Among the thousands driven that day to worship Selassie as a living god were Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. Marley, having joined his mother in Delaware to “work some money” as a custodian and assembly-line worker at a Chrysler plant there for some months, wasn’t present. But he received a letter from his sweetie Rita, back home, about how when the emperor waved to her from his motorcade, she’d glimpsed Christ’s stigmata on his palm. All three, upon Bob’s return, stopped cutting their hair and began spending much of their time at the Trench Town yard of Mortimo Planno, the prominent Rasta who had hosted Selassie on behalf of Jamaica’s government. Whatever their personal reasons for embracing the faith, Rastafari gave the Wailers a liturgical language that, in an era of Black Power and African freedom struggles, bespoke connections among black people everywhere. Their success in setting those links to music made them stars—and forced Jamaican leaders like Michael Manley, in the 1970s, to embrace a sect whose adepts his father’s generation had suppressed. In 1962, military police raided a Rasta camp in the hills over Montego Bay, beating and jailing its inhabitants—a few were killed—to signal the new state’s determination that these unkempt cultists weren’t welcome. A decade later, as that nation’s dreadlocked singers won fame at home and abroad, this changed. Michael Manley traveled to Ethiopia and returned with a long staff he called the “rod of correction.” He played hard to the Rastas, who called him “Joshua,” even advocating for laws allowing the Rastas their sacred herb. His government’s main patrons in Washington, at the IMF and in the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue, put the kibosh on that. But this history may help gloss the reply supplied by the woman in burlap robes, there at Peter Tosh Day, when I asked her, as she cradled her weed amid the reggae filling the air around Tosh’s tomb, why she wasn’t concerned about the police outside. She looked at me hard. “Di music mek it legal.”
In the decades since Rasta gained something like mainstream tolerance, if not full acceptance, in Jamaica, its faithful have weathered many crises, including the dawning realization on the part of many that their “immortal” god was an earthly despot unrevered by his subjects. More challenging still was the fact that, a mortal man, and a frail old one at that, he up and died in 1975. Had the latter event occurred before reggae’s greats “went Rasta,” one wonders if Rasta would have survived. But luckily for the faithful, and Selassie’s memory, those greats were already selling millions of records in 1975, when Marley wrote his response to his Jah’s demise: “Jah no Dead.” By the time Selassie passed, the cult he’d inspired had spawned singing saints with prophecies of their own. And infelicities of earthly history aside, “the larger point of Rasta,” a musician friend told me in Kingston, was that “we needed to connect some dots—between now and our past, between here and Africa.” Which, no matter the squiggly lines it used, was true. And there in Belmont, it was plain that Rasta was still furnishing a usable language and worldview for poor people seeking ways to grasp the larger history that made them poor, and to reject the larger “Babylon system”—the entire white capitalist West—that keeps them that way. And it still offered ways and means, with the help of excellent vibes and ital goods, to live outside Babylon’s walls.
Beneath the breadfruit and mango trees in old Tosh’s yard, vendors peddled some of these. In front of ital food stalls, they hawked low-salt corn porridge and green callaloo. A juice stall’s bottles were tagged with aphrodisiac names like “Mannish Wata” and “Front-End-Lifter,” and bore ingredient lists rich in Irish moss, ginger, and ra-moon bark. Next door, the turbaned proprietor of I-Nation Books and Necessities stood over tables stacked with not a few of the titles one sees lining the racks of “black book” peddlers on 125th Street in Harlem. Perusing a comic-book biography of Marcus Garvey and another of Nanny of the Maroons, I passed over Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery and Elijah Muhammad’s Fall of America. Eschewing a few others pertaining to numerology and Candle Burning Magic, I picked up a volume called Olympic DNA: Birth of the Fastest Humans. Its cover was done in the colors of the Jamaican flag. Its argument, I found when I read it, posited that all of Jamaica’s world-class sprinters, for a complex mash of reasons pertaining to chromosomes and history, owed their gifts to the runaway Maroons whose resistance to slavery, and physical feats in Jamaica’s jungle, helped their progeny develop insuperable speed—and become the modern-day heroes of people like the man dressed in flowing golden robes who stopped me as I walked by with my purchase to point at “Usain!” on its cover.
I inspected the ital “jewels” the man in gold robes was peddling, and complimented the tray of necklaces he’d laid on a cloth on the ground. They were made from dried bits of carrot and mango, accented with fish skin, and covered with clear rosin. His golden robes, he told me, signaled “uplifment, yuh know.” His name was Rasta Shaw, and he had come here from Sav-la-Mar, just up the coast, “where di slave ships come,” because “Peter a revolutionary. Seen?” Seen. “Him stand up for equal rights. Equal rights . . . and justice.” He sang the last words, as Peter did in a famous song whose chorus continued where Marley had left off in “Get Up, Stand Up.” Tosh demanded not just equal rights now, but redress for past wrongs as well. This may have been what distinguished Tosh, most of all, to his admirers here. The flyer Rasta Shaw handed me agreed. “Commemoration Coral Gardens,” it read, in gold ink. “Atrocity Against Rastafari.” Coral Gardens is the name of the old Rasta camp by Montego Bay that was devastated by the “Bad Friday” massacre in 1962. In a couple of weeks, many of those gathered here would reconvene for “cultural presentations, drumming,” and a stage show featuring a pair of performers called Mackie Conscious and Ranking Punkin. On the flyer, an outline of the African continent was overlaid with a slogan that was also a statement of faith. “Victory of Good Over Evil,” it said.
I took the flyer from Rasta Shaw’s hand, with thanks, and moved on.
Down by the stage, a few dozen Rastas sang and drummed along with one of Peter’s sons. Dressed in camo pants and a black T-shirt printed with the block-lettered phrase “BABYLON CAN’T WIN,” he mouthed his dad’s songs into a mic. At the yard’s other end, I approached a small house on whose porch a stooped old woman sat. She was dressed in a high-necked gray blouse and an ankle-length skirt. I mounted her porch’s stairs to pay respects. This was Mrs. Coke: Peter’s mum. Her unseeing eyes were mostly shut; whiskers ringed her chin. I told her how pleased I was to meet her, touching her hand, and she smiled gently. I asked her how it felt to welcome all these thousands of people to her yard, to honor her son. “Bless,” she nodded. “Joy.” Which seemed about right for a ninetysomething woman. As I took my leave, I pressed a small bill into her palm, as seemed to be the custom here, and turned to greet a man, standing on the porch nearby, whom I’d noticed before.
He wasn’t the only other white person here. Ganja Man, naturally, was also on the scene. He was everywhere. He’d spent much of the afternoon on the dais with Irie FM’s deejay, reasoning with passion on air about the ital importance of ensuring balance in your endocannabinoid system. There were also a few aging bohemians, led by the ex-wife of the novelist Russell Banks, who kept winter homes in the area and whom I recognized from meeting at a restaurant down the way. This fellow, though, was different. He was youngish, but with a proprietary air. He had the shabby-chic facial hair and skinny stylish girlfriend