No Woman No Cry (7 page)

Bob didn't want me to go to the studio, it seemed. “Stay home and take care of your baby,” he would write, always “stay home.” He would never say “Go find you a job,” though he knew I had to have money coming in from somewhere. We wrote each other almost every day. Letters would be in and out, and if that postman passed my gate without stopping, my heart sank, because I'd look for a letter every day, no matter if I'd gotten one yesterday or the day before. But despite Bob's constant advice to stay home and take care of Sharon, Dream and I went to Studio One whenever we were asked, to do background vocals for Peter or for Bunny or whoever else Coxsone was recording and wanted us to work with.

Nevertheless, even with keeping myself busy and Bob's letters keeping up my spirits, sometimes I'd feel lonely and lost after a studio session, just thinking, when will I see my husband? And missing him—everything about him, his voice, his music—and then going home and saying to myself, when am I going to go to America? I wasn't thinking about him coming home, it was all about my going to America. That separation was a trial for me. I was a strong young lady, true, but it would get me down sometimes when people said, “I heard you're married to Robbie, where is he?” One of his old girlfriends, a girl named Cherry, even accosted me to say, “That was my man!” I went through all that without him even being around to defend me. But Bunny told her not to mess with me, that Bob would come home and kill her if she did!

It took Bob a while to reveal to his mother that he was married. Cedella Booker had known about me, or at least about a girl named Rita, from my letters. She knew we had been dating, knew I was his girlfriend, but nothing about the wedding. After he finally admitted to it, and she asked him to describe me, he'd said, “Oh Mommy, if you should see her you'd like her, she walks and she rolls.” And Mrs. Booker said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “If she walking and you see her from the back, she rolls!” When I heard this story I wondered what could he mean? Until I realized it was my knock knees that did that! (Some people think it's sexy.)

Married or not, his mother sent her sister to check out my house—I guess to find out where I lived, whether I was good- or bad-looking, whatever—I never knew what they were looking for. But when her sister came to see where I'd been raised and saw that the walls of my room were decorated with pictures from magazines—like all teenagers I had put up posters and pinup pictures—Mrs. Booker's sister wrote her to say that I was such a poor girl that I lived in a house with cardboard walls! Plus, I had a baby! So in America they were all disappointed. But by then there was nothing to be done; we were on our way.

It wasn't long—only eight months—before Bob decided to leave Delaware. His mother said he'd been worried about me; she was surprised that he loved me more than he loved the United States. She couldn't understand why, even though she'd never met me. She had been sure that America was his dream, and his family there had done everything to entice him to stay—even brought him pretty girls
after
they found out he was married.

But Bob had his own reasons for leaving America. Poor thing. He'd worked first in a Chrysler factory, then at the Hotel Dupont in Wilmington. When at last he gave up he wrote me, “I'm coming home, I'm sick of this place. Today, while I was vacuuming, the vacuum bag burst and all that dust went up in my face.”

The poor boy!

“If I stay here, this is gonna kill me,” he wrote. “It will give me all kinds of sickness! I'm a singer, I'm not this, I'm coming home.”

The whole homecoming scene was
so
very good—and felt so long overdue! It didn't seem like eight months; it seemed like forever that I had waited for that moment, to see him coming out, into the terminal. And there he was looking at me, his head to the side as if he was just longing to put eyes on me, just the same way I was feeling. And poor Bob, you looked at him and you just felt sorry for him! And I keep feeling this way about him, even now. My love for him is a deep, true, lasting love, of course—but there was something about sorrying for him that still is in me. Though he had left with only one bag, now he had one over his shoulder and another, a suitcase, in his hand. We hugged and kissed, and he said, “Yeah, man, I'm back, my mother sent some things for you and Sharon and I bring a dress for you and things like that.” I just had a chance to say
“Ooooh”
before Dream and Aunty grabbed him. And Sharon even remembered how to say “Bahu!” We were all so glad to see him!

But then, on the way home, he said to me, “Why you no fix up yourself, what happened to your hair?” (I was wearing it natural.) He seemed puzzled more than critical, and I guess, after American women, I looked different. With him gone, I'd been into reading and trying to confirm that whatever he had said wasn't simply herb talk, or something he had picked up on the street. And ever since seeing the dark spot on Haile Selassie's hand, I'd felt more secure about being a part of the Rastafarian movement.

But the day he came home none of that stayed on my mind very long. We got home, ate dinner, played a little music, sneaked out to the alley for a little smoke, and then went straight to bed—and it was like
whooo
—heaven! If that's how heaven is, fine, I want to go there!!

And even after the first excitement wore off, I noticed a little extra affection being laid on me, whether from missing me or any other reason, I didn't know. Whatever, I was very happy about it. Love can bring out the best in anyone, I guess. And it was great to realize all over again how much we loved each other. This is where we had a nice time. Yes, definitely, this is about a nice time.

The little money Bob brought back was just enough to go into the studio with Bunny and Peter to record a few of his earliest songs, like “Nice Time”: “Long time we no have a nice time/ Long time I don't see you/ this is my heart to rock you steady …” As he did then, and as he always would, he was just naturally singing about his feelings. So we went into lovemaking and family making. First was to be Cedella, my second daughter, named after Bob's mother, but whose pet name is “Nice Time,” just like the song.

As soon as Bob came home, I had to get to work. Music is art, but it's also business, and all three of the Wailers were more into writing songs and rehearsing. To keep the rights to their music, we had begun our own company, Wail'NSoul'M (for the Wailers and the Soulettes). At one point we were actually producing, manufacturing our own records. I was still singing (Bob and I recorded a cover version around this time, along with Peter, Bunny, Cecile, and Hortense, of “Hold On to This Feeling”). But someone had to be going out to make sure the record shops and the radio stations had the records. You had to be on the streets to service them every day.

We were still living at Aunty's house on Greenwich Park Road, where she had added on a room for us. Our bedroom faced the road, so in the daytime Bob and I curtained off part of it and made the front into a little shop, where we sold our 45rpm “dub plates”—in those days everything was on these seven-inch vinyl recordings. Some days we'd sell three, some days six, sometimes as many as twenty-five, out of a cashier's booth, a little cage we'd constructed. I never imagined that cage as part of history, but there are two replicas of it now, one at the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston and the other at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida.

I also made deliveries on my bike. Aunty was a bicycle rider, so she had trained me to do the same—“Take the bicycle, run go buy a needle.” It was because of the bike and the shop that I found a woman friend for life, Minion Smith (later Phillips). When we met I was still searching, looking for more strength to confirm my feelings of faith in Rastafari, and I saw Minion as a sister who was already involved in the struggle in Jamaica, where white supremacy and class barriers were so defined. Her mother's Jewish family had fled the Holocaust and her father was Jamaican, and they lived uptown, in middle-class Kingston. Minion—called Minnie—was one of the first young women from that area to show an interest in Rasta and, as expected, her family thoroughly disapproved. Tall and beautiful and very militant, she used to come down to our shop to buy records, and I liked her style, her sandy brown dreads, the way she carried herself. Seeing her in Trench Town, I thought, wow, there goes a Rasta sister who looks confident and
strong
.

That strength was so appealing. During those early sixties years, being young and female and endorsing Rastafari was a sure way to become an outcast, and seen as crazy and strange, even more so than the men. But like them, Minnie—the only other young Rasta woman I'd met so far—and I were simply searching for a way out of the discrimination and rejection we felt all around us, and trying to understand that we were not from the nowhere in which we felt stranded, but had a heritage in Africa, that we had roots.

Sometimes I'd get on my bicycle and meet Sister Minnie part way, between Trench Town and where she lived, and we'd talk about Black Power and Malcolm X and Angela Davis and Miriam Makeba. To make extra money I was making dashikis, and she'd take them uptown with the bead jewelry she made and sell them at the university. Over the years she has given me a lot of strength and support, but we had a link at the first. Sometimes you meet somebody and you know right away, wow, we're going to be friends for a long time.

Late one afternoon, riding home from a record shop in Half Way Tree, which is more than three miles from Trench Town, I was hit by a car and thrown from the bicycle. In my carrier on the back I had a load of records, to be delivered from orders we'd gotten for Wail'NSoul'M Recordings. I was more embarrassed than frightened, because I was accustomed to this daily three-mile ride from Trench Town to Crossroads, and from Crossroads to Halfway Tree. Sometimes I'd go back to downtown Kingston, too, where all the famous record shops were, like Randy's and KG's. Everybody knew me, everybody looked out for me: “Oh Rasta Queenie come! What records you have for us today?” I was a favorite because we were carrying new stuff that was in demand, a little of the Wailers, a little of the Soulettes, so it was very exciting. And I was so young and full of enthusiasm, carefree and happy despite being poor, and loving every moment of my life and thinking, one day we're gonna be somebody, or one day we'll have money, or one day, we're gonna have enough to eat!

Eating—specifically, what am I gonna cook for our dinner tonight?—was exactly what I'd been thinking about when the car knocked me over. It had never occurred to me that I might stop concentrating on the road, and when it happened I was totally surprised and frightened. Why had this happened to me? By then people on the street were used to seeing me, so all around me I heard “Queenie, your records!” and “Queenie, you all right?” Everyone tried to help me, people gathered in the street. “Queenie, man, you no fear ride the bicycle?” “Queenie, man, you forget you aren't a car?” And I'm thinking, yeah, that's true! I'm gonna stop doing this, I'm gonna give this over to one of the guys! I'd hurt myself, too, but I was just glad the accident hadn't been fatal, and when Bob saw me, and saw what the bicycle looked like, that was the day I stopped riding to sell records!

I'd been worried about cooking because most of Bob's friends had started coming to our house, and they had to be fed, that's how they were. Aunty's place had become a social scene. They'd stay all day and they would make music, smoke a little (well away from the house), talk, make more music, tell jokes, make more music, play a little football (soccer). A lot of people learned from Bob the discipline and patience required for making music. As Ansel Cridland of the Meditations was to say years later, “Is not like a thing that is just run in there and look at the clock and trying to get it done in … an hour or something. It's a time. And when you spend time on your work you get better results. Working with Bob Marley was a great experience.”

Still, I was the one who had to think about practical things, like making sure we had something to eat, and paying for the electricity we used playing records over and over, because even though we weren't paying Aunty rent, it was only right that we paid for the power. So if I wasn't thinking about the next meal, or the electric bill, I was worrying about how we'd pay the bill for the bed and dresser we'd bought on credit at Courts Furniture Store in Crossroads.

Sometimes Aunty would say she didn't see any life in this; she'd be upset because it didn't look like there was going to be a better day. I was always under that microscope of hers, and she would make sure I knew it. But then our music began to be played on the radio and the sound systems; the street people were reacting to our music, and after that we started doing a little TV. Aunty liked that, she liked the charisma, she liked the excitement. And now, when people would ask her, “How is Rita?” she'd say with a smile, “Oh she's not too bad. She turned out—not as we wanted, but you know, t'ank God, she's not too bad!”

My brother Wesley, though, was furious when he found out about my Rastafari beliefs. Though Bob and I were already married, as a policeman Wesley felt he had a little authority, and he had an attitude, you might say. “Do you think it is right,” he asked me when he came home from one of his parish assignments, “after all the money Aunty and I spent on you, that you end up like this? What are you getting out of it? You think because you're married you're big? You're still under our protection, and you have no right to be a Rasta! That's being worthless!”

I said to him, “You have no right to be a policeman, you're a Babylon!”

And he boxed me! Slapped my face—
pow
! I cried and thought, I'm still being treated like a child. What the hell is this, where's my life? But I was determined, despite all these objections.