There in the main hall, a testament to “The Cricket ‘Immortals’ of the West Indies” hung alongside a portrait of Father Hugh Sherlock, the kindly mid-century parson who founded Boys’ Town and also wrote his secular nation’s rather Christian national anthem (“Eternal Father, bless our land, / Guide us with Thy mighty hand”). Boys’ Town sits right between JLP-and PNP-controlled blocks; it has long been a sanctuary where wearing the parties’ colors (green and orange, respectively) is banned. On a chalkboard, someone had scrawled a plaintive slogan in blue chalk: “Revenge Restrained Is a Victory Gained.” Restive kids sat teasing each other in their chairs. Most were skinny or fat in the way poor kids everywhere tend to be; a few looked undernourished-gaunt. I took my place, in a plastic seat, with the other interlopers Junior had asked to “say some words to the youth.” My role, as the “professor from foreign,” was to offer some sincere noises about how I knew they may have heard how their neighborhood changed the world, but that I was here to tell them that well, it was true. I did so. Then I handed the microphone to the reggae-pop singer Shaggy, whose string of world hits in the early aughts, from “Boombastic” to “Angel,” saw him sell more records than any Jamaican since Marley. Shaggy was dressed in designer jeans; he’d hung his expensive sunglasses from the V-neck of his shirt. He crooned a verse for the kids; the girls giggled. He told them to “follow they dreams.” And then Junior Lincoln, who’d told us he was trying to raise funds to build the “top-class recording studio” here that Ziggy Marley never did, followed with a slightly-more-real urging that “in the music business, we need more than stars; we need engineers and stylists and roadies.” This information was received by the kids with only a few more nods than the remarks of another of our party: Shirley Hanna expounded the uplifting powers of “positivity” and good posture.
In the hall afterward, we sipped powdered lemonade from paper cups. A few of the boys followed Shaggy’s lead, taking turns singing songs or showing off with the mic. A few of the girls played at perfecting their beauty-queen walks while laughing with Shirley. I chatted with some kids in knockoff Man United jerseys about a subject—Premier League Soccer—in which children everywhere but America can converse. Back out on Trench Town’s ragged streets, feral dogs were skulking past. It wasn’t hard to despair of a country whose privileged, when met with its poor, have naught to offer but blandishments about following dreams and a good carriage’s uplifting force. But as I walked up the boulevard with Junior Lincoln, it was also true that the lines playing in my head had been written by a ghetto kid who strode from these blocks with a beauty queen’s bearing, and with dreams and positivity to burn.
Natty dread, natty dread now
A dreadlock congo bongo I
Natty dreadlock inna Babylon
Roots natty, roots natty.
This is the chorus of “Natty Dread,” the title track to Marley’s beautiful third album. It begins as kid’s-verse homily to Rasta living, and being a locksman “inna Babylon.” But then it gets interesting.
Then I walk up the 1st Street
And then I walk up to 2nd Street to see
Then I trod on, through 3rd Street
What’s the singer aiming to see? He goes on:
And then I talk to some dread on 4th Street
Natty dreadlock inna 5th Street
And then I skip one fence to 6th Street
He talks to a Rastaman, before pausing, on 5th, to check himself before treading on to 6th Street, and telling us where he’s going.
I’ve got to reach 7th Street
He’s got to reach 7th Street. Why? Walking up Collie Smith with Junior, I felt a possibility arise. Across 7th, we could see another block of low-rise projects. Arnette Gardens was this garrison’s official name; unofficially, it’s known as “concrete jungle,” per another Marley tune (“Concrete jungle / Where the living is harder”). On a wall by its entrance, I could see an orange-tinted mural. A bit higher up, another building-side image featured the face of Portia Simpson-Miller, leader of the PNP and a big bad man herself. Here was an area loyal to the party of Portia, Manley, and Marshall. Back toward Tivoli, green was everywhere; here it was all about orange. And 7th Street, not a few times in its history, and especially at election times, has comprised a frontier not to be crossed. Pondering Marley’s lines by the road that inspired them, I found it easy to imagine young men here, caught on the wrong side, thinking just what he sang. “I’ve got to reach 7th Street.”
Reaching safe turf, as any ghetto kid knows, is a worthy subject for song. If that simple muse was the subject of “Natty Dread,” though, the theme of its bridge, like his larger oeuvre, was the grander problem of how, whether with music or otherwise, to transcend the brutal “politricks” that made the concrete jungle tick. And in this respect, the home Marley figured wasn’t mere blocks away, or even up in Kingston’s hills. “Natty 21,000 miles away from home,” he sang. “And that’s a long way for Natty to be from home.” Redemption, as the Rastas said, lay over the sea. Rarely was their greatest voice so literal about it, though. Marley’s best songs—and this was his greatness—refused to ground Zion in the vulgarities of blood or land. In the tune that endured as his epitaph, he distilled his art’s essence. “Redemption songs / are all I ever have.” The line’s double meaning, and his image of music’s subtler salvations in this place where daily life was a hurtful grind, were of a piece. “One good thing about music,” went the chorus to “Trenchtown Rock,” “when it hits you, you feel no pain.” And that song, fittingly enough, was the one Junior Lincoln invoked as we reached 7th Street and, approaching the dusty site of one of music’s most aqueous springs, stepped across.
“Tell: What music was playing when the Berlin Wall fell?” Junior pulled a key from his pocket. “Trench Town rock!” We were standing by a large building’s curving concrete wall, freshly painted white; only a small “PNP” someone had tagged, off to our side, sullied its surface. Lincoln pushed his key into a heavy padlock on its gate and, removing the chain, led me inside. The place’s roof was long gone. But the distinct shape of a large theater’s proscenium and deep stage was plain. “And right here,” Junior said, “is where it began.” He pointed to the spot where he’d stood as a boy when Alton Ellis was discovered by Sir Coxsone Dodd; when the Wailers played “Simmer Down” for their friends; when Jimmy Cliff, years before being cast as a gun-flashing folk hero in The Harder They Come,