I wasn’t sure if Tosh’s avowedly black act, and message, had the same crossover potential twenty years after his death as the mixed-race Obama-ite figure his old friend Bob became. But at this party, where, Peter’s estate manager told me, everyone was performing for free, the reverence accorded “the Toughest” by the sisdren and bredren singing his songs, anyway, was clear. For them, the question of how the great Peter Tosh could be sold to kids in Peoria was as irrelevant as Babylon’s impertinent queries about their god’s end. And up onstage, the Rastas were pounding their drums, dozens strong, with open palms. The elders waved their flags in time, and then parted behind them to allow a new party to come to the fore.
A diminutive figure, stepping from between two bearded drummers, shuffled onstage. He was spectacularly attired. He wore a mock policeman’s outfit, made of pink cloth, topped off by a matching pink sailor cap with gold and green piping. Down his back, a single cord of braided dreadlocks hung, reaching nearly to his knees. It was the last of the Wailers. Bunny. In a pink sailor cap and all. Burdened with the weight of being both the least charismatic and the least successful of Jamaican culture’s holiest trinity, Bunny is also the only Wailer not to have been martyred before middle age. When he left the group, he took their name as compensation: he has gone, for forty years, by “Bunny Wailer.” He is a tricky figure. Given to reclusive paranoia and mad pronouncements, he is a man more warily respected, even among his fellow Rastas, than actively loved. But on this day, his pro bono appearance at what felt like a family reunion shook with meaning. Bunny embraced Peter’s son, in his black T. Taking the mic in hand, he extended a pink-sleeved arm.
“Get up, stand up!” The elders beat their drums, good and slow. Bunny growled. “Stand up for your rights.” The song is known as Marley’s, but it was one of the last songs the original Wailers recorded together—and its most searing verse, as all Jamaicans know, and as Bunny sang, loud and strong, by its author’s grave, was penned by Peter Tosh.
We’re sick and tired of your ism-schism game
Dyin’ ’n’ goin’ to heaven in-a Jesus name, Lord
We know when we understand
Almighty God is a living man
The last living Wailer, his sailor hat bobbing in the fading light, conducted his flock.
You can fool some people sometimes
But you can’t fool all the people all the time
We all sang along.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?)
We gon’ stand up for our rights!
As the sun dipped into the waves, I piled back into the rental car with Ganja Man and pair of new Rasta pals who I watched flick their half-smoked spliffs into the sea. The music might have legalized the herb for the afternoon, but not now. “Too much Babylon on di road.” We pulled out into traffic. And then, after pausing in Sav-la-Mar, where old Tosh’s forebears were unloaded as slaves and our friends took a pee break by a seawall scrawled with the phrase “Don’t Piss Yah,” we hopped back in the car and rolled on toward Jamaica’s western tip.
* * *
ONCE, WESTMORELAND WAS BEST known for the slave ports where Africans were delivered to this island where the roots of badness, as every hack reggae writer and historian parrots, reach back centuries. Now another species of arrivant crowds the once teeny town at Westmoreland’s end, providing the parish with its dodgy lifeblood. As recently as the 1970s, Negril was reachable only by dirt track. The tourist mecca’s famed “seven-mile beach” was inhabited by a few fishermen and a growing colony of counterculture types from the capital, who came to live out their own “Countryman” fantasies or join the area’s main industry at the time. Negril and Orange Hill, in the bush nearby, were famous for their weed. In those days, before the United States’ own production of the plant had become a cash crop to rival corn, smugglers used grassy airstrips out past the coral cliffs north of town to toss loaded duffel bags into prop planes bound for Florida. Such was Negril’s outlaw air, in that era before electricity reached the beach, that those days’ veterans are full of stories about how Babylon’s soldiers turned up, more than once, to arrest their friends and sack tent cities lousy with Castro-ite Rastas, the authorities claimed, and commie plots. In the 1980s, all that changed. That was when the developers moved in, along a new road from Mo’ Bay they paved for the purpose, to exploit Negril’s super sunsets for themselves. Among them was Butch Stewart, a white Jamaican who began his career as an air-conditioning magnate before switching industries to invent such crucial tourism technologies, at his resorts, as couples-only guest policies and swim-up bars. Stewart built an outpost of his Sandals chain here in 1988. Since it opened, Negril’s famous beach has been so built up that scarcely an inch of its west-facing shore, for five miles on either side of its teeny town center, isn’t filled with resorts, ranging from Stewart’s old Sandals to Hedonism II, a clothing-optional “sandbox for your inner child,” its website says, “where the word ‘no’ is seldom heard.”
For the sun-starved honeymooners and others who come here for three to eight days of all-inclusive fun, the smooth road down from the Montego Bay airport, traversed by courtesy shuttle or chauffeured SUV, proffers few visions of “the real Jamaica.” Approaching Westmoreland’s tourist hub from the south, however, reveals more typical Jamaican byways, riddled with potholes, on which the first rule of Third World Driving is strictly observed: If there’s a car in front of you, you pass it. Whether the fatalism feeding that rule is a simple epi-phenomenon of poverty or comes from some deeper historical well, it’s hard to say. But either way, and especially when careening around a tight corner or crossing a one-lane bridge at night, it can lead to some close calls, and, naturally, to tale telling about times when the close calls didn’t work out. Times like the night, on the road past Sav-la-Mar, when Ganja Man said he happened on the aftermath of an awful accident that had taken the arm of a car’s driver—and then watched a couple of bystanders, before the police turned up, run out to lift a gold watch off that severed limb. Or the time, after an evening church service like one of the many we passed on that road, when another of our party watched some addled motorcyclist, for reasons unknown, barrel into the crowd outside, killing four—and then ending up, after someone walked over to where the motorcyclist lay and hurled rocks at his head, “getting dead” himself. (The next day’s newspaper, like the police report, read, “The driver died at the scene.”) Such were the stories filling our car as it passed dusky hillsides dotted with the half-done houses that émigré Jamaicans build in piecemeal fashion by sending a bit of money back each year. With bits of rebar sticking skyward from their flat roofs, these homes awaited second stories that may or may not ever be completed by owners who, after thirty-two or forty years working in Brooklyn or Brixton, may or may not come to retire on their native isle. Jamaica was known in slavery days as a place synonymous with death, and the name that a leading historian of that era gave it—“the Reaper’s Garden”—may still fit.6
If the ghosts of colonial violence are never far away here, they’ve certainly found a home in the other trade, alongside tourism, that makes Negril go. At huge all-inclusive resorts owned by Spanish and other foreign conglomerates on the island’s north shore, the assumption is that guests will spend their three to eight days lounging behind their hotels’ barbed wire walls, that they’ll not glimpse a Jamaican beyond the ones pouring their drinks or cutting the grass. On the white sands fronting Hedonism II in Negril, by contrast, part of the allure likely derives from the prospect of closer contact. There’s a reason