That was one impact of Garvey’s rhetoric. Another was to furnish Bob Marley, born a few hilltops over, with the liturgical language to become his turbulent century’s greatest translator of history’s muse into the idiom of pop. Garvey, Belafonte, Marley. This out-of-the-way parish, on this poor little island, birthed not one but three totemic figures in the great twentieth-century story of black freedom. Astonishing, when you think about it—and even more so when you’re standing in the middle of St. Ann’s hardscrabble poverty. But then, this was Jamaica, where punching above one’s weight is a kind of national sport, and where, passing through Aboukir’s quiet, years after that first visit, I watched the uniformed school kids walk across their old field, now lined with a wavy-lined running track, on which they could train to become their island’s next gold-winning star. I wound through blue-green hills cross-cut by the ochre gashes of bauxite mines to find the town where Bob Marley, like the Age of Three Worlds he so shaped, was born in 1945.
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HIDDEN IN THE HILLS above the larger market town of Brown’s Town, Nine Miles is a dusty hamlet as remote as it sounds. Its one main street winds past sloping plots, planted with dasheen and yams, that Marley’s maternal kin have tended for centuries. His mother, when he became her firstborn, was a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, dark-skinned and homely. His white father, employed as a surveyor of Crown Lands in the area, was the short outcast son of a prominent Kingston family. He was past sixty when he rode into Nine Miles on a white horse and chatted up young Ciddy, who soon thereafter bore Captain Marley’s son. Christening her little half-caste boy Nesta Robert, Ciddy raised him here; then, after she brought him to the capital when he was twelve, he finished the job himself. Rising from the Trench Town streets, where in his teens he earned the nickname Tuff Gong for his scrappy prowess as a fighter, he became a man so revered by the time he died that every mile of the winding road to Nine Miles was lined with mourners when his hearse passed. That route is still traversed by old lorries carrying bananas and sugarcane and by shared roto-taxis carrying kerchiefed country women, stuffed five across in rattly Toyotas’ backseats, heading home from town with their shopping. Now, though, these vehicles have been joined by white-paneled tourist buses which bump up the rough road from Ocho Rios and disgorge their sunburned cargo within the high-walled gates of the compound that’s been built up around Marley’s refurbished birth shack and the rather grander mausoleum, alongside, where he’s interred. Outside the walls, affected Rastas mill about, trying to sell visitors mix CDs and “Bob Marley weed!” Offput or scared by the poverty glimpsed through the bus windows, few of their prey experience much of Bob’s world beyond the disembodied voices or hands that, reaching through slats in the wall, proffer those CDs and herb. The tourists prefer patronizing the overpriced gift shop, strategically located between the parking lot and the bar, with its stuffed monkeys with dreads, Rasta-colored water shoes, with little sockets for your toes, and shelves full of all you might need—rolling papers, all kinds; a metal “herb grinder”; a six-inch “Marley’s mood” lighter—to craft a spliff to puff while kicking about the hacky-sack affixed with Bob’s face, also for sale here. Nine Miles can be a gnarly scene. Until, that is, you move beyond the several square feet of transactional nastiness around its one tourist trap to stroll through a place exuding the mellow air of little mountain towns everywhere.
Having had the fortune, this time, to arrive with a man who lawyered for Bob’s mom, and fought to win her wing of the family their piece of Bob’s posthumous pie, I listened to Ganja Man ring up “Bob’s brother Richard”—one of Ciddy’s other sons; he lived in Miami—to see about crashing in the family’s home by the mausoleum, which he managed “from foreign.” We rolled into town. Ganja Man lowered his window to greet one kindly local after another, identifying them all as “Bob’s cousin.” His phone rang. It was Richard: “It’s cool.” Sleeping spot sorted, I stepped from the car and walked down a main street lined with the familiar features of country life here. Outside the little Yah Suh Nice Store, a cheery higgler was selling “gunga rice and peas” in Styrofoam trays, “wit chunks if yuh like.” (“Chunks” are a soy-based meat substitute that some development scheme somehow worked into Jamaicans’ diet long ago.) Down farther, outside a crooked wooden house that sat just below the Marley mausoleum, a hand-painted sign advertised “Mount Zion Apostolic Ministries Incorporated.” Nearby, a rough concrete retaining wall was painted with a fresh mural, of a sort one sees all over Jamaica, showing a round-faced local potentate who’d recently passed. “In Memory of Karl ‘Busta’ Brown,” it said. “Our Father Our Hero Our Strength.” I poked my head into an open door by the wall that led onto a darkened barroom. Inside, a low stage was equipped with a metal stripper pole and decorated with a metal street sign. The sign said “Pimpin’ Ave.” I asked a young woman outside where we were. “Is Busta Brown place,” she explained. Whatever else the biggest local bad man was up to, this country go-go bar, it seemed, was among his holdings. She pointed behind the bar to a cement structure guarded by faux-Doric columns, likewise freshly painted, in saffron. This, she explained, was Busta Brown’s mausoleum. That Friday would be his “nine night”—the all-night ritual, rich with music and rum, by which Jamaicans mark their fellows’ passage from this plane to another. It was clear, from how she said it, that Busta’s nine night was a big deal.
The young woman outside the bar, with her big eyes set in a wide face over a button nose, bore more than a passing resemblance to the photos of a young Ciddy, Bob’s mother, that hang in her mausoleum. (She died here in 2008, after returning from Florida and opening a school in her old hometown.) Were they related? To some degree, probably. Omeriah Malcolm, Bob’s maternal granddad and a local grandee of his day, fathered dozens of kids. The kinship ties that bind this bit of St. Ann’s to itself, with Omeriah’s offspring still hoeing his lands, are hardly rare in rural Jamaica. What distinguishes Nine Miles, though, is that not a few of Marley’s darker cousins earn their living from his memory. This fact, it’s fair to say, doesn’t occur to most tourists who come here picturing their hero’s latte-colored face. But back at the compound, on old Omeriah’s land, which has been built up in Bob’s name, it is various of his cousins who work there as tour guides, and who prod visitors with their own theme song: “One love, one heart / Tip your tour guide, and feel alright!” They lead visitors up the hill to show them the little shack where Bob was born (his childhood bed is decorated with a marijuana-leaf flag reading “A Spliff a Day Keeps the Doctor Away”). They point to a rock outside that may or may not have inspired his verse, in “Talkin’ Blues,” about how “rock stone was my pillow too.” They take their charges through the handsome marble chapel where Bob is buried, right next to the newer one where his mother is. By day, this Temple Mount felt overrun. But that night, after the cruise shippers cleared out and the compound’s high gates were locked, I accompanied Ganja Man up the path to the mausoleum that he called “Zion,” to a nodding night watchman called Chicken, to “smoke with Bob.”
There in the chapel, around a marble plinth two tombs high, lay the offerings of pilgrims from the four corners: a charcoal drawing of Malcolm X; a small Canadian flag on a wooden dowel; a book emblazoned with Marley’s face and the title, in what looked like Serbo-Croatian, “Boba Marlija.” From the road below, the plaintive sounds of singing people drifted up: the congregants of Zion Apostolic Ministries Incorporated were praising Jesus. On one of the chapel’s walls, a large black-and-white photo showed Mother Booker smiling and hugging a handsome young man who shared her smile. This was another of her sons—a bodybuilder in Miami named Anthony, who, like her firstborn, died too young. Ciddy had ordained that he be interred here, with Bob: it was Anthony, rather than the woman for whom the tomb’s second berth was first built—Rita Marley—who lay next ot Bob in the two-slot tomb. The presence of the matriarch’s less-famous son here, though, wasn’t the only bit of intrigue surrounding the tomb—nor, Ganja Man revealed, did Anthony’s quiet interment mark the tomb’s last opening. Puffing his spliff, my companion looked over as the hymns floated up from below. “You know they cut him out,” he said through the haze. “Bongo Joe—he took Bob out; put him back again.”
There was only one