By
Gerald Hausman
Santa
Fe, NM, USA
My
search for folklore in Jamaica took me across many bays and bridges and to the
top of the Blue Mountains and the bottom of Trenchtown in Kingston.
It
took me to the North Coast and the South Coast and deep into the Cockpit
country, the so-called “Land of Look Behind” where a man could say, “Me no
call, you no come.”
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| Gerald Hausman |
In
fact, there is a village there in Trelawney called “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come” a
village founded by slaves in the mid-1800s. A place of forlorn beauty bonded by
unbound freemen who dared to resist or die.
I
was everywhere I could be, scribbling by lantern light, firelight, moonlight
and flashlight.
I
went to Nanny Town and Maroon Town. Brownstown and Highgate where Oliver
Cromwell once owned land.
My
search kept me on the Jamaican mythological highway, riding not on a cranky
donkey but in a spirited minibus named Irie One.
And
I was reading the whole time. And interviewing people who have now passed unto
and into Zion. I met the man who knew Marcus Garvey and the man who met Haile
Selassie I and the man who cooked for Peter Tosh and despaired of Americans
using salt on his Ital patties. I passed through the portals of myth so many
times that I scarcely noticed the color of my skin or if any of me was actually
attached to flesh and bone.
I
met natural mystics, conmen and killers, cops and lock-up ghosts who had
gripped the bars of Gun Court for so long they were reduced to hands that only
sought the light of day.
I
was at Sting ’87 when the field of thousands ran for their lives as gunmen
fired on every living soul and the tide of flowing bodies swept us the 100
yards and my feet never touched the ground, the press of the crowd was so great
everyone was lifted and raised, and if they had feet, they used them as paddles,
but what sustained us was being carried in the treadmill of souls.
Eventually,
fourteen years after living and teaching in Jamaica, I wrote a book called Rastafarian Children Of Solomon which
was meant to be the flip side of the coin. The other side was Children of Sisyphus by Harvard professor
Orlando Patterson.
Patterson
wrote so eloquently about “the Dungle”, that part of the Kingston ghetto that
shrank human lives to the oblivion of poverty – my own daughter was kidnapped
there and lived to tell. She managed to break free, but my close friend
Chuckie, who grew up inches from that oppression of humanity told me once,
“Them strip me down, me own brethren, until me stand naked as the day I was
born, on the hot city street for all to see while them search through every
fiber of me clothing.”
I
was doing research at the Institute of Jamaica when he told me that. I walked
those streets, the pavement of downpression and heard Spreeboy, another friend who
explained the exodus of city people to the country when the shooting was so
rampant you heard it all day and all night. He hid in the cellar of his own
house under a blanket where his puppies also hid out. Gunmen came down the
stairs and he buried himself in puppies while the gunmen poked around with warm
gun-barrels and he vowed, “If I ever live through this, I take my puppies and
disappear into the mountains.” Which is what he did.
I
bought him a surgery, many years later, with royalties from a book in which he
was a main character. He had what they call in Jamaica a “bosun”, an old nautical
term for hernia.
So
I knew something about Dungle life and Dungle death. But I wanted to tell the
other tale. The one about resurrection, deliverance from despair. Cedella
Marley, Bob’s eldest daughter, said of my book that came out of this longing to
tell the flip side of the coin – “Day by day, the elders who formed the
foundation of Rasta in the 1920s and 30s are passing. Within Mr H’s pages you
will meet a man who knew Marcus Garvey and an elder who met Haile Selassie I
when he came to Jamaica. You will also meet younger rootsmen whose faith is
constant and true. This book goes straight to the heart with truths that are
seldom written but often said in my home country.”
Patterson’s
book is not one you put down. I believe I have read it four or five times.
There is Revivalism on the one hand and Rastafarianism on the other. The slums
of Kingston where a man might say a prayer in the morning and be dead by
nightfall. Prayers did not work as fast as bullets, but in the end, it was the
Bible that won the war.
It
is Brother Solomon in Patterson’s story who said, “The Emperor said it was true
that he has land ready and waiting for us, that he was aware of our plight and
suffering, and that the days of our suffering were near an end. He has agreed
to send one of his many warships, one of the very types he used to destroy the
Italian fleet, to take us back home.”
So
it was Garvey’s old dream of repatriation. Back to Africa. To the roots of
life. Freedom from black and white oppressors. Nyabinghi, full blown.
Some
did actually return to Liberia and one that I interviewed, Spreeboy, said that
“President Tubman, though dead, would rise as spirit again and take the people
back. Fear not,” he said. “The Lion of Judah shall break every chain and give
us a victory, again and again.”
I
can still see and hear Spreeboy speak with fire in his eyes: “The Emperor’s
milk-white short pants and his passionate, moist face promising delivery to
Zion.”
He
said much, much more, and I dutifully wrote it down.
Once
it was this:
“Every
village has its Samson
Every
town has its David
Every
heart has its Solomon
Every
star has its Jacob, ever climbing upward.”
(Gerald Hausman photo credit: Mariah Fox)
Link:
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Gerald
Hausman is an award-winning, bestselling author and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine. His latest book, Little Miracles – A Memoir, will be
released in the Spring of 2019.