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Island People. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Читать онлайн.Название Island People
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782115601
Автор произведения Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Издательство Ingram
“Give thanks.” Our host offered the traditional Rasta greeting. He bid me sit on a bag of fertilizer. I asked him his name. “My name Bongo.” He paused. “My other name—my Babylon name—it’s Gilbert Powell.” He chuckled gently. And then he told me his tale.
Born here in Brown’s Town, he had adopted Jah as lord in the late 1960s and taken his nom de Rasta around the same time he “met a lady, yuh know, from up in the hills.” Said lady was from Nine Miles. It was in renting a house there, from Bob Marley’s aunt, that he got to know the local kid who always made time, Bongo Joe said, to drive his Land Rover up from town and, tending to one of the family plots, to fill his jeep with “plenty punkin and yam.” Bongo Joe was a trusted fellow Rasta in the rural homeplace where Marley returned, even after growing world famous, “when him want to relax hisself.” The men became close. And when the end came, Bongo Joe was there. The hearse that carried the Gong up from the capital, he said, had broken down around the town of Ewarton; Bob’s bredren, following in one of the departed’s trucks, slid his coffin from one carrier into the next. They continued into St. Ann’s and, once they reached Nine Miles, slid the box containing Bob’s battered body and his Gibson guitar out of the pickup’s bed and into his marble tomb—without remembering, some said later, to turn the coffin around again. No one knew for sure. But the prospect that “Bob went in wrong way” set the stage for the secret drama in which Bongo Joe, who worked with the Marley family and served as a tour guide at Zion for years, played his indispensable role.
“We always tell people,” he recalled, “that Bob Marley head face east, face the star.” The heads of the dead, in Jamaica, must face the rising sun. Tombs on the island, no matter their context, are angled that way. It matters. “But we never sure,” Bongo continued. “And then Bob mother and him lawyer start having dreams. Having dreams that Bob not happy in him tomb.”
“They thought he was faced the wrong way?”
“Yeah mon. And so one day, Bob brother Richard, he say, Bongo! Come up here.” Up by the tomb, Bongo found Bob’s brother standing with their mother and a robed priest from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. “‘We need to get in there,’ Richard say. ‘We need help to dig Bob out. We need to turn him round.’” Bongo, there on his porch in Brown’s Town, lifted a pantomime hammer and chisel. “So I start to dig. Dig and dig and dig and dig. The whole of me face white up. Dust flying in me nose. I couldn’t leave it, cause they wanted me to do it. So I dig and dig.”
Back in Nine Miles that night, as the townspeople gathered by Busta Brown’s bar to toast the bad man’s life, I walked up the Temple Mount to Bob’s tomb once more. The praiseful sounds of Zion Apostolic Ministries floated up in the dark. I sat by the tomb’s western end, crouching by the little Canadian flag and a burning stick of incense. I moved aside a bit of the gauzy cloth hung over its end. I could see, through the haze, a wide seam of rough stone where someone had chiseled an opening and then, working in cement, covered it up again.
CHAPTER 3
REDEMPTION SONGS
“BADNESS! AND BAD MEN. Dat’s wha gwaan deh.” It’s certainly true in Nine Miles, where Busta Brown’s wake was the party of the year; it’s true all over Jamaica. But most of all, it’s true in the capital, where the forging of the Jamaican state corresponded with the building of a garrison complex whose construction, housing scheme by housing scheme and brick of coke by brick of weed, made the state Jamaicans know today: a twisting concatenation of overlapping interest and contested concern whose presiding logic and larger course are perhaps nowhere better distilled than in the story of the first garrison. That tale is inextricable, like Jamaica’s history as a sovereign nation, from the career of the politician who became known as the “bigges’ bad man of all.” Edward Seaga, the man who built Tivoli, and who used the garrison as a springboard to becoming Jamaica’s elected leader long before the gangster Dudus became its “first president,” was never one to let holding office stand in the way of wielding real power. Seaga never let his background or views—he was born to a prominent Syrian family from Kingston’s merchant class—prevent his winning its poor’s love. A pro-Washington right-winger who was born in Boston (his parents were there for school), he was long chided by supporters of his great rival, Michael Manley, with a tune touting their man’s native-born cred: “He was born here.” But the man PNPers called CIA-ga grew up in Kingston. Seaga attended Wolmer’s Boys School there before earning his BA at Harvard and returning home, in the mid-1950s, to settle—surprisingly, for a young man of his class—by downtown’s poor western edge. His career as a politician, even before he was one, began brilliantly.
Seaga worked as an ethnologist in the downtown slums of Denham Town and Back-o-Wall, becoming one of Jamaica’s leading scholars of black religion. He also became a record producer and promoter whose ties to downtown’s poor, and recordings of their songs, made him a crucial figure in building Jamaica’s music industry. When “independence time” came, Seaga became West Kingston’s first member of Jamaica’s parliament—and Jamaica’s first minister of development and welfare. Still in his early thirties, he was perhaps the only figure in Jamaica’s new government who could have pulled off convincing his constituents and friends in Back-o-Wall to abide the ministry’s bulldozing of their neighborhood. He oversaw the razing of the zinc-sheet and cardboard-walled shacks where they lived, and directed the building of the new community—Tivoli Gardens—into which these once-and-future supporters of his JLP, thrilled to join the era of cement walls and indoor plumbing, moved in 1965. Legend says the garrison’s walls were laid out with their ramparts aligned for armed defense. Whether or not that’s so, Tivoli soon became the potent base of its builder’s growing sway.
In Seaga’s early years downtown, his most crucial source of support came from the congregation of a Revivalist preacher named Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, a charismatic figure whose talents as an artist—Kapo was also a prolific sculptor and painter of folk-mystic scenes in an elemental style—made him one of Jamaica’s most noted artists. After Tivoli rose in Back-o-Wall’s place, Kapo remained a loyal Seaga ally and JLP Stalwart. But as the garrison system took shape, and with it the violent mores of a new island politics, Seaga’s patronage also began flowing to the top-ranking street toughs who rivaled such preachers’ power on the ground. By the early 1970s, area bad men like Claudie Massop commanded foot soldiers with names like “Tek Life” and “Ba Bye,” and were being furnished with arms by the parties whose garrisons they controlled. Men like Massop and his PNP-affiliated counterpart, Bucky Marshall, were responsible for overseeing the copious bloodletting that accompanied Jamaica’s elections in 1972 and ’76. It was also Massop and Marshall, though, whose mutual friendship with the most famed downtown tough—Bob Marley—helped them convince the singer to take part in the One Love Peace Concert.
That show, in 1978, which forms such a crucial part of the Gong’s legend, was Marley’s first appearance in his homeland in nearly two years. He had fled the island eighteen months before after an attempt on his life. His second and third records for Chris Blackwell had won him fame and money, and in early 1975, he’d bought Island House from Blackwell and moved himself, and his entourage, to Hope Road. In moving uptown, though, Marley didn’t so much leave the ghetto behind as bring it with him. And in December 1976, downtown came calling. One warm evening, Marley stood in his kitchen peeling a grapefruit. He was talking with his manager, Don Taylor, when a car turned off Hope Road and rolled through his gates. A pair of gunmen leapt from the car. They spotted their target through his open kitchen door and emptied their rounds in his direction, before then hopping back in the car and, screeching through Island House’s gate, tearing off toward downtown.