Bob Marley: The Untold Story - Chris Salewicz

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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.

      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

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