dangerous replacement.

That replacement was cocaine. And among those who moved aggressively to make Jamaica a key node in the hemisphere’s trade was Jim Brown. Working with a close émigré associate named Vivian Blake, Jim Brown built an international cartel based in the Kingston garrison he now ruled. His syndicate network of smugglers and hit men reached from his Tivoli headquarters south to Colombia’s coca fields and north to Brooklyn and the Bronx, through Miami, Baltimore, Toronto, and Texas. His cartel was called the Shower Posse. It was perhaps named for a JLP slogan, but the gang’s tag also evoked its members’ predilection for showering their enemies with lead. In conjunction-cum-rivalry with the PNP-affiliated Spangler Posse, centered mere blocks from Tivoli in the adjoining burg of Matthews Lane, Jamaica’s cartels became the hemisphere’s only ones to rival the Colombians’ impact. They perhaps gained an even larger one: it was the Shower Posse’s Vivian Blake, who, while looking for more profitable ways to push cocaine, and foisting what he cooked up on poor addicts in the Bronx, is alleged to have invented crack.

Such activities on U.S. soil have a way of attracting federal heat. The FBI and the State Department both built huge dossiers on a ring allegedly responsible for more than two thousand murders by 1992, many of them grisly. Eventually, the investigation brought Jim Brown down. In 1991, he was imprisoned in Kingston’s castle-like General Penitentiary. But with U.S. agents waiting at the airport to extradite him to the States for indictment on a raft of charges, the cell of “don dadda” was engulfed in a mysterious fire. Jim Brown died in the fire at the age of sixty-four. Whether the flames were set by a don who preferred silence by suicide to being asked to squeal on his cronies or by cronies or enemies who feared that he would is still debated. But Brown’s funeral march saw Eddie Seaga lead thirty thousand mourners through Kingston’s streets. It was the sort of thing to keep conspiracy theorists talking for years. (Many naturally posit that since the autopsy photos of Jim Brown’s charred body have never been released, he’s still alive.) But it also set the stage for Jim Brown’s youngest son to take his place—and go further.

The man all Jamaicans learned to call “Dudus” was a short, pudgy youth of just twenty-one when his father died. Christopher Coke was not only the youngest of Jim Brown’s sons; he was also born to a woman who was not the don’s wife—hardly a rare story in context, but a certain handicap for his prospects. (The alleged source for his moniker was his favoring African-style shirts that were also worn by the ’70s-era Jamaican statesman Dudley Thompson.) During the weeks and months after Jim Brown’s death, not a few pretenders to his throne were subjected to a “Tivoli funeral,” their bullet-riddled bodies deposited in front of the Denham Town Police Station. During this interregnum, Dudus displayed deft cunning. Helped by the fact that Jim Brown’s eldest son, Jah T, had been murdered in mysterious circumstances days before his dad’s death, Dudus outmaneuvered his rivals to secure rising-don status. He ultimately won power, in an apt wrinkle on this incestuous isle, with the unwitting help of another son of a 1970s icon.

Bob Marley’s eldest son, Ziggy, is a singer who has enjoyed a modicum of success internationally—though not in Jamaica—that has often seemed to depend on his striking resemblance, especially as beheld by stoned reggae fans abroad, to his famed father. As a spoiled son of privilege, Ziggy grew up far from Bob’s home ghetto and its ways. In 1994, he endeavored to “give back” to Trench Town’s people by building a recording studio for local kids and seasoned pros who wanted to soak up the vibes of his father’s home slum near Tivoli’s edge. Unfortunately, he neglected to call the area’s new don to kick the construction contract his way. Maybe Ziggy was determined not to deal with the progeny of men who had tried to murder his father (Jim Brown was long rumored to have been one of Marley’s assailants in 1976), but in any case, this wouldn’t do, and it was Dudus’s swift campaign to show as much—a couple of Ziggy’s associates ended up prone in front of the Denham Town Police Station—that concretized his rule as the new don dadda. (It may be no accident that the only one of Marley’s offspring with much cred or popularity on the Jamaican street is Damian. “Junior Gong,” as he’s known, is the son of Cindy Breakespeare—Miss World 1976—who, after the Gong’s death, partnered with a prominent “garrison lawyer” who was intimately tied to the leaders of the Tivoli garrison, and made sure her son spent much of his youth downtown.)

Dudus was as unflamboyant as Jim Brown was flashy; “Short Man” (another nickname) was a study in wily discretion—and a keen businessman. He moved quickly to open a new construction firm. That outfit, Incomparable Enterprise, soon had a portfolio of rich public contracts from such agencies as Jamaica’s National Heritage Trust and the Ministry of Education. Its projects didn’t just include bread-and-butter local jobs like rebuilding Tivoli’s drainage gully; Dudus’s firm was also responsible for such prominent gigs as the long-delayed refurbishment of the Ward Theatre and the incredible boondoggle that is the Downtown Kingston Transport Centre. Completed not long before Dudus’s death in 2010, the center consists of a huge maze of concrete barriers and Plexiglas bus shelters. It’s sited right between downtown proper and Tivoli’s eastern edge, and was intended to be the main hub for buses and roto-taxis linking Kingston to its suburbs and beyond. Today, the completed complex sits empty: its smooth pavement is used much more for pickup soccer than transport, and is eschewed by Kingstonians, who still prefer to line up for buses and roto-taxis—as someone in power may or may not have known they would—where they always have: by Parade. With his wealth from these other less visible gangster trades, Dudus furnished financing for Tivoli’s young women to open beauty salons and other businesses; he bought their kids toys at Christmas; he provided the entire garrison—whose twenty-thousand-odd tenants have always lived there rent-free—with water and power. He also became the de facto don of Jamaican music. Through his production company, Presidential Click, Dudus promoted shows that launched the careers of dancehall stars like Vybz Kartel. He also underwrote Passa Passa, the street dance held each Wednesday right outside Tivoli’s gates, for a decade from the late ’90s, which made his garrison the twerking heart of Jamaica’s youth culture. Dudus, as the don dadda also responsible for organizing other JLP garrisons (and, as such, for what might be called get-out-the-vote efforts across the island), was also crucial to helping the first JLP government in a generation take power, in 2007, under the leadership of the new-sullied politico, Bruce Golding, who succeeded Seaga as both Tivoli’s MP and his party’s titular head.

All of which may help explain why, when the United States pressured Golding into detaining Dudus by force, in 2010, not a few Jamaicans were shocked that he agreed. Goldings party’s power derived from the gangsters it relied on for votes. The dons, whose sway in the ghetto far excelled the government’s, had long since usurped their makers. Could this JLP lifer, Golding, really invade his own constituency by force, to arrest its don? In the end, it seems that he had no choice: his government’s chief patron, and indispensable creditor in Washington, had decided that it was time to the haul the Shower Posse’s head to jail. The ensuing set-to pitted Jamaica’s military police against the don’s well-armed supporters, many of whom erected burning barricades and fired on their assailants from within Tivoli’s walls. When Golding’s soldiers shot back with bigger weapons and indiscriminate fire, the result was at least seventy-four civilians dead, and a country in chaos. (Two police officers also died in the violence.) Dudus was eventually captured, stopped at a roadblock in a disguise comprised of an old lady’s hat and glasses, but not before Kingston burned once more, and not without disgracing a prime minister who lost all credibility not merely in his brutalized constituency but across the country. Golding was ushered from power, and Tivoli Gardens, the garrison he had both represented and destroyed, was returned to the wizened hands of its creator. Edward Seaga, fifty years after creating Tivoli, and never having really relinquished it, became the garrison’s MP once more and the scars from this “incursion,” as I found hopping a cab downtown two years later, still linger large amid Kingston’s more general state of emergency.

I pointed, as we rolled down King Street from the Half Way Tree, at a hulking concrete building with blue trim. “That’s KPH, no?” My query to my cabbie was more about making conversation than confirming the identity of this place. We were passing Kingston Public Hospital, whose emergency room during the Tivoli incursion became a hellish blood den. His short reply, though, contained a memorable tale.

“Yes, sir,” murmured the cabbie, whose head, I noticed, was as large as his thick neck. “I was there.”

He reached across my lap to open the glove compartment, and pulled out a bit of folded paper. “Dem shot me,” he said softly. “Darkness.” He handed me the paper. It was a clipping from The Gleaner: “‘Fat Head’ Survives Head Wound,” read its headline.²

The story described how “the taxi driver Anthony Nicholson, also known as ‘Fat Head,’” had been jumped by three “youths,” who, after demanding money and ganja, had shot him in the head. It continued: “While Nicholson cannot remember the month or year, Nicholson is definite that he was shot between 4:30 and 5 pm.” Fat Head, as we rolled past KPH, confirmed the information to me.

“Have you thought of leaving the taxi business?” I asked.

“No sir.” Fat Head drove his cab six days a week—every day but Saturday. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, and Saturdays were reserved for Jesus.

We passed a church called Redeemer’s Moravian. Fat Head turned onto Marcus Garvey Drive, down by the sea, and stopped his cab. I stepped out.

“You take care,” he said. He smiled faintly as he pushed his hat back on his iron dome. “Bless.”

* * *

IT IS CLEAR EVERYWHERE one looks that little in Jamaica remains untouched by its two parties’ fractious rivalry. Along the waterfront, a hot wind blew off the sea to buffet the dusty palms and turn Kingston Harbour, as usual, into a choppy tub dotted with rusting freighters and no pleasure craft. I paused by an outsized bit of bronze that was, until recently, the island’s most famous bit of art. A blocky figure whose metallic brown head, with angular art deco lines, is thrown back to the sky, Negro Aroused was sculpted by Edna Manley, the artist wife of founding father Norman. She was inspired by the labor unrest in the 1930s that grew into Jamaica’s drive for independence—and lived to see her work erected outside the state institution where I was to meet my ride to an engagement in the nearby garrisons that make that state go. Jamaica’s National Gallery of Art is housed in a boxy 1950s-style hovel that began its life, before high-end retail left downtown, as a department store. The gallery boasts scores of impressive works by the likes of Isaac Mendes Belisario, whose depictions of the “John Canoe” dances of slavery days, and the colorful costuming associated therewith, have been invaluable to scholars connecting those traditions to today. Its permanent collection also contains two galleries, and two alone, dedicated to individual artists. One is devoted to Edna Manley, white-woman icon of bien-pensant PNP socialism. The other is filled with the “intuitive” paintings and sculpture of Kapo, the Pocomania preacher who, when not making art, delivered to Seaga’s JLP its first partisans among the “sufferahs.”

The parties’ animus, though modeled in the layout of the National Gallery, finds deadlier form in the built environs of the nearby blocks I was heading for. I had been invited to visit with a youth group in Trench Town run by one of the neighborhood’s most devoted servants. I stepped from the gallery to climb into the backseat of a white SUV. At the wheel was Nando Garcia, an expat Spanish filmmaker whose passion for Jamaican culture led him to make such useful movies as Why Do Jamaicans Run So Fast?, a winning vox-pop documentary, and Hit Me with Music, a portrait of dancehall culture’s vibrant state at Passa Passa’s height. In Garcia’s passenger seat sat his producer. Shirley Hanna was an elegant uptown lady whose main notoriety in Jamaican society, apart from this film work, came of her being the mother of Lisa Hanna, the last Jamaican Miss World and the current minister of youth and culture. Our driver, excited as a schoolboy, rolled off from the gallery toward the west.

Garcia guided his SUV up Matthews Lane, the longtime stronghold of Spangler Posse and its PNP thugs. He turned a corner by Coronation Market to pass higglers peddling green dasheen and gritty-sweet naseberries. The center of the JLP’s downtown cosmos rose into view. Tivoli’s cement walls, two years after the incursion, were still pocked with divots from its invaders’ bullets. On one gray-white wall was a green-tinted mural of a big U.S. dollar bill. The portrait at its center, in place of George Washington’s, was Jim Brown’s. We rolled past the Denham Town Police Station, and Garcia pointed to the spot on Spanish Town Road where Passa Passa once ruled, but no more. During the 2010 state of emergency, the government moved to enforce old “noise abatement laws”; two years later, they were still in force. We passed the huge May Pen Cemetery, where many of those slain in Dudus’s deposition now lay, and where a young Bob Marley and his friends, training themselves to “sing wid duppy,” rehearsed. Then we turned up Collie Smith Boulevard to enter the ghetto that the most famous Wailer made Jamaica’s best known.

“Trench Town! It’s an even stronger brand than Brand Jamaica.” That’s what our host, Junior Lincoln, exclaimed soon after we hopped out of Garcia’s car. We were standing in his neighborhood’s heart. An esteemed music impresario who got his start organizing dances here in his teens, Lincoln had light brown skin and a manner at once gentle and firm. He made his way from Jamaica to London in the 1960s and played a key role there, as a concert promoter and producer, in selling Trench Town’s music to the world. After thirty years abroad, he returned home, and now he was spending his dotage trying to “put Trench Town on the map.” He handed me an actual map. Its title was printed in bold red ink: “Musical Celebrities from Trench Town: To Di Root.” The map charted an area, to downtown’s west, cross-hatched with a ladder of streets numbered 1 through 7 and jutting off of Collie Smith. Trench Town was built in soggy lowlands uninhabited until World War II. It became a landing place for the rural poor who crowded the capital after the war’s end, among them little Nesta Robert Marley and Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh: each had a spot on Junior’s map. But this was also a borough, as the map showed in numbered red dots, which were clustered with astonishing density along these blocks, whose shanties nurtured the rise of assorted Heptones and Maytals, ska greats like Ernest Ranglin, and Alton Ellis, the rocksteady king. Kapo’s Zion Revival Chapel, on Junior’s map, sat around the corner from the 2nd Street yard where Marley hit puberty. The latter site is home now to the Trench Town Culture Yard, a would-be tourist destination where adventuresome pilgrims can come to take snapshots of the burned-out VW bus near which Bob wrote “No Woman, No Cry” (“I remember / when we used to sit / inna government yard in Trenchtown”). If they’re more brave still, they can take up one of the scowling hustlers outside on their offer to buy some Marley weed, or check out the surrounding blocks. (Few do.) I found the dot, on Junior’s map, corresponding to the low-slung cement building, with slatted windows and yellow walls, before which we stood. This was Boys’ Town, an old Anglican community center where many of the greats on Junior’s map came as kids to escape the grim yards where they lived. Junior had invited a few guests here today to speak with some of the area kids who do the same now. Inside, he pointed out a battered old piano where Tosh and Marley learned harmony.

There in the main hall, a testament to “The Cricket ‘Immortals’ of the West Indies” hung alongside a portrait of Father Hugh Sherlock, the kindly mid-century parson who founded Boys’ Town and also wrote his secular nation’s rather Christian national anthem (“Eternal Father, bless our land, / Guide us with Thy mighty hand”). Boys’ Town sits right between JLP-and PNP-controlled blocks; it has long been a sanctuary where wearing the parties’ colors (green and orange, respectively) is banned. On a chalkboard, someone had scrawled a plaintive slogan in blue chalk: “Revenge Restrained Is a Victory Gained.” Restive kids sat teasing each other in their chairs. Most were skinny or fat in the way poor kids everywhere tend to be; a few looked undernourished-gaunt. I took my place, in a plastic seat, with the other interlopers Junior had asked to “say some words to the youth.” My role, as the “professor from foreign,” was to offer some sincere noises about how I knew they may have heard how their neighborhood changed the world, but that I was here to tell them that well, it was true. I did so. Then I handed the microphone to the reggae-pop singer Shaggy, whose string of world hits in the early aughts, from “Boombastic” to “Angel,” saw him sell more records than any Jamaican since Marley. Shaggy was dressed in designer jeans; he’d hung his expensive sunglasses from the V-neck of his shirt. He crooned a verse for the kids; the girls giggled. He told them to “follow they dreams.” And then Junior Lincoln, who’d told us he was trying to raise funds to build the “top-class recording studio” here that Ziggy Marley never did, followed with a slightly-more-real urging that “in the music business, we need more than stars; we need engineers and stylists and roadies.” This information was received by the kids with only a few more nods than the remarks of another of our party: Shirley Hanna expounded the uplifting powers of “positivity” and good posture.

In the hall afterward, we sipped powdered lemonade from paper cups. A few of the boys followed Shaggy’s lead, taking turns singing songs or showing off with the mic. A few of the girls played at perfecting their beauty-queen walks while laughing with Shirley. I chatted with some kids in knockoff Man United jerseys about a subject—Premier League Soccer—in which children everywhere but America can converse. Back out on Trench Town’s ragged streets, feral dogs were skulking past. It wasn’t hard to despair of a country whose privileged, when met with its poor, have naught to offer but blandishments about following dreams and a good carriage’s uplifting force. But as I walked up the boulevard with Junior Lincoln, it was also true that the lines playing in my head had been written by a ghetto kid who strode from these blocks with a beauty queen’s bearing, and with dreams and positivity to burn.

Natty dread, natty dread now

A dreadlock congo bongo I

Natty dreadlock inna Babylon

Roots natty, roots natty.

This is the chorus of “Natty Dread,” the title track to Marley’s beautiful third album. It begins as kid’s-verse homily to Rasta living, and being a locksman “inna Babylon.” But then it gets interesting.

Then I walk up the 1st Street

And then I walk up to 2nd Street to see

Then I trod on, through 3rd Street

What’s the singer aiming to see? He goes on:

And then I talk to some dread on 4th Street

Natty dreadlock inna 5th Street

And then I skip one fence to 6th Street

He talks to a Rastaman, before pausing, on 5th, to check himself before treading on to 6th Street, and telling us where he’s going.

I’ve got to reach 7th Street

He’s got to reach 7th Street. Why? Walking up Collie Smith with Junior, I felt a possibility arise. Across 7th, we could see another block of low-rise projects. Arnette Gardens was this garrison’s official name; unofficially, it’s known as “concrete jungle,” per another Marley tune (“Concrete jungle / Where the living is harder”). On a wall by its entrance, I could see an orange-tinted mural. A bit higher up, another building-side image featured the face of Portia Simpson-Miller, leader of the PNP and a big bad man herself. Here was an area loyal to the party of Portia, Manley, and Marshall. Back toward Tivoli, green was everywhere; here it was all about orange. And 7th Street, not a few times in its history, and especially at election times, has comprised a frontier not to be crossed. Pondering Marley’s lines by the road that inspired them, I found it easy to imagine young men here, caught on the wrong side, thinking just what he sang. “I’ve got to reach 7th Street.”

Reaching safe turf, as any ghetto kid knows, is a worthy subject for song. If that simple muse was the subject of “Natty Dread,” though, the theme of its bridge, like his larger oeuvre, was the grander problem of how, whether with music or otherwise, to transcend the brutal “politricks” that made the concrete jungle tick. And in this respect, the home Marley figured wasn’t mere blocks away, or even up in Kingston’s hills. “Natty 21,000 miles away from home,” he sang. “And that’s a long way for Natty to be from home.” Redemption, as the Rastas said, lay over the sea. Rarely was their greatest voice so literal about it, though. Marley’s best songs—and this was his greatness—refused to ground Zion in the vulgarities of blood or land. In the tune that endured as his epitaph, he distilled his art’s essence. “Redemption songs / are all I ever have.” The line’s double meaning, and his image of music’s subtler salvations in this place where daily life was a hurtful grind, were of a piece. “One good thing about music,” went the chorus to “Trenchtown Rock,” “when it hits you, you feel no pain.” And that song, fittingly enough, was the one Junior Lincoln invoked as we reached 7th Street and, approaching the dusty site of one of music’s most aqueous springs, stepped across.

“Tell: What music was playing when the Berlin Wall fell?” Junior pulled a key from his pocket. “Trench Town rock!” We were standing by a large building’s curving concrete wall, freshly painted white; only a small “PNP” someone had tagged, off to our side, sullied its surface. Lincoln pushed his key into a heavy padlock on its gate and, removing the chain, led me inside. The place’s roof was long gone. But the distinct shape of a large theater’s proscenium and deep stage was plain. “And right here,” Junior said, “is where it began.” He pointed to the spot where he’d stood as a boy when Alton Ellis was discovered by Sir Coxsone Dodd; when the Wailers played “Simmer Down” for their friends; when Jimmy Cliff, years before being cast as a gun-flashing folk hero in The Harder They Come, got his start chirping ska ditties during the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour. We were standing on the floor of the Ambassador Theatre. This was “hallow’ ground in the story of this music.” The revitalization of “the ’Bas,” Junior said, would be a main feature of Trench Town’s future.

How was that going? A buzzard flew overhead. “Tough road.” Butch Stewart, the package-tourism magnate, had invited Junior onto his yacht to express support for his aims of leveraging Trench Town’s brand. He couldn’t get anyone in government, though, to back his plans. But Junior, who’d been key to spreading the music born here to its old ruler’s heart, wasn’t terribly surprised.

“You saw what a mess they made of the Olympics? Jamaica 50, in London—all the culture England has comes from us! And you saw what they did?”

I had not seen it.

“That’s right! Because they had some little ting in a theater, two thousand people. It should have been the party of the year. All the stars; Hyde Park. But it was a higgler’s shop! A bloody higgler’s shop.”

This, Junior thought, was a huge opportunity lost for Brand Jamaica. But part of why the government hadn’t been able to get it together was familiar. After Bruce Golding’s catastrophic campaign to bring Dudus to justice, new elections were called. Months before the Olympics, the JLP was swept from power and a new government installed. The transition’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Any chance for an effective large-scale touting of Brand Jamaica in London was lost.

Junior Lincoln stepped into the sunlit scrubland around the ’Bas and the 7th Street frontier. “Perhaps,” he sighed, as he replaced the roofless theater’s lock, “we can do better here.”

* * *

JAMAICA’S POWERS THAT BE were not enthused about ferrying tourists to the ghetto districts that supply both their power and their shame. This wasn’t shocking. But if their idea wasn’t to help Junior Lincoln bring tourists to Trench Town, what did they mean, after all, by Brand Jamaica, and what might they do with it? A couple of weeks after visiting the ’Bas and Boys’ Town with Junior Lincoln, I went to another event that promised some answers at Emancipation Park in New Kingston.

Emancipation Park lies about as far from the ’Bas as one can get in Kingston’s geography of power. Since opening in 2002, it has become Jamaica’s chosen venue for official showcases of “national culture” and attendant conflicts. This was the place, for example, where the gala Jamaican premier of Kevin Macdonald’s Marley was almost canceled after Bunny Wailer, arriving to the film with a delegation of Rasta elders, saw the red, gold, and green carpet laid out at the park entrance, protested that no one should trod on the holy colors, and demanded its removal. (A plain red one was found instead.) This is also the bit of Jamaican public space that boasts the piece of statuary that’s supplanted Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused as Jamaica’s most famed. Unmistakable for its location and size, the piece guards the park’s entrance, where it’s set in a low circular pool. It is comprised of two nude figures, twelve feet tall and with their thighs emerging from the water, their eyes gazing up from bondage. Sculpted by another white female artist from Kingston’s upper classes, it was called, predictably enough, Redemption Song. But the statue’s local notoriety derives less from artistic merits than from a feature that is impossible to miss. Walking by and casting your eyes at these obsidian figures, you are met, right at eye level, with the figures’ colossal genitals. Big Bamboo, indeed.

On the day of the prime minister’s Youth Awards for Excellence, hundreds of uniformed school kids streamed into the park, pointing at Mr. Jamaica’s Brobdingnagian bits, and giggled loudly. I joined the throng of well-dressed parents and kin who’d come straight from church; it was a Sunday afternoon. I’d spent some weeks speaking with people from the Tourist Board, the Film Board, and the Institute of Jamaica; it was clear that none of them, no matter the ways they all spoke of Brand Jamaica, could talk about what comprised best brand practice. This event was put on by the prime minister and had the official motto “Youth on a Mission . . . Project 2062.” It was presided over by then minister of youth and culture Lisa Hanna and promised to distill, in one grand tableau of live-action propaganda, how Portia’s administration saw the brand and its uses. Loitering inside the park, I looked for the new friend who had told me about it.

Seretse Small was a veteran of Jamaica’s culture industries with a secondary role in their official staging. He was a noted jazz guitarist and arranger whose career had taken him from studying music theory and composition at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, just up the road, to touring the world with reggae’s biggest stars. He had told me, the evening we’d met through a mutual friend, about backing up Shaggy on Saturday Night Live, and about how, when he’d gone on tour to Kenya with someone else, the people there had told him how it was Jamaican music men like him who “showed them how to be both modern and black.” Now Seretse had mostly retired from performing. But he was still in the music game, managing a band of young men from his alma mater whose reggae-tinged guitar pop seemed aimed at appealing to the boy-band fan base of One Direction. His group, Da Blueprint, had bested a few thousand rivals in a “World Battle of the Band Contest” in the UK earlier that year, and thus garnered a spot on the bill at the Youth View Awards back home. A couple of nights before, I’d stopped by Edna Manley College to watch them rehearse. The school’s ’70s-idealist architecture placed domes and trees amid little amphitheaters and shaded groves. It seemed almost a carbon copy of the analogous school Fidel Castro built in Havana in the ’60s on the grounds of an old country club to train the youth who would build Caribbean socialism. This made sense: Michael Manley’s PNP took its cues from Cuba in the ’70s. To judge by the official who stopped by that night to look in on Da Blueprint’s rehearsal, today’s PNP still takes them from there. The official was an affable if unctuous fat man in a tie, backed up by two aides, similarly attired. He pronounced the band’s two covers of classic reggae songs “okay.” He was less sure about a bubble-gum ballad, “Your Love,” on which the skinny guitar player harmonized with his bassist brother. Was it too risqué to include in their nine-minute set? He’d let Seretse know.

At Emancipation Park, one party who had needed no pre-show vetting was the woman who gazed into the crane-mounted camera sweeping over the crowd, to welcome us to the show. Lisa Hanna was no stranger to TV. She first passed before the public eye hosting local programs as a teen before ascending, after she became Miss World in 1993, to the status of Brand Jamaica icon. When flying out for that pageant in South Africa, Lisa’s mother told me, the nineteen-year-old budding politician made a point of showing local news cameras how, at the nape of her neck, she had grown a single little dreadlock, wrapped in Rasta-colored string, that she would hide beneath flowing tresses abroad but that people back home, secure in her Jamaican-ness, would know was there. Twenty years on, Shirley Hanna’s daughter had traded her tiara for a prim suit. Now she lent her poise and perfect grooming to this PNP government as its minister of youth and culture. It was her job, baring pearly teeth below high cheekbones, to launch this pageant put on by her boss. She said we were there to honor young Jamaicans who, “like the stars up above,” had a “brilliance [that’s] allowed Jamaica to shine and provide light for the rest of the world.” And then those young stars—a young man who’d won London bronze at 200 meters; a young woman who won the same colored medal, in “Fashion Technology,” at something called the WorldSkills Competition, in São Paulo—mounted the stage. They took their plaudits from the prime minister, who smiled serenely from the front row, doting on her children. One of them, a proud pigtailed schoolgirl in this society where twice as many girls as boys finish high school, delivered the day’s “vote of thanks.” She described how the honorees gathered onstage weren’t merely proud to be honored, and proud of Jamaica’s great leaders; they felt that “Portia” wasn’t just a leader, she was “our mother too, the mother of our people. And for her love, which we can feel so dear, we are so grateful.” Amen.

Seretse’s boy band was allowed to do their song; another young singer, I learned, drew harsh reprimand for wiggling his hips overmuch. I’d seen his act. His moves might have been risqué on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1954; in this city where kids’ dominant dance was called “daggering” for a reason, they seemed gentility’s height. But such wiggling wasn’t in accord with the aims of what was, at bottom, a political rally whose producers left nothing to chance. This was unshocking. So were the leagues of remove from actual youth culture its youth culture awards cited. What was striking, here, was the larger vision of Brand Jamaica, and culture’s role in it, espoused by Minister Hanna as she closed the proceedings. “The excellence of the next generation,” she told us and the cameras, “would herald a new time of courage, passion, resilience, and fortitude, for Jamaica to remain the best cultural capital, and country, in the world.” She wasn’t done there. Remaining “the best cultural capital” wouldn’t be easy. She flashed those pearly teeth to conclude with a call to arms. “What we need,” the former Miss World intoned, “is a cultural revolution.”

The Chairman Mao phrasing was striking. But it wasn’t new. She’d used it before. “Cultural revolution” had also been the takeaway phrase from a speech she’d delivered in the heady days of Jamaica 50, in which she’d outlined her ministry’s new cultural policy, high in the mountains of the cockpit country, where the Maroons won self-rule from the British. The larger aspect and resonance of the venue for that speech, the Maroons’ old capital of Accompong, suggested much about its contents. This village was described by the American choreographer Katherine Dunham in her 1946 book, Journey to Accompong,³ based on Dunham’s research as a grad student in anthropology, as home to a kind of “Africanity” unknown in North America. Dunham’s ideas helped inspire a postwar folk revival whose builders included Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett in Jamaica and, in New York, a folk singer—Harry Belafonte—who married one of Dunham’s dancers. That generation’s art was premised on performing a kind of “authenticity” that may be regarded, by sophisticated kids now, as imbued with the same artifice all performing is. But Accompong’s resonance, in the Dunham-Bennett-Belafonte vision of folk culture’s political uses, certainly allied with the vision of cultural revolution Lisa Hanna proclaimed in a place whose ties to its past I’d glimpsed when, after driving up to Accompong myself, I met the curator-cum-foreman of its town museum. That thin man with a wily air told me he was descended in a direct line from Queen Nanny and insisted on posing, with her abeng horn, for a picture. And then he showed me around a tidy mountain town whose access to public funds, and the sympathy of international NGOs, was plain in its gleaming new school and the good, drivable road I’d arrived on—built by the PNP, he said, for their loyal supporters here. “Di only green me deal with,” he volunteered, “is di vegetation and grass deh.”

That avowed Maroon’s reasons for enacting a past that was also his livelihood, and for rejecting the JLP’s colors, were plain. Could it really be, though, that his party’s new leaders, invoking their cultural revolution and Brand Jamaica in the same breath, saw the same pastward-looking thrust as Jamaica’s path ahead? As I stood in Emancipation Park, listening to Lisa Hanna try to instill in the youths the spirits of the elders, it certainly seemed so. And when I went to see her ministry’s chief consigliere and speechwriter, he confirmed it. Resplendent in his silk Rasta-colored tie and braces, he shrugged off the phrase’s Beijing ring. “What we mean by ‘cultural revolution,’” he explained, “is activity awakening the memory of Bogle, and Nanny, and Sam Sharpe and the Maroons.” The efflorescence of those figures’ images, on hotel walls and in airports, had found their source. “That culture of resistance is Brand Jamaica,” he concluded. “And we are a uniquely cultural people.” I didn’t have the heart to ask, as I’d planned to, why this government so committed to Jamaica’s “uniquely cultural people” was actively engaged in constricting the main space—street dances—within which their culture now grows.

The answer was implicit. The only ways that Jamaica’s leaders, so aware of their peoples’ visibility and keen to tout it, had been able to work out how to do so were stuck, if not in the seventeenth century, then certainly in the 1970s. What the policymakers didn’t see, or couldn’t, was that what makes Jamaica cool was not it “activating the past.” It was about young people from Tokyo to New York looking here, as they have been learning to do for some decades now, to see what will be cool next week, or next year. Jamaica’s brand had juice precisely for the bits of culture that governments are traditionally good not at supporting but suppressing. And it had juice because of how its most gifted exponents don’t “activate” the past so much as play with it. In the manner, say, of the martyred street dancer Bogle, whose name did just that, and whose funeral march, featuring a glass casket adorned with the Sesame Street characters he loved, brought thousands of decked-out mourners to “jiggy jiggy” wakes, in the garrisons where he was a hero. (“A lie!” they yelled as his hearse passed.)⁴ Or in the manner of, say, Lady Saw, whose reign as the Queen of the Dancehall has lasted better than twenty years, and who told me, when I met her one night at TGI Friday’s in Kingston, about how she saw her work as building on the best folk tradition of Louise Bennett.

“How did Miss Lou put it, about ‘Jamaican ’oman’?” asked Lady Saw in our corner booth. “Look how long dem liberated and de man dem never know!” Wearing white sneakers, and dark sunglasses perched atop an auburn wig, Lady Saw laughed. We sat across Hope Road from the Marley museum, in this chain restaurant full of Jamaicans who, perhaps getting a jump on their dream to one day dwell in a Florida suburb, were downing iridescent drinks from big plastic cups. Their island’s queen of raunch, sipping a daiquiri and eating fries, told me of being born to a large family in a small country town, and of how her father went to America, and though he never got papers to bring his family, did send home country records she loved. (“You know Loretta Lynn’s ‘Woman Enough to Take My Man’—that’s gangster!”) She told me of coming to Kingston to work as a sweatshop seamstress in the Free Zone, where she met the lover-producer who “put her on.” (“First hit was ‘Half-and-Half Love Affair’—it was about having an affair with a man when he’s someone else’s man.”) She explained the over-sexed “slack” persona she performs onstage—“The guys were doing it, why couldn’t a woman do it?”—and she recounted how the American pop-punk band No Doubt came to Jamaica to record their Grammy-winning hit “Underneath It All,” and called her to lend them a verse. (“It was done in a minute, and then: Boom! It was a hit. I loved that.”) She chatted graciously with fans who walked over to pay respects, and told me about how much she loved Louise Bennett—but how she’d also felt compelled, in a remake of Miss Lou’s “Under the Sycamore Tree,” to tweak her hero. (“It’s about getting her first kiss under that tree. But you know she got laid under there!”) She told me about how lots of young pretenders had come at her crown but that she “spits harder than any of these young chicks coming up; I don’t have competition” (it was true); and also about how, when she’s placed in social set-tos with Jamaica’s “uppity uppitys” among whom she now lives in a big house uptown, they are often shocked to find that Marion Hall, the lovely, bright woman Lady Saw is when she’s not singing tunes they abjure, “actually wasn’t a rude person at all.”⁵

Here, in short, was a real, live exemplar of what makes Jamaica cool as hell. But here, also, was a remarkable person whose appeal to officialdom, and to a minister of culture who closed her Youth Awards for Excellence with the hope that “God continue to bless this country, as we move forward, to bless the world with who we are,” was beyond nil. That spring, Lady Saw, after an extended raunch sabbatical during which she’d performed only gospel and country tunes, had just returned to heavy radio play and cultural relevance, with a tune Miss World wouldn’t touch with a bamboo pole.

The title of her latest hit was this: “Fuck Me with My Heels On.”

* * *

THE BIRTHLAND OF the great Lady Saw, of course, is hardly the sole country whose uppity uppitys struggle to commandeer the songs and styles of their lowers, for the ends of an establishment that fucks them. One is tempted, as a general rule, to echo the dictum of a great island culture maven about what happens when officialdom butts in. “Anytime you get government involved,” says Chris Blackwell, “it’s a fuckup.” Which, with the exception of building schools to train art makers, or create spaces for them to play—and then getting out of the way—may obtain everywhere. So may the gap between culture as it happens on the street and “cultural policy” as decreed from on high. That Jamaica’s powers that be should turn Marley’s “Redemption Song,” a tune as subtly aware of art’s limits as music’s power, into a gravely unsubtle monument in stone isn’t surprising. But part of what’s striking about these gaps’ breadth, in this country whose brand’s boosters speak of “our uniquely cultural people,” and whose Miss World minister of culture believes she lives in “the best cultural capital, and country, in the world,” is that even on their discourse’s own terms, Brand Jamaica’s strength is middling to poor.

Not in terms of Jamaica’s outsized impress on global pop: by now, that’s both undeniable and widely known. But in terms, as a prominent local blogger pointed out after the Youth Awards, of its “brand strength’s” putative relation to real economic growth. In a report by an outfit called FutureBrands that aimed to quantify growth potential as tied to countries’ reputations for “quality of life,” “good for business,” and “history and culture,” the Jamaican author Diana McCaulay noted on her Facebook page, Jamaica wasn’t merely nowhere on the list of top entrants.⁶ It lagged far behind such island peers as Mauritius (20), and Bermuda (24), not to mention such diverse rivals as Namibia (46) and Belize (48). In the Caribbean, Jamaica’s “brand strength” was soundly bested by Barbados (29) and the Dominican Republic (53). Even Trinidad and Tobago (54) and, most galling of all, socialist Cuba (57) trumped the world nation perhaps most invested in, and high on, using its “brand strength” for growth. Jamaica came in 62nd.⁷ Future-Brand’s algorithm may have been hazy. But as Jamaica’s wakeful citizens began to assert with rising force, banking on the ineffable currency of “cool” seemed about as wise a tack for battling poverty as bottling sin. Brand Jamaica, as McCaulay and others noted, was perhaps most useful as a politicians’ slogan for demeaning democracy. They had seen how their minister of culture, when she caught some negative press, maligned a group of concerned citizens for harming Jamaica’s brand: they had signed a simple petition voicing concern over state care provided to youths by her ministry. By that spring’s end, as I readied to leave the island, it was unclear how long Brand Jamaica would dominate the country’s chats with itself. Either way, one felt sure, Jamaican culture would survive. Its makers would continue, with their outsized will to perform, to enact their past and their now, by means loud and funny and inspired and mad, forever.

On one of my last days in Jamaica that spring, I walked by Emancipation Park, past the Herculean nudes of Redemption Song, and turned up New Kingston’s main road. I passed a building-sized Digicel billboard featuring Usain Bolt’s familiar torso (“Millions of Dreams,” read its flag-colored caption, “Need Strong Shoulders”), and stepped into an outlet of Tastee, the fast food restaurant whose morsels of fatty dough, air-fried around ground meat, are dispensed from franchises around the island and have become free Jamdown’s national dish. I took the bag my pattie came in. “Buy Jamaica,” it said on the greasy brown paper. “Brand We Love.” I continued up the road, to where the same flashy modeling agency that hosted the Global Reggae book launch in its bar was hosting a similar fete tonight. This one toasted the release of a book of photos of “reggae’s golden age,” published by the same outfit that put out Edward Seaga’s 100 Most Influential Songs box set. Word was that the Dark Lord Seaga, who’d had a hand in this project, too, might turn up.

At a table by the bar, I recognized Seaga’s partner in releasing many old records Pat Chin. Earl “Chinna” Smith, an eminent Rasta guitarist whose chicken-scratch tones graced all the greats, was accepting the adoration of a pair of Japanese girls in saddle shoes. On the bar’s walls, and in an adjacent room, hung large-format images of the late-’70s moment that Jamaica’s boosters can’t seem to leave behind. There was Marley in full flight; Toots in repose; a smiling Peter Tosh, skinny and locked, riding a unicycle on Martha’s Vineyard during a U.S. tour. At the bar I chatted with a tall young woman in a royal-blue dress and zebra-print heels, from whom I gathered that the duty-cum-perk of signing with the modeling agency she represented was that you had to adorn the bar at functions like these. She said she had a manager in Zurich; she’d spent last summer in Ibiza, “working.” She bore a striking resemblance to Rihanna. She asked if I’d like to pay her rent. I paid for her wine, instead (she frowned when the barkeep said he had no moscato; she settled for Chablis). This was a timely reminder that the only sure way Jamaica seems to have found for “monetizing” its “uniquely cultural people” in a new era that maybe wasn’t so new was to offer the more exceptional of their bodies, whether belonging to models or sprinters, for sale. I joined a tableful of culturati I’d grown used to seeing at these things.

Seaga, it seemed, wasn’t coming after all. At his name’s mention, though, someone at the table presented an intriguing theory about the Tivoli incursion. “You know it’ Seaga doing,” he said. Tivoli was Seaga’s garrison; what better way for the old CIA hand to tie up his loose ends, near his life’s end, than by taking out a don who’d outgrown his control and, in the same swoop, making the position of his loathed successor as PM untenable? (Golding and Seaga had a notorious falling-out.) “Where Seaga now?” We knew. “He’ back! And the people still love him!” True enough. “Politricks,” or the wary perception thereof, knew no bounds in this city where Vybz Kartel’s just-released book contained some sage conclusions. In The Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto, the dancehall king had argued that the nation’s first step to betterment was to ban its two ruling parties. “As a people,” he wrote, “we should insist that we will not vote for the PNP or JLP in the new Republic. Those two bodies are synonymous with too many deaths.”⁸ Perhaps there’d be a new constitutional convention. Now, though, the photographer being feted here had risen behind a microphone at the end of the patio to speak.

He wore a knit skully and a tie-dyed T-shirt. These weren’t the only traits, in this hunched sixtysomething white man with kind eyes, to scream “aging hippie.” He thanked us for coming to see the pictures that had made him the don of reggae photogs, and told us about how, after growing up in Westchester County as a scion of the family behind Simon & Schuster publishing (and the brother of Carly Simon), he fell in love with Jamaican music. “It all started when I went to see The Harder They Come,” Peter Simon recalled. “I’d been following American rock ’n’ roll for many years, but got bored with it; it became too commercial. So when I saw that film with Jimmy Cliff in ’73, it hit me like a wave. A wave of compassion, love, and reggae rhythm.” The film and its soundtrack inspired him. He won a book deal, he explained, to come down and start shooting the snaps we were toasting tonight. And then he introduced a special guest, by way of a story about how he’d met his wife, one fall night in 1975, just after the Red Sox, as usual, had lost the World Series. “I’ve got two tickets for Toots and the Maytals!” he’d said to a bar full of downcast friends in Boston. No one knew who he was talking about; one shy girl, though, raised her hand. By the time they reached the club, Toots had already played. “But it was Toots,” Simon said, “that brought on my romance with my wife. And I’m so grateful to Toots for playing that night, and we’ve been friends ever since, and he’s the best.” Applause. “And now, I’d like to welcome him to the stage.”

A small man I’d noticed before but not recognized—his head was cloaked in a do-rag and dark glasses—ambled onstage. The reason I’d noticed him, apart from his leather pants, was that he seemed to be attracting more than his share of well-wishers. Now, holding an acoustic guitar by his leather-pantsed leg, he gave Simon a hug, and I understood. The short man plugged in the guitar, and began to play.

Stick it up, mister!

Can you hear what I’m saying now, yeah

Get your hands in the air, sir!

It was Toots. The leather pants and round belly made it hard to tell. But the voice was all his.

I said yeah (I said yeah)

Listen what they say (listen what they say)

Can you hear me say, yeah? (yeah yeah)

Listen what they say (listen what they say)

He swayed like Stevie Wonder, he crooned the words to his great song about being locked up—everyone has one—in Kingston’s jail for badness (or, in Toots’s case, on weed charges that saw him spend a year there in ’66). His photographer pal, off to the side, swayed happily, too.

You give it to me, one time!

We knew how to reply. “Huh!”

You give it to me two times (huh-huh!)

You give it to me three times (huh-huh-huh!)

You give it to me four times (huh-huh-huh-huh!)

We gave it to him. And his familiar voice, floating over the heads of the Red Stripe-and Chablis-sipping crowd, shook the hot Kingston night.

54-46 was my number, was my number, man

Right now, someone else has that number

54-46 was my number, well

Right now, someone else has that number . . .