In the meantime, Blackwell had helped Marley buy Fleming’s sea-front home—before Marley then pronounced GoldenEye “too posh,” and signed it back over to his producer. Blackwell seems to have agreed with his friend: beyond loaning the place to assorted Rolling Stones and other pals in need of a spot to dry out or write (a gold record hanging there, signed by Sting, says “‘Every Breath You Take’—written at GoldenEye”), he didn’t really know what to do with it—until he decided, in the 1990s, to turn the house into a plush vacation rental. Blackwell added a few more tasteful villas to the grounds, and his GoldenEye resort was born—and with it, his ongoing effort to revolutionize Jamaican tourism.
For Blackwell, the “all-inclusive” model that’s guided most efforts to sell Jamaica’s sun and sand, since the 1960s, is anathema. “These massive hotels who warn you, ‘Don’t go outside,’ with their food precut and pre-portioned, flown in from Florida—they’re killing the country.” His aims were different. “We encourage people to go out and about—to meet locals, to meet the producers. Because I’m convinced that that’s what makes long-term business sense, for us—and for Jamaica to thrive.” And it was here at GoldenEye, and in the neighboring village of Oracabessa, where he was focusing his efforts. After striding across a new suspension footbridge over the lagoon, we plodded down a white sand beach lined with tasteful cottages, toward where Blackwell, on a promontory the government built to make a new port here, was planning to expand GoldenEye further. He gestured over the bay, and toward St. Mary’s hills beyond. “When I was a boy, I used to watch the banana boats anchor here.” Those boats’ workers, loading the boats by night, wished for the daylight that would let them go home. “Day-o!” they cried, giving Harry Belafonte the inspiration for what became, when he released his Calypso LP in 1956, history’s first million-selling LP—and launched a career that inspired Blackwell’s own. It was the title of Belafonte’s 1957 film, Island in the Sun, based on Alec Waugh’s novel, that inspired the name of Island Records. “That’s where it started,” Blackwell murmured in the breeze. “And now, there are three musics that you hear everywhere in the world. American, English, and . . . Jamaican.” We arrived to an open-air restaurant whose decor featured collaged photos of Blackwell’s musician pals, and sat down to lunch.
Since the completion of the first of Blackwell’s planned expansions, a couple of years before, GoldenEye had won raves in luxury travel rags for its easy elegance. It wasn’t hard to see why, as I admired the callaloo and pepper that came from Pantrepant, Blackwell’s own organic farm. Across from me at the table sat a striking black woman, laughing in her big red hat. It took a few beats to realize she was the selfsame “Grace” whose image hung nearby. In the early ’90s, Grace Jones introduced Blackwell to his wife, the designer Mary Vinson. (Vinson, whose fabrics and ideas are all around GoldenEye, died in 2004.) Jones had come home for vacation, as she often did, and to see her old friend. She nodded as Blackwell explained how Island Outpost had begun organizing farm-to-table meals and tours of Pantrepant. I wondered if patrons of this paradise would ever want to leave GoldenEye’s premises, having paid upward of US$1,000 a night to stay. But Blackwell was undeterred. He was convinced that “the 20 percent” of Jamaica’s visitors who both covet authenticity and can afford to pay are out there—and would further his goals. “I love the island, I love the people. That’s why I’m doing my work here,” he said. “And if I’m successful in what I’m trying to pull off, it will genuinely make a difference.” And then he excused himself to partake in an afternoon ritual he never forgoes. Minutes later, a poof of white hair bobbed past: a proud Jamaican on a Jet Ski, tracing a bit of the St. Mary’s coast he first fell in love with as a boy, and where, now, he was building his legacy.
* * *
FROM ST. MARY’S BANANA FIELDS to the famous statue in St. Thomas of the rebel preacher Bogle; from Westmoreland’s beaches, and weed, to the Karst convolutions of Trelawny’s “cockpit country” which sheltered the Maroons; from Portland’s Blue Lagoon to the arid shores of St. Elizabeth, from whence a pair of lovelorn slaves offed themselves, when they couldn’t wed, at a place called Lover’s Leap—each of Jamaica’s fourteen parishes, like America’s states or the countries of Spain, has its own identity and fame. The “garden parish” of St. Ann, comprised of fecund peaks tumbling down to the sea, was for most of its history best known for a stretch of coast called Discovery Bay: this is where Christopher Columbus brought history’s first whites, and his conquistador’s particular breed of badness, to Jamaica. In the past couple of decades, though, word has gotten out that the peaks above Disco Bay were also where, 450 years later, history’s most famous Jamaican was born, and where, 36 years after that, he was laid to rest in the little hillside hamlet of Nine Miles. St. Ann’s identity changed. Today the parish may as well be known as Bob Marley Parish. But as I learned the first time I visited Marley’s birthplace, by way of another hamlet a few hilltops over, St. Ann’s hills and quays have shaped not a few of Jamaica’s greatest modern exponents.
The village of Aboukir, St. Ann, was like many obscure outposts of the British Empire named for a famed battle long ago and far away—in the case of Aboukir, the site on Egypt’s Nile where Commodore Horatio Nelson routed Napoleon’s army in 1798. Not that this matters to the people of a hamlet whose denizens pronounce its name “Ah-boo-kah,” and who live in a place where the sight of a white man in shorts, to judge from the quizzical stares my presence earned from kids walking home from school, is pretty uncommon. In the town rum shop, I chatted with a few old-timers passing their afternoon in dominoes and booze, and soon found what I had come for—an aging cousin of Aboukir’s favorite son, Harry Belafonte. The singer’s Jamaican mother, emigrating from here to Harlem, found work there as a maid, but grew wary of the trouble her rambunctious son might find in the cold city’s streets. She sent him away, on one of the United Fruit Company boats the boy’s father worked on as a cook, for “safekeeping” in her own mum’s home. And so it was in St. Ann’s hills that Belafonte, who spent parts of each year with his grandmum here, absorbed the songs and stories to which he’d later turn, as a struggling young actor back in New York, to launch the new vocation—as a folk singer—that made him a star. His Calypso record of Caribbean folk tunes, released in 1956, didn’t merely become the first long-playing record to sell a million copies. It made Belafonte America’s “first black matinee idol,” and earned him the royalties he then used, over the next decade, to bankroll his friend Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement. Not bad for a kid from Aboukir. But it wasn’t surprising to his cousin, whose name was Norman and who shared Harry’s light brown skin (their grandmother, he said, was a Scotswoman) and with whom I chatted, fortified by bush rum, about all this and more. Norman dilated on his and Harry’s boyhood mango-throwing exploits, and also recounted, when I asked, how their uncle Callbeck had sold off their grandmother’s shack, “down by Old Bethany,” when he went to work for Kaiser Aluminum in St. Ann’s Bay—the town where I was going to end that day. Not, that afternoon, to pay respects to Uncle Callbeck, but because that sleepy port was the natal home of yet another massive figure—Marcus Garvey—in the modern history of black culture and politics.
Watching the sun set from the town’s ancient jetty, I pictured a young Garvey doing the same, before he emigrated to Harlem and from there spread his message to a global flock of followers that included Belafonte’s mother. “Garvey’s model was everything to us,” Belafonte told me back in New York, after I wrote him a letter about my time in Aboukir and we met at a seafood place on the Upper West Side. “That constant striving, for more than we were given.” As