Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (29 page)

Currently living in Miami, Cedella balances her life as performer and one of four Melody Makers with the considerable demands of being CEO of Tuff Gong International and a full-time mom of two. With her group she has eight acclaimed albums and two Grammy awards under her belt, has toured internationally and performed on numerous TV shows. As head of the record label formed by her father, Cedella has developed razor sharp business skills. She is a natural performer and has received critical acclaim for her on-screen work with Gina Gershon in
Joey Breaker
. It is in every aspect of her life, be it performing, administering, or at home, that Cedella has actively safeguarded and developed her father’s great legacy and style. It is a challenge she has always met with determination, self-confidence and energy. It is now that Cedella has harnessed her creative energy and put it towards developing a line of customized women’s clothing, appropriately named Catch A Fire, the title of her father’s first album. Through this project, Cedella once again intends to keep her father’s memory and message alive while sharing with the world her own distinct sensibility.

B
ob Marley’s image is ubiquitous. His face adorns posters, T-shirts, and jackets. It adorns walls in thousands of different renderings. Throughout Africa and the Caribbean, Marley has become an object of near deification, a star with a following of Elvis-like proportions, perhaps even bigger and stronger. In many countries, his image evokes the dreams of freedom that he sang of, redemption songs in reality. He inspired freedom fighters in Zimbabwe and gave hope to the down-pressed everywhere. His face has become the emblem of the quest for freedom, both politically and spiritually.

He has also become symbolic of sympathy for the African diaspora. In a way no other artist of African extraction has, Marley has reached people of all races and given them a taste, through his music, through his life and celebrity, of what it means to be poor, what it means to be part of a hungry mob looking at people with dem belly full.

The place of his birth (wherein his tomb also resides) has become a tourist mecca, despite its relative isolation. Indeed, the village is called Nine Miles because it was nine miles away from any other outpost of humanity back when Marley was a boy. His Hope Road home in the “good” area of Kingston has become a museum with guided tours. He has been celebrated in literature and panel graphics and even at theme parks. If ever there were an icon for the rise and need of developing nations of the world, Bob Marley has become that icon.

B
Y five o’clock we were awake, listening to the soothing slapping of the surf and watching the sky redden over the ocean. By six we were dressed and knocking on my daughter’s door. She and her friend Kevin were going with us (Robert and me) to visit Nine Miles, the birthplace of someone we all loved, Bob Marley. It was Christmas day, bright, sunny, and very warm, and the traditional day of thanksgiving for the birth of someone sacred.

I missed Bob Marley when his body was alive, and I have often wondered how that could possibly be. It happened, though, because when he was singing all over the world, I was living in Mississippi being political, digging into my own his/herstory, writing books, having a baby—and listening to local music, B. B. King and the Beatles. I liked dreadlocks, but only because I am an Aquarian; I was unwilling to look beyond the sexism of Rastafarianism. The music stayed outside my consciousness. It didn’t help either that the most political and spiritual of reggae music was suppressed in the United States, so that “Stir It Up” and not “Natty Dread” or “Lively Up Yourself” or “Exodus” was what one heard. And then, of course, there was disco, a music so blatantly soulless as to be frightening, and impossible to do anything to but exercise.

I first really heard Bob Marley when I was writing a draft of the screenplay for
The Color Purple
. Each Monday I drove up to my studio in the country, a taxing three-hour drive, worked steadily until Friday, drove back to the city, and tried to be two parents to my daughter on weekends. We kept in touch by phone during the week, and I had the impression that she was late for school every day and living on chocolates.

My friends Jan and Chris, a white couple nearby, seeing my stress, offered their help, which I accepted in the form of dinner at their house every night after a day’s work on the script. One night, after yet another sumptuous meal, we pushed back the table and, in our frustration at the pain that rides on the seat next to joy in life (cancer, pollution, invasions, the bomb, etc.), began dancing to reggae records: UB–40, Black Uhuru . . . Bob Marley. I was transfixed. It was hard to believe the beauty of the soul I heard in “No Woman No Cry,” “Coming In from the Cold,” “Could You Be Loved,” “Three Little Birds,” and “Redemption Song.” Here was a man who loved his roots (even after he’d been nearly assassinated in his own country) and knew they extended to the ends of the earth. Here was a soul who loved Jamaica and loved Jamaicans and loved being a Jamaican (nobody got more pleasure out of the history, myths, traditions, and language of Jamaica than Bob Marley), but who knew it was not meant to limit itself (or even could) to an island of any sort.

Here was the radical peasant-class, working-class consciousness that fearlessly denounced the
wasichu
(the greedy and destructive) and did it with such grace you could dance to it. Here was a man of extraordinary sensitivity, political acumen, spiritual power and sexual wildness; a free spirit if ever there was one. Here, I felt, was my brother. It was as if there had been a great and gorgeous light on all over the world, and somehow I’d missed it. Every night for the next two months I listened to Bob Marley. I danced with his spirit—so much more alive still than many people walking around. I felt my own dreadlocks begin to grow.

Over time, the draft of the script I was writing was finished. My evenings with my friends came to an end. My love of Marley spread easily over my family, and it was as neophyte Rastas (having decided that
Rasta
for us meant a commitment to a religion of attentiveness and joy) that we appeared when we visited Jamaica in 1984.

What we saw was a ravaged land, a place where people, often Ras-tas, eat out of garbage cans and where, one afternoon in a beach café during a rainstorm, I overheard a 13-year-old boy offer his 11-year-old sister (whose grown-up earrings looked larger, almost, than her face) to a large hirsute American white man (who blushingly declined) along with some Jamaican pot.

The car we rented (from a harried, hostile dealer who didn’t even seem to want to tell us where to buy gas) had already had two flats. On the way to Nine Miles it had three more. Eventually, however, after an agonizing seven hours from Negril, where we were staying, blessing the car at every bump in the road to encourage it to live through the trip, we arrived.

Nine Miles (because it is nine miles from the nearest village of any size) is one of the most still and isolated spots on the face of the earth. It is only several houses, spread out around the top of a hill. There are small, poor farms, with bananas appearing to be the predominant crop.

Several men and many children come down the hill to meet our car. They know we’ve come to visit Bob. They walk with us up the hill where Bob Marley’s body is entombed in a small mausoleum with stained-glass windows: the nicest building in Nine Miles. Next to it is a small one-room house where Bob and his wife, Rita, lived briefly during their marriage. I think of how much energy Bob Marley had to generate to project himself into the world beyond this materially impoverished place; and of how exhausted, in so many of his later photographs, he looked. On the other hand, it is easy to understand— listening to the deep stillness that makes a jet soaring overhead sound like the buzzing of a fly—why he wanted to be brought back to his home village, back to Nine Miles, to rest. We see the tomb from a distance of about 50 feet, because we cannot pass through (or climb over) an immense chain link fence that has recently been erected to keep the too eager (and apparently destructive and kleptomaniacal) tourists at bay. One thing that l like very much: built into the hill facing Bob’s tomb is a permanent stage. On his birthday, February 6, someone tells us, people from all over the world come to Nine Miles to sing to him.

The villagers around us are obviously sorry about the fence. (Perhaps we were not the ones intended to be kept out?) Their faces seem to say as much. They are all men and boys. No women or girls among them. On a front porch below the hill I see some women and girls, studiously avoiding us.

One young man, the caretaker, tells us that though we can’t come in there is a way we can get closer to Bob. (I almost tell him I could hardly be any closer to Bob and still be alive, but I don’t want to try to explain.) He points out a path that climbs the side of the hill and we—assisted by half a dozen of the more agile villagers— take it. It passes through bananas and weeds, flowers, past goats tethered out of the sun, past chickens. Past the lair, one says, of Bob Marley’s cousin, a broken but gallant-looking man in his 50s, nearly toothless, with a gentle and generous smile. He sits in his tiny, nearly bare house and watches us, his face radiant with the pride of relationship.

From within the compound now we hear singing. Bob’s songs come from the lips of the caretaker, who says he and Bob were friends. That he loved Bob. Loved his music. He sings terribly. But perhaps this is only because he is, though about the age Bob would have been now, early 40s, lacking his front teeth. He is very dark and quite handsome, teeth or no. And it is his humble, terrible singing— as he moves proprietarily about the yard where his friend is enshrined— that makes him so. It is as if he sings Bob’s songs for Bob, in an attempt to animate the tomb. The little children are all about us, nearly underfoot. Beautiful children. One little boy is right beside me. He is about six, of browner skin than the rest—who are nearer to black—with curlier hair. He looks like Bob.

I ask his name. He tells me. I have since forgotten it. As we linger by the fence, our fingers touch. For a while we hold hands. I notice that over the door to the tomb someone has plastered a bumper sticker with the name of Rita Marley’s latest album. It reads: “Good Girl’s Culture.” I am offended by it; there are so many possible meanings. For a moment I try to imagine the sticker plastered across Bob’s forehead. It drops off immediately, washed away by his sweat (as he sings and dances in the shamanistic trance I so love) and his spirit’s inability to be possessed by anyone other than itself (and Jah). The caretaker says Rita erected the fence. I understand the necessity.

Soon it is time to go. We clamber back down the hill to the car. On the way down the little boy who looks like Bob asks for money. Thinking of our hands together and how he is so like Bob must have been at his age, I don’t want to give him money. But what else can I give him, I wonder.

I consult “the elders,” the little band of adults who’ve gathered about us.

“The children are asking for money,” I say. “What should we do?” “You should give it,” is the prompt reply. So swift and unstudied is the answer, in fact, that suddenly the question seems absurd.

“They ask because they have none. There is nothing here.”

“Would Bob approve?” I ask. Then I think, “Probably. The man has had himself planted here to feed the village.”

“Yes,” is the reply. “Because he would understand.”

Starting with the children, but by no means stopping there (because the grown-ups look as expectant as they), we part with some of our “tourist” dollars, realizing that tourism is a dead thing, a thing of the past; that no one can be a tourist anymore, and that, like Bob, all of us can find our deepest rest and most meaningful service at home.

It is a long hot anxious drive that we have ahead of us. We make our usual supplications to our little tin car and its four shiny tires. But even when we have another flat, bringing us to our fourth for the trip, it hardly touches us. Jamaica is a poor country reduced to selling its living and its dead while much of the world thinks of it as “real estate” and a great place to lie in the sun; but Jamaicans as a people have been seen in all their imperfections and beauty by one of their own, and fiercely sung, even from the grave, and loved. There is no poverty, only richness in this. We sing “Redemption Song” as we change the tire; feeling very Jamaica, very Bob, very Rasta, very
no
woman no cry
.