Living by the Word (14 page)

The villagers around us are obviously sorry about the fence. Perhaps we were not the ones intended to be kept out? Their faces seem to say as much. They are all men and boys. No women or girls among them. On a front porch below the hill I see some women and girls, studiously avoiding us.

One young man, the caretaker, tells us that, though we can’t go in, there
is
a way we can get closer to Bob. I almost tell him I could hardly
be
any closer to Bob and still be alive, but I don’t want to try to explain. He points out a path that climbs the side of the hill, and we—assisted by half a dozen of the more agile villagers—take it. It passes through bananas and weeds, flowers, past goats tethered out of the sun, past chickens. Past the home, one says, of Bob Marley’s cousin, a broken but gallant-looking man in his fifties, nearly toothless, and with a gentle and generous smile. He sits in his tiny, bare house and watches us. His face is radiant with the pride of relationship.

From within the compound now we hear singing. Bob’s songs come from the lips of the caretaker, who says he and Bob were friends. That he loved Bob. Loved his music. He sings terribly. But perhaps this is only because he is, though about the age Bob would have been now, early forties, lacking his front teeth. He is very dark, and quite handsome, teeth or no. And it is his humble, terrible singing—as he moves proprietarily about the yard where his friend is enshrined—that makes him so. It is as if he sings Bob’s songs
for
Bob, in an attempt to animate the tomb. The little children are all about us, nearly underfoot. Beautiful children. One little boy is right beside me. He is about six, of browner skin than the rest—who are nearer to black—with curlier hair. He looks like Bob.

I ask his name. He tells me. I have since forgotten it. As we linger by the fence, our fingers touch. For a while we hold hands. I notice that over the door to the tomb someone has plastered a bumper sticker with the name of Rita Marley’s latest album. It reads: “Good Girls Culture.” I am offended by it; there are so many possible meanings. For a moment I try to imagine the sticker plastered across Bob’s forehead. It drops off immediately, washed away by his sweat (as he sings and dances in the shamanistic trance I so love) and his spirit’s inability to be possessed by anyone other than itself, and Jah. The caretaker says Rita erected the fence. I understand the necessity.

Soon it is time to go. We clamber back down the hill to the car. On the way down the little boy who looks like Bob asks for money. Thinking of our hands together and how he is so like Bob must have been at his age, I don’t want to give him money. But what else can I give him, I wonder.

I consult “the elders,” the little band of adults who’ve gathered about us.

“The children are asking for money,” I say. “What should we do?”

“You should give it” is the prompt reply. So swift and unstudied is the answer, in fact, that suddenly the question seems absurd.

“They ask because they have none. There is nothing here.”

“Would Bob approve?” I ask. Then I think, Probably. The man has had himself planted here to fund the village.

“Yes” is the reply. “Because he would understand.”

Starting with the children, but by no means stopping there, because the grownups look as expectant as they, we part with some of our “tourist” dollars, realizing that tourism is a dead thing, a thing of the past; that no one can be a tourist anymore, and that, like Bob, all of us can find our deepest rest at home.

It is a long, hot, anxious drive that we have ahead of us. We make our usual supplications to our little tin car and its four shiny tires. But even when we have another flat, bringing us to our fourth for the trip, it hardly touches us. Jamaica is a poor country reduced to selling its living and its dead while much of the world thinks of it as “real estate” and a great place to lie in the sun; but Jamaicans as a people have been seen in all their imperfections and beauty by one of their own and fiercely affirmed, even from the grave, and loved. There is no poverty, only richness in this. We sing “Redemption Song” as we change the tire; feeling very Jamaica, very Bob, very rasta, very
no woman no cry.

1986

My daughter smokes. While she is doing her homework, her feet on the bench in front of her and her calculator clicking out answers to her algebra problems, I am looking at the half-empty package of Camels tossed carelessly close at hand. Camels. I pick them up, take them into the kitchen, where the light is better, and study them—they’re filtered, for which I am grateful. My heart feels terrible. I want to weep. In fact, I do weep a little, standing there by the stove holding one of the instruments, so white, so precisely rolled, that could cause my daughter’s death. When she smoked Marlboros and Players I hardened myself against feeling so bad; nobody I knew ever smoked these brands.

She doesn’t know this, but it was Camels that my father, her grandfather, smoked. But before he smoked “ready-mades”—when he was very young and very poor, with eyes like lanterns—he smoked Prince Albert tobacco in cigarettes he rolled himself. I remember the bright-red tobacco tin, with a picture of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, dressed in a black frock coat and carrying a cane.

The tobacco was dark brown, pungent, slightly bitter. I tasted it more than once as a child, and the discarded tins could be used for a number of things: to keep buttons and shoelaces in, to store seeds, and best of all, to hold worms for the rare times my father took us fishing.

By the late forties and early fifties no one rolled his own anymore (and few women smoked) in my hometown, Eatonton, Georgia. The tobacco industry, coupled with Hollywood movies in which both hero and heroine smoked like chimneys, won over completely people like my father, who were hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. He never looked as dapper as Prince Albert, though; he continued to look like a poor, overweight, overworked colored man with too large a family; black, with a very white cigarette stuck in his mouth.

I do not remember when he started to cough. Perhaps it was unnoticeable at first. A little hacking in the morning as he lit his first cigarette upon getting out of bed. By the time I was my daughter’s age, his breath was a wheeze, embarrassing to hear; he could not climb stairs without resting every third or fourth step. It was not unusual for him to cough for an hour.

It is hard to believe there was a time when people did not understand that cigarette smoking is an addiction. I wondered aloud once to my sister—who is perennially trying to quit—whether our father realized this. I wondered how she, a smoker since high school, viewed her own habit.

It was our father who gave her her first cigarette, one day when she had taken water to him in the fields.

“I always wondered why he did that,” she said, puzzled, and with some bitterness.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“That he didn’t want me to go to anyone else for them,” she said, “which never really crossed my mind.”

So he was aware it was addictive, I thought, though as annoyed as she that he assumed she would be interested.

I began smoking in eleventh grade, also the year I drank numerous bottles of terrible sweet, very cheap wine. My friends and I, all boys for this venture, bought our supplies from a man who ran a segregated bar and liquor store on the outskirts of town. Over the entrance there was a large sign that said COLORED. We were not permitted to drink there, only to buy. I smoked Kools, because my sister did. By then I thought her toxic darkened lips and gums glamorous. However, my body simply would not tolerate smoke. After six months I had a chronic sore throat. I gave up smoking, gladly. Because it was a ritual with my buddies—Murl, Leon, and “Dog” Farley—I continued to drink wine.

My father died from “the poor man’s friend,” pneumonia, one hard winter when his bronchitis and emphysema had left him low. I doubt he had much lung left at all, after coughing for so many years. He had so little breath that, during his last years, he was always leaning on something. I remember once, at a family reunion, when my daughter was two, that my father picked her up for a minute—long enough for me to photograph them—but the effort was obvious. Near the very end of his life, and largely because he had no more lungs, he quit smoking. He gained a couple of pounds, but by then he was so emaciated no one noticed.

When I travel to Third World countries I see many people like my father and daughter. There are large billboards directed at them both: the tough, “take-charge,” or dapper older man, the glamorous, “worldly” young woman, both puffing away. In these poor countries, as in American ghettos and on reservations, money that should be spent for food goes instead to the tobacco companies; over time, people starve themselves of both food and air, effectively weakening and addicting their children, eventually eradicating themselves. I read in the newspaper and in my gardening magazine that cigarette butts are so toxic that if a baby swallows one, it is likely to die, and that the boiled water from a bunch of them makes an effective insecticide.

My daughter would like to quit, she says. We both know the statistics are against her; most people who try to quit smoking do not succeed.*

There is a deep hurt that I feel as a mother. Some days it is a feeling of futility. I remember how carefully I ate when I was pregnant, how patiently I taught my daughter how to cross a street safely. For what, I sometimes wonder; so that she can wheeze through most of her life feeling half her strength, and then die of self-poisoning, as her grandfather did?

But, finally, one must feel empathy for the tobacco plant itself. For thousands of years, it has been venerated by Native Americans as a sacred medicine. They have used it extensively—its juice, its leaves, its roots, its (holy) smoke—to heal wounds and cure diseases, and in ceremonies of prayer and peace. And though the plant as most of us know it has been poisoned by chemicals and denatured by intensive mono-cropping and is therefore hardly the plant it was, still, to some modern Indians it remains a plant of positive power. I learned this when my Native American friends, Bill Wahpepah and his family, visited with me for a few days and the first thing he did was sow a few tobacco seeds in my garden.

Perhaps we can liberate tobacco from those who have captured and abused it, enslaving the plant on large plantations, keeping it from freedom and its kin, and forcing it to enslave the world. Its true nature suppressed, no wonder it has become deadly. Maybe by sowing a few seeds of tobacco in our gardens and treating the plant with the reverence it deserves, we can redeem tobacco’s soul and restore its self-respect.

Besides, how grim, if one is a smoker, to realize one is smoking a slave.

There is a slogan from a battered women’s shelter that I especially like: “Peace on earth begins at home.” I believe everything does. I think of a slogan for people trying to stop smoking: “Every home a smoke-free zone.” Smoking is a form of self-bartering that also batters those who must sit by, occasionally cajole or complain, and helplessly watch. I realize now that as a child I sat by, through the years, and literally watched my father kill himself: surely one such victory in my family, for the rich white men who own the tobacco companies, is enough.

1987

* Three months after reading this essay my daughter stopped smoking.

[On January 19, 1984, more than 1,500 people gathered to see the West Coast premiere of the film
Seeing Red
at a benefit performance for
Socialist Review
and Democratic Socialists of America. This work by filmmakers Julia Reichert and Jim Klein depicts the history of the Communist party through interviews with rank-and-file CP members and former members. At the benefit, I read this as an introduction to the film.]

During the last years of the 1700s a black man in his sixties by the name of Benjamin Banneker helped survey the land and “run the lines” for what was to be the United States capital, Washington, D.C. He was acknowledged in his day, by Thomas Jefferson and others, as a remarkable mathematician, clock-maker (having made one of the first in America), surveyor, and astronomer, and the writer of precise, widely used almanacs that studied the stars and predicted the tides, eclipses of sun and moon, and all manner of natural phenomena. He was considered by many, then as now, to have been a genius.

Now this is more about Benjamin Banneker than most people know. It is certainly more than I knew growing up, or even until a few weeks ago. All I had was a vague notion that he had helped with the planning and laying out of Washington, D.C., and since I have usually only gone to Washington to demonstrate against something—often in horrendous weather—I thought little about it.

But isn’t it strange, even astonishing, that a black man, born and raised in Maryland during the 1700s, a period of deepest enslavement of black people, was not only a free man all his life, but the son and grandson of free people as well, and all his life, furthermore, lived on his own sizable portion of excellent farmland? And isn’t it odd that this man not only read and wrote (including several still-preserved
sharp
letters to a racist Thomas Jefferson), but also wrote, published, and distributed almanacs?

One night a few weeks ago, a friend of mine was reading to me from a book on Banneker’s life* that he was studying for the purpose of understanding historical biography, and the first thing he read was about how Banneker had received much of his interest in, and knowledge about, the natural world from his grandmother, whose favorite grandchild he was, and who had been a farmer. She had encouraged his curiosity, supported his interests, taught him all she could, and loved him devoutly.

Aha, my friend and I thought, smiling knowingly at each other, the old black grandmother, who rarely gets any credit, surfaces again!

A few pages later, however, this is what we found:

“The dark man’s story had its beginnings nearly a hundred years before [he helped create our country’s capital]. It started when a former English bondwoman, having served out her sentence, bought two male Africans off a slave ship just arrived at Maryland port. One of the Africans was [Banneker’s] grandfather.”