All of which may help explain why, when the United States pressured Golding into detaining Dudus by force, in 2010, not a few Jamaicans were shocked that he agreed. Goldings party’s power derived from the gangsters it relied on for votes. The dons, whose sway in the ghetto far excelled the government’s, had long since usurped their makers. Could this JLP lifer, Golding, really invade his own constituency by force, to arrest its don? In the end, it seems that he had no choice: his government’s chief patron, and indispensable creditor in Washington, had decided that it was time to the haul the Shower Posse’s head to jail. The ensuing set-to pitted Jamaica’s military police against the don’s well-armed supporters, many of whom erected burning barricades and fired on their assailants from within Tivoli’s walls. When Golding’s soldiers shot back with bigger weapons and indiscriminate fire, the result was at least seventy-four civilians dead, and a country in chaos. (Two police officers also died in the violence.) Dudus was eventually captured, stopped at a roadblock in a disguise comprised of an old lady’s hat and glasses, but not before Kingston burned once more, and not without disgracing a prime minister who lost all credibility not merely in his brutalized constituency but across the country. Golding was ushered from power, and Tivoli Gardens, the garrison he had both represented and destroyed, was returned to the wizened hands of its creator. Edward Seaga, fifty years after creating Tivoli, and never having really relinquished it, became the garrison’s MP once more and the scars from this “incursion,” as I found hopping a cab downtown two years later, still linger large amid Kingston’s more general state of emergency.
I pointed, as we rolled down King Street from the Half Way Tree, at a hulking concrete building with blue trim. “That’s KPH, no?” My query to my cabbie was more about making conversation than confirming the identity of this place. We were passing Kingston Public Hospital, whose emergency room during the Tivoli incursion became a hellish blood den. His short reply, though, contained a memorable tale.
“Yes, sir,” murmured the cabbie, whose head, I noticed, was as large as his thick neck. “I was there.”
He reached across my lap to open the glove compartment, and pulled out a bit of folded paper. “Dem shot me,” he said softly. “Darkness.” He handed me the paper. It was a clipping from The Gleaner: “‘Fat Head’ Survives Head Wound,” read its headline.2
The story described how “the taxi driver Anthony Nicholson, also known as ‘Fat Head,’” had been jumped by three “youths,” who, after demanding money and ganja, had shot him in the head. It continued: “While Nicholson cannot remember the month or year, Nicholson is definite that he was shot between 4:30 and 5 pm.” Fat Head, as we rolled past KPH, confirmed the information to me.
“Have you thought of leaving the taxi business?” I asked.
“No sir.” Fat Head drove his cab six days a week—every day but Saturday. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, and Saturdays were reserved for Jesus.
We passed a church called Redeemer’s Moravian. Fat Head turned onto Marcus Garvey Drive, down by the sea, and stopped his cab. I stepped out.
“You take care,” he said. He smiled faintly as he pushed his hat back on his iron dome. “Bless.”
* * *
IT IS CLEAR EVERYWHERE one looks that little in Jamaica remains untouched by its two parties’ fractious rivalry. Along the waterfront, a hot wind blew off the sea to buffet the dusty palms and turn Kingston Harbour, as usual, into a choppy tub dotted with rusting freighters and no pleasure craft. I paused by an outsized bit of bronze that was, until recently, the island’s most famous bit of art. A blocky figure whose metallic brown head, with angular art deco lines, is thrown back to the sky, Negro Aroused was sculpted by Edna Manley, the artist wife of founding father Norman. She was inspired by the labor unrest in the 1930s that grew into Jamaica’s drive for independence—and lived to see her work erected outside the state institution where I was to meet my ride to an engagement in the nearby garrisons that make that state go. Jamaica’s National Gallery of Art is housed in a boxy 1950s-style hovel that began its life, before high-end retail left downtown, as a department store. The gallery boasts scores of impressive works by the likes of Isaac Mendes Belisario, whose depictions of the “John Canoe” dances of slavery days, and the colorful costuming associated therewith, have been invaluable to scholars connecting those traditions to today. Its permanent collection also contains two galleries, and two alone, dedicated to individual artists. One is devoted to Edna Manley, white-woman icon of bien-pensant PNP socialism. The other is filled with the “intuitive” paintings and sculpture of Kapo, the Pocomania preacher who, when not making art, delivered to Seaga’s JLP its first partisans among the “sufferahs.”
The parties’ animus, though modeled in the layout of the National Gallery, finds deadlier form in the built environs of the nearby blocks I was heading for. I had been invited to visit with a youth group in Trench Town run by one of the neighborhood’s most devoted servants. I stepped from the gallery to climb into the backseat of a white SUV. At the wheel was Nando Garcia, an expat Spanish filmmaker whose passion for Jamaican culture led him to make such useful movies as Why Do Jamaicans Run So Fast?, a winning vox-pop documentary, and Hit Me with Music, a portrait of dancehall culture’s vibrant state at Passa Passa’s height. In Garcia’s passenger seat sat his producer. Shirley Hanna was an elegant uptown lady whose main notoriety in Jamaican society, apart from this film work, came of her being the mother of Lisa Hanna, the last Jamaican Miss World and the current minister of youth and culture. Our driver, excited as a schoolboy, rolled off from the gallery toward the west.
Garcia guided his SUV up Matthews Lane, the longtime stronghold of Spangler Posse and its PNP thugs. He turned a corner by Coronation Market to pass higglers peddling green dasheen and gritty-sweet naseberries. The center of the JLP’s downtown cosmos rose into view. Tivoli’s cement walls, two years after the incursion, were still pocked with divots from its invaders’ bullets. On one gray-white wall was a green-tinted mural of a big U.S. dollar bill. The portrait at its center, in place of George Washington’s, was Jim Brown’s. We rolled past the Denham Town Police Station, and Garcia pointed to the spot on Spanish Town Road where Passa Passa once ruled, but no more. During the 2010 state of emergency, the government moved to enforce old “noise abatement laws”; two years later, they were still in force. We passed the huge May Pen Cemetery, where many of those slain in Dudus’s deposition now lay, and where a young Bob Marley and his friends, training themselves to “sing wid duppy,” rehearsed. Then we turned up Collie Smith Boulevard to enter the ghetto that the most famous Wailer made Jamaica’s best known.
“Trench Town! It’s an even stronger brand than Brand Jamaica.” That’s what our host, Junior Lincoln, exclaimed soon after we hopped out of Garcia’s car. We were standing in his neighborhood’s heart. An esteemed music impresario who got his