Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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      Meanwhile, Cedella would hand herself over to the Lord’s mercy: ‘I would pray and wouldn’t stop praying and asking God to take me out of that man’s hands.’

      Cedella’s address was 19 Second Street, Trench Town; the area was so-called either because it had been built over a ditch that drained the city’s sewage, or because of the name of a local builder on the project, a Mr Trench. Cedella took over the downstairs one-room concrete apartment from her elder brother, Solomon, who was about to emigrate to England, quitting his job as a bus-driver. The rent was twelve shillings a month, whilst the upstairs apartments, which had two rooms, went for twenty-four shillings a month. In the evenings, Toddy was a frequent visitor, sometimes bringing Bunny with him.

      Trench Town was a housing scheme built at the beginning of the 1950s, after the 1951 hurricane had destroyed the neighbourhood’s squatter camps. These squatter camps, which had gradually been filling up west Kingston, had been built around the former Kingston refuse dump, from which the countryfolk and displaced city-dwellers who lived there would scavenge for whatever they could find. In the days of the ‘plantocracy business’, the area had been a sugar plantation, owned by the Lindos, one of the twenty-one families that are said to rule Jamaica, and the ancestors of Chris Blackwell, who would some years hence play a highly significant role in the life of Nesta Robert Marley. Later, the district that became Trench Town had developed as a spacious, largely white, middle-class housing area, verdant and fertile, home to macka and plum trees. Bang in its centre, the Ambassador Theatre hosted shows by such esteemed American artists as Louis Armstrong, at which the writer and performer Noël Coward was a regular attendee. But the encroaching squatter camps caused the middle classes to depart, selling up for what they could get.

      For the country ‘sufferahs’ seeking employment, the area was not without its natural resources: west Kingston once had been a simple fishing village, and the fishing beach of Greenwich Farm was only a short walk away, providing a source of nutrition or income for anyone with a hook and line. If you had the nous to lash driftwood together into a raft on which to slide out to sea along the still, warm ocean shore, so much the better. The Zen task of fishing granted those who followed that occupation an honourable, respected role in the community. It had, after all, archetypal associations as an occupation of Jesus’ disciples.

      Trench Town, the core of the district, was in the hottest part of Kingston, almost untouched by the breezes from the Blue Mountains that wafted down to cool the city’s more northerly, uptown reaches. But for the slum- and shantytown-dwellers who became lodged in it, Trench Town was considered a desirable place to live; the ‘government yards’ were comprised of solidly constructed one- or two-storey concrete units built around a central courtyard that contained communal cooking facilities and a standpipe for water. Unhelpfully, Jamaica’s colonial masters had seen fit to build Trench Town without any form of sewage system.

      Alton Ellis, later to become one of Jamaica’s most mellifluously beautiful – and, especially during the 1960s rock-steady era, most successful – vocalists, moved to the area as soon as the first stage of the building of the government yards had been completed: work began at Fifth Street and progressed to Seventh Street before the clearing of the ‘Dungle’ permitted the first four streets to be constructed. But there was a desperate insecurity about much of the influx of countryfolk into Kingston – those born in the city blamed them for the rise in crime figures. And Alton Ellis remembered how the entrenched lawlessness in the hearts of the shantytown dwellers soon surfaced, leading to the reputation that Trench Town developed as a haven of outlaw rejects, which later became a reality. Ellis and others, however, remembered it as initially being a ‘peaceful, loving place’. ‘When I went there,’ recalled the singer, ‘it was a new scheme, government-built for poor people.’ Each apartment within the individual complexes had one or two bedrooms, in the communal yard there would be four toilets and bathrooms, and by each gate was planted a mango or pawpaw tree. ‘But even though the place was nice,’ he said, ‘the poverty still existed. The poverty was so strong that you know what that would lead to.’

      Near to Trench Town, in Jones Town, lived Ernest Ranglin, a professional jazz guitarist influenced by the likes of Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Originally from a hamlet called Harry Watch in Manchester, Ranglin had been a teenage prodigy employed by prominent band leaders such as Eric Dean and Val Bennett, who from the end of the 1940s ran big, swinging dancehall bands in the American style. In Dean’s orchestra Ranglin had shared the stage with another maestro, Don Drummond, who would later be considered one of the world’s top jazz trombonists. Employed from 1958 as the staff guitar-player by JBC Radio, Ranglin was equally considered the Jamaican master of his particular instrument. Frequently, he would find himself in Trench Town, sometimes playing cricket with the local youth, including the Marley boy. ‘Really, it was still a nice area. And even the parts that weren’t, those kids didn’t notice: when you’re a child you only see the good things.’

      Even before the 1951 hurricane had mashed down the zinc and packing-case residences of the shantytown, the region had a reputation as an area of outcasts. Specifically, the Trench Town environs had become one of the main homes in Kingston for the strange tribe of men known as Rastafarians, who had set up an encampment down by the Dungle in the early years of the Second World War. Although a few such men – like the trio of ‘mountain lions’, named after the Ethiopian guerrillas who swore not to cut their hair until Ethiopia was freed from Italian occupation – wore their hair long and uncombed, in the manner of Indian saddhus, most only had their faces framed by their matted beards. (It was not until the 1960s that ‘locks’ became common, partially because long hair had the effect – as it did elsewhere in that age – of unnerving the more conventionally coiffured populace. Briefly known as ‘fearlocks’, this soon mutated to the marginally less threatening ‘dreadlocks’.) These primal figures, around whom the funky aroma of marijuana seemed permanently to float like an aura, could appear as archetypal and prophetic as a West African baobab tree or like the living, terrifying personification of a duppy, that most feared of dark spirits on the Island of Springs. It all depended on your point of view and upbringing.

      Mortimer Planner (whose surname commonly mutated into ‘Planno’), for example, was considered sufficiently elevated in the Rastafarian brethren to travel in 1961 to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to meet His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah; he had first moved to Trench Town in 1939. A very simple reason, he said, had drawn him there – the energy emanating from this part of Kingston: ‘Trench Town is a spiritual power point.’ Yet others in the area were not at all happy about the presence of these men with their curious belief that Haile Selassie was God. For example, a young woman called Rita Anderson, a worshipful member of the Church of God, would go out of her way to hurry across the road to avoid them; her parents had told her the truth about these people: that Rastafarians lived in the drainage gullies and carried parts of people they had murdered in their bags. No doubt it was such thinking that was the basis for the sporadic round-ups of Rastas – known at that time on the island as ‘beardmen’ – by the police, who would shove them into their trucks and cut off their locks.

      In 1960, dynamite and assorted weapons were discovered at the Kingston home of Claudius Henry, a prominent Rastafarian who was a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary president Fidel Castro; Claudius Henry billed himself as the ‘Repairer of the Breach’ and had predicted repatriation to Africa would occur the previous 5 October, to this effect having sold hundreds of postcards that he claimed to be passports. The search of Henry’s home was prompted by an incident involving his son Ronald; in company with other ‘beardmen’, Ronald had shot and killed two soldiers, for which the culprits were later hanged. At the time, Prime Minister Norman Manley delivered his thoughts to the nation on followers of Rastafari: ‘These people – and I am glad that it is only a small number of them – are the wicked enemies of our country. I ask you all to report any unusual or suspicious movements you may see pertaining to the Rastafarians.’ Three years later, Rudolf Franklyn, a Rastaman who had been brutalised and imprisoned by police, took his revenge, murdering two people on the edge of the СКАЧАТЬ