No Woman No Cry (15 page)

I was surprised and definitely unprepared when I heard his car coming up the road. I went out to the yard and there he was. I couldn't even think of anything to say so I just said, “Where were you?”

And he said, “I don't know!”

I'd been alone with the kids much of the time when Bob went off into his “I don't know” program. There were many lonely days and nights. Of course, Aunty came regularly if I needed to go somewhere and couldn't take Stephen, and sometimes she'd stay overnight if it got late. Friends helped out with the heavy stuff, like bringing water from the main community pipe. I needed a lot of water, because I was determined to plant a garden. The soil in the yard was poor, largely sandy soil from the seabed. People told me, “Ah you're crazy, you can't plant there.” But I said, “Wait, I'm gonna show you.” And the expression on their faces when they saw my collards, my spinach, my papayas!

In later years, when I was touring, I'd bring all kinds of things home. Each time I'd go somewhere I couldn't wait to return because I'd be carrying this or that to my home to do this, do that. It had room for improvement! I built a veranda, and a wall around the property, and planted a lawn for the kids, where they'd play gunfight, or dollhouse, or school (with Sharon as teacher), or something that involved tree climbing—it seemed as if they were always
doing
something. And Aunty would teach them songs just as she had taught me. Just to see them thriving in the clear air and space—at last out of that one little room in Trench Town—was enough to convince me that coming to Bull Bay had been the right move. I still give thanks to Gabby for it.

Windsor Lodge was real homey, and I think of it that way even now, I guess because it was my first home and has a lot of sentiment to it. Which is why I can't give it up—recently I called my lawyer to ask, “Where is the title to Windsor Lodge?” He called me back and said, “It's here, Mrs. Marley, you have the title, you still own that property.” It's such a
nice
place and sometimes I think I should refurbish it—even the mango tree is still there and bearing. In any case, I can't let it go. My kids are fond of it too; it holds a lot of memories for all of us. After they grew up and started to earn money, Ziggy and Steve built an adjoining place on the property where they still come to relax. “Oh Mommy,” they tell me, “out there it's so nice, that's where we go when we want to meditate on something.” So when people say to me, why don't you just sell it, get rid of it, you don't
need
it, I say no, no, no. This was my beginning—how could you want to sell your beginning?

When Bob wasn't on the road he'd come out to Bull Bay to see the kids, even though our own relationship was almost at the point where I'd become just “Rita the friend” or “Rita the sister.” Sometimes he'd bring other women, like the American Yvette Anderson, whom he wanted me to help with some publishing thing. A lot of our friends shrugged off his behavior, saying “This is what happens.” Others just couldn't understand why it was happening and really disapproved. But the fact that other people sympathized with me didn't change how I decided to deal with it—which was that I saw it and wasn't going to fight it. Because, despite everything—all the rumors as well as what I could see with my own eyes—most of the women still came with an explanation: “This one is happening because she does my pictures,” or “Island sent her to do this or that,” or “Yvette Anderson is here because she's an American, she can have my publishing work done properly.” So there was always a reason for each of them—especially when they came to Jamaica to stay with him at Hope Road while the children and I were living in Bull Bay, in what we spoke of as “the family house.”

After the two-month Esther Anderson program, he never stayed away too long. Sometimes, especially when he'd come back from a tour, he'd come alone, or he would bring some of his friends, telling them, “Come let me show you
my
house!” Because that was still “coming home” for him. Often his line was that nothing was happening at Hope Road, “them just living and having fun, plenty rehearsal and music business so/so,” but “nobody thinking about planting,” and “oh, you come to this garden, man, you don't want to leave!”

And because there were times that he really
didn't
want to leave, I had a basement room dug behind the kitchen, which we used as a studio. We put in a little tape recorder, and when it got hot he would come and sit down there. Because to us it would not be a life without music. At night after the kids had gone to bed and we'd finished cleaning up the kitchen, after all was quiet, we'd go down there—sometimes to make out, of course, because that was our little nest—but more often just to rehearse and compose. And it was a daytime thing too—we spent pretty nice Sundays right there with the kids. The house was always full, because I usually had other children coming for care and attention. Neighborhood kids would drop by—“Mrs. Marley home?”—as well as Bob's friends. But this was our domain. In some small way having it kept me more involved in the music, in what I loved.

Bob had a little Capri then, and if the kids were out in the yard playing and heard the car coming and recognized its distinctive sound, they'd start yelling, “Daddy's coming, Daddy's coming!” Because whatever was going on between the two of us, he always loved his kids and paid as much attention to them as he could—running around the house in a Frankenstein mask and trying to scare everyone, Cedella remembers. Even today she says he was the softy and I was the disciplinarian—that when he saw any of the children upset, “we knew we were going to the ice-cream parlor!” And he was very ambitious for all of them, always willing to provide school fees or uniform money and advising them to continue their education. Occasionally he took them to school himself, which was a big deal for them—“That's my Daddy!”

But music was our food. It had always been our entertainment, our pleasure. And when you find out early enough that your kids are extraordinarily talented and are following in your footsteps, there is certainly no way you're
not
going to encourage them. So we had our little “events” in the cellar. We'd say, “Okay, this is the Marley Show! Audition time now! Come do what you can!” We trained them, not professionally or purposely, but because this is how I remembered learning how to sing, the way Dream and I had always amused ourselves, learning songs and harmony from Papa and Aunty and Uncle Cleveland back in Trench Town. And now we had our little audition area—where “Tomorrow we're going to have concert now! Showtime!” Everybody would start getting their little thing together, their act—“And this is what I'm gonna do for Mommy, and this is what I'm gonna do for Daddy!” It was fun, fun, fun!

With Bob so often absent, daily life was more difficult, although I didn't lack friends who would check on us. Besides Gabby, who had been so helpful in finding the house for me and was now my neighbor in Bull Bay, I had another good friend, Owen Stewart, a Jamaican soccer star known familiarly as Tacky.

Because he knew I was married, Tacky wasn't into our friendship for sex or having a girlfriend (although eventually we did develop a relationship). But he was one of those who felt sympathetic toward me because of the way Bob was treating me. In fact, he had occasion to witness the different women Bob sometimes brought to the house, and he was there to ask why. As for Bob, even before Tacky and I became involved, when he just
thought
we had a relationship, he became irrationally possessive.

Once he saw Tacky with me and wanted to fight! He had just come back from one of his tours, and I guess his friends told him that Rita could be very close with Tacky. He came by the house one morning and the kids told him that Tacky and I had gone to the river for water—the government took its time about laying the pipes. When Bob showed up there (as usual with a girl in the car), he left the girl and came down to the riverbank, yelling, “Hey, Tacky, you're seeing my woman! And blah blah blah …” And carried on like a wild man!

But Tacky said, “No Bob, we can't fight, we're brethren. And I'm here because she needs help. She needs someone, and you must respect that.” Tacky went very hard on him. And Bob was sorry for the accusation and did admit it. Poor Bob. He could always see the truth and he knew nothing was going on then between Tacky and me.

But I got very upset. I said to Bob, “After all you're doing, you're going to accuse
me?
What about that bitch you have in the car?”

The next time he went off to London, just about 1973, it was quite obvious that he'd started having women right in my face. At one point I thought there must have been something personal going on between him and Diane Jobson, but I guess she lived to overcome it when she became his lawyer. When I'd ask him, though, it was always the same story: Everyone came for a purpose. “This one's for this, so don't get upset, and this one's for that.” But it had become too obvious. I felt that I was being taken for a ride, and it seemed like it was going to be a
long
ride. So I decided I wasn't going to play the game. I told him plain, straight out, if you're going to be doing this, we will not have a sexual relationship. We will have a relationship because we're already family, but as far as sexual involvement is concerned, no. We didn't have AIDS at that time, but there were other diseases, and I refused to be exposed to that kind of thing.

By then Tacky was already coming by sometimes to keep me company. He was my
good
friend, I knew I could always call on him when I needed help. Although at first it had been strictly a friendship situation—“I see you're here with the children, and I don't see Bob coming around”—now there were evenings when I got lonely and wanted to see someone. Because living in that location for the first time, anything could have happened to us, and we needed—
I
needed—someone. Not living in, because I've never done that, but just around me when Bob didn't come home for a couple of weeks. Tacky would come in the morning to see how is everything, was everything all right last night, you had no problem? Often he'd bring fish, or Irish moss, all the “ital” stuff—foods that Rastafarians eat. Tacky is a very handsome Rastaman, who looks a lot like Bob. He was very respectful of the family, and caring; sometimes he'd even take the kids to school or take me to town in his yellow van. He had a job as an accountant in a big office in Kingston, and I found him intelligent and a reasonable man. We had a lot in common, so eventually I found myself attracted to him as well as grateful for his attention, and we developed a relationship that I thought was normal.

The next time Bob came back to Jamaica, I was almost raped. Because this is where I had drawn the line—“I'm not having sex with you.” But he insisted: “You're my wife and I want you!” And so we had sex, and I think that's when I got pregnant again. When I discovered I was going to have another child, my first thought was, my God, what is this—because, despite trying to overlook everything and be the good sister, I was so sick of his ways! (By then he had another outside baby, a daughter born in London.) But he knew that Tacky and I had a relationship; he and Tacky had a meeting—he sent for Tacky to discuss the matter. But during the meeting in came Bob's current girlfriend, Cindy Breakspeare, saying, “Oh darling …” And Tacky said, “Look at that, Bob.” So Tacky brought him down again, and Bob felt bad about that too, because he would rather she had not appeared at a time when he was trying to correct something that he was so wrong about!

After that, at least for a while, it seemed as if we weren't going to be intimate anymore. Still, he just couldn't bear to know that I might find somebody who loved me as a woman. And I wasn't trying to prove that I could; it just so happened that someone was there for me, and that really saved me. Because the frustration and the insult that I had to face with Bob's lifestyle was, in spite of the good face I showed to the world, killing me. It could have killed me. So I think God sent me a friend when I needed one.

Still, I had promised myself I wasn't going to be falling and dying, and this meant that I had to keep an eye on what was happening at Hope Road. Some of Bob's girlfriends were upset because I was always there, seeing everything. I heard that one of them said, “Oh, she's getting serious here!” And that's exactly what was happening. I
was
getting serious.

From the first, when the whole thing started there, I'd felt a little bit outside of it. I don't know if it was again the color of my skin or my Rasta philosophy that caused me to feel that way. The uptowns came to Island House out of curiosity, since it was in their territory, although Bob Marley and the Wailers were new to them; while our friends from the ghetto knew the music scene they were coming into if not much about the neighborhood where it had relocated. So the population at the house was a mixture. That part was okay. Additionally, I felt outside because of my personal feeling. So it took a while for me to figure out how I should be a part and yet not be a part.

My third daughter, Stephanie, was born in 1974, and in an effort to feed our large family healthy foods, grown organically according to Rastafarian precepts, and because I'd had such success with my home garden, I'd gone into full-time farming. St. Ann was too far away from Kingston, but a farm in Clarendon Parish, which is much closer, had been up for sale. So Bob bought it for us, and then I started to reap things like coconuts (and more coconuts!), naseberries, star apples, oranges, almost everything that you would think of coming off a farm, all of it organically grown. Recently I gave a portion of the land to the Rastafarian movement; the Nyabinghi Brothers built a tabernacle where they worship, and there's a section of it that they farm; they also have accommodations for women and children, and a school.