Bob Marley: The Untold Story
Chris Salewicz
What was it about Bob Marley that made him so popular in a world dominated by rock’n’roll?How is that he has not only remained the single most successful reggae artist ever, but has also become a shining beacon of radicalism and peace to generation after generation of fans across the globe?On May 11, 1981, a little after 11.30 in the morning, Bob Marley died. The man who introduced reggae to a worldwide audience, in his own lifetime he had already become a hero figure in the classic mythological sense. From immensely humble beginnings and with talent and religious belief his only weapons, the Jamaican recording artist applied himself with unstinting perseverance to spreading his prophetic musical message.And he had achieved it: only a year earlier, Bob Marley and The Wailers' tour of Europe had seen them perform to the largest audiences a musical act had up to that point experienced. Record sales of Marley's albums before his death were spectacular; in the years since his death they have become phenomenal, as each new generation discovers afresh the remarkable power of his music.Chris Salewicz, who had a sequence of adventures with Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1979, offers us a comprehensive and detailed account of Bob Marley's life and the world in which he grew up and came to dominate. Never-before-heard interviews with dozens of people who knew Marley are woven through a narrative that brings to life not only the Rastafari religion and the musical scene in Jamaica, but also the spirit of the man himself.
BOB MARLEYTHE UNTOLD STORY
CHRIS SALEWICZ
Dedication (#ulink_8fa58c33-e316-575e-8d6c-88a1414170e5)
For Dickie Jobson (14 November 1941–25 December 2008)
and Rob Partridge (2 June 1948–26 November 2008)
Contents
Cover (#ub48ce4eb-4432-5b09-95f6-01c36ab82d1f)
Title Page (#ue8e3ee82-dc72-52d1-8314-c89bb6e7ffa2)
Dedication (#ulink_88dab27e-5299-571f-8ccc-b2112a7e57f3)
Map (#ulink_b9d8f838-7785-5e04-b3ec-e4d1cf6ee9aa)
Introduction (#ulink_05faea65-a198-5797-b6b5-9fbdc7d4bf14)
Jamaica (#ulink_1655cb64-32bf-51a0-a893-a4c64ea8a8ef)
Natural Mystic (#ulink_965c60af-e07b-594c-a21f-7a2109d02c36)
Kingston (#ulink_e34d5248-5fae-5e95-8028-a4e4410cf289)
Trench Town Rock (#ulink_c85e6df3-e013-533f-807d-bf1ad1d12832)
Nice Time (#ulink_22bd73b4-d970-5f7a-a365-13ae3b141b1b)
Duppy Conqueror (#ulink_6f504abc-5ad6-507e-96d3-44949a1d3c60)
The Rod of Correction (#ulink_5038089f-d5a6-5070-9c10-7d6116480f88)
Catch a Fire (#ulink_4ba1ebe2-6ef1-5050-988b-9dc75e22a1b5)
Natty Dread (#ulink_e871e55d-d20e-5863-92ce-4646585e845d)
Rastaman Vibration (#ulink_37edda0f-0952-55fc-8591-0a410e452e6d)
Exodus (#ulink_9224c770-f79c-57d8-9ca9-796fc3ee8712)
Peace Concert (#ulink_088288c7-8fdb-56e1-93b3-f4f5c9c2c63c)
Uprising (#ulink_9137f8b6-0e52-5f15-b2ea-7eec6f74ff5a)
Zimbabwe (#ulink_b431c55f-bf15-5789-8de5-12359f8e027d)
Legend (#ulink_83247105-9b09-50b7-8ace-c618c08d4a87)
Plates (#ulink_3241878d-3599-5763-ba8c-abd923f56a18)
Sources
Index (#ulink_0116530f-f6a6-55d5-9e06-9d8c76e4689c)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_162f06a5-adbe-5a01-93d0-806b0995f549)
Other Works (#ulink_49b79d99-a973-5148-8bb3-571d56eeea9b)
Praise for Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song (#ulink_06bb9779-c6f4-5c4a-8053-02709b1daa71)
Copyright (#ulink_5993ba8c-06cb-556b-8e86-d77b970de6b3)
About the Publisher
Map (#ulink_fd008fd5-c83e-5ccc-aabd-ae0bbd3f9330)
Introduction (#ulink_4beeaba6-cce9-56bf-930e-5e4c5741c5fa)
ME ONLY HAVE ONE AMBITION, Y’KNOW. I ONLY HAVE ONE THING I REALLY LIKE TO SEE HAPPEN. I LIKE TO SEE MANKIND LIVE TOGETHER – BLACK, WHITE, CHINESE, EVERYONE – THAT’S ALL.
In early 1978 I spent two months in Jamaica, researching its music and interviewing many key figures, having arrived there on the same reggae-fanatics’ pilgrimage as John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon and Don Letts, the Rastafarian film-maker. My first visit to the island was a life-changing experience, and I plunged into the land of magic realism that is Jamaica, an island that can be simultaneously heaven and hell. Almost exactly a year later, in February 1979, I flew to Kingston on my second visit to ‘the fairest land that eyes have beheld’, according to its discoverer, Christopher Columbus, who first sighted the ‘isle of springs’ in 1494. Arriving late in the evening, I took a taxi to Knutsford Boulevard in New Kingston and checked into the Sheraton Hotel.
Jet lag meant that I woke early the next morning. Seizing the time, I found myself in a taxi at around quarter to eight, chugging through the rush-hour traffic, rounding the corner by the stately Devon House, the former residence of the British governor, and into and up Hope Road. ‘Bob Marley gets up early,’ I had been advised.
Arriving at his headquarters of 56 Hope Road, trundling through the gates and disgorging myself from my Morris Oxford cab in front of the house, there was little sign of activity. On the wooden verandah to the right of the building was a group of what looked like tough ghetto youth, to whom I nodded greetings, searching in vain for any faces I recognised. In front of the Tuff Gong record shop to the right of the house was a woman who wore her dreadlocks tucked into a tam; she was sweeping the shop’s steps with a besom broom that scurried around the floor-length hem of her skirt. A sno-cone spliff dangled from her mouth. Wandering over to her, I introduced myself, mentioning that I had been in Jamaica the previous year writing about reggae, showing her a copy of the main article I had written in the NME. She was extremely articulate, and I discovered that her name was Diane Jobson and that she was the inhouse lawyer for the Tuff Gong operation (over the years I was to get to know her well; and her brother Dickie, who directed the film Countryman, became a close pal).
Then a 5 Series BMW purred into the yard. Driven by a beautiful girl, it had – like many Jamaican cars – black-tinted windows and an Ethiopian flag fluttering in the breeze from an aerial on its left front wing. Out of it stepped Bob Marley. He greeted the ghetto youth, walked towards them, and began speaking with them. On his way over, he registered my presence. After a couple of minutes, I walked towards him. I introduced myself, and he shook hands with me with a smile, paying attention, I noticed, to the Animal Rights badge that by chance I was wearing on my red Fred Perry shirt; again, I explained I had been to Jamaica for the first time the previous year, and showed him the article. He seemed genuinely interested and began to read it. As he did so, like Bob Marley should have done, he handed me a spliff he had just finished rolling. Nervously, I took it and pulled away.
After a minute or two Diane came over. Gathering together the youth, she led them in the direction of a mini-bus parked in the shade that I had not previously noticed. Bob made his excuses – ‘We have to go somewhere’ – and walked over to the vehicle. Then, as he stepped into it, he turned. ‘Come on, come with us,’ he waved with a grin, climbing down out of the vehicle and holding the door open for me.
I hurried over. Ushering me into the mini-bus, Bob squeezed up next to me on one of its narrow two-person bench-seats, his leg resting against my own. I tried to disguise my feelings – a sense of great honour as well as slight apprehension that the herb I had smoked was beginning to kick in, suddenly seeming a million times stronger than anything I had ever smoked in London. I was starting to feel rather distanced from everything, which was possibly just as well. Bumping through the potholed backstreets of what I knew to be the affluent uptown suburb of Beverly Hills, I ventured to ask Bob, who was himself hitting on a spliff, where we were going. ‘Gun Court,’ he uttered, matter-of-factly.
I blinked, and tried quickly to recover myself. The Gun Court had a reputation that was fearsome. To all intents and purposes, the place was a concentration camp – certainly it had been built to look like one: gun towers, barbed-wire perimeters, visibly armed guards, a harsh, militaristic feel immediately apparent to all who drove past its location on South Camp Road. The Gun Court was a product of Michael Manley’s Emergency Powers Act of 1975. Into it was dumped, for indefinite detention or execution after a summary trial, anyone in Jamaica found with any part of a gun. (In more recent times, it is said, the security forces adopt a more cost-effective and immediate solution: anyone in Jamaica found with any part of a gun, runs the myth, is executed on the spot – hence the almost daily newspaper reports of gunmen ‘dying on the way to hospital’ …) The previous year, when I had been in Kingston with Lydon, Letts and co., the dreadlocked Rastafarian filmmaker had been held at gunpoint by a Jamaica Defence Force soldier whilst filming the exterior of the Gun Court. At first the squaddie refused to believe Letts was British; only after being shown his UK passport did he let him walk away. What would have happened had he been Jamaican?
‘Why are we going there?’ I demanded of Bob, as casually as I could.
‘To see about a youth them lock up – Michael Bernard,’ he quietly replied.
Michael Bernard, I learned later, was a cause célèbre.
Having descended from the heights of Beverly Hills, a detour that had been taken to avoid morning traffic (like most of the rest of the world, and especially in Jamaica at that time, when cars and car parts were at a considerable premium, this was nothing compared to the almost permanent gridlock that Kingston was to become by the end of the century), we were soon pulling up outside the Gun Court’s sinister compound.
At nine in the morning, beneath an already scorching tropical sun, the vision of the Gun Court was like a surreal dubbed-up inversion of one of the ugly, incongruous industrial trading estate-type buildings that litter much of Kingston’s often quite cute sprawl.
At the sight of Bob emerging from the mini-bus, a door within the main gates opened for his party. We stepped through into the prison. After standing for some time in the heat of the forecourt yard, an officer appeared. In hushed tones he spoke to Bob; I was unable to hear what passed between them, which was probably just as well – it being almost a year since I had last enjoyed a regular daily diet of patois, I was beginning to register I could comprehend only about a half of what was being said around me.
Then we were led into the piss-stinking prison building itself. And through a number of locked, barred doors, and into the governor’s broad office, like the study of a boarding-school headmaster, which was also the demeanour of the governor himself, a greying, late-middle-aged man who sat behind a sturdy desk by the window. We were seated on hard wooden chairs in a semicircle in front of him. I found myself directly to the right of Bob, who in turn was seated nearest to the governor. Through a door in the opposite wall arrived a slight man who appeared to be in his early twenties. He was shown to a chair. This was Michael Bernard, who had been sentenced for an alleged politically motivated shooting, one for which no one I met in Kingston believed him to be responsible.
Discussions now began, the essence of which concerned questions by Bob as to the possibilities of a retrial or of Bernard’s release from prison. Bernard said virtually nothing, and almost all speech was confined to Bob and the governor. I asked a couple of questions, but when I interrupted a third time Bob wisely hushed me – I was starting to get into a slightly right-on stride here. Most of the dialogue, I noted, was conducted in timorous, highly reverent tones by all parties present, almost with a measure of deference, or perhaps simply hesitant nervousness. (Over the years I was to decide that it was the latter, noting that often Jamaicans called upon to speak publicly – whether rankin’ politicians at barnstorming rallies, Rasta elders at revered Nyabinghi reasonings, Commissioner of Police Joe Williams in an interview I conducted with him, or crucial defence witnesses in the rarified, bewigged atmosphere of English courts – would present themselves with all the stumbling hesitancy and lack of rigorous logic of a very reluctant school-speechday orator. Yet in more lateral philosophical musings and reasonings, there are few individuals as fascinatingly, confidently loquacious as Jamaicans when it comes to conversational elliptical twists, stream-of-consciousness free-associations, and Barthes-like word de- and re-constructions.)
After twenty or so minutes, all talk seemed to grind to a halt. Afterwards I was left a little unclear as to what conclusions had been arrived at, if any. At first I worried that this was because initially I had been struggling with the effects of the herb, which seemed like a succession of psychic tidal-waves. Then later I realised that the purpose of this mission to the Gun Court was simply to show that Michael Bernard had not been forgotten.
Bidding farewell to the prisoner, wishing him luck, and thanking the governor for his time, we left his office, clanking out through the jail doors and into the biting sunlight. Soon we were back at 56 Hope Road, which by then had become a medina of all manner of activity. ‘Stick around,’ said Bob. I did. And on a bench in the shade of a mango tree round the back of the house promptly fell asleep for at least two hours from what was probably a combination of jet lag, the spliff, and some kind of delayed shock.
This visit to the Gun Court with Bob Marley was one of the great experiences of my life. I was in Jamaica for another three weeks or so. During that time I saw Bob several more times. I watched rehearsals at 56 Hope Road; saw Bob playing with some of his kids – the ones that had just released their first record as the Melody Makers; and found him with one of the most gorgeous women who had ever crossed my eyes (a different one from the car-driver at 56 Hope Road) at a Twelve Tribes Grounation (essentially, dances steeped in the mystique of Rastafari) one Saturday night on the edge of the hills. She turned out to be Cindy Breakspeare, Jamaica’s former Miss World. I also interviewed Bob for an article: whilst doing so, I remember feeling a measure of guilt for taking up so much of his precious time – though I didn’t realise then precisely quite how precious and finite it was. Part of the reason I thought this was because I felt Bob looked terribly tired and strained – it was only just over eighteen months later that he collapsed whilst jogging in Central Park with his friend Skill Cole, and was diagnosed as suffering from cancer.
It came as a deep, unpleasant shock just before midnight on 11 May 1981 to receive a phone call from Rob Partridge, who had so assiduously handled Bob’s publicity for Island Records, to be told that Bob had lost his fight with cancer and passed on. (I had always believed that Bob would beat the disease …) Although I wrote his obituary for NME, it seemed my relationship with Bob and his music was only just beginning. In February 1983, I was back in Jamaica, writing a story for The Face about Island’s release of the posthumous Bob Marley album Confrontation.
Again, jet lag caused me to wake early on the first morning I was there. This time I was staying just down the road from the former Sheraton, at the neighbouring Pegasus Hotel. Getting out of bed, I switched on the radio in my room. The Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) seven o’clock news came on with its first story: ‘Released from the Gun Court today is Michael Bernard …’ Wow! Phew! JAH RASTAFARI!!! That Jamaica will get you every time. The island really is a land of magic realism, a physical, geographical place that is like a manifestation of the collective unconscious. Or is it that Bob Marley, as someone once suggested to me, is very active in psychic spheres and has a great sense of humour? Was this just something he’d laid on for me in the Cosmic Theme Park of the Island of Springs, I found myself wondering, with a certain vanity.
JAMAICA (#ulink_cb0960e4-6f28-51b0-9b23-e77417c525ad)
The Caribbean island of Jamaica has had an impact on the rest of the world that is far greater than might be expected from a country with a population of under three million. Jamaica’s history, in fact, shows that ever since its discovery by Christopher Columbus, it has had a disproportionate effect on the rest of the world.
In the seventeenth century, for example, Jamaica was the world centre of piracy. From its capital of Port Royal, buccaneers under the leadership of Captain Henry Morgan plundered the Spanish Main, bringing such riches to the island that it became as wealthy as any of Europe’s leading trading centres; the pleasures such money brought earned Port Royal the reputation of ‘wickedest city in the world’. In 1692, four years after Morgan’s death, Port Royal disappeared into the Caribbean in an earthquake. However, a piratic, rebellious spirit has been central to the attitude of Jamaicans ever since: this is clear in the lives of Nanny, the woman who led a successful slave revolt against the English in 1738; of Marcus Garvey, who in the 1920s became the first prophet of black self-determination and founded the Black Star shipping line, intended to transport descendants of slaves back to Africa; of Bob Marley, the Third World’s first superstar, with his musical gospel of love and global unity.
Jamaica was known by its original settlers, the Arawak peoples, as the Island of Springs. It is in the omnipresent high country that resides Jamaica’s unconscious: the primal Blue Mountains and hills are the repository of most of Jamaica’s legends, a dreamlike landscape that furnishes ample material for an arcane mythology.
On the north side of the Blue Mountains, in the parish of Portland, one of the most beautiful parts of Jamaica, is Moore Town. It was to the safety of the impenetrable hills that bands of former slaves fled, after they were freed and armed by the Spanish, to harass the English when they seized the island in 1655. The Maroons, as they became known, founded a community and underground state that would fight a guerrilla war against the English settlers on and off for nearly eighty years.
When peace was eventually established, the Maroons were granted semi-autonomous territory both in Portland and Trelawny, to the west of the island. In Moore Town was buried the great Maroon queen, Nanny, who led her people in battles in which they defeated the English redcoats. Honoured today as a National Hero of Jamaica, Nanny’s myth was so great that she was said to have the ability to catch musket-balls fired at her – in her ‘pum-pum’, according to some accounts.
Jamaica has always been tough. The Arawak peoples repulsed invasions by the cannibalistic Caribs who had taken over most of the neighbouring islands. Jamaica was an Arawak island when it was discovered in 1494. ‘The fairest island that eyes have beheld; mountainous and the land seems to touch the sky,’ wrote Columbus. Although he may not have felt the same nine years later, on his fourth voyage to the New World. In St Ann’s Bay, later the birthplace of Marcus Garvey, Columbus was driven ashore by a storm, and his rotting vessels filled with water almost up to their decks as they settled on the sand of the sea-bed.
Later placed into slavery by the Spaniards, the Arawaks were shockingly abused, and many committed suicide. Some were tortured to death in the name of sport. By 1655, when the English captured the island, the Arawaks had been completely wiped out.
Even after the 1692 earthquake, piracy remained such a powerful force in the region that a King’s pardon was offered in 1717 to all who would give up the trade. Many did not accept these terms, and in November 1720 a naval sloop came across the vessel of the notorious pirate ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham anchored off Negril, in the west of Jamaica. Once the crew was overpowered – with ease: they were suffering from the effects of a rum party – two of the toughest members of Rackham’s team were discovered to be women disguised as men: Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who each cheated the gallows through pregnancy.
Those Jamaican settlers who wished to trade legally could also make fortunes. Sugar, which had been brought to the New World by Columbus on the voyage during which he discovered Jamaica, was the most profitable crop that could be grown on the island, and it was because of their importance as sugar-producing islands that the British West Indies had far more political influence with the English government than all the thirteen American mainland colonies.
Sugar farming requires a significant labour force, and it was this that led to the large-scale importation of African slaves. For the remainder of the eighteenth century, the wealth of Jamaica was secured with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession: one of its terms was that Jamaica became the distribution centre for slaves for the entire New World. The first slaves shipped to the West Indies had been prisoners of war or criminals, purchased from African chiefs in exchange for European goods. With a much larger supply needed, raiding parties, often under the subterfuge of engaging in tribal wars, took place all along the west coast of Africa. The horrors of the middle passage had to be endured before the slaves were auctioned, £50 being the average price.
Although the money that could be earned was considerable compensation for the white settlers, life in Jamaica was often a worry. There were slave revolts and tropical diseases. War broke out frequently, and the island was then threatened with attack by the French or the Spanish – Horatio Nelson, when still a midshipman, was stationed on the island. Hurricanes, which invariably levelled the crop, were not infrequent; and earthquakes not unknown. In the late seventeenth century Kingston harbour was infested with crocodiles, but it should be said that in those days inhabitants of the entire south coast of the island always ran the risk of being devoured by them.
Despite such disadvantages, it has always been hard for Jamaica not to touch the hearts of visitors, with its spectacular, moody beauty. The island contains a far larger variety of vegetation and plantlife than almost anywhere in the world (as it is located near the centre of the Caribbean sea, birds carrying seeds in their droppings fly to it from North, Central, and South America). Jamaica’s British colonisers added to this wealth of vegetation, often whilst searching for fresh, cheap means of filling the bellies of its slaves. The now omnipresent mango, for example, was brought from West Africa and it was on a journey across the Pacific to bring the first breadfruit plants to Jamaica that the mutiny on the Bounty took place.
Slavery was eventually abolished in 1838. From the 1860s, indentured labour from India and China was imported; the Indians brought with them their propensity for smoking ganja, itself an Indian word (interestingly, sometimes spelt ‘gunjah’), as well as the plant’s seeds. In the 1880s, a new period of prosperity began after a crop was found to replace sugarcane – the banana. In 1907, however, this new prosperity was partially unhinged by the devastating earthquake that destroyed much of Kingston. The economy recovered, and the next wave of financial problems occurred in the late 1930s, as the worldwide depression finally hit the island. A consequence of this was the founding of the two political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) under Alexander Bustamante and the People’s National Party (PNP) under Norman Manley, which would spearhead the path towards independence in 1962.
On 6 August 1962 Jamaica became an independent nation. The Union Jack was lowered and the green, gold, and black standard of Jamaica was raised. Three months previously, the JLP had won a twenty-six-seat majority and taken over the government under Prime Minister Bustamante. Paradox is one of the yardsticks of Jamaica, and it should be no surprise that the Jamaica Labour Party has always been far to the right of its main opposition, the People’s National Party.
Beneath this facade of democracy, the life of the ‘sufferah’, downcast in his west Kingston ghetto tenement, was essentially unchanged. In some ways things were now more difficult. The jockeying for position created by self-government brought out the worst in people. Soon the MPs of each of the ghetto constituencies had surrounded themselves with gun-toting sycophants anxious to preserve their and their family’s position. In part this was a spin-off from the gangs of enforcers that grew up around sound systems: back the wrong candidate in a Jamaican election and you can lose not only your means of livelihood, but also your home – and even your life. Political patronage is the ruling principle in Jamaica.
During the 1960s, Jamaican youth, who felt especially disenfranchised, sought refuge in the rude-boy movement, an extreme precursor of the teenage tribes surfacing throughout the world. Dressed in narrow-brimmed hats and the kind of mohair fabrics worn by American soul singers, rude boys were fond of stashing lethal ‘ratchet’ knives on their persons, and bloody gang fights were common. Independence for Jamaica coincided with the birth of its music business; in quick succession, ska, rock steady, and then reggae music were born, the records often being used as a kind of bush telegraph to broadcast news of some latest police oppression that the Daily Gleaner would not print.
In 1972, after ten years in power, the JLP was voted out of office. Michael Manley’s People’s National Party was to run Jamaica for the next eight years. Unfortunately, Manley’s efforts to ally with other socialist Third World countries brought the wrath of the United States upon Jamaica, especially after the prime minister nationalised his country’s bauxite industry, which provides the raw material for aluminium – and had been previously licensed to the Canadian conglomerate Alcan.
A policy of destabilisation began that turned Jamaica into a battleground, especially after Manley was returned to power in December 1976 in the subsequent election. Soon the country was almost bankrupt. Bob Marley played a part in attempting to restore peace, forcing Manley and his opposition rival, Edward Seaga, to shake hands publicly at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, and bringing opposing gunmen together. But the 1980 election, won by Edward Seaga, in power until 1989, was the bloodiest of them all.
In recent years, a measure of peace seems to have been brought to the island. A positive relationship with the nearby United States has been forged, and there is a previously unsurpassed national pride, following the Jamaican soccer team’s qualification for the 1998 World Cup and an unprecedented run of successes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Still, the story of Jamaica is that of an island that can be simultaneously heaven and hell – as indeed described in the Bob Marley song ‘Time Will Tell’, in its line ‘Think you’re in heaven but you’re living in hell’; a country that could suffer the devastating economic bullying of the United States’ Caribbean Basin Initiative during the 1970s but that now, against expectations, is experiencing economic growth and a resultant rise in self-esteem that lets it serve as a model for developing nations in the first years of the twenty-first century. And at least its inhabitants rarely forget that Jamaica is a land whose blessings are surely God-given.
Bob Marley is seen by the world as the personification of the rebellious island nation of Jamaica – not without considerable justification. For Bob Marley was a hero figure, in the classic mythological sense. From immensely humble beginnings, with his talent and religious belief his only weapons, the Jamaican recording artist applied himself with unstinting perseverance to spreading his prophetic musical message; he only departed this planet when he felt his vision of One World, One Love, which was inspired by his belief in Rastafarianism, was beginning in some quarters to be heard and felt. For example, in 1980, the European tour of Bob Marley and the Wailers played to the largest audiences a musical act had ever experienced there. And as much as the late Bob Marley continues to personify Jamaica, so he also embodied the soul of what the world knows as the odd, apparently paradoxical religion of Rastafari, the only faith uncritically accepted globally as an integral aspect of popular music.
Bob Marley’s story is that of an archetype, which is why it continues to have such a powerful and ever-growing resonance: it embodies, among other themes, political repression, metaphysical and artistic insights, gangland warfare, and various periods in a mystical wilderness. It is no surprise that Bob Marley now enjoys an icon-like status more akin to that of the rebel myth of Che Guevara than to that of a pop star. And his audience continues to widen: to westerners, Bob’s apocalyptic truths prove inspirational and life-changing; in the Third World, his impact is similar, except that it goes further. Not just amongst Jamaicans, but also amongst the Hopi people of New Mexico and the Maoris of New Zealand, in Indonesia, in India, even – especially – in those parts of West Africa from which slaves were plucked and taken to the New World, Bob Marley is seen as the Redeemer figure returning to lead this planet out of confusion. Some will come out and say it directly: that Bob Marley is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ long awaited by much of the world. In such an interpretation of his life, the cancer that killed Bob Marley is inevitably described as a modern version of the crucifixion.
Although the disease probably did have its origins in assorted injuries to his right foot, conspiracy theories still persist. Was Bob’s body poisoned still further when going for medical check-ups in Babylonian cities, such as London, Miami, and New York? Were his hotel rooms or homes bombarded with cancer-inducing rays? Or, more simply, was Bob’s system slowly poisoned by the lead from the bullet that remained in his body after the 1976 attempt on his life? (All of these were suggested to me by his mother as possible causes of her son’s death.)
Prior to the US leg of the Uprising tour in the autumn of 1980, Bob Marley had been given a complete physical examination, allegedly passing with flying colours – though this is odd, as the musician was certainly in the latter stages of suffering from cancer. In Miami, before the tour kicked off, he played a game of football for America Jamaica United, against a team of Haitians, in which his fluid skills seemed unabated.
But yes, you think, the cancer probably was the consequence of the injuries to his foot. And then you remember that this was a time when the forces of darkness thought nothing of killing a woman such as Karen Silkwood, who was endeavouring to expose a nuclear risk. How much more must they have been threatened by a charismatic, alternative world leader who in widely accessible popular art was delivering warnings about the wickedness of the world’s institutions?
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Timothy White, the author of Catch a Fire, the wonderful Bob Marley biography published in 1984, the extent of the CIA files on Bob has become widely known. Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob to his Island Records label, had personal experience of this. ‘There are conspiracy theories with everything, especially out of Jamaica, because Jamaicans have such fertile imaginations. The only thing I will say is that I was brought in by the American ambassador in Jamaica to his office, and he said that they were keeping an eye on me, on what I was doing, because I was working with this guy who was capable of de-stabilising. They had their eye on him.’
Bob’s end was very sad. After his collapse whilst jogging in New York’s Central Park on 8 October 1980, he received radiation treatment at the city’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; his locks fell out, like a portent.
Even confronted by a future of such grim uncertainty, Bob Marley managed never to lose his wry view of life. Two weeks after his collapse, his death was being reported in the US media; he put out a statement in which his characteristic dry sense of humour was clearly still in evidence: ‘They say that living in Manhattan is hell, but …’
With a similar attitude, he strove to make light of his illness to his children. Whilst he was being treated in New York, they flew up from Jamaica to see him at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South, where he habitually stayed when in Manhattan. ‘He told us what was wrong with him,’ said Cedella. ‘His hair was gone. We were like, “Where’s your hair?” He was making it to be such a big joke: “Oh, I’m Frankenstein.” We said, “That’s not funny.”
‘I knew Daddy had a bad toe, because I would have to clean it sometimes. But I just thought it was a bad toe. I didn’t expect anything else but for maybe the nail to come off.’
By November 1980, the doctors at the Sloan-Kettering admitted they could do no more. A number of alternative cures were considered: the apricot kernel therapy attempted by the actor Steve McQueen; a spiritual cure by journeying to Ethiopia; a simple return home to Jamaica – though this plan was abandoned when the island was seen to be in the grip of the most violent general election it had ever known.
After the options had been weighed up, Bob travelled to Bavaria in West Germany, to the Sunshine House Cancer Clinic in Bad Wiessee. A holistic centre, it was run by the controversial Dr Josef Issels, a former SS officer. Issels only took on cases that had been proclaimed incurable, and he claimed a 20 per cent success rate.
The environment, however, was hostile and alien. The house of the dread who would never tour Babylon during the winter months was surrounded by thick snow. Bob would go to Issels’s clinic for two hours of treatment each day then return to spend time with the several visitors who flew in to be with him – his mother, his wife, members of the Wailers, old friends. Much of his time was spent watching videotapes of soccer matches, particularly those played by the Brazilian team.
But Bob never stopped songwriting. He seemed to think he could make it. His weight went up and for a time he seemed in better spirits. But the sterile, picture-postcard atmosphere of Bad Wiessee hardly nurtured Bob’s soul. ‘It was a horrible place,’ thought Chris Blackwell. ‘It must have been very disorientating for him. He had virtually no hair, just scraggly bits, and was so thin: he must have weighed a hundred pounds or something like that. He looked terrible. But there was something … He was still so proud. He chatted for a bit. He was very strong somehow still.’
The atmosphere where he was staying was even worse: vicious psychological warfare was taking place between, as Mortimer Planner, the Rastafarian elder, described it, ‘the Orthodox and Twelve Tribes factions’. It seems demeaning to everyone involved, including Bob, to describe this in further detail. Sufficient to heed Planner’s words: ‘A terrible misunderstanding has gone on. For all these people loved Bob.’
He developed a craving for plantain tarts, and it was arranged for a carton of them to be flown to him from Jamaica. Before they arrived, he decided he wanted to go home. He had had enough of Bad Wiessee. He knew what was going to happen. Bob Marley asked Chris Blackwell to rent him a plane. Blackwell said he would send one for him immediately. ‘But even then, Bob hadn’t lost his sense of humour,’ smiled the Island Records boss. ‘Bob always thought I was kinda cheap, so he said, “Don’t send me one with propellers now.”’
Accompanied by two doctors, Bob was flown across the Atlantic. He made it no further than Miami.
Judy Mowatt, one of the I-Threes, was at home on the morning of 11 May 1981. A little after 11.30 she heard a loud clap of thunder and saw lightning fork through a window of her house and flash on a picture of Bob on the wall. And Judy knew exactly what this foretold.
At a little after 11.30 a.m., in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital in Miami, Bob surrendered his soul to the Almighty Jah.
NATURAL MYSTIC (#ulink_8fc066df-6299-5fae-9f80-2e4b9b992f17)
Although in later life the name of Bob Marley came to be considered as synonymous with Kingston’s downtown ghetto of Trench Town, the singer was really a country boy, raised and reared in a backwoods part of Jamaica. There he would watch the ebb and flow of nature, observing animals and plants grow, paying especial attention to the timeless progress of trees; in his music there is often a sense of an association with the earth itself.
The ‘garden parish’ of St Ann in which he ‘came up’, as Jamaicans would say, is often considered the most beautiful part of Jamaica. And Nine Miles, where Nesta Robert Marley was born, is like a perfect microcosm of the north-central region of Jamaica in which it is located. Deep in the interior of the extraordinary lush landscape of St Ann, and not easily accessible, the rolling, feminine countryside around the hamlet of Nine Miles is like the heart, even the soul and mystery of the island. Located at 3,500 feet above sea-level, its height gives this landlocked region distinct climatic advantages: for example, it enjoys temperate weather, cooler and less oppressive than that of the marshy plains in the south of the island or the baking, concrete swelter of Kingston, the capital.
Cedella Malcolm, the mother of Bob Marley, was born on 23 July 1926; she shared the date, but not the year of birth, with a man whose very name ultimately would weave a life-changing spell over her: Ras Tafari, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Negus Negusti, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Such an apparent coincidence should be no great surprise: the very air of Jamaica seems thick with great truths and inconceivable, magical mysteries. Obeah, an African diasporic word, a marriage of African animist and Catholic practices, had long been accepted by many as a norm. And in Jamaica – as in neighbouring Cuba and Haiti, where it is known as voodoo – it lived hand in hand with what often revealed itself to be a stringent, unforgiving form of Christianity.
This was the world in which Bob Marley’s mother grew up. It was not surprising then that when Cedella Malcolm – whose name was familiarly shortened to ‘Ciddy’ – was eight years old, she saw Hubert Hall, a local practitioner of obeah, confess that he had caused the crash which had overturned her father’s car when she was a toddler. On his deathbed the man struggled to save his soul by admitting the wickedness of his sins and transgressions. Lying on a board in Cedella’s father’s kitchen at Nine Miles, Hall’s head seemed to dwarf his drawn, wretchedly suffering body: it was pure skin and bone, except for his feet, which had swollen up to almost the size of his skull. As he spoke, Cedella could see the fear and terror emanating in a kind of steam from his jaw, his lips skinning back from his teeth.
Driven by a bitterness and jealousy that gnawed away at him like a cancer, Hall had waited until Omeriah Malcolm’s De Soto, a symbol of the family’s prosperity, on that day piled up with relatives, purred along one of the only straight stretches on the endlessly winding, ever climbing road that clambers up through Nine Miles. As her father approached Eleven Miles, Hall summoned up his ‘science’, as obeah is also known, to flip the car over on its side. A truckdriver passing through Nine Miles called out the grim news: Mr Malcolm’s car overturn ’pon de bank and all de people dem dead dere!
Omeriah’s friends and relatives, the tiny Cedella clutched to the bosom of an aunt, hurried to the scene of the accident. Arriving there, they experienced a measure of relief; no one was dead, but there were some terrible injuries: the mother of one of Cedella’s brothers – as befitted a man prosperous and powerful enough to be the local custos (a legally ordained arbitrator), her father had not restricted his love life to Cedella’s mother, his wife Alberta, and he had over twenty children by various women – had had her hair burned off entirely by scalding water from the cracked radiator. Trapped in the wreckage, crumpled and crammed up on top of each other, were the other passengers, dreadfully burnt, or moaning from the pain of their broken bones and torn flesh. Sitting dazed by the side of the road, however, with only a slight cut to his face, was Cedella’s father, balancing her little brother John on his knee: his inborn goodness had led God to protect Omeriah Malcolm.
Even as they were taking Hubert Hall’s body on a stretcher up to the burial plot, little Ciddy was still mulling over the man’s confession, her first direct experience of the force of obeah; the casualness of his wickedness caused her deep distress. Hall admitted he had been in league with others who had sought out his dark talent, urging him on to this terrible act with no more lavish a bribe than a meal of goat’s head, yam, and cho-cho. But for most of the adults who had heard Hall’s tormented words, such wickedness unfortunately was commonplace. Her father, for example, had little doubt of their veracity; and of the way the obeahman had distorted the ‘natural mystic’ that wafts on the breeze through Nine Miles like one of God’s greatest and most secret truths.
The Malcolms were the oldest, most respected family in the region of Rhoden Hall, where Nine Miles is located, owning or renting a considerable amount of land and local properties. As the ownership of the luxury De Soto motor car indicated, they were by no means impoverished. Although there was no electricity or running water in Nine Miles, Ciddy’s father owned one of the only Delco generators in the area. Omeriah Malcolm would start it up on Sundays, so that his friends and relatives could listen to his radio. For this enjoyment they would walk from miles around. ‘Sometimes we would hear a sermon from Kingston, sometimes rumba music from Cuba,’ said Ciddy.
Omeriah’s father was Robert ‘Uncle Day’ Malcolm, who was descended from the Cromanty slaves shipped from the Gold Coast – what is now Ghana – between 200 and 250 years previously: as tenant slaves, the Malcolms had lived in this bush region long before slavery was abolished in 1838.
Cedella’s grandmother, Katherine Malcolm, known as Yaya, lived ‘down the bottom’, away from the road over on the other side of a steep hill. Her home was the family residence known as ‘Big House’, though it consisted only of one room and a hall – but there were a number of outhouses. Cedella had the impression that Yaya never slept. Every morning, round about 3 or 4 a.m., the hour at which many Jamaican countryfolk rise, Mr Malcolm would walk up the goat-path to his mother’s for his morning coffee. He would take with him – as would anyone who ventured up that way – a big log of wood to stoke up the fire that always blazed at Yaya’s; in those days before matches became plentiful, anyone who needed fire would go up to see her and beg a blazing lump of wood. When Cedella’s father returned home after an hour or so, he’d carry with him a covered quart tin full of coffee for the children’s breakfast. Set up for the day, Omeriah would then leave for his various pieces of farmland. He was the biggest cultivator of coffee in the neighbourhood, taking it to market at Green Hill in his horse and cart before he bought first a Ford Model T and then the De Soto. But he would also grow pimento and bananas, making sure that every piece of land he worked had a plentiful supply of banana trees.
But Omeriah Malcolm’s relative commercial success was not his only source of wealth. His father had carefully instructed him in the arcane arts brought to Jamaica by the Cromanty slaves. Omeriah proved to have an empathy and skill with these God-given positive forces; he was, to all intents and purposes, a magician, but one who dealt only with light and high matters; one of his closest friends was an eminent Jamaican ‘scientist’ so skilled he was said to be able simultaneously to write two letters of the alphabet with one hand. Omeriah Malcolm became what was known as a ‘myalman’, a healer and a bush doctor, and his understanding included the natural medicine and power in the individual plants, such as Tree of Life and Sink-a-Bible, which flourish in Jamaica. When she grew older, Cedella’s father would confide in her about the many powerful spirits lodged in the neighbourhood of Nine Miles. It had always been so, he would say, and would puzzle why so many people there were ready to surrender themselves to the dark forces; why it would always be said that the place was a small garden but a bitter weed.
Ten years later, when Cedella Malcolm was pregnant with her son Nesta, her father or her grandmother would show her which herbs to take to ease any potential problems in the pregnancy; which blend of bush tea would ease high blood pressure or back-ache; which bush was the best cleanser for the coming baby’s skin. Her father, in fact, was more nervous about this imminent birth than his daughter. Ciddy loved being pregnant, her already intriguing aura, one of a kind of infinite calm, heightened even further by a numinous glow as she felt the child growing within her. But her father would scold her. ‘You runnin’ around hearty, but you sicker than the rest of your sisters,’ he would admonish. ‘Take up your doctor book and read it instead of laughing and playing. Always remember,’ he would add a piece of Jamaican folk wisdom about pregnancy, never failing to unnerve his daughter, ‘you are between life and death until you give birth to that baby.’
‘I was young. I didn’t know any better. I was happy, everything was lovely. The pregnancy was great. Everything was nice.’ Sometimes the unborn child would give a clue to one of the career options he would later consider: ‘This baby kick like hell – like a footballer.’ Cedella would even find it within her to be able to ignore those malicious souls in the neighbourhood who would audibly curse her as she passed, angry at her for having taken up with a white man.
For, two years previously, one Captain Norval Marley, a white Jamaican (although there are recent suggestions that, as with many ‘white’ Jamaicans, his blood bore more than a trace of a black lineage), had proudly ridden on his horse into Nine Miles. The man was employed by the colonial government: he was involved in yet another attempt by the authorities to persuade locals to farm or even settle in Jamaica’s vast acres of uncultivated bush, the region around Nine Miles being this man Marley’s particular terrain. At first he boarded in Yaya’s Big House. Then one day he asked Omeriah if he could oversee the building of a small house for him to stay in: Omeriah complied, knocking up a wooden shack in a weekend. Marley was something of a ne’er-do-well, referred to by almost all those who knew him as ‘the Captain’ – even though it seemed there was scant justification for him to have been given such a rank. (It may have originated in a spell in the Nigerian police force after the First World War.)
It was in this tiny wooden house that Captain Marley, already in his sixties, began an affair with the foolish girl, then only seventeen: he would make little jokes with her about how their destinies were linked because of the way their surnames both began with the letters ‘MA’. The relationship had a consequence that could be seen as virtually inevitable: Cedella was married to Captain Marley on a Friday in June 1944, not long after they had both learned of the pregnancy; the next day he left Nine Miles for Kingston, having bestowed legitimacy on his unborn child. Cedella was surprised, but protected by her youthful innocence from grief. Norval Marley had explained, after all, that he was becoming ill and needed to have an operation; his long days in the saddle had caused a hernia to develop. This was behind his move back to Kingston: for the sake of his health he was taking another, more humble job, as an overseer on the bridges being built to carry water into Kingston.
The pregnancy was problem-free. On the first Sunday of February 1945, Cedella Marley, as her marriage had caused her to be renamed, went as usual to church. The next day she hoped to fast, rejoice and give testimony in the church in the evening, as Elder Thomas encouraged his flock to do each Monday. But Cedella felt the first twinges of going into labour and remained at the property of her father, a vacant shop with two rooms attached, in which she had set up her bedroom. The next morning, Auntie Missus, as they called the great-aunt who doubled as local midwife, was called to Ciddy, who was starting to experience pain of a new and fearsome degree. Auntie Missus pointed at pictures of pretty women from magazines which Cedella had pasted up on her bedroom wall. ‘All these women go through the same thing,’ she reminded her. Auntie Missus had brought food – some yam, some sweet potato, some rice; by now the contractions were coming more powerfully, and Ciddy had to time each mouthful in between them.
The baby boy was born at around 2.30 on the Wednesday morning of 6 February 1945. He weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces; the afterbirth was taken and buried at the foot of one of Omeriah’s coconut trees. The child was called Nesta Robert Marley. All three names came from the father. ‘Robert’ was in tribute to Norval’s elder brother, a prominent cricket and tennis player. ‘Nesta’ was also suggested by Norval Marley: Ciddy had never heard the name before and she was concerned that people might mishear it as ‘Lester’. She didn’t know what it meant but in time she would discover it was ‘messenger’. The child had been conceived in Yaya’s Big House, and after the birth Cedella returned there to live with him.
Nesta was a healthy child. Running on the rock stone, him ‘not have no time fe sick’; brought up on a country diet of fresh vegetables and fruit, the only inkling of a prickly digestion was the vomiting that would occur whenever he ate eggs. As the baby started to grow bigger, Cedella would from time to time feel a twinge of loneliness or sadness that she didn’t hear more regularly from his father. Some help, some support, would have been nice, that was all. Even when he sent money – for a time four or five pounds would come most months, though it was by no means guaranteed – the envelope with the cash would be addressed to her father. As time went on, moreover, the money supply began to dwindle until Cedella hardly heard from her husband.
Still, Nesta was happy, running barefoot in the relatively car-free neighbourhood almost from when he could first walk. They would always say that Nesta loved to eat, and the boy was especially fond of his uncle Titus, who lived up by Yaya and always had plenty of surplus banana leaf or the spinach-like calaloo cooking on his stove. For a long time, Nesta’s eyes were bigger than his stomach. It became a joke in the area how he would take up a piece of yam, swallow his first piece and almost immediately fall asleep: ‘one piece just fill up his belly straightaway.’
Early on, there were signs that the child had been born with a poet’s understanding of life, an asset in a land like Jamaica, where metaphysical curiosities are a fact of life. When he was around four or five, Cedella would hear stories from relatives and neighbours that Nesta had claimed to read their palm. But she took it for a joke. How could this little boy of hers possibly do something like that? Though she did feel slightly shaken when she first heard that what Nesta told people about their futures invariably came true. There was District Constable Black from Stern Hill, for example: he told Cedella how the child had read his hand and everything he said had come to pass. Then a woman who had also had her palm looked at by Nesta confirmed this, forcing his mother to accept this strange talent of her jolly, much loved son, one that went a considerable way to defining him as an obeahman. ‘How he do things and prophesy things, he is not just by himself – he have higher powers, even from when he is a little boy,’ said Cedella Booker – as she later became. ‘The way I felt, the kind of vibes I get when Bob comes around … It’s too honourable. I always look upon him with great respect: there is something inside telling me that he is not only a son – there is something greater in this man. Bob is of a small stature, but when I hear him talk, he talk big. When it comes to the feelings and reactions I get from Bob, it was always too spiritual to even mention or talk about. Even from when he was a small child coming up.’
If Nesta had read his own palm and perceived what was to be the pattern of his life, he never told his mother. When he was almost five, however, Omeriah received a visit from Norval. What Cedella should do, he suggested, was to give up Nesta for adoption by Norval’s brother, the esteemed Robert, after whom he had been named. What was more, Cedella should guarantee that she would not attempt to see the boy any more. ‘It’s like he wouldn’t be my child no more! I said, “No way.”’
But then Norval came out to Nine Miles on another visit. He had had a different idea: what if the child were to come and stay with his father in Kingston for a time? He would pay for his education and let him benefit from all the opportunities and possibilities inherent in Norval’s own large, affluent family, who owned Marley and Co., Jamaica’s largest plant-hire company.
Cedella could see the advantages for her son in this. She felt she could go along with the plan. Nesta was duly delivered to her husband in Kingston. Hardly had the boy arrived, however, than he was taken downtown, to the house of a woman called Miss Grey. Norval Marley left his son with her, promising to return shortly. He never did.
All communication was then broken with the Malcolm family at Nine Miles. Cedella was deeply worried, fearing her son had been stolen from her – as indeed he had been. After almost a year, when Cedella had moved to Stepney, a village two or three miles past Nine Miles, a woman friend of hers went to Kingston to see her niece. The woman and her niece, who was called Merle, were together on the Spanish Town Road when they ran directly into Nesta. He had been sent to buy coal, he said, by the woman in whose house he was living. ‘Ask my mother,’ the boy continued, ‘why she don’t come look for me?’ And he told the woman his address.
When Cedella’s friend returned to Stepney that night she reported all that had happened. Nesta looked happy, she told Cedella: a little chubby, fat, healthy. A colossal sense of relief came over Cedella. ‘I was so tickled pink, I was so happy when she told me.’ But there was one problem: her friend had not had a pen or pencil with her. And she had forgotten the address where Nesta was living.
A solution was suggested – that Merle, the niece, might remember the address. Cedella wrote to her, and Merle replied straightaway that, although she couldn’t remember the number of the building, she knew Nesta was living on Heywood Street, in a poor downtown neighbourhood. Heywood Street was a short street, she added, and told Cedella that if she came up to Kingston, Merle would help her look for the missing child.
Accompanied by another friend from Nine Miles, Cedella arrived in Kingston one evening. Meeting Merle as arranged, Cedella discovered Heywood Street to be off Orange Street, and filled with stores. All these businesses were closed, however. Outside the first building that she came to, Cedella saw a man sitting out on the pavement. ‘I asked him,’ she said, using the name by which her son’s father called him, ‘if he knew a little boy who lived round there by the name of Robert Marley?’
‘Yeah mon,’ the man replied, looking behind him. ‘He was jus’ here a minute ago.’ Cedella’s heart lifted, as it filled with happiness.
Then she followed the man’s eyes. ‘There he was, just on the corner, playing. Nesta just bust right round: when he see it was me him just ran and hugged me so. And he said, “Mummy, you fatty.” I say, “Where you live?” He was very brisk, very bright. He say, “Right here. Her name is Mrs Grey: come and I’ll introduce you to her.”’
Mrs Grey was a heavyset woman. But she did not look at all well: she had lost almost all of her hair, and the skin peeled away in thin scales from both sides of her hands, one of the symptoms of ‘sugar’, as the widespread disease of diabetes is known in Jamaica; Mrs Grey also suffered from chronic high blood pressure. Robert, she told Cedella, had been her strength and guide, running errands for her, going to the market to fetch coal, as he had been on that day when he had been seen on the Spanish Town Road. He was going to school, Cedella discovered, though from what she heard it seemed as though his attendance was not regular. All the while, Mrs Grey said, she would find herself looking at Robert and wondering, ‘What happen to your mother? How is it that your mother never come to see you?’
‘I told her that I had to take him. And you could see how much she love him. She said she was going to miss him because he’s her right hand, to do any little thing for her. But she know that he have to leave. Then Nesta and I just go home. And we come back and everybody was glad to see him at his school, everybody.’
Once Nesta was back at school, however, he started to become very thin, suffering an inexplicable weight loss, as the extra pounds he had put on in Kingston mysteriously peeled away. On the advice of his teacher, Cedella began to feed the boy with a daily diet of goat’s milk. Whether it was that additional food supplement, or merely the healthier air and life he was living, he soon began not only to recover but to develop muscles and grow stronger and tougher, a country tough, that little-town soft gone.
That was the only occasion on which Cedella could remember sickness coming near her son. Not long after he returned to Nine Miles, however, he suffered a physical injury, perhaps a portent of a future problem. Running along the road one day, he stepped with his right foot on some slivers and splinters of broken glass, the remnants of a bottle. At first not all the glass could be dug out from the sole, hard and tough from years of barefoot walking. Then the wound wouldn’t heal up, pus seeping ceaselessly from it. When he tried to step on it, he would cry with pain, his foot going into involuntary spasms. Tears would well up in Cedella’s eyes as she watched her young son hobble up the rocky path to Yaya’s, trying to place his weight on the side of his foot. But it was not until several months had passed that his cousin Nathan, who was 13 years old, brought a potion, a yellow powder called Iodoform, from the chemist’s in Claremont; mixing it with sour orange he baked a poultice which finally healed Nesta’s foot. Nathan also made Nesta a guitar, constructed from bamboo and goatskin.
One more event of significance occurred shortly after Nesta returned from Kingston. When a woman asked him to read her palm, the boy shook his head. ‘No,’ said Nesta, ‘I’m not reading no more hand: I’m singing now.’
‘He had these two little sticks,’ Cedella recalled. ‘He started knocking them with his fists in this rhythmical way and singing this old Jamaican song:
Hey mister, won’t you touch me potato,Touch me yam, punking tomato?All you do is King Love, King Love,Ain’t you tired of squeeze up, squeeze up?Hey mister, won’t you touch me potato,Touch me yam, punking potato?
‘And it just made the woman feel so good, and she gave him two or three pennies. That was the first time he talked about music.’
During this time, Nesta was a pupil at the Stepney All Age School, in which he had first been enrolled when he was four, before he went to Kingston. His mother had continued to live in Stepney when she brought him back from the capital. Cedella had set up a small grocery shop there, building most of it herself, carrying the mortar and grout. When it was set up Nesta would help her in it when he returned from school. Its stock was never more than the neighbourhood market would bear: bread, flour, rice, soft drinks, which she used to collect on a donkey carrying a hamper. One day as she was walking along the road, the donkey’s rope held loosely in her hand, the animal reared up on its hind legs and ran down a hill, mashing up all the bottles it was carrying. Cedella cried and cried and cried, and was only somewhat mollified when people who had witnessed the incident assured her they had also seen the cause of it, a spirit that had come from Murray Mountain to frighten the beast. But it set Cedella to thinking: wasn’t there perhaps an easier way of ensuring some small measure of prosperity for her and her pickney?
There was another new shopkeeper in the area: at Nine Miles, a man from Kingston called Mr Thaddius ‘Toddy’ Livingston had also opened up a small grocery shop. The man had a wife and a child, who had been christened Neville but was more popularly called Bunny. The boy had been born on 10 April 1947, and was also a pupil at Stepney All Age School. He and Bob became friends. Cedella, however, was only on nodding acquaintanceship with her business rival, Bunny’s father. After a time, Mr Toddy sold up his business and moved back to Kingston, intending to open a rum bar.
Soon Cedella made a similar decision, and a relative bought her shop from her. She was now in her mid-twenties and becoming restless. Though she deeply loved her son, she felt her life was slipping away in Nine Miles. More and more, she had begun travelling to Kingston, taking jobs as a domestic help and leaving Nesta in the care of her father, Omeriah, who bore a deep love for the boy and was happy to care for him.
Omeriah Malcolm, a disciplinarian and a very hard worker, set Nesta Robert Marley to work chopping wood, caring for and milking the cows, grooming horses, mules, and donkeys and dressing their sores, chasing down goats, and feeding the pigs. To an extent Nesta ran free and wild. Unusually for a rural Jamaican family, little attention was paid to sending him to church – although a Christian, Omeriah Malcolm took an extremely free-thinking view of the necessity of regular church worship. Years later, Bob would talk of his farmer grandfather as someone who had really cared for him, perhaps the only person who had really cared for him at that time – his mother’s absences in Kingston rankled with him.
Inevitably, Nesta also began to osmose some of the arcane knowledge to which his grandfather was privy. Another relative, Clarence Malcolm, had been a celebrated Jamaican guitarist, playing in dancehalls during the 1940s. Learning of Nesta’s interest in music, Clarence would spend time with the boy, letting him get the feel of his guitar. He was delighted when the boy won a pound for singing in a talent contest held at Fig Tree Corner on Fig Tree Road, on the way to the junction that leads to Stepney and Alderton. So began a pattern of older wise men taking a mentor-like role in the life of the essentially fatherless Nesta Robert Marley, a syndrome that would continue for all his time on earth.
From Nine Miles, Nesta would walk the two and a half miles to school at Stepney, dressed in the freshly pressed khaki shirt and pants that comprise the school uniform of Jamaican boys. The journey was not considered excessive – some children walked to the school from as far away as Prickle Pole, seven miles distant.
When he was ten, his teacher was a woman called Clarice Bushay; she taught most subjects to the sixty or so children in her overcrowded but well-disciplined class, which was divided only by a blackboard from the four or five other classes in the vast hall that formed the school. Away from his family circle, Nesta didn’t reveal the cheerful countenance he presented in Nine Miles, where his wry and knowing smile was rarely absent.
Hidden behind a mask of timidity, his potential was not immediately apparent to Miss Bushay. When, however, she realised that this particular pupil required constant reassurance, needing always to be told that his work was satisfactory, he began to blossom. ‘As he was shy, if he was not certain he was right, he wouldn’t always try. In fact, he hated to get answers wrong, so sometimes you’d have to really draw the answer out of him. And then give him a clap – he liked that, the attention.’
She did, though, feel a need to temper the amount of concentration she could give him. ‘Because he was light-skin, other children would become jealous of him getting so much of my time. I imagined he must have been very much a mother’s pet, because he would only do well if you gave him large amounts of attention. But it was obvious he had a lot of potential.’ The difficulties endured by Nesta Robert Marley because of his mixed-race heritage were representative of an archetypal Jamaican problem: since independence from colonial rule, the national motto has been ‘Out of many, one people’, but this aphorism masks a complex reality in which shadings of skin colour create prejudices on all sides. The truth was that, as a child, the future Bob Marley was a distinct outsider, the quintessential ugly ducking. Bob felt from the start that he wasn’t wanted by either race, and he knew he had to survive, and become tough.
Even at Stepney All Age School, Nesta was confirmed in his extracurricular interests. After running down to the food vendors by the school gates at lunch-time to buy fried dumplings or banana, or fish fritters and lemonade, it would be football – with oranges or grapefruits used as balls – and music with which he busied himself for the rest of the break. But he was so soft-spoken when he sang – a further sign of an acute lack of self-confidence – that you would have to put your ear down almost to his mouth to hear that fine alto voice. Yet of all the children who attempted to construct guitars from sardine tins and bamboo, it would always be Nesta who contrived to have the best sound. ‘He was very enterprising: you had to commend him on the guitars he made.’
He was a popular boy, with very many friends; very loving, but clearly needing to get back as much love as he gave out. ‘When he came by you to your desk,’ Miss Bushay noted, ‘you knew he just wanted to be touched and held. It seemed like a natural thing with him – what he was used to. A loving boy, and really quite soft.’ An obedient pupil, he deeply resented the occasion that he was flogged by the principal for the consistently late arrival at school by himself and the other children from Nine Miles. After the beating, falling back on his grandfather’s secret world, he was heard to mutter dark threats about the power of a cowrie shell he possessed and what he planned to do with it to the principal.
Maths was Nesta’s best subject, whilst his exceptionally retentive memory allowed him unfailing success in general knowledge. But Miss Bushay would have to encourage him to open reading books: she noticed that, although he’d read all his set texts, he wouldn’t borrow further volumes, as did some of his classmates. ‘He seemed to spend more time with this football business.’
One day, whilst she was in Kingston, his mother received a telegram from Nine Miles, telling her that Nesta had cut open his right knee and been taken to the doctor to have the wound stitched. When she next saw her son, he told her what had happened. Running from another boy at the back of a house, he had raced round a corner, directly into an open coffin. Startled, he had spun away, cutting his knee on a tree stump. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ said his mother, ‘with his gift of second sight, did Nesta glimpse something that day in the gaping coffin that made him fly out of that backyard in breakneck terror? What might he have seen that day?’
When Nesta was 11 years old, there was another accident. Playing in a stream to which his mother had forbidden him to go, he badly stubbed the big toe of his right foot, cutting it open. It was not until it became almost gangrenous that he told his mother, who then wrapped it in herbs to take down the inflammation and remove the poison. But from then on, that toe was always black.
Whilst his mother was in the capital, Nesta for a time was lodged with his aunt Amy, his mother’s sister, who lived in the hamlet of Alderton, some eight miles from Ocho Rios, on the north coast. The aunt, Rita Marley later observed, was something of a ‘slave-driver’, a strict disciplinarian even by Jamaica’s harsh standards. At five in the morning the boy would be woken up to do yard work: he would have to tie up and milk the goats and walk miles for fresh water before going to the local school, which he could see from his aunt’s house. The only respite from his chores was the friendship of his cousin Sledger, Amy’s son; the pair rebelled together against her regime, earning a reputation with Amy as troublemakers. One day Nesta’s mother received a message: Nesta had run away from his aunt’s, carrying his belongings, and made his way back to Nine Miles. In fact, he was fleeing punishment because he and Sledger had been left behind to make the Sunday ‘yard’ lunch but, clearly enthralled with their task, had then eaten up almost all of it before Amy returned from church.
However, Nesta’s mother Cedella was also a naughty girl. One Sunday evening when Cedella was about to set off back to Kingston after a weekend with her family, she got a lift in the same car as Toddy Livingston, who had returned to Nine Miles to visit some friends. It was the first extensive period of time they had spent together and there was a strong mutual attraction. On their return to Kingston they started dating and, notwithstanding Toddy’s married status, became lovers.
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