“Bredren!” Country called out as we approached, rising to embrace Ganja Man from in front of his zinc-and-wood hovel. “Long time!” He hugged his old friend’s chest. He was tiny. He wore a white undershirt, bright against his copper-dark East Indian skin. Ganja Man looked Countryman over and, apparently satisfied that he wasn’t in a bad way with rum or the white drug most Rastas hate, reminisced about some good times they’d shared, riding Jet Skis in Negril. Country led us to the beach. I negotiated with one of the fish hustlers to see about roasting one of his parrotfish for this summit. “Me live natural,” Country said, pulling out scrap-wood stools for his guests. “No current deh; jus’ livity.” No electricity here, just life. Which consisted, here, of a five-foot-nothing Rasta man who crouched over his sun-blackened feet and had lost little of the wiry charisma that had convinced his fellows to turn him into a film that, with its righteous rebel hero and backdrop of violence, perhaps begot by the henchmen of CIA-ga (as the Rastas dubbed Seaga), distilled much of reggae’s appeal. Countryman accepted his old friend’s offer of a spliff. And then he turned to his guests with a half smile. He fixed us with piercing eyes flecked the same yellow hue as his matted white locks and bid us sit.
The disquisition he delivered, over the next hour and more, would have been impressive even without the smoke. But what made it true theater was Countryman’s lady. She introduced herself as Mama Delsy and stood off to the side, in the Rasta way, with kind eyes and poverty’s gnarled teeth. But from there, she punctuated Countryman’s speech, on life and livity as Country sees it, with the affirmations or annotations of a Greek chorus. “Seen!” she’d exclaim, when she agreed; “Evr’y time!” was another favorite. Country began with a riff on “how all of us, when you think on it, are going twenty-four thousand miles an hour, spinning roun’ the sun.” (“Plenty fas’! Ev’ry time!”) He told us how he pled in court with its judge (“Am I innocent or guilty? That’s what I’m here to find out!”), and delivered a cogent excoriation of the “discomfortable livity” (“Discomfortable!”) to which Bashar Assad in Syria was subjecting his people—while Countryman’s hovel had no current, he kept his battery-powered radio tuned to the BBC. He made no mention of Jamaica 50.
Sitting there with these avid pilgrims and their penniless oracle was tricky. Who, as the song goes, was zooming who? In the story of reggae culture’s wider appeal, the imaginary Noble Savage has always hovered. But the bearing of our host, wholly undiminished by this meeting, abounded with the proud will to perform, and create a public self that one grows so used to encountering here. When Warren Weir won London bronze, Jamaicans’ Twitter feeds echoed with his catchphrase—Nuh English, straight patwa!—and with the suggestion, too, that someone should sell T-shirts touting it. Some awareness of this entrepreneurial spirit, certainly, informed Brand Jamaica’s boosters. Whether their addled plan to fix all this in place, and monetize it, could ever work was unclear. Either way, Jamaicans would continue evincing the words of Country’s old friend from the beach. “We the survivors,” as Marley sang, “the Black survivors.” Countryman continued to listen to the radio as we ate our parrotfish. The news of a meteor crashing into Russia prompted a reflection about how “we create in darkness; we sleep in darkness; and when you dead, you go back to darkness.” His chorus agreed: “Seen!”
CHAPTER 2
BADNESS
IT WOULD BE FOLLY to suggest that Kingston, at least on its surface, is a lovely place. “The center resembles the nastiest of London outskirts,” wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1948, “and the outskirts are equal to the most dreary of West Indian slums.”1 He’d be more damning now. Kingston has little in the way of the shaded squares or comely spires that describe the Catholic capitals of Spain’s or Portugal’s New World empires—places designed, at least in part, to exude the majesty of those imperiums’ hearts. Unlike Havana or Rio, Kingston was never intended to be a capital of anything but its makers’ crass commerce in sugar and people. Back in the island’s Spanish days, Jamaica had the makings of a stately capital. Sited in a sheltered river valley a dozen miles to Kingston’s northeast, the Spanish founded Villa de la Vega in 1534. The town sitting there now, which Jamaicans call Spanish Town, still has a few colonial buildings redolent of Seville. Outside one such, visiting academics hop from taxis to sift crumbling records in Jamaica’s National Archives. But for most Jamaicans, the phrase “Spanish Town” evokes images not of Conquistadors Past but of a dusty suburb reached by the busy and slum-choked Spanish Town Road, which runs between here and the core of the city whose great modern laureate, Peter Tosh, dubbed “Killsome.”
No, Jamaicans don’t have a beautiful capital to love. They have Kingston, a concrete jungle founded across the harbor after Port Royal’s fall. It was built from an old farmer’s field with little rhyme or foresight, along a sloping road leading up from the waterfront and toward Halfway Tree, now Kingston’s symbolic heart but then a crossroads named for a huge cotton tree that shaded a popular pausing place, in olden days, on the route between Saint Andrew’s hinterland and its port. By the early twentieth century, the blocks between the sea and Parade, old downtown’s central square, were lined with Syrian- or Chinese-owned shops selling armchairs and egg creams. Down by the water, Kingston’s old downtown even boasted the Myrtle Bank Hotel, a handsome white-columned pile to rival Havana’s Hotel Nacional. Never what one could call prosperous, though, downtown fared even worse under Jamaican rule than it had under the British. In 1960, the Myrtle Bank was razed to make way for the vast port complex now containing the notorious “free zone,” surrounded by razor wire and created by the IMF, where foreign conglomerates like Hanes and Levi’s pay Jamaican women US$6 a day to sew underwear that’s then loaded onto nearby ships. After independence, downtown’s fate was sealed when Kingston’s monied classes hatched a plan to move its key functions elsewhere. That plan unfolded on the grounds of the old Knutsford Park racetrack, just beyond Halfway Tree and near the foot of uptown’s hills, and resulted in what’s now called New Kingston: a soulless thicket of medium-rise banks and expensive hotels where the business of the country, and of governing it, takes place. With that monstrosity allied to choking traffic on treeless boulevards cutting across it, the greater KMA—Kingston Metropolitan Area—is an urban planner’s bad dream.
But as is the way with such things, downtown’s abandonment by its rich also fed the ragged charm now exerted by the old byways, like King and Orange streets, along which I strolled a few days after that visit to Countryman, passing discount stores whose facades haven’t been changed since 1962, along sidewalks, crowded with “higglers” peddling bananas and flip-flops, that buzz with the feel of West African market towns. Not long before the witching hour, at dusk, when the higglers disappear down potholed side streets that lead into the notorious garrisons bleeding westward from Parade, or hop into route taxis taking them back to country homes, I walked down the stretch of Orange Street once known as beat street. It earned its name for the density of old record shops and spaces where the old sound system men,