Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (18 page)

He listens as a young-back dread from Grenada pours out a variant on the Bob Marley death conspiracy theory. “Everyone of us came here to do a portion of Jah’s work. “I’m rise up as a songster . . . He died because Babylon killed him. He went innocently into their hands. He is mixing with the wrong sort of people. They began to call him the King of Reggae, when there is only one King. His Majesty Haile Selassie I . . . His blood is spattered all over Europe. Europe is responsible for his death . . . They gave him cocaine,” he asserts, as though privy to secret information. “They can cut into that cancer germ . . . and his death is on the shoulders of that harlot in Britain!”

At the end of this harangue Bongo smiles, waits a moment, then offers his own thoughtful interpretation. “They try to seduce Bob Mar-ley. But he is well alive. Death is not in our language. I and I deal with rest.”

Late one evening by the front porch of the Tuff Gong house, a white dread, a former American DJ who—inspired by the
Natty Dread
LP—moved to Jamaica to become a Rastafarian, is standing and reasoning with the gathered brethren. He has heard from Rita Marley, he says, that there are sufficient Bob Marley songs remaining for at least one, possibly two more LPs. With the solemnity of a Biblical prophet, he reels off the titles of Bob Marley’s albums, his tone drawing out the significance in which they string together:
Catch A Fire!
Burning! Natty Dread! . . . Kaya! . . . Survival! . . . Uprising!
. . . And now:
Con-fron-tay-shun!

“Yes-I!” He exclaims. “So the next LP, it must be given the title— JUDGEMENT!!!”

H
e sat with his friends smoking and rapping. Bob Marley. During his lifetime this man had become a mythical figure, yet nothing in his easygoing manner identified a superstar. He did not overshadow or separate himself from the dozen or so Rastamen milling about his Essex House suite. His laughter was uproarious, unpretentious, and free. He blended so snugly with his peers that I could not have picked him out had his face not decorated record jackets, T-shirts, and posters everywhere. A year after his death his words still sustain and warn and fulfill.

I had read about the millions of records Marley sold worldwide and that he was a multimillionaire. Still, I found it hard to reconcile the slightly built, denim-clad man with the explosive entertainer who danced across the stages of huge arenas or penetrated me with his stare from the cover of
Rolling Stone.
Marley got up, and politely took leave of the jolly group. He led me to the bedroom. Lying casually across the bed he carefully thumbed through a Bible. Tonight he will talk with me about Rastafari; tomorrow he will go up to Harlem’s Apollo Theater and make more history, more legend.

Marley recorded his first song, “Judge Not,” in 1961; he was 16 years old then. A helter-skelter music industry was just developing in Kingston where the unemployment rate was 35 per cent and Marley scuffed out a living as a welder. “Me grow stubborn, you know,” he recalled when we talked. “Me grow without mother and father. Me no have no parent te have no big influence pon me. Me just grow in a de ghetto with de youth. Stubborn, no obey no one; but we had qualities and we were good to one another.” In 1964 Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer formed the Wailing Wailers. From the beginning Marley strove to convey meaningful content in his lyrics: “Nothing I do is in vain. There is nothing I ever do that goes away in the wind. Whatever I do shall prosper. Because I and I no compromise I and I music. I’m one of dem tough ones,” Marley said.

Soon the world discovered that Marley was no ordinary singer whose words were designed to be hummed for moments and forgotten; here was a messenger whose lyrics call attention to our condition, to the reasons for suffering. The music brings lightness to the feet and makes them dance, but the best is a marching drum, a call to struggle: “Get up, stand up,/Stand up for your rights/Get up, stand up,/Don’t give up the fight.”

Marley came to be widely respected as a songwriter with a reach that was broad and deep. Eric Clapton had a big hit with Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” Johnny Nash scored with Marley’s “Stir It Up” and “Guava Jelly.” In 1972 Marley and the Wailers signed with Island Records, a small London-based company headed by Chris Blackwell, a white Jamaican. Marley, who writes his songs and arranged his music, made 10 albums with Island. They all went gold; 500,000 copies sold within the first year in England, Europe and Canada. Two albums,
Rastaman Vibrations
and
Uprising,
made gold in the U.S. His only comment when asked about his success was, “The man who does his work well, he shall be rewarded.”

During the late ’60s the Wailers became the first popular Jamaican group to make Rastafari philosophies and Rasta drumming the main thrusts of their music. Inspired by the back-to-Africa beliefs of Rasta-fari, Marley took a deep interest in Africa and the slave trade and wrote some of the most devastating statements of black rage ever recorded. His songs were designed both to tell history and to instill pride and hope in a people indoctrinated with the lie of inferiority. “In my music I and I want people to see themselves,” he said. “I and I are of the house of David. Our home is Timbuktu, Ethiopia, Africa where we enjoyed a rich civilization long before the coming of the European. Marcus Garvey said that a people without knowledge of their past is like a tree without roots.”

Soon, more and more of Jamaica’s top musicians became Rastas, and reggae, the dominant music of Jamaica, became the main vehicle of expression for the Rastafari movement. Its radical ideas were carried by radio into every home and soon Rastafari permeated the society. Reggae singers like Marley became more than mere entertainers, they became “revolutionary workers” and representatives of Kingston’s poor. “Them belly full but we hungry/A hungry mob is an angry mob/A rains fall but the dirt it tough/A pots cook but the food no ’nough.” Sung with simplicity and the clarity of Marley’s skeletal voice, these ideas were easily understood and quickly absorbed by even the most illiterate among the poor. Through music, Marley and other Rasta musicians attacked Jamaica’s skinocratic system that placed whites at the top, mulattos in the middle, and blacks nowhere. Marley sang in “Crazy Baldhead”: “I and I build the cabin/I and I plant the corn/Didn’t my people before me slave for this country/ Now you look me with a scorn/Then you eat up all my corn.”

The singer became the high priest, prophet and pied piper of Rasta and captivated the people of the third world. Unlike most religious cults Rastafari has no written rules or procedures; its members are united by certain common beliefs and uncommon rituals. The rituals and even the beliefs vary from one Rasta group to another. Bongo-U, a college-trained pharmacologist and now a Rasta medicine man in Montego Bay, says: “You will never know the Rastaman through books. You can tell the Rastaman through deeds, but to know the Ras-taman you must live the experience—it’s the only way.” Some Rastas are devoutly religious and of exemplary moral character; others are thieves and criminals. Some Rastas are hardworking and industrious; others believe employment means surrendering to “Babylon.” The only two beliefs all Rastas hold in common are: Haile Selassie is God; repatriation to Africa is the only true salvation for black people.

“Rasta is the most dominant, most important thing in my life,” Marley once told me. “You have one man defend capitalist and other man defend socialist . . . finally you have I and I who defend Rastafari.” Marley believed that in the Rastafari way of life there was an urgent message for the rest of the world. He believed that it was his divine mission to spread the word of the living, almighty “Jah,” and also to inform blacks in the West that they are a lost tribe of Israelites sold into slavery in a Western hell called “Babylon.” Marley came to help an uprooted and displaced people establish an identity. Bob Marley, who worked to explode the myth of a white God in a black society, was the first person to tell me that Israel was a man and not a place. He said the people who live in the country of that name are imposters. To Marley and all orthodox Rastas, blacks are the true Hebrews.

Rastas refer to themselves as “I and I,” speaking always in the plural because they believe that God lives inside them. To express this divine presence they change the numeral in the title of Selassie I of Ethiopia and pronounce it like the personal) pronoun. Most Rastas adhere to a strict vegetarian diet.

In the strictest Rastafari sect, called Niyabingi, Rasta take an oath pledging “death to black and white oppressors.” Yet they refuse to carry weapons: “Violence,” Bongo-U explains, “is left to Jah. God alone has the right to destroy.” Niyabingi Rastas cite Genesis, saying that God made the earth with words—“Let there be light, Jah said, and there was light.” They believe that when all Jah’s children are united in one cry—“death to black and white oppressors”—destruction will surely come to the exploiters. “Rastas believe in mind power and in the power of the elements, lightning, earthquake, and thunder,” Bongo-U says.

From the Book of Numbers Marley and other Rastas took the command never to cut their hair: “All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head, he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.” This is the oath of the Nazarites, which Jesus took. According to biblical injunction, Rastas cannot eat while others starve. They live communally, sharing goods and services among their community.

In the mid-’60s when there was an unprecedented rise in gang warfare and violent robberies in the West Kingston ghettos—police and politicians alike blamed the Rastas. The government ordered an offensive against Rasta communes and police viciously routed them and burned their homes. The worst attack involved the July 1966 destruction of Back-O-Wall, the worst part of the slums where numerous Rastas had settled in makeshift tin-and-board shacks. At dawn heavily armed police ringed the settlement with bulldozers while the occupants slept. Without warning they leveled the settlement, injuring and arresting scores of Rasta men, women, and children. This attack failed to destroy the Rastafari movement; instead it was scattered throughout Kingston and the rest of the island and soon began to challenge the norms, beliefs, and habits of Jamaicans throughout the island.

Once entrenched all over Kingston, the Rastafari, who had a history of self-reliance based on fishing, farming, and handicrafts, now inspired the youths to seek alternative employment outside the “shitstem!” Their call to “come out of Babylon” spurred an explosion of creative art and today Rasta painters and wood-carvers are transforming Kingston into a showplace of talent that generates considerable tourist business for Jamaica. But the most important product of the Rasta artistic renaissance is reggae music. Numerous drumming brotherhoods developed in the Kingston ghetto as unemployed youths and former rude boys turned to music as a profession and creative outlet.

Until 1966 Marley’s music consisted mostly of glorifications of the rude boy desperado life style. He had had hits with “Rude Boy,” “Rule Them Rudy,” “I’m the Toughest,” and the rude boy anthem “Stepping Razor.” But Marley came under the influence of Mortimo Planno, a high priest and a force among the West Kingston Rastafari, and his transformation began. Marley said Planno guided him to a consciousness which we always saw in him and which he only had to recognize. He emphasized that no one can make a person a Rasta: “You have to look inside yourself to see Rasta,” he said. “Every black is a Rasta, dem only have to look inside themselves. No one had to tell me, Jah told me himself. I and I looked inside I-self and I saw Jah Rastafari.”

After Planno, Vernon Carrington Gad, the Prophet to Rastas and the founder of the Twelve Tribes of Israel Rastafari sect to which Marley belonged, took the singer even further into Rastafari: “Gad revealed back to I and I the secret of the lost Twelve Tribes,” said Marley, who learned that each person is assigned to a tribe according to the month of their birth. “I was born in February so I’m from the tribe of Joseph,” he explained. “Somebody born in April 1 could say they are Aries and that’s what they will be because the word is power and you live it. But if you say you are Reuben, then you realize you find your roots because you become Jacob’s children, which is Israel. Jacob said thou art Reuben, thou art my firstborn, the beginning of my strength, the excellency of my dignity.”

In “Redemption Song” Marley identified himself as the present-day incarnation of Joseph, son of Jacob: “But my hand was strengthened by the hand of the almighty.” Genesis 49:24 says of Joseph: “But his bow abode in strength and his hand was made strong by the hand of the almighty.” Ramdeen, an East Indian dread, pointed to this bib-lical verse and said, “Same man that Bob Marley. Jah gave him the gift to write that music and put those words together. His mission was to deliver Israel through songs of redemption.”