Living by the Word: Essays

Author:Alice Walker [Walker, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781453224076
Google: _czVJ6B5FwEC
Amazon: 0156528657
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 1989-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

JOURNEY TO NINE MILES

By five o’clock we were awake, listening to the soothing slapping of the surf, and watching the sky redden over the ocean. By six we were dressed and knocking on my daughter’s door. She and her friend Kevin were going with us (Robert and me) to visit Nine Miles, the birthplace of someone we all loved, Bob Marley. It was Christmas Day, bright, sunny, and very warm and the traditional day of thanksgiving for the birth of someone sacred.

I missed Bob Marley when his body was alive, and I have often wondered how that could possibly be. It happened, though, because when he was singing all over the world, I was living in Mississippi, being political, digging into my own his/herstory, writing books, having a baby—and listening to local music, B. B. King, and the Beatles. I liked dreadlocks, but only because I am an Aquarian; I was unwilling to look beyond the sexism of Rastafarianism. The music stayed outside my consciousness. It didn’t help either that the most political and spiritual of reggae music was suppressed in the United States, so that “Stir It Up,” and not “Natty Dread” or “Lively Up Yourself” or “Exodus,” was what one heard. And then, of course, there was disco, a music so blatantly soulless as to be frightening, and impossible to do anything to but exercise.

I first really heard Bob Marley when I was in the throes of writing a draft of the screenplay for The Color Purple. Each Monday I drove up to my studio in the country, a taxing three-hour drive, worked steadily until Friday, drove back to the city, and tried to be two parents to my daughter on weekends. We kept in touch by phone during the week, and I had the impression that she was late for school every day and living on chocolates. (No way! She always smiled innocently.)

My friends Jan and Chris, a white couple nearby, seeing my stress, offered their help, which I accepted in the form of dinner at their house every night after a day’s work on the script. One night after yet another sumptuous meal, we pushed back the table and, in our frustration at the pain that rides on the seat next to joy in life (cancer, pollution, invasions, the bomb), began dancing to reggae records: UB-40, Black Uhuru…Bob Marley. I was transfixed. It was hard to believe the beauty of the soul I heard in “No Woman No Cry,” “Coming In from the Cold,” “Could You Be Loved?,” “Three Little Birds,” and “Redemption Song.” Here was a man who loved his roots, even after he’d been nearly assassinated in his own country, and knew they extended to the ends of the earth. Here was a soul who loved Jamaica and loved Jamaicans and loved being a Jamaican (nobody got more pleasure out of the history, myths, traditions, and language of Jamaica than Bob Marley) but who knew it was not meant to limit itself, or even could, to an island of any sort.

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