LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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