Gerald Hausman - Rastafarian Children of Solomon: The Legacy of the Kebra Nagast and the Path to Peace and Understanding

Rastafarian Children of Solomon

Folklorist Gerald Hausman takes us deep into the modern dreamtime of Jamaicas backwaters, enthralled by the company of living prophets and conmen, killers and saints, obeah workers and ethereal half-real creatures of the sea. They are all, as his eloquent mythlike prose reveals, the voices of the cherubim and seraphim of old.

ROGER STEFFENS, FOUNDING EDITOR OF THE BEAT MAGAZINE AND COAUTHOR OF THE REGGAE SCRAPBOOK AND ONE LOVE: LIFE WITH BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It Takes a Village to Write a Book

Deep gratitude to Dr. Michael Gleeson, friend and anthropology mentor. Mike said, First you see Jamaica, then you love it, then you marry it. He did: so thanks to him and his gracious wife Michele and his son Miggy with whom we had so many adventures with tree frogs in the night and bufos in the day.

My wife Lorry who is me spelled differently, and who lets me see through her eyes as she sees through mine. Mariah Fox, our daughter and constant companion in back-a-yard reasoning sessions, the artist whose paintings grace these pages and the one who took Dr. Mikes advice and married the island. Thanks, too, to Sava, her husband because blood is thicker than water. To Shai, Taj, and Anais, our Jamerican grandkids. Hannah Hausman, nicknamed business lady at age ten because she ran a drinks and snack store at our school, the first entrepreneur to have an ice box business that worked, made money.

Thanks to Cedella Marley whos always there to tell how it really was, not the way people imagine it but the truth of it.

Mackie McDonnough: Jamaica mentor and friend who took us to Rastafari and left us there to simmer and be. His family: Dido, Junior, Lorraine, Lorna, and Jeremymade us welcome in their home in Highgate when our daughter Hannah lived with them. Roy McKay stuck by us through thick and thin, good times, hard times, all times: glad times.

Spreeboy, the great rememberer of early days of Rastafari, helping us with that which we would never find in books. Ernie Uton Hinds for getting us there and back and there and back again, all over the island until it was the back of our hand and the bottom of our feet. Stan (Irons) whose story is a mainstay, as he, himself, is a mainstay. Dreamy Leroy Harrow, Julie, Pansy, Candy, Mark, Merline, Michael, Miss Jenny: mainstays of our school, the ones who kept the kitchen going, the food coming, kept the cockroaches out, made our students feel at home.

Raggy Anthony Henry and his whole family: May, Doodus (Janga), Son, Michelle, Delly: without Raggy the magical long-distance swims beyond the reef never would have happened, nor the secret prowling amidst sweltering attics of Blue Harbour. Benji Oswald Brown, translator and interpreter, gone but not forgotten. Special thanks to Pansy Carlette Douglas who, with her family, gave us strength; she also gave us The New Ships, and wrote in it: The horses of hope run fast but the asses of experience amble thoughtfully. And Clover, now gone, our beautiful Maroon mountain hiker and friend.

Sasstree, friend, constant companion. Jah Son, backbone of the village. Perth, the pirate. Morris, the tailor. Mr. Denzel, water-bearer, fruit-bringer, savior in the worst of weathers. Vincent, the tam man. Michael Higgins, natural mystic. Selvin Johnson for the early Bob memories, and for the akete drumming. Georgie who made the fire light and told the little birdy story. Countryman who counseled on running, swimming, and being.

Everyone in Castle Gordon and Port Maria. All the students and teachers who came just to learn but left so much the richer in spirit.

INTRODUCTION

Rastafarians in Jamaica

The Children of Solomon

I began collecting the material for this book in 1985 when we made our first trip to Jamaica. The year 1985 in Jamaica, was just like the 1970s because that is how it works in what is called a third world country, an island nation, a world unto itself. It lives, as some might say, in the past. And the past is always very much present in the West Indies as island nations still struggle with neocolonial government and the conditions that Bob Marley called mental slavery. But the book is not only about this.

This book is about people. A particular group of people who are as much misunderstood now as they were in the 1930s when they appeared on the scene with surprising vehemence, urging social and spiritual change in an indifferent and antithetical world. Perhaps it began with the St. Ann revolutionary Marcus Garvey who stated clearly what the Bible had already said: Look to Africa, when a black King shall be crowned for the day of deliverance is near. He might very well have said that the king was Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia and that he was not only a king but a deity, descended from the House of David.

Singularly, the most important thing was that this king would bring forth a new day on earth. That his ancestral lineage included Jesus of Nazareth was perhaps less important than his direct familial connection to King Solomon, author of Ecclesiastes and considered by Rastafarians to be the wisest man who ever lived.

The children of Solomon are the children of Africans. And so it is said, as well, that God come black. Haile Selassie was, according to Rastafarians we know, a black man and they ask: Was not Jesus also black? And all of the Biblical Fathers of the Old Testament?

These are the foundation of the conversations found in this book. The conversations themselvesspoken by country- and city-dwelling Rastafariansrevolve around issues that concern us today. How do I get bread to eat? How do I get money to live? Bob Marley, once again, turned this into a koan: How do I work my more to get my less?

This is still the conundrum in Jamaica, and now in many of the first world countries of the world including America, which has fast turned into a stratified nightmare of rich and poor, with an indecisive government that, like Jamaica in the 1980s, teeters between the extremes.

For more than ten summers, my wife and I ran a small Outward Bound type of school on the North Coast of Jamaica. During that time we traveled the parishes and visited every one, camped, bused, hiked, ran, swam, and climbed every accessible and inaccessible cranny of this beautiful, hardy, resilient island. In time, we would come to know Jamaica from the inside out, and time after time, we would reason with Rastafarians, listen to them talk about the birth of the world, their world, the world of Creation, the world of the moment we were in, the one just past, the one soon come, as they said.

We met men who had known Marcus Garvey, and who had heard Haile Selassie I speak. We listened to a man who said he was once Jonah riding in the belly of a whale. We heard tale tellers, ital chefs, men of reason, women of wisdom, but always we were included, not excluded, and during these years our eyes opened wide to a resourceful, spiritual way of life that is, sad to say, mostly gone in the Jamaica of today.

The conversations in this book seem a bit lost in time to us. They were recorded before some of the present-day Rastafarians, black and white, were born. Those who were alive were probably a little too young to listen to the scriptural poetry and storytelling of the past. Was it one minute ago that all this happened? It seems so to us. But at the same time, it also seems to have happened long ago.

Jamaica is a timeless country, an undiscovered country in a way. We have met only a few people who have followed in the literal footsteps of the revolutionary leader, Nanny, when she trekked from Moore Town to Accompong to meet with the great rebel leader Cujo. We did it while the sluices of rain came down off the limestone jungle cliffs, and the stories of Rastafarian friends poured down with them.