LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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