Marley and Me by Don Taylor & Mike Henry

Author:Don Taylor & Mike Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569804797
Publisher: Barricade Books

POLITRICKS

10

THE FREE CONCERT AND THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

I had been dividing my time—during this period—between Miami and Kingston. In November of 1976, I flew in to Jamaica to handle some personal business as well as Bob’s management portfolio. For rest and relaxation I planned to hang out at two gambling clubs, Norman’s and House of Chen, both offshoots of another club that had been near to Dizzi, the disco Bob used to frequent.

At these clubs, games of chance such as poker, craps or Mah Jong (at all of which I was pretty adept) would commonly continue nonstop for days and nights, with millions routinely won and lost. There the real Jamaican gamblers would mingle, sated with all the whisky and food they could consume.

Christmas was approaching, a more magical season in Jamaica than in many developed countries of the world. Traditionally, the celebrations of Christmas in Jamaica begin as early as October. Nature herself seems to participate in the revelries by bedecking the land in a profusion of red, pink and white poinsettias. Merrymakers would sometimes make the rounds of six or more office and private parties in an evening that would stretch into the wee hours of the morning.

In between partying and attending to my own personal business, I visited Bob at Hope Road to find out what he had in mind for Christinas.

Even by Jamaican standards, it was a time of unprecedented violence and mayhem. Michael Manley had lately imposed a state of emergency on the country. Fresh in the news was a grisly incident known as the Green Bay Massacre, where ten youths had been lured to their deaths by the army and massacred in cold blood on the Hellshire hills. The country later learned that an entire cadre of PNP bad men, following false leads about where they could pick up guns for an anti-JLP raid, had walked into an army ambush. It was a chilling incident, and the kind one could hardly believe would ever happen in Jamaica. Civil war seemed imminent.

The economy had deteriorated rapidly; the treasury was broke; Jamaica had stumbled badly since the heady first days of Independence.

The ghettos had become “hot.” A disastrous fire with political implications had occurred on Orange Street. As Bob said in June of 1976, “We trying to make things easier but y’know, the politics keep its teeth. You have two parties fighting each other so we come like nutten because them guys always fighting and claiming to be the big guys. Plenty people fight for jobs, so the only way to get a job is to be on one side or the other, otherwise you suffer, you suffer and they hurt you bad. They burn houses with people in it, babies in it, in Jamaica, you know. I don’t really understand it bwoy, really can’t understand that. And I know it is politicians doing it. It’s the youth that catches the place afire, but it is the politicians influence. That really not look good. Politics, man.”

The conflict

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