Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
I’d brought a little digital speaker setup with me. We listened to “Fighting Against Convictions,” the song he wrote during his fourteen-month stint of hard labor, much of it spent at Richmond Farm Prison in 1967. It begins,
Battering down SEN-tence …
with a sudden rising note on
SEN.
I told him what an unusual melody I thought that was, immediately gripping. Some of the senior wardens wouldn’t let him sing it, he said, even when the other prisoners requested it. “You see, the t’ing about it is,” he said, “the melody has to sing the message of how you feel. In the prison, it has to have that kind of a
wailing
type of melody that suggests you are actually experiencing something, you’re not just singing about something that you heard about.”
Around this point, I underwent what I can only assume was a momentary hallucination of some type. Strange things were happening to Bunny’s face as he spoke. Different races were passing through it, through the cast of his features—black, white, Asian, Indian, the whole transnational human slosh that produced the West Indies. The Atlantic world was passing through his face. I was having thoughts so crypto-colonialist, I might as well have had on a white safari hat and been peering at him through a monocle. Out of nowhere, Bunny started talking about fruit, all the different strange fruits that grow in Jamaica. I dug his physical love for his home, the reason he could never leave. “You’re talking about soursop, you’re talking about sweetsop. You’re talking about naseberry, you’re talking about June plum. Breadfruit.” (That tree the original Wailers met under in Joe Higgs’s yard was a “coolie plum.” I ate one in Trench Town. Quite toothsome.)
“We have guinep,” Bunny said. “I’ve never gone anywhere in the world and seen guinep. We got one called stinking toe. So dry that you gotta be careful how you eat it—it might choke you, the dust from the pollen.” He jumped up. A spry man. “I got some of it here,” he said. “I got some stinking toe right here. I’m gonna put some liquid glucose on it, make jelly out of it. Just taste it,” he said. He scooped some from the bottom of the bucket. The West Indian locust,
Hymenaea courbaril.
He warned me that it would be the driest thing I would ever eat. My mouth was already cottony from the weed. I don’t know how long it took to eat that single bite. The process of excavating it from my teeth afterward alone took twenty minutes. But the sweetness that is at the center of locust fruit is the strangest, most unexpected sweetness. It’s like crawling through the desert for days and coming upon a tiny bush that gives extremely sweet fruit. There’s a page of my life that is the eating of that bite of stinking toe, with Bunny watching me and cackling at my expressions as I progressed through the Willy Wonka–esque wonders of this fruit.
“And it’s a stimulant,” Bunny said, thwacking my knee. “It gives you a hard cock. It’s like the shell—it makes your dick hard as a shell.”
The singing across the road had stopped long before; so had the rain. It was getting very late. There was one last thing: I wanted to sit with him and listen to “Let Him Go” on the little player. While I cued it up, he ran through the other Rude Boy songs of those years. He remembered them all. “This one, now, just
ended
the [Rude Boy] war,” he said. “‘Let Him Go’ stopped them in them tracks.” It was never answered. The song came on, and Bunny sang along. He sounded fantastic. That crackling tone.
You frame him, you say things he didn’t do,
You rebuke him, you scorn him, you make him feel blue.
Let him go …
He threw back his head. “Lloyd Knibbs,” he said, referring to the Skatalites’ drummer. The three of us were leaning forward. Bunny had his hands pressed between his thighs. The music, even over my little Target-bought sound system, filled the shed with a golden vibe.
As the
So!
approached, I caught his eye. “This thing coming up,” I said over the music, “that
So!
Who’s doing that?”
Bunny slapped his chest. “That’s me, mon!” As if he were disappointed in me for asking.
He demonstrated, rising from his chair. I leaned back to take him in. “Here’s Vision,” he said (meaning Constantine “Vision” Walker, who stepped in for Bob in 1966). Bunny moved his hand in a wavy pattern as Vision sang,
Remember he is smart, remember he is strong.
“And here’s me,” Bunny whispered. He thrust his head forward and ghosted his long-ago line into an imaginary mike:
Remember he is young, and he will live long.
Pulling back quickly, he pointed his finger in the air—like, “Aha!”—and shouted,
Sooo!
It was him.
* * *
Three months after my visit, relations between Bunny and me soured. Not even the mystical sweetness of stinking-toe jelly could have redeemed them. The magazine sent a world-class photographer, Mark Seliger, over to Kingston, with a crew, to photograph him. I got involved in the negotiations surrounding the portrait. Bunny didn’t want to do it, but in the end (at least as I understood our conversations) he agreed. We were asking almost nothing, an hour, at his house. But we were also asking a lot: we wanted his face. I sympathized and tried to be delicate. But he grew increasingly hard and suspicious on the telephone. A legal letter arrived. This all happened after our crew was in Kingston. Hotel fees, per diems, plane-ticket changes. My last talk with Bunny degenerated into hostility. He called me a “ras clot” and a “bumba clot,” the worst things you can call someone in Jamaica. I’m not 100 percent sure what those words mean, but apparently they have something to do with an ass rag or used tampon. He accused me of having boxed him in, with the whole photo-shoot business, and of then trying to guilt him. Possibly I did this, on some level. He ranted. He reminded me that he was a revolutionary commander. Didn’t I know that he needed to hide his face? “Do you know Bunny Wailer?” he asked. “Do you know I and I?”
I admitted that no, I didn’t.
He summoned a dark cloud of patois cursing. I couldn’t follow for minutes on end. Then he hung up. He never would call me back. I became an unanswered ring in the pockets of his marvelous suits.
I was fine with it. It felt right to be rejected by Bunny Wailer. “What can
GQ
magazine do for I and I?” he had demanded. The answer was nothing. We’d come from Babylon; he sent us back there, to our garrisons. The last transmission I got said, “Greetings, John, Here are photos. One Love. Jah B. Wailer.” There was a snapshot of him in a parking lot, wearing a white sailor suit, saluting. You could read it any way you wanted.
The real gift he gave me was the gift of saying no. It was the gift of remaining the Blackheart Man. That had been the hook the whole time—that he is still alive.
VIOLENCE OF THE LAMBS
Human history is mainly the history of human customs, and we know very little of animal history from this point of view. Nevertheless animals do change their customs.
—
JOHN BURDON SANDERSON HALDANE,
British Geneticist,
What Is Life?
, 1947
Animals are changing, and I cannot tell you why.
—
INUSIQ NASALIK
, 88-year-old Inuit Elder, September 6, 2004
Last year I was asked to write a magazine story about the future of the human race, a topic on which my sporadic descents to the crushing mental depths of pop-rock culture crit had quite predictably made me the go-to guy. Nonetheless I undertook in all good faith to fulfill the assignment. The future of the human race is something we ought to take seriously, since despite all the fortunes spent on those giant space-monitoring radio dishes and the exploratory satellites and whatnot, there exists not a shred of conclusive evidence to contradict the rational assumption that away from this blue ball we live on, the universe is an infinity of unfeeling matter. So let’s keep this thing going, is my take.
In search of insight I spent a couple of days at the Future of Humanity Institute, at Oxford University in England. I called the woman I’d been told was the most farsighted person at FEMA. I talked to any self-identifying and not instantly, palpably insane futurologist who’d answer a query—Bill Lilly at the New School for Human Advancement proved especially accommodating. I spoke with someone at the Vatican. The Vatican actually has a future expert, essentially a house book of Revelation wonk. In short, I want you to know that I tried and tried, for months, to write about something other than what I’ve ended up writing on here, a tangent that popped up early in the research but immediately screamed career-killer and was repeatedly shunted aside in favor of things like out-of-control nanotechnology of the near future (which, you’ll be glad to hear, is something they’re deeply concerned about at the Future of Humanity Institute). But as I tried every way I knew to find some legitimate half-truths about the future for you to read about on your flight to Dallas or wherever your loved ones live—and I do suggest that you visit them soon, as in this year, I really do—the problem became that people who make a profession of thinking seriously about the future won’t really tell you anything that isn’t cautious, hedged, and quadruple-qualified, because, as I came slowly to comprehend and deal with, no one knows what’s going to happen in the future.
My surprise at this pretty obvious-seeming realization showed me the extent to which, thanks to Hollywood or my own paranoia or whatever, I’d unconsciously internalized a belief in the existence of some person, some prematurely middle-aged guy, either Jewish or Asian (or, in the comedy version, Irish), who sits in a room in the bowels of some governmental building and actually knows what’s going to happen in the future, whose mutterings need to be heeded, whose moods must be tracked with concern if not alarm, and whose very existence is a cause all over the world of slight, constant anxiety, and properly so. Is this a dying spasm of the religion gene? Probably. All I know is that it came as a great liberation to me, to have this creature expunged from my imagination, with his alert levels and his survival kits and all his total crap that he goes on about while with the left hand building nukes and starting wars. I reminded myself that incessant potential catastrophe is the human condition, is in fact the price of possessing consciousness, and I determined to live with greater ease from now on, and not to let anyone scare me about the future, because the truth is, the worst thing that could ever happen to you is death, and that’s going to happen despite all your worry and effort, so it’s simply irrational not to say fuck it. I’m not saying start chain-smoking cloves and having unprotected sex with seaport trannie bar girls, though neither am I saying to abjure those things if they’re what make you feel most alive. I’m just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do. And these thoughts were so edifying to me, and I really looked forward to sharing them with you, hoping they might lighten your load along the road.
Then I was introduced to a person called Marcus Livengood.
Good day, sunshine.
* * *
A question that lately has been getting knocked around a lot in the better biology departments is this: As we intrude on, clear-cut, burn, pollute, occupy, cause to become too hot or too dry, or otherwise render unsuitable to wildlife a larger and larger percentage of the planet, what will be involved in terms of the inevitable increased human exposure to remnant populations of truly wild fauna? Not just for us but for them. What sort of changes, adaptations, and responses might we look for in the animals themselves as the pressures of this global-biological endgame start to make themselves felt at the level of the individual organism? We have in mind here not micro-evolutionary changes to existing species but stress-related behavior modification, so-called phenotypic plasticity, the sort of thing we know numerous animal groups to be capable of, though it is rarely witnessed. Or was rarely witnessed. Now it seems to be cropping up everywhere, as even a casual viewer of nature shows can attest. Across numerous species and habitat types, we are seeing, in crudest terms, animals do things we haven’t seen them do before.
I tiptoe around saying anything direct here because of what I hope is an understandable sheepishness in reporting on this subject at all, so sharply does it smack of quackery and gullibility; on top of that, it should be clear by now that I take no pleasure in freaking anyone out. What I can tell you is that this thing is real, that it has proved harder rather than easier for reasonable and informed people to deny, and that, however modest and obscure continues to be the small community of researchers and analysts and bloggers who have thus far commented on it and made the first steps toward charting its dimensions, you will hear a lot more about it in the next ten to twenty years. Even the Future of Humanity Institute folks are going to want to pay attention to this one, though its origin lies rather far, academically speaking, from the stone paths of Oxford.
* * *
Centerbrook, in southern Ohio, embodies a type of small-town college familiar to anyone who grew up or was educated in the Midwest. It started out in the nineteenth century as some sort of vocational academy, a normal school or a technical school, and accrued its university status over time, adding a department here or a professor there as qualified academics moved back from the Northeast to retire or take care of Mom, until one day all that remained undone was to stamp it a liberal-arts institution. No one ever got a good job just by saying they went to Centerbrook, but the students, on the days I visited, seemed sharp and ambitious. Many of them were a good decade past eighteen to twenty-two. And although the campus isn’t pretty—it’s all naked brick and parking lots—there was an atmosphere of seriousness about what they were up to there.