Read Online No Woman No Cry by Rita Marley - Free Book Online Page A

…” 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