“Long time ago, your Grandma Vaughn gave me one of her locs,” I say. “It was brown and long as love and I put it in an empty milk tin and slept with it under the bed. Every night I talked to it in the dark.”
“Were you deaf then, Mama?”
“No, I could hear.”
“What did your voice sound like when you were a girl?”
“Like Grandma Vaughn’s voice, only little bit softer, and like Gran-Winnie’s, only higher.”
Anjahla is picking off lint from the bedspread, thinking.
“That loc was a company to me, almost like it could breathe,” I say.
“But hair is dead, Mama.”
“How can it be dead when it holds your whole story?”
Anjahla lifts one of my locs and puts it gainst her cheek. I open the dresser drawer, take a pair of scissors, cut off the loc and give it to her. My one-daughter coils it, a love-root in her small hands. She holds it like a bang-belly baby, watches it unfurl a little, then rest all quiet. When she looks up at me, her eyes full with water.
“What it would be like to hear my voice, Mama?”
“Like Zion.”
“Zion is in Africa; you never even been there.”
Her eyes are bright and waiting for my reply.
“There is a Zion, deep inside, that don’t need ship or plane,” I say.
I&I is a Rastawoman
This is the story I want Anjahla to know. They say my mother, Vaughn, pushed me out into the I-niverse on a night when the moon was yellow. My eyes were the same moon colour – jaundice, the midwife said. I had long fingers, like Anjahla, and ears with no lobes; I was named after my great-grandmother, Murlina, who was born in Guinea and came to Jamaica via Cuba on a fishing boat. Murlina was the name given to her by a Spanish captain.
In Cuba, Great-grandmother Murlina had six children, none of them living passed two months. When her seventh, Hector – my grandfather – was born, the Santería priestess said, “Sail south,” and that was how Murlina and her husband, Augusto, crossed sea in a fisherman’s small boat – Hector curled in an uncle’s felt fedora – a parting gift for the ninety-mile journey.
They arrived in Jamaica late-evening, at a place where a quiet river met the sea. A woman washing in the brackish water came to greet them. People say they spoke little English and my great-grandmother, pointing to herself and to her husband and to their crying child and to the open sea, said, “I and I.” Many years later, hearing this story I would joke that my great-grandmother, Guinea-woman, Murlina, was the first Rasta. It was 1892, the same year that Haile Selassie – Tafari Makonnen – was born in Ejarsa Gora, Ethiopia.
FROM THE HUMMING OF LIONS IN THE GARDEN OF JAH
[Tafari in Bass]
Track 6.0: 1892: Yeshimebet and Her Only Son [Version]
They say Tafari was a soft-spoken child. Even as a baby, though his cry was small, he had an uncanny ability to mesmerize humans and animals alike. Once his mother, Yeshimebet, left him in his cradle, and when she returned, he was holding communion with a magpie; the magpie had a worm in its beak and was feeding it to the boy-child’s open mouth. Only when Yeshimebet ran to him did Tafari begin to cry, his arms reaching for the bird flying out into the garden.
Yeshimebet knew that her son was a long-awaited child. She could trace his roots through a line of kings all the way to Makeda and Solomon, the tribe of Judah, the root of Jesse. And now if his father, Ras Makonnen, could raise him so, his son would one day be the 225th emperor of Ethiopia. Yeshimebet had watched as sugar ants made a circle around Tafari’s bed, and had seen them march away when Tafari pointed to the open door; she had watched as swallowtails kept vigil at his window, and heard hyenas purr like kittens on the night of his birth. But even then, she had no way of knowing that one day, in a little salt and sugar island fraught with sufferation, her son would be known as God-self Almighty Jah.
FROM BLOODFIAH, RECORD OF DREAMSLOST
Track 3.0: Harar, Ethiopia, 1901: Tafari, the Dreamer
Tafari, the young Judah-lion, had a dream once that a man gave him a song. He was nine years old at the time and had fallen asleep in the eucalyptus garden, his lesson book on his belly. In this dream, he walked down a dirt path thick with fern and red hibiscus. Emerald lizards watched from amid croton leaves, and sea lapped in a quiet cove in the distance. Just as Tafari thought he had stumbled upon paradise, he saw a great throng of wailing children coming toward him. The children were barefoot and dirty, their feet caked with mud; they had left their families and crossed hill and gully to meet the Ethiopian youth in his dream. Upon each child’s forehead was written the name, Ras Tafari, in black coal. Tafari was just a boy and had not yet been given the title, ras, so he held up his hands as if to say, No, but the children pressed closer and wailed even louder, while from their midst rose the figure of a man with hair like a lion’s mane, and a guitar slung over his shoulder. The man sang a strange music that filled Tafari’s body with god-fire and sent him dancing through the throng, the children calling, Ras Tafari!
And such as dreams are, many years later the boy-turned-Conquering-Lion, Haile Selassie-I, visited Jamaica at the invitation of the prime minister, and only then, at the doorway of the jet, twirling a ring on his finger and looking out at the greeting throng chanting his name, did he remember the dream and the feel of god-fire.
FROM THE ANGEL’S LEDGER BOOK
[Wood Bongo Cross-rhythms]
ONE LOVE PEACE CONCERT; JAMAICA NATIONAL STADIUM, KINGSTON/APRIL22, 1978
When Bob Marley sings his voice is guango dread, cacao memory and lions roaring in His Majesty’s garden.
The people are hungry for food, for shelter, for Zion; for a leader to part the Red Sea and lead the boat ashore.
The Jamaica National Stadium is electric. Lizards feel the vibration of sound as far as Spanish Town. Even a boy being hung from a tree in 1766 feels it.
Prime Minister Manley and opposition leader, Seaga, join hands. Bob Marley makes them. There is scent of Leenah on his sleeve.
I want to tell humans: there is more than what the eye sees.
This night, there is a gate to Zion in the Jamaica National Arena. No one finds it, but later a young boy, alone in a Kingston gully, remembers a certain chord in Bob’s voice, and sings it into a long-long thread that takes him to a place which is both far and near as his own breath.
LEENAH
The One-foot Woman
The story goes that my grandfather, Hector, married Winnie, an obeahman’s daughter. Grandpa Hector was a tailor, a quiet man who liked to smoke a little herb now and then down by the river. That’s what Gran-Win told me. She said nobody knew about Hector’s herb except she. He liked to smoke while he sewed, his tape measure around his neck. He took an interest in Marcus Garvey, Jah prophet, who went to America preaching back-to-Africa and stirring up so much dust that Babylon had to devise a way to kick him out and deport him to Jamaica – mail fraud, they claimed. Hector wallpapered the two rooms in which they lived with newspaper clippings and drawings of the Black Star Line, Garvey’s ships, which would take us to Ghana. That’s what I remember most about Gran-Win’s house – the ships, and the walls covered with newspaper; it was the same house I grew up in. Gran-Win made a paste of flour and water to stick everything up; I loved her pitchy-patchy.
“I knew Marcus when he was just a boy in short pants,” Gran-Win used to say. “Even then, he rub his chin when he talk.”
She pasted a note to one wall along with two old calendars that advertised Murray’s Miracle Hair Pomade and Palmolive soap. The note went like this: A little Epsom salt in riverwata and a stone at the battom of the cup two night raw moon and a good night sleep on a bare mattrass see if you find… After that the ink was too faint to read. I loved Gran-Win’s shaky join-up writing, and always wondered what the thing was that needed to be found.
Gran-Win said Grandpa Hector was the one who added a world map, some UNIA pamphlets and bits and pieces of news that had been saved in a C
uban cigar box under the bed. He drew a blue line on the map – Jamaica to Africa – and stuck a threaded needle in his destination. Gran-Win said that first thing every morning he boiled a cup of mint and drank it while studying the wall. He used a piece of magnifying glass, studying each and every one of Garvey’s words, admiring the look of Africa in print. LOOK TO AFRICA, the wall said, FOR THE CROWNING OF A BLACK KING. HE SHALL BE THE REDEEMER.
One day Anjahla will tell this story to her children.
It’s true Hector carried pictures of Garvey’s Black Star Line in his front pocket, but his most valued possession was his Singer sewing machine. Sometimes Winnie thought he loved the sewing machine more than her, more than his own flesh and blood. He had bought it on trust, putting five shillings in a brown envelope every month-end and paying at the post office. He was a good tailor and always had work, sewing way into the night. The sewing machine was his mistress and rum bottle. Whenever something bothered him, he turned to his machine. “Millicent”, he called her. When he stitched with Millicent he took off his shoes and socks, because he liked his bare feet against the cool iron of her peddle. It was to Millicent Hector turned when he discovered that the Black Star Line was going nowhere and that Garvey, his vision unsupported, had left for England. Gran-Win said that when Hector sang with Millie that night, his voice was wood-smoke and Job’s tears.
HECTOR
Singerman in Root Bass
One thousand stitch will hem a jacket, three hundred a sleeve; not that I count them, but I know them are there. A man don’t count his breath, but he know is there. I listen the stitches that way. One stitch at a time, like the words-them on the wall, one word at a time. How many words in this house? Too many to count; this house made of words. And while I stitch I breathe and while I breathe I sing.
Breddren and sistren, I pass through some things in life. When me was a boy, my eyes at my knee, my mother put me on a bus and send me to Spanish Town to spend time with my uncle and learn to sew. When I get off the bus it was night and nobody to meet me. I wander three days and three nights before I find my uncle yard. When I reach the house, I find him dead at his sewing machine, black fly already at his mouth-corner. But the thing about his mouth that I always member was the smile. He dead with a smile on his face. True that. I’m a man don’t fraid death, for the first dead I see had a smile on him face.
Now, because my uncle dead, is me teach meself how to sew. One stitch at a time. That’s how I learn it. Anything you want learn, you can learn it one thing at a time. One-one cocoa fill basket. I love to sew because it mellow me. And the herb too. It mellow me. If it wasn’t for the sewing and the herb, I would be a different man – because I go through some things, I tell you.
My wife, Winnie, the obeahman daughter, she can tell you. Her father set duppy on me because him never want me marry her. But me know Winnie was to be my wife from me was fourteen years old. Me see her a catch water by the river and me see how she set the pan on her head and hold her neck high, her neck so long and straight and pretty make you want kiss it. I used to walk behind her, just so I could watch that neck – and her bottom when she walk. I never realise her father – Bro. Mo – see me watch her from his corner-eye till, one night, him send the duppy of one of them old-time overseer to whip me. The overseer duppy whip me and whip me just like times of slavery. And when him whip me, him say, Who do you love? His voice big and boom. And I say, Winnie. And him say, Who do you love? And I say, Winnie. And still him don’t stop till one night something come to me and I say, Long live the Queen, Sar. And then him let me go.
In the morning, not a sign on my back. I get to find out that the overseer was a man used to name Brighton. He was an Englishman on a plantation in Clarendon – but what in them times they used to call Vere. After his wife dead of dengue fever, he go mad and turn blame on Jamaica, and he whip every last slave, every Jack man, woman and child out their bed – 5 people dead that night – then he hang himself on a stinking toe tree. Some night when Brighton whip me, my mother stand in the doorway, watching me bawl, but she couldn’t do a thing. And when I can’t take it anymore I say, Long live the Queen, Sar, and sometime him stop and sometime that don’t satisfy neither. On those nights, I have to salute to every duke and duchess and lord and lady, and puss and dog go straight back. You never see Brighton, you know, you only hear the whip and his voice rolling like a three-wheel mill. But my mother knew it was Bro. Mo set Brighton on me, but she couldn’t do a thing.
No matter where I go, Brighton follow me. Even after Bro. Mo dead and I marry Winnie and in bed with my wife as a man ought be, Brighton still cast his whip on my back same way. Sometimes I so shame, I don’t want Winnie know say Brighton down on me with his whip, and when I cry out I make her think is she and her sweet why I holler. For we fight not against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers. Is there a balm in Gilead?
Then the thought came to me that if I could go Africa, Brighton could never follow me there, and that’s when I hear about Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his ships to Zion.
RASTAMAN
[Acoustic Guitar]
2:19 AM; May 15, 1978; quiet quarter-moon; back door – 56 Hope Rd., Kingston 6
Zion train
Zion train
Zion train
Oh Children –
LEENAH
But Garvey’s Black Star Line went broke and the ship, old and leaky-leaky, never made it to Africa at all. Second chance came on a sticky afternoon when Gran-Winnie met a man at a standpipe by the road as she waited for slow water to fill her cup. He said his name was Leonard Howell. He had quick, intelligent eyes, and a beard alive with natty hair; he gave her a postcard of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia. “Wake up and live,” Mr. Howell said; then he was gone. The emperor in the photo was handsome with his crown and velvet robe; Winnie had never seen a black king before. With his arch eyebrows and long nose, he looked like Uncle Lloyd on her mother’s side. She ran home to Hector – “Come see a man!” She had found the king prophesied in the writing on the wall.
Rumour had it that the emperor’s photo was good for passage on a ship back to Africa. Hector arrived at Kings Street Wharf on October 14, 1934 with the postcard from Howell, a suitcase containing a change of clothes, five pounds in his pocket and the brown fedora he had crossed sea in as a newborn. He was going to Africa. He would send for Winnie and the children once he got settled. The dock was scattered with men just like himself; most of them beardsmen – they called themselves Rastas. They had all felt Ethiopia in their marrow, paid their shilling and answered the call. But passage to Africa was nowhere to be found and when the authorities came, it was clear that no one would be leaving for Ethiopia that day. Bit by bit the men dispersed. Hector alone sat on the dock until the next morning, when he took the bus home, his fedora in his suitcase. As Winnie made him chicken-foot soup that afternoon, the house was quiet. She set the table with bowls that had belonged to Guinea-woman, Murlina.
“Your passage soon come,” she said.
After that, Hector took in more and more sewing and began to pedal his way to a far off place only he could see. Sometimes when he sewed on his beautiful black machine, he was taken so far away that when Gran-Win called, he could barely hear her. He sewed through hurricane, through hogs in labour under the house, through visitations of dark moths, and Gran-Win’s praying; his beard gone natty dread-o. They say my mother, Vaughn, was born at a neighbour’s house across the hill on a night when the moon had been eaten up and Hector stayed home to sew. Later, on his way to see his new daughter, he heard the news that Garvey had moved to London, his Zion dream unsupported.
It was when Garvey died, and on a day that Hector had come back from his usual trip to the post office, that he disappeared – both he and the sewing machine. He had been such a quiet man, no one understood why he would leave. One day, many years later, Gran-Winnie would tell me that Hector ran off with a one-foot woman, Millicent, black as the Ace of Spades.
(For Leenah had no way of knowing that on the day he made his last payment at the post office, her grandfather, Hector, journeyed all the way to Zion on his foot-pedalled sewing machine. His tape measure around his neck, he pedalled and the machine whirred; pedalled and whirred into the night. For it is possible to arrive at Zion, one stitch at a time, especially if the thread is cerulean-blue and you are stitching your finest suit. On such a needle-and-thread journey, you forget the children still playing outside, the cup of cerasee cooling on the kitchen table, the newspaper headline, “Black Star Liner”. What need is there for a ship to cross sea when your Singer hums across an expanse of blue, your feet pedalling over the shoes of saints and charlatans and galaxies of the fallen, to the marvellous equations of the long-dead and the divination of spilt rice? When you finish the last seam, the far future arrives, like the piece of thread caught in your mouth, the little house in which you sit, lit up by a home-sweet-home lamp on the sill, two men outside your window — one a prophet, the other a Judah-lion — the nutmeg tree shaking in anticipation.)
STUDIO Z: MT. ZION HECTOR
TRACK 2.5: SINGERMAN NYAHBINGHI CHORUS
How many stitches to balm I back? One stitch at a time. How many stitches to holy Mt. Zion? One-one at a time. If you can’t go by ship, you go by spirit; if you can’t go by ship, you go by spirit. You stitch and you stitch till you run out of thread, but you stitching same way. Yes, you stitching same way. And that’s when you know that you reach Zion Gate. The feet of the defiled cannot enter therein. Cannot enter therein –
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread Page 5
